2008-04-07

SCRAPS 2007Jun08-14ICT

SCRAPs (Saved Copies of Reports, Analyses & Presentations)
Week of 2007.Jun.08-14 ICT (IndoChina Time)

+ The past goes on: latest SCRAPs collected, for the week of 2007 June 08-14.
+ Time of saving to disk precedes each web page's title, in format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS (ICT).
+ Copies of original reports saved to disk available upon request, as i can't afford to put them online.

By ADMarshall at 19:37 0 comments

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SCRAPS 2007Jun01-07ICT

SCRAPs (Saved Copies of Reports, Analyses & Presentations)
Week of 2007.Jun.01-07 ICT (IndoChina Time)

+ Back to the past.  What follows are the latest SCRAPs collected, for a day, today, up to 16h13.ICT, after edits.
+ Time of saving to disk precedes each web page's title, in format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS (ICT).
+ Copies of original reports saved to disk available upon request, as i can't afford to put them online.


By ADMarshall at 19:33 1 comments

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2008-03-30

SCRAPs, AD.2007.05.25-31.ICT

SCRAPs (Saved Copies of Reports, Analyses & Presentations)
Week of 2007.May.18-25 ICT (IndoChina Time)

+ Getting back up to speed and back into old interests, Vietnam, Free/Libre & Open-source (FLO) information tech/systems (IT/IS) -- FLO IT/IS! -- the culture and economics of FLO systems and communities, women/femininity and old political ideals. I discover the Lazy Boy and, later, Barack Obama, while searching for info on Emilio Estevez' inspirational film "Bobby" (Kennedy). Interest in the Buddhist Dharma fades -- as i started falling back to feeling It is All still best explained by the Tao and Economics.
+ ICT time of saving to disk precedes each web page's title, in format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.
+ Copies of original reports saved to disk available upon request.

By ADMarshall at 19:54 0 comments

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SCRAPs, AD.2007.05.18-24.ICT

SCRAPs (Saved Copies of Reports, Analyses & Presentations)
Week of 2007.May.18-25 ICT (IndoChina Time)

+ And... we're back! -- If not yet on track. I go into the Buddhist Dharma (teachings) more deeply, with a focus on new Western Buddhism and the relationships between sex, mind-modifying drugs and Buddhism. The Belgian NEE Party is born and offers blowjobs internationally for support via Web subscription form.
+ ICT time of saving to disk precedes each web page's title, in format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.
+ Copies of original reports saved to disk available upon request.

By ADMarshall at 19:37 0 comments

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SCRAPs, AD.2007.05.11-17.ICT

Nada.

By ADMarshall at 19:30 0 comments

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SCRAPs, AD.2007.05.04-10.ICT

Diddly squat.

By ADMarshall at 19:29 0 comments

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SCRAPs, AD.2007.05.01-05.ICT

SCRAPs (Saved Copies of Reports, Analyses & Presentations)
Beginning and End Days of 2007.May.01-15 ICT (IndoChina Time)

+ Distractions again apparently prevailed: only four RAPs here. If i remember correctly, i was being divorced and keeping my mind off that and too many other personal problems via Buddhist meditation, pondering the Death of God, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, and cruising around Saigon on the Dream II (tm, Honda) snapping pix by the hundreds per week with the good ol' Sony Erickson 750i -- which is still providing loads of good entertainment, communications and information value.  A fashion victim i am not.
+ ICT time of saving to disk precedes each web page's title, in format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.
+ Copies of original reports saved to disk available upon request. Too many RAPs on the Web either vanish or get revised with little more than the Internet Archives' Wayback Machine to preserve them for those who'd like to see "the original, please".



By ADMarshall at 19:27 0 comments

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SCRAPS: AD.2007.04.ICT

SCRAPs (Saved Copies of Reports, Analyses & Presentations)
Month (more or less) of 2007.Apr ICT (IndoChina Time: GMT/UTC+7)

+ Distractions apparently prevailed this month.
+ ICT time of saving to disk precedes each web page's title, in format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.
+ Copies of original reports saved to disk available upon request:

By ADMarshall at 15:36 0 comments

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SCRAPs: AD.2007.03.09-15.ICT

SCRAPs (Saved Copies of Reports, Analyses & Presentations)
Week (more or less) of 2007.Mar.09-15 ICT (IndoChina Time: GMT/UTC+7)

ICT time of saving to disk precedes each web page's title, in format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.
Copies of original reports saved to disk available upon request:

By ADMarshall at 15:33 0 comments

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2008-03-28

WWEeeeee! Nostalgi Meets the Here & Now, Boys, Here & Now....

WWEeeee?!? Wild Wild East in Saigon?!? Talk about touching a nerve! Listen up, folks!

DEC (David Everitt-Carlson) is doing "Dailies" here in sunny SighGone. Dare i blurt a hallelujah?!? Another gonzo journo fan(atic) -- albeit one eloquent and an adland and online vidi artiste, too -- have actually hit the ground in our edutainment-deprived adoptive Ho'town?

It does indeed look to be so, fellow hoz. DEC gives good EXPLICIT mention to HST, Hisself.

I'll not dally more in feeble tries to tell WEE Dailies' tale. In his own words:

The "Wild Wild East" is a memoir of my ten years marketing in Asia“ you'll find a link in the sidebar. But somewhere along the line you're going to ask, "Hey, what happens in the end?" And of course, that is a trade secret, but to help you all along, here's a daily blog of basically what I'm doing now. You can have all the fun you want filling in the blanks between "then" and "now". ©2008 David.E.Carlson@gmail.com

Email up front! Yo... Good bio brevity, too:

About DEC

My Photo

David Everitt-Carlson,
HCMC, Vietnam,Independent writer and
Brand Provocateur living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
-- that's Saigon for the old schoolers.

And -- personal peeve -- he even had the balls to go with a black background, ie, far, far fewer pixels turned on, and burning your eyeballs out ;)).

I still prefer Saigon, or SighGone. Guess that makes me old-schooler. Dang... So dying b4 i old. The memories WWE revive make fogey-status indubitable now. Dang, dang, dang...

Done.

To torch a few cobwebs for any of the other oldies about, who might've actually forgotten watching this way2cool TV show way back when -- and, frighteningly, maybe even before the star of Wild Wild West, the feature-lenth flick, Will Smith (huzzah), was but a twinkle in his old man's eye:

By ADMarshall at 18:08 0 comments

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2007-12-26

Vietnam Media's State Monopoly to End

Your SGGP English-Language Editor simply can't resist spreading this news a bit farther and faster. Soon to appear on the site of the SGGP English edition is the following report.

Happy Solar and Lunar New Years, y'all!

Vietnam's Media to Be Freed From State Monopoly Control

Words: 370 (including headline)

In remarkable news likely to benefit the nation at large, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung yesterday reportedly agreed to a proposal to end the state monopoly on all Viet Nam media, said an unidentified government official.

After receiving suggestions on a draft government decree on state-controlled monopolies by the ministries of Justice and Information and Telecommunications, the Government Office held a conference with the ministries on the draft. At the conference the prime minister agreed to remove the national media from the list of exclusively state-controlled monopolies.

As a result, private, independent publishers and media organizations will be allowed to coexist alongside state-run media.

Related to a conference reviewing the new Press Law yesterday, sensitive issues of journalism, such as foreign sponsorship of media, the web-log ("blog") boom, taxation of journalism, and advertising, were discussed.

Most chief editors at the conference said the current law failed to provide clear financial incentive for the national media and requested Government adjust the law's sections on advertising.

Under the law, advertisements in printed newspapers are limited to 10 percent of editorial pages, a situation infeasible to publishers' current economic circumstances.

The chief editors suggested the law permit the media to decide publications' shares of advertising content and not limit advertisements in the media because such limits would affect the media's abilities to finance their products and meet businesses' demands.

One of the issues attracting journalists and journalism managers is that of blogging. They debated whether or not blogs should be considered a form of journalism and thus require government regulation.

Vice Minister of Information and Telecommunications Do Quy Doan said blogs differ significantly from journalism in that their contents are personnel opinions bloggers wish to share with the online community. Doan suggested managing blogs in particular, and information on the Internet in general, did not require outright bans be imposed, that, instead, legal guidelines should be drafted for those using the Internet and posting to blogs.

Under Vietnamese Law, a person can and should be charged if he slanders others and bloggers are not excepted from laws prohibiting publications from distributing information promoting violence, wars, sexual abuse or information opposing Vietnamese morals and customs.

Reported by Phuong Anh, Translated by Hai Dang, Edited by AD Marshall

By ADMarshall at 17:28 1 comments

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2007-12-16

Chord Struck 01: Another Depressing Screed on Global Warming

This post struck a chord: "Another Depressing Screed on Global Warming". It's by an young but already renowned US guy, Nick Brown, someone, who like some 80 percent of Vietnam, is under 45.

Brown's "screed" pretty well sums up the progressive certainty i've been feeling and pondering about at least the evidence, if not the appropriate response, to the "climate crisis", after following the global warming, climate change headlines -- and even reading several of the articles, too -- since i first watched Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" last June. 

To the point of how this might interest an editor at "The Organ[?!?] of the Party Committee, The Communist Party of Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh City", Sai Gon Gai Phong, well, some 80 percent of Vietnamese are among the generation(s) Brown refers to when he writes:

... frightening. When they explain that, if current trends continue, fifty years from now the next generation - by which they mean me - could easily have a sea level that is one meter higher than the present one, it's depressing.
-- Huffington Post, "December 7, 2007 | 06:17 PM (EST)"

Brown was lamenting the potential disastrous prospects of a "1m SLR" (Sea Level Rise of one meter). But cast that against the following conclusions drawn regarding Vietnam, and, in particular, Ho Chi Minh City (ex/or SaiGon) extracted from a report found at the Social Science Research Network via Googling "vietnam one-meter sea-level rise" (3,290 hits). From "The Impact of Sea Level Rise on Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis", by analysts of the World Bank's Development Research Group, independent Canadian consultants and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and funded by the Canadian Trust Fund (TF030569) sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). (The URL for this paper was incorrectly hyperlinked in " Risk of sea-level rise: High stakes for developing countries", posted "01/04/2007", at the site of the Marine Protected Area Network in Vietnam (ficen.org.vn).) From the original World Bank report: 

As shown in Figure..., Vietnam is the most seriously impacted by SLR: Up to 16% of its area would be impacted by a 5m SLR, making it second only to The Bahamas among countries analyzed for this paper. Most of this impact is in the Mekong and Red River Deltas. Note in Figure... that most of Vietnam's land area southwest of Ho Chi Minh City would be severely impacted by SLR.

Large percentages of Vietnam's population and economic activity are located in these two river deltas. As shown in Figures..., 10.8% of Vietnam's population would be impacted by a 1m SLR. This is the largest percentage of impacted population among all 84 countries ( A.R. of Egypt follows with 10.56%). Vietnam's impacted population would reach 35% with a 5m SLR. The impacts of SLR on Vietnam's GDP (Figure...) and urban extent (Figure...) closely follow the impact on its population.

Eleven percent of an impending 90mn population, almost 10 million people! With a 1m SLR, they'd likely be pressured at a snail's pace to move to higher ground over those 50-odd years, but in a nation already packed to the brim with people, a nation already normally hot, wet or dry, and getting hotter and wetter or drier already. 

How would the nation's most practical and capable people respond?

Eighty percent of Vietnam is in the countryside and vastly more poor than the cities' rising young consumer classes. "Brother and Sister Rice", as established urbanites call them, have little chance to fully appreciate the global perspective explicit in global warming. Most of their information comes to them via limited media that's completely one-party-state controlled. And they're way too busy focusing on just keeping their fields fertile, harvesting them and getting a price they can survive better upon.

And 80 percent of Vietnam is under 45, and just getting its first glimpse of a just the decent standard of living they or their parents have already worked too hard to attain.

Thomas Tobin, the president and chief executive of HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Bank) Vietnam, recently summed up their prospects, as quoted in " Foreign banks encounter cultural barrier in Vietnam", by Ben Stocking, The Associated Press, at the site of the International Herald Tribune (IHT), Friday, December 14, 2007:

"Stand on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and watch the millions of motorbikes drive past," he [Tobin] said. "Everyone has a mobile phone. Everyone is really well dressed. Every day, you see more and more people able to participate in consumerism."

How many and which of those nouveau riche, young Vietnamese consumers' dreams will they defer, or even pass up, just as they seem within their grasp? Why should they abstain from the unbridled consumerism they see in foreign films and TV news when they soon find out that most of those who can have any significant, if small, impact on reversing the climate crises are not even in their own nation, and worse, a depressingly small percentage of those overseas elite yet have any interest in doing anything significant about the impacts of climate change even in their own domains.

Who can spell "lower, warmer coastal nations' rich-brain drain (LWCNRBD)"?

-- ADM, on the hyperevolution.


From the Huffington Post, a leading US voice of relatively objective, informed dissent:

Another Depressing Screed on Global Warming

Posted December 7, 2007 | 06:17 PM (EST)


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"It's not sinking!" uncle John is angry. Or grumpy. Or both. He has spent far too much of his life screaming logic at disinterested boobs to tolerate misphrasing. "The water is rising."

The 'it' in question is New York, specifically Manhattan.

"True, but isn't that really a matter of relativity?" I ask. "I mean, if we measure altitude in feet above sea level, then if sea level rises we're technically sinking."

"It's not sinking!" John says. Our Thanksgiving table is filled with relatively agreeable people who agree heartily on the catastrophe of carbon emissions, so in order to stir up a really good fight - an important part of any Thanksgiving - it's important to be stubborn over small details.

John's wife, Susan, interjects "Seattle is rising. The rock bed underneath it is moving the city slowly upward. Venice is sinking. Those have nothing to do with the water level."

These are people who have become so deeply embroiled in a cause that shrugging it off as yet another of the world's moral train wrecks is not an option. To them, global warming is apartheid or imperialism or slavery; anyone who can shrug and a buy an SUV is a collaborator and a villain. They are moral and dedicated people. And, like most moral and dedicated people, they make dreadful cocktail companions.

"True," I say "but look: the kilogram is defined by a block of platinum in Paris, right? So if somebody knocks that block and chips off a few molecules, everything suddenly weighs more. It's the same with sea level."

It's important to keep up these stupid arguments because otherwise John or Susan or both will talk about global warming in earnest.

The problem is that they are too distinguished. John is a scientist emeritus at Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute and Susan has her own PhD and for ten years was the president of Ecological Engineering, a wastewater management firm. Their titles carry weight, so when they say Manhattan is sinking - or, I suppose, global water levels are rising thus putting Manhattan underwater in a way that, really, has pretty much the same effect as sinking - it's frightening. As if their knowledge didn't scare me enough, they use metric units, which are terrifyingly scientific.

As the only person in the entire world who has not seen An Inconvenient Truth, I can generally avoid confronting the all-but-inevitable implications of global warming if I set my mind to it. Does this winter seem different from the winters fifteen years ago? Sure, but maybe I'm misremembering.

My aunt and uncle know the numbers. When they explain that water levels are rising about 1mm a year but that rate is accelerating, it's mildly frightening. When they explain that, if current trends continue, fifty years from now the next generation - by which they mean me - could easily have a sea level that is one meter higher than the present one, it's depressing. And when they explain that Manhattan would have to spend gobs of money on levies and water pumps or else be partially submerged, I entertain thoughts of doomsday. I like Manhattan. I live there. I would like it to remain an above-water attraction.

If science is the religion of the secular left, then global warming is our Armageddon. And like any young Baptist who believes in the rapture but isn't sure he'll pass muster, I come out of global warming sermons feeling hollow and jumpy.

John is standing now. He rose to refill his wine glass, but he is irritated so standing will do him just fine. "The kilogram's not the same. Water levels change constantly and we don't redefine the heights of mountains. And it's a dumb way to look at it. The water is rising." His tone has a note of finality to it, and he waits for me to challenge him.

Earlier in the night, John noted that his farm is a good 22 feet above sea level (in a rare scientific lapse, he didn't use meters) and thus will mostly avoid the coming flood. Honestly, this seemed smug.

My generation, our generation for those of you twenty-somethings out there, is going to be the first, by most indications, to really feel the worst effects of climate change. We will have memories of polar bears as creatures that lived in the arctic while our children will understand them as yet another in a long list of extinct species. We could easily see large parts of the Greenland ice shelf collapse into the ocean in our lifetimes. And, again, parts of Manhattan - not to mention Florida, Louisiana and Hawaii - will probably be underwater by the time I am in my seventies.

Pessimism is an unpopular sentiment in American politics, even when it seems pretty close to realism. So we won't hear much in this next election about the preposterously large global effort it would take to mitigate, much less reverse, our current climate trends. For the first time in history, China is emitting more carbon dioxide than the United States and India is closing in on us. The candidates will probably talk a fair amount about the US taking leadership in the battle against global warming. They will probably not talk about the fact that to seriously dampen carbon emissions, we will have to convince 2.6 billion people in China and India to develop a transportation system that doesn't rely on automobiles and a fuel system that doesn't rely on petroleum, and that's assuming we can begin to steer our own people in the same direction.

It's not, of course, that catastrophe is inevitable. There is a chance that climate change will occur more slowly. There's a chance that human technology will limit or even eliminate its effects. It's just that there are a lot of very smart people who know a lot about climate change who think we are making the world irreversibly hotter.

John is waiting for me to respond to his point in our tiny argument, and I do: "look, I'm just saying all motion is relative - that's a basic principle of physics - so both sinking cities or rising water levels are correct." It's a dumb point in a dumb argument. At the end of the day, whether the water is rising or we are sinking, we will all still be in deep - and might I add hot - water.

--
AD (Andi) Marshall
Zone: ICT (IndoChina Time, GMT/UTC+7)
Post: HoChiMinh City (ex/or SaiGon), VietNam
Quote: "Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none..."
Source: Shakespeare, 1623, "All's Well That Ends Well"
Get it at Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2246

By ADMarshall at 11:18 0 comments

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2007-09-06

Biuti: Firefox Redshift v2 theme on Ubuntu

It's a s'shots day today it seems. 

In the environmentally zeitgeist of Blackle, the new Redshift v2 theme for Firefox rocks.  Even with FF overloaded with add-ons, an add-on it doesn't display lusciously has yet to be found. 

By ADMarshall at 00:27 0 comments

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2007-09-05

Despite unprecedented lobbying and PR, Microsoft's OOXML loses ISO approval vote

[This post will just have to be improved very soon.  More links have to be added, and maybe a few images, too.  But Sir Francis beckons now for brews and grub at 219 No Tran Long, yet again.  :D  Please pardon the inevitable typos and awkwardness.]

According to GesmerUpdegrove LLP's ConsortiumInfo Standards Blog, Microsoft's OOXML just lost the vote for acceptance by International Standards Organization (ISO) as an international standard, leaving the OASIS/OpenOffice ODF standard as the world's sole globally-approved office-document standard. 

The near-term implication, assuming no reversal of the vote, seems to be that digital office documents will now enjoy a single, open standard under which any company, anywhere competitively build information-systems applications. 

The ODF standard could thus provide a common global standard for working with office documents just as HTML has long so successfully provided the same for pages in the Internet's World Wide Web.  (See comments by Canonical, Ubuntu Linux' Mark Shuttleworth in a Vietnam video-conference transcript about the same, near here.)

Of this hardly insignificant event, Andrew Updegrove wrote on the Standard Blog, PDT.05:31.Tue.04.Sep.2007.AD, 'The actual numbers for the final tally are now what you could rightly call "encouraging."  All 41 P members voted, with the following breakdown:  17 yes, 15 no, and 9 abstain.  Or, as the ISO press release more neutrally described the result':

Approval requires at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were achieved, with 53 % of votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 being positive and 26 % of national votes cast being negative.

As Updegrove notes in the outset of his post, the New York Times conspicuously just ran an piece by Kevin J O'brien headlined, "Microsoft Favored to Win Open Document Vote ", 04.Sep.2007, New York (03.Sep, Berlin) -- which now erases most of the doubts i at least had about the NYT's neocon establishment slant since i read a recent interview with Seymour Hersh following Bush Jr's recent self-serving comparison of the USA's invasion of Iraq to its regrettable invasion of Vietnam.

Another highly informative, if potentially biased piece on the MS OOXML ISO approval bid can be found at the Boycott Novell blog, " Has Microsoft 'Bought' the Vote for OOXML in Vietnam?", 27.Aug.2007.   The post's question-veiled proposition is supported by a lot of apparently credible links and what looks at first glance to be a fairly well-rounded argument. 

In fact, it was via a post at the Boycott Novell blog, "It's Final and Official: ODF is the Only ISO Standard", 04.Sep.2007, that Updegrove's post was first found.

By ADMarshall at 12:47 0 comments

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