Here is an interesting twist to the old debate about dressing like a law enforcement officer. Someone in Las Vegas, NM has a car that looks identical to a police cruiser:

Vigil’s black-and-white car sports a red-and-blue emergency bar across the top and the word ‘police’ painted on the doors. Law enforcement agencies say what he’s done with his car isn’t illegal as long as he doesn’t act like a police officer.

Is it going to be in a play? Used for comedic or artistic purposes? How could he possibly drive on the road without “acting” like a police officer. What would distinguish him as a non-LEO?

The SF Asian Art Museum has an exhibit called Drama and Desire: Japanese Paintings from the Floating World. Sometimes when I try to convince a group that they should take risks seriously and see the benefit of distributing funds to safety and security, I remind myself that there are some people who see no evil, want no weight on their project. Or, as Ukiyo Monogatari explained in Tales of the Floating World:

Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating: caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world . . .

So, here’s my new warning to VPs of software development:

Don’t just be a gourd floating along with the river current.

Hmmm, on second thought, that might need some refinement.

The real story on the site I was reading is the US Commander in Chief believed only 5,000 troops would be in Iraq by December 2006. However, as I dug through the bits and pieces of history, I could not help but notice this quote from Lt. Gen. David McKiernan’s book Cobra II:

It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense… In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides… [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.

I just heard something similar from a network operations group the other day as they chastised the engineering group for trying to issue PowerPoint slides as deliverables. Blame it on PowerPoint? In any case, the best quote from Cobra II is here:

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task – defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces – and the least amount on the most demanding – rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq. The result was a surprising contradiction. The United States did not have nearly enough troops to secure the hundreds of suspected WMD sites that had supposedly been identified in Iraq or to secure the nation’s long, porous borders. Had the Iraqis possessed WMD and terrorist groups been prevalent in Iraq as the Bush administration so loudly asserted, U.S. forces might well have failed to prevent the WMD from being spirited out of the country and falling into the hands of the dark forces the administration had declared war against.

Success was defined too narrowly by the Commander in Chief, like a half-knitted sweater ready to be unraveled. I’m reminded of the stockpiles of conventional weapons that were left unguarded in the critical early phases of the invasion. Those stockpiles that turned into IEDs….