Kurt Johnson

Since this isn’t an anonymous blog I’m exercising restraint on controversial topics. However I can’t hide a little satisfaction at seeing Greenpeace get a little of their own disobediance thrown back at them. If they want to exercise their free speech rights outside on the street, fine…but when they break the law and invade private property they’ve lost their claim (real or imagined) to the moral high ground.

The London Times carries this story about Greenpeace protesters invading the IPE’s oil trading floor with noisemakers and placards in an attempt to disrupt trading for the afternoon. If you haven’t seen a big open outcry trading floor (Chicago Merc, Nymex, whatever) you should make it a point to visit one before they get too civilized and/or pushed out by electronic exchanges - listening to the interactions and seeing the pace of commerce on the floor is surreal.

“WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.

What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
…..

“Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,” Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.

“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.”

They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry” trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.

But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,” a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.”

Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.”

Better luck next time - I’ve heard the Iraqi insurgency is not recycling their used VBIEDs - maybe Greenpeace should try disrupting their workplaces.

I’ve been invited to interview at Wharton (U Penn). I’m trying to schedule the interview now - I gambled on getting an invitation earlier if I was to get one (i.e., not getting one two days before the last possible invitation date) so that I could schedule it for my time in Dallas last week, but now I’m stuck trying to schedule it on one of the remaining two weekdays I’m in Dallas between now and the deadline. Because I’m booking all of my business travel 3-6 weeks out to save on airfare it’s tough to plan around the uncertainty of the interviews.

Still no word from Columbia…..I’ll be a little surprised if I don’t hear something in the next 2-3 weeks.

I haven’t heard anything back from either Wharton or Columbia since turning my applications in about a month ago. Wharton has committed to telling me this week whether they’ll be interviewing me or rejecting me outright. Columbia only commits to a decision within 12 weeks of submission (=mid April my case). If I manage an acceptance Susanne and I will start the process of getting her licensed and interviewing for PA jobs in either NYC or Philadelphia (probably at another Emergency Room) and finding housing.

I’m now having regular panic attacks whenever I consider having to compress and move our Texas-sized apartment and furnishings to a more austere living space fifteen hundred miles away. Regardless of what happens with school we’re planning on taking a trip somewhere exotic in July (seizing the childless years of marriage). We’d love to do Vietnam but July is an unworkable month due to heat and rainstorms that cause road closures and other disruptions. In lieu of Vietnam we’re thinking about somewhere farther north in East Asia (dryer/cooler weather) or Tanzania.

I’ll post status updates on the web as I get them.

I’ve started a new book on Vietnamese history. I’m only 100 pages into it but the style and content of the writing is excellent. I’m not extremely interested in the details of Dien Bien Phu but the author is doing a wonderful job of describing the pre-battle history of Vietnam including cultural issues, national geography, weather, etc. - these are the details that are more interesting to me.

If anybody wants to read this and discuss I’d love to start a mini-book-club.

The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

The Economist Review - also named an Economist “Book of the Year” for 2004

I’ve had some headaches keeping my personal email in line recently; I’m lugging around archives of email for the last 5+ years spread across several webmail accounts, and my primary personal email account has suffered recurring corruption problems lately (and I’ve outsourced my server admin). Finally, I’m accessing email from 3-4 different PCs in any given week and I turn over PCs frequently enough that trying to move archives around is a real hassle.

My solution, for now, is to move all of my archives to gmail and forward my personal mailbox there as well. Hopefully this simplifies my life a little as I can put the archiving out of mind and let gmail administer spam filtering instead of doing my own. I haven’t figured out how to get POP downloading to work across multiple PCs yet, but the gmail interface and options make it attractive enough to forego local email except on whatever laptop I’m using for travel.

The other thing I’m doing is setting my personal mail to be BCC’d to a second gmail account so that I’ve got a permanent archive of sent mail. I ran this for a while on my own server and like the way it works, but going to gmail is an easy switch and frees up some disk quota on my web server.

Based on what I’ve seen in the last week I’m giving two thumbs up to gmail. Thanks to Tomur for the invite; I’ve now got 50 invites if anyone else wants to try it. I started using GML to upload my local mail archives to gmail and then switched to gExodus. Neither of them is perfect but they’re easier than writing my own script.