Steve Speak

With talk of a bailout of GM (General Motors) looming, I figured I had to make some kind of comment. In the past, I have commented several times in this blog about the poor management decisions of GM and other automakers. I noted that just about any person off the street would have seen the trends coming that have put these companies in crisis. Heck, I’ll hire myself out as a consultant to them for cheap! I can’t do a worse job than the current top management of these companies.

This bailout, though, shows just how bad that management has been, and is a very troubling development. Yes, the sudden downturn in the economy means that an already fragile auto industry needs help. The repercussions of not doing so would be catastrophic to the USA if not the world. That said, how we got here is very troubling. What overly greedy investment tactics and sub-prime mortgage failure have to do with falling profits of automakers? I think this is a good question. If you have some answer, I’d love to hear it.

What we have here, is an extremely mismanaged industry, the failure of which would have too severe of repercussions to ignore. At the same time, the failure of which is to be expected. Now all us tax-payers have to foot the bill. This is absolutely unfair, but unfortunately, a likely reality.

The trend here that is so extremely dangerous, is that huge companies can be mismanaged, with such extreme waste… and then expect to be bailed out because of their critical importance to the national and global economy. Why even worry about the long term when running such an organization? Take the maximum money you can extract and waste… worry only about the shareholders…. if everything falls apart, the tax-payers will just bail us out.

I think we’re going to have to implement some kind of check and balance on any company that gets this critical to national and global economy. This means either breaking them up, or some other kind of external oversight to be sure they don’t get into this kind of mess. I’ve see this coming for a long time with GM. I’m sure others have as well. Yet, they just blindly fumbled down a path of destruction for many years now.

So, who will be the next industry to cash in on government bailout? It’s easy money if you are a big and important industry. We can hardly let them fail. Yet, they don’t seem to care about anything but feeding internal and external greed… not even enough to do any planning for the future.

Mark my words on this… if we do not fundamentally change the way companies are run, and how investors invest in them… we WILL NOT get out of the economic crisis we are currently in. If we do temporarily because of bailouts and governments manipulating the economy, it will only be covering up the the real problem. The current history-breaking swings of the stock markets show the investors don’t have a clue about the nature of the problem. Companies like GM are prime examples of the cluelessness on a corporate level as well. Can we fix the problem without letting it all come crashing down? I think the answer is yes, but it will take fundamental changes in thinking about investing and business. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this will happen without a complete collapse.

Just a quick update. Trixie spent a couple weeks in the shop getting all dried out, carpets cleaned, and enzyme treatments applied. I also changed all the fluids (transmission, differential, oil and filter, coolant, etc.) All seems fine now. Yay!

It is great to have Trixie back, and we’re looking forward to more adventures. This summer, she might get to make a trip to Yosemite. Stay tuned…

First, we hear that GM is having problems and cutting back. Now, about a month later, we hear the same or worse news from Ford. Huge cuts and changes affecting tens to hundreds of thousands of employees.

I feel very bad for these folks. While in my field, IS/IT, jobs can be had just about anywhere, the same is not true for auto workers. Many towns literally revolve around the plants located in or near them. This will ultimately affect more than just those who work at the plants getting shut down. They might even take whole towns down with them. NPR had a worker on who was just moved from one state where a plant closed, now he is facing the same thing again… even IF he could get moved to a plant in yet another state.

One has to ask how this could happen. Sure, the American auto makers are competing on a global scale now. But, many of these companies now own some of the foreign car makers, or have partnerships on many of the models. The problem is much deeper than that.

I typically am not a big fan of unions. My story on this goes back to personal experience within my family while growing up, watching how the union interacted with my father’s work situations. Then, I had more direct interaction with a couple of the large national unions on a project I worked on later in life. They have become very self-interested entities that I believe are out of control in many ways. Yet, even the UAW hit it square on the head on NPR today. Ford had simply not kept up with the times on what people want to buy. BINGO!

I still come back to the question of, how and why??? If just about every person in the country can figure it out… and has had it figured out for several years… how can highly paid people who have for their primary job watching the industry mess up so badly? I just can’t fathom the stupidity of it. Sorry I can’t be more diplomatic about it…. but it is just that, stupidity!

How long have gas prices been going up? How long have we known people were beginning to become more aware of the environment? How long have other companies like Honda and Toyota had hybrid models? How long has flack been growing against the popularity of SUVs?

I suppose SUV sales haven’t drastically declined until the super high gas prices of the last year or two. But, couldn’t they see this coming? Again, I just don’t understand. If I were the share holders of these companies, I’d clean house of all the upper management. You could hardly pick worse people to run things. Heck, just go randomly pick folks walking down the street and they are likely to have better judgment for what the market wants and needs.

I really hope one day the American car companies ‘get it’. America is a country that seems to be able to be on top of technology in any area that we put our minds to it. The auto industry should be no exception. American autos have come a long way on build quality, and the workers should be proud of that. But the workers and unions can’t do a lot about poor design, market research, and planning. This time, the fault falls squarely on the management… shame on them!

Well Christmas and the Holiday season were going nicely this year… busy but I got some actual time off and I was really enjoying that. I’m certainly behind in my posting and editing the Intelligent Design article I had planned. But, 2005 went out in a bit of a wild way here in the Bay area. We got rain… lots of rain! It was the start of a rather different New Years event than I have experienced before.

I had come home around midnight from a day playing Gran Turismo 4 with a friend and parked Trixie (hey… you folks didn’t come up with a better name… don’t you feel bad now?) in her usual parking spot on the street curb by our apartment.

About 4am on Dec 31st, we were woken by doorbell and pounding on our door. Fortunately, it was a neighbor who had got up for some reason and noticed that things were being flooded. At the time, there was no water in our actual parking lot, but street was beginning to flood. Several of us ran to our cars to get them out of the street… the parking between our buildings is space limited, but on a bit higher ground.

Well, soon we realized that it was coming up into that area too, but the street would have been over Trixie’s dash for sure! As the water level got higher, we soon realize that our cars might still be in trouble… but there was no where else to go. Then we began to be concerned about our actual apartments. Our apartment is on the 2nd floor, but many of our neighbors were in possible trouble. We were house sitting the 1st floor apartment below us.

We watched the water level closely and it crept up steps, step by step. It was about 1 inch from invading the 1st floor apartments, when it stopped rising. It slowly began to drop. Some people had actually started to move 1st floor things to 2nd floor. We were all pretty tired from the excitement, yet no one could sleep as it was still raining, but it had slowed for sure.

In a couple hours, the water had dropped another inch or so, and it was beginning to get light. We could see more damage at this point and debris floating around. We were certainly lucky compared to many others in our community who lost homes, business, and lots of cars. I think 170 businesses in San Anselmo were badly damaged or destroyed. I heard a number of $50 million in damage being mentioned in this small town while I was out the other day.

Trixie did take some damage. There is about 2 inches of height difference between the door sill of the Miata and our Civic. The Civic was fine, but the Miata got an Inch or so of water on its floor. It initially started fine, but after driving a bit, wasn’t running so well, and the engine and ABS lights are on. I’m hoping after it is dried out, it is just something simple like water splashed in the spark plugs, or O2 sensor and brake pad sensors for ABS. Time will tell… she is at the shop now.

So, while this is not the start to the New Year I had been hoping for, I still have to be thankful for what we have. It could have been MUCH worse. Gave us just a small glimpse into what so many have gone through over this last year. Let’s hope this year is much better for the world in regard to natural disasters.

Here are some photos I snapped when it got light out. It was at least 3 inches higher at its peak level… maybe more.

This topic, as the title states is somewhat of a rabbit track from what I was going to post. I WAS going to post the details of my stereo install this weekend in my Miata. I’m still going to do this, but it might take a while. To give you some idea how this all went, I’m debating between “Frankenstein Stereo Install” and “Stereo Install Nightmare on Steve Street”. I’m sure I’ll come up with something better when I write it, but you get the idea…

Well, as an aside, when I got my stereo, I started to browse the manual, and I made some interesting discoveries. My stereo reads v1.x ID3 tags, and my titles weren’t showing up. I soon learned that iTunes defaults to v2.2. Interesting… I didn’t even know what a ID3 tag was, let alone the differences between versions. I was about to find out.

ID3 tags are the embedded information in your MP3 files which give various information, such as the track title, artist, album, genre, etc. I knew this info was there, but not much about it. Basically, v1.x tags are put at the end of the MP3 data, and are delimited by the number of characters per field. The fields are also very limited in length, most to 30 characters (not enough for even all your track titles, let alone other information.) Also, there are a lot less fields available. The advantage to putting them at the end, is they are easy to change. The disadvantage is that you have to read in the entire file to see them.

Well, v2.x came along an fixed much of this. They are prepended to the front of the file, and are stored in 256 byte ‘frames’. Apple smartly pads this area of the MP3, so they can change information without re-writing the whole file. This kind of takes the best advantage of v1.x, but at the beginning of the file, so they are quickly accessed when browsing files.

If you want to see the tags… you can actually open an MP3 in your text editor… look at the start or end, and you should see some familiar info. You can read all the gooey details about this at:

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/id3tags00.php

I started to wonder, sweat, and worry…. will my newly purchased stereo even be able to show the track names now? I found information out there about ID3 tag editors, so I guess I could go through thousands of songs and edit them to v1.x… ekk! Then I found that iTunes has this nice feature under Advanced – - Convert ID3 Tags…. YAY! The only problem with this is that in many of my MP3s I have a lot more information stored in them (I record a lot of Internet radio programs, and often store notes about the show content in the notes field… also a lot of my tracks have long titles.) If I converted them to v1.x, my data got chopped off, or erased.

Then I started wondering…. what happens if BOTH tags are present? Since an MP3 file seems to work equally well with the appended info, or prepended info…. why couldn’t their be both? I searched and searched… and really couldn’t find info on this. One article said something about append/prepend when talking about the specs… so I started to DL tag editors, hoping I’d find a way.

I stuck gold!!! I found two pretty nice apps, which actually do a lot more. But both can be set to go through your libraries of MP3s and convert versions of tags, as well as put BOTH! Whoo hoo!

MP3 ID3X
http://www.three-2-one.de/321apps/main/global/index1.htm

MP3 Rage
http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MP3Rage.html

I picked the later one… not because of its ‘totally awesome’ skull logo (not sure what is up with that… maybe I need to read about its history or something), but because it does SO many other things too.

It seems to work quite well… it went through my entire music collection in about 10 minutes or so, and now I have v2.3 AND v1.1 ID3 tags on my MP3s.

Problem solved for now! Now back to lamenting and resting from my VERY involved stereo install process…

It seems that most of the time when a Mazda Miata is being referred to, it usually has a name. I guess this must be because they are so much fun, that they just become members of the family.

Well, here is my problem… my Miata has no name! It is a ’95 M Edition, Merlot Mica. I just love this color, in fact it is my very favorite. I’m really lucky to have found one of these. They only made 3500 of them. Its over 10 years old, but is in great condition.

Back to the name dilemma… When I first got it, my brain made an instant connection to ‘Merlin’ the Merlot. That has kind of a ring to it. But, when Mark (his Miata is named UBY, derived from the license plate) and I did a bit of looking at the Miata registries, it seems that MANY other folks had the same idea. Well, my Miata is just too special to have that common of a name. Yet, I’m going to resist giving it a ‘unique’ name, following the traditions of California, such as ‘Sparkle-star Moonbeam Shiraz’. But, I really need help, as my wife has suggested ‘Trixie” (I’m just not sure what she could mean by that!!!)

So, can you help me come up with a great name for my racy little friend?