Daniel

How AFCEA Improved My Home Wireless Network

This last Saturday I was lucky enough to attend the annual AFCEA volunteer appreciation event at FedEx field. While there Ellen and I got to meet Brian Mitchell, a very classy guy and a great former Redskin.

I also ran into an old friend from my Sun days, Dennis McLain, who continues to be one of the smartest people I ever knew. He now works at Fortress Technologies which was bought by General Dynamics and is now probably called something else. They deal with wireless technologies and in the course of the conversation, Dennis spent some time discussing channel conflicts and wireless optimization.

After the event when we got home, I thought about how our home wireless network was sometimes not as fast as we would like. SO based on the conversation with Dennis, I downloaded a network app for my Android-based Xoom and looked at the various networks that touched us and realized in fact there were a variety of areas of interference.

By changing the channels used and moving the devices around a bit to optimize the signal we were able to increase throughput quite a bit. As usual, we look to fixing customers often far more than ourselves. A big thank-you goes out to Mr. McLain.

Washington Capitals Hockey Is Back

So I am happy to report for those who do not know (and for the vast majority who do not care) that the National Hockey League (NHL) will in fact have a hockey season for 2012-13.

Well, 2013 anyway, consisting of 48 games, 24 at home. The article about the Capitals schedule is here, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capitals-insider/wp/2013/01/12/capitals-schedule-released/.

A story about the Capitals being ready to play this shorter, more compressed schedule is here, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/capitals/washington-capitals-are-ready-for-nhl-season-to-be-an-intense-sprint/2013/01/12/d4fccf02-5d16-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html.

I, of course, started the season off right by attending a Season Ticket Holder (STH) event last week at Union Jack’s in Bethesda. It originally, I suspect, was organized as were a number of similar events to make the STH feel that the club cared about them but instead became a celebration of the annouinced settlement between the NHL and the union, the National Hockey League Players Association (NHLPA).

They served wings and mozzarella sticks, all of the fried food you could ever want. When Slapshot, pictured below came by, I asked him if he would like some of my wings, to which he acted horrified (as any self-respecting avian mascot should). Thank goodness my daughters were not present …

Thoughts Regarding the Publishing of the Names & Addresses of Gun Owners

The publishing of the names and addresses of local gunowners by the Westchester Journal News in December, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/01/02/newspaper-decision-to-out-gun-owners-sparks-all-out-battle/, was, to put it mildly controversial. It has led to a lot of strong reactions in large part as far as I could tell driven by one’s position on the Second Amendment of the Constitution relating to the rights of citizens to own firearms.

I am not, at least in this short set of comments, taking any position regarding the Second Amendment. In the interests of complete disclosure, I do not own a gun, do not plan to buy a gun, and only fired anything when I was in basic training at Ft. Dix, many (many) years ago. I am not enough of a Constitutional expert to know whether there are enough comma’s in the Second Amendment or not.

When I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, there was a lot of emphasis over the protection of what we referred to as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This was information which when released would provide sufficiently information to allow someone to be able to identify who the person was, where they lived, what and/or where their financial or health information was kept or was, and so on.

This concern lead for example to policies put in place by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) while I was in Government to decrease as much as practical the use of social security numbers to identify individuals. We invested significant resources into tracking and managing any databases which contained PII and went to great lengths to keep them protected.

It seems to me that this is the more fundamental issue associated with the request by the Westchester Journal News, and other news organizations, not the Second Amendment. The question is whether it is appropriate for the Government to release databases which contain PII which was collected for Government purposes. In general, it seems to me the answer is no except in extraordinary and explicitly authorized situations, e.g. sex offender registries come to mind as an example of an exception or other situations where laws were explicitly broken as determined in a court of law.

Otherwise the normative decision, in my opinion, should be one where privacy concerns dominate the decision process. As with the First Amendment, Freedom of Speech, these kinds of rights need to be protected especially when faced with uncomfortable situations. That is why these protections exist.

Comcast Neck and Neck With PEPCO

For a while now, our Comcast cable and internet access has been pretty solid, leaving the field to PEPCO as the most remarkable (and I do not mean that in a positive way) utility we deal with.

However, Comcast does seize the moment to stay competitive.

Friday night both the Internet and Cable went out at the same time, well ‘duh’ you say they both come from the same source. However, nothing is obvious to organizations like Comcast.

My wife, Ellen, called them up. The person she called said it was just a coincidence they both went out and thus it was only necessary to send a person to make an ‘easy’ fix. Ellen argued the point for a while and pointed out the Redskins game coming up Sunday evening (I rarely watch football but even I feel this one is worth the seeing). Comcast said they would send someone out Sunday morning.

After getting two automated calls last night reminding us that someone was coming out and if we did not answer the Sunday automated call they would not show up and that if this was our fault we would pay a fee, this morning they showed up. And guess what, the answer was there was a more general problem, just like Ellen told them. THEREFORE the person who came out who was therefore unprepared to make a ‘real’ fix had to get someone else to come out later today.

We have thus entered the ‘who knows when they will show up and whether they will fix it’ zone that is the normal Comcast end-state. Sigh.

One interesting side-note, for those who are generally uninterested in cable but care deeply about access to the Internet (like me), having a tablet I can turn into a hot spot turns on the mostly wireless network that exists in our house anyway. An interesting change in the last year for us.

The NHL and Revenue Sharing

I wrote about the Hockey Lockout earlier this month, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2012/12/08/my-two-cents-about-the-hockey-lockout/. Sadly the lockout continues though there are some signs that it may be finally coming to an end.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem with the NHL is that the owners have not come to terms with the economic realities of modern professional sports. The current labor struggle is a symptom of this but not the actual problem. From what I have read the likely agreement will put a Band-Aid on the problem, but not really fix anything.

The issue that the NHL needs to deal with, like all professional sports leagues, is to recognize that they are first in the entertainment business, competing for a higher share of the overall entertainment money that is spent, and only second in the fielding a team most likely to win an individual championship business.

While I have written that dichotomies like this ultimately require a balancing act, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2011/06/28/dave-wennergren-solving-problems-vs-managing-dualities/, one still picks one focus or the other.

Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner from 1960 to 1989, in my opinion decided that entertainment was the primary focus. The combination of a long career plus the NFL still being relatively weak financially allowed Rozelle to setup a system where TV revenue was heavily shared. Thus regardless of the popularity of any one team, the overall league would have relatively equal revenues and thus there were institutional limits, eventually supplemental by salary caps, which prevented one team from just buying championships.

Other sports have wrestled with this issue. For example, baseball imposed a ‘tax’ on teams that pay too much on salaries, but in the end the large market teams still tend to dominate which teams make the playoffs.

Academic studies, one example is linked to here, http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/js_0011.pdf, show that a case can be made that 100% revenue sharing ends up with the most profitable league result. An analysis of current revenue sharing, http://slapshot.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/how-to-share-the-revenue-could-be-stumbling-block-in-n-h-l-negotiations/, showed that where the NFL shares as much as 80% of their revenue, MLB shares around 30%, the NHL shares less than 15%.

For those who love to hate NHL commission Bettman, an easy target with his lousy public persona and arrogant demeanor, they are aiming at him in the wrong direction. It is not his poor relationships with the players labor unions that is the problem it is his inability or lack of interest in changing the overall owner relationships within the NHL and how they deal with the league as a whole. The current labor negotiations do not seem to be likely to change this situation though like all hockey fans I hope they come to closure soon.

My Two Cents About the Hockey Lockout

My spectator sports life normally has symmetry about it. Six months of the year I care about the Washington Nationals and six months of the year I care about the Washington Capitals.

While I notice that Washington has a professional basketball team and have flung in my face that it has a professional football team, they do not register in the same fashion.

This year, however, balance has been broken when the hockey owners through their commissioner Gary Bettman locked out the players until a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) was signed. The season has now been canceled through the middle of December and with the recent breakdown in talks, more games are expected to be canceled. There is even the now less remote possibility that hockey will not be the only professional sport to cancel an entire season but instead be the only professional sport to cancel two seasons.

For those unfamiliar with the issues involved, the last agreed to CBA put in place what is called a hard salary cap. Teams were not allowed to spend more than a specific amount of money on player salaries (there was also a floor that had to be reached to make sure every team was trying to field a competitive team). The total expenditure was to be 57% of total hockey revenues.

Even with those restrictions, the pressure to win (which hopefully is still considered a reasonable goal) lead owners to figure out ways to let us say ‘bend’ the rules by coming up with creative contracts which ended up being counted against the cap (upper expenditure limit) inconsistently with what was really being paid to the player in question.

The goal of the owners therefore was to accomplish the following in negotiating this new CBA:

Lower the percentage allocated to the players to 50%
Change the definition of hockey related revenues so that the 50% was applied to a lower number
Put in place restrictions relating to contracts to protect the owners from themselves

One complication that then arose was the change from 57% to 50%, if done quickly, would actually prevent the teams from paying fully already agreed to contracts; thus the owners were asked to invest in what has been called “make whole” contributions to cover current contracts above the 50% allocation.

There was one other significant change between the last CBA negotiations and this one. In the past Gary Bettman has dealt with incompetent union leadership which caused the players to split. This allowed an owner strategy of basically just being stubborn to work in the end, especially when it became clear that Bettman was prepared (and ultimately did) cancel an entire season.

This time however the hockey players hired Don Fehr, the former union head for professional baseball, who has been through this kind of negotiation many times before. Baseball, as Tom Boswell pointed out, finally came to terms with Fehr, and as a result both baseball owners and players have ended up doing very well and with relatively peaceful labor relationships, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-11-21/sports/35509401_1_fehr-factor-baseball-union-three-collusion-cases.

Fehr evidently negotiates by getting under the other side’s skin, irritating them to make them make poor decisions and insisting on negotiating everything. I suspect that ‘take it or leave it’ as a negotiating ploy does not work well with Fehr. Bettman’s typical if-you-don’t-like-it-I’ll-take-my-puck-home approach has not worked as well as it did in the past.

From the articles I have been reading, it seems that both sides at long last have agreed to most of the financial issues and have gotten very close to agreeing on the make whole part. There were still some arguments over how to close the contract loopholes and the length of the CBA itself. The last offer from the owners was to increase the make whole provisions to what seemed like an acceptable amount and with that to offer answers to the remaining issues. The entire package was a take it all or leave it offer.

Fehr of course ignored the take it all part, said fine to the financial numbers and went on to start negotiating the remaining issues. Bettman, visibly angry over Fehr’s doing that, said everything was now off the table and stopped the negotiations.

Now, walking out in ‘anger’ is a recognized negotiating tactic. However it is not particularly effective if you keep doing it, the Bettman has now done this two or three times during this set of negotiations and it is not particularly effective with Fehr.

In addition, at least in my opinion the owners have spent (wasted) too much energy trying to make the point that they feel Fehr is detrimental to coming to an agreement and that the players should keep Fehr out of the negotiations. In previous years this might have worked but not this one.

In the end, I get the sense that Gary Bettman and some of the owners are having trouble separating out the business and financial issues, which are merely at the end mathematics and money, and the emotional issues of Fehr driving them crazy.

Hockey and especially hockey fans who are among the most fanatic and loyal of all sports fans are the losers in all this. While I am not a particularly big fan of Donald Fehr, Gary Bettman is being paid something like $7m/year to act like an adult. Thus far, he is not rising to that bar in my opinion.

An Unexpected Issue With A Home Office

So over the last couple of months I have established a home/office for my almost LLC esem consulting.

All of the office kinds of stuff have been relatively straight forward but as usual technology is waiting to trip one up.

I have a blue tooth enabled phone earpiece (earbud? ear<whatever>) I use during the day and a bluetooth enabled phone accessory in the car so I can deal with calls hands-free.

As a side note, I thought Montgomery County had a law that said you had to have hands-free capability to call from your car. Evidently this is not a well-enforced law.

In any event, when I come back from meetings and park in the driveway, it is not unusual for me to forget to turn off the car bluetooth phone accessory. Then when I work in my home/office and someone calls and I try to answer the phone, people are talking to the accessory in the car not to me with the phone. I therefore have to either turn off bluetooth on the phone OR wait for the car bluetooth to turn off (which it eventually does to save power) or worse walk downstairs, out to the garage, into the car and turn it off manually.

Still another issue that just didn’t exist ten years ago.

Word Processing

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.” – Through the Looking Glass

On June 29^th of this year, Washington experienced a Derecho, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/derecho-behind-washington-dcs-destructive-thunderstorm-outbreak-june-29-2012/2012/06/30/gJQA22O7DW_blog.html.

A Derecho, prounounced “de ray cho” is Spanish for straight and per Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, is a “widespread, long-lived, straight-line windstorm associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms.” Continue reading “Word Processing”

Lessons From A Political CIO (updated)

I have updated my write-up of the lessons I took from my time from 2006-9 as the US Department of Transportation CIO. This was published earlier this week in FedScoop, http://fedscoop.com/lessons-from-a-political-cio-2/.

I repeat the update here.

Continue reading “Lessons From A Political CIO (updated)”

Some Comments On Presidential Transitions – govloop

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Chris Dorobek about process issues associated with the currently in-process Presidential transition. The interview was published at:

http://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/former-cio-of-dot-speaks-on-the-transition

which includes a link to the audio of the interview plus a summary write-up.