Wesley Howe

So what about me?

Actually, I was just going to note that I was looking at the title for this site, which is my name. But I registered the url for my nickname, which is what I usually think of for my name, except when I have to fill out something official, when I use my full name.

Then I thought, gee, what if another Wesley Howe registered wesleyhowe.com (I know from Google there is more than one Wes Howe active). So I checked, and wesleyhowe.com was still available, so I registered it and added it to this site as a parked domain (like an alias).

So whether you check www.weshowe.com or www.wesleyhowe.com, you get the same server. I know this doesn’t mean much to most people, because my name is of mostly personal interest. I didn’t get to pick it, but I am proud of it, and I am trying to keep it from getting too much mud and crud on it. I’m not planning on doing anything except keep it from being used by anyone else.

Because for me, it’s personal.

So, I have a high-speed internet provider called Cobalt Broadband that uses wi-fi technology. This is a bit faster than most DSL connections, but nowhere near Cable internet speed. Where I live, I am not likely to get phone company DSL or Cable TV service of any type anytime in the predictable future. Too far for too few homes.

The wireless broadband connection works pretty well, when it is working. Yes, as you can tell I am setting up another rant… this time, I was left without service for four days. One thing that is frustrating about the whole issue is trying to deal with the attitude of my no-service provider, Cobalt Broadband. Oh, yes, I mentioned their name before.

Like a lot of companies, their phone system is designed to make it hard to report problems. Of course, they are severely understaffed and do not seem to care about their customer’s concerns. I left messages, and got no call back. I did talk several times with the single technical support person, but they seemed to merely be a phone answerer, and provided no explanation for and no ETA on the problem resolution.

Everybody has problems from time to time… we all have a few warts somewhere. But the mark of a good provider is how well they try to manage the problems when they occur. Cobalt Broadband failed that, big time. While you get an apology for the trouble, it is an empty set of words when it isn’t backed with a sincere effort at problem resolution. I have no doubt that it requires a lean and mean operation to make any money running a rural internet system. Large distances need to be traversed and we all know what the price of fuel has done to budgets. But without some honest communication about the efforts being made, the only judgement you can make is that no one cares.

For what value it has, I requested and was promised a credit for my service outage time. As long as the service isn’t working, it serves me no purpose to let the provider retain the revenue. I know management watches the funds, and probably has to approve a refund, so by demanding my refund I am at least making it hurt a little bit. Four days is more than 10% of a month; few companies could withstand a steady stream of revenue losses at the double-digit level.

It has been a while since we had any new calves hit the ground here at Rancho Como. While new calves become what we sell, they are more delightful than just a future ka-ching in the cash register of life. It is great to see them trying to explore the world, to see their mothers dote on them, grooming them and easing their fears, and to watch them grow and develop.

This calf is a cutie, too. Her mother is a salt-and-pepper colored Longhorn breed cow (horned, of course) and the father is our all black Brangus bull, Mr. Duke. The new gal is polled (naturally hornless), because the father is polled, and horns on cattle are a recessive trait, despite what intuition would tell you. She is white, with a few black spots, and black “trim”… meaning around the edge of her eyes, her nose, hoofs, teats and the inside of her ears are all black. Like most of the Longhorn/Brangus crosses we have, the head has the “Angus” look to it, generally a shorter snout and wider head, with peak between the ears where the base of the horns would start on a horned animal.

I found the gal this morning, but I am pretty sure she had to have been born the day before (Thursday), perhaps in the afternoon or evening. Her mother is treating her well, and she seems healthy enough. This is a first calf for her mother (who was also born here) and sometimes the first calves come a little too soon, and premature calves do not fare well. They often seem to lack the will to survive, which frustrates their mothers, who are trying to get them to nurse and relieve their pressure. It is sad because they just get weak and die, sometimes the mother abandons them, sometimes not. I tried hand feeding one once, but after a few weeks it eventually died, it never thrived and I decided that allowing nature to take its course was the best policy with the preemies. We had two last year, but none yet this year.

I have several more mothers that should be calving soon, but it has been a couple of months since we had a new calf. This time of year can be a bad time for them, because the evenings can get pretty cold. we haven’t had our first freeze yet this year, but it shouldn’t be long. The cattle find somewhere to lay sheltered from the wind, with a full belly of grass, which generates heat as it is digested. The youngest of the calves have more trouble, because they start out totally dependent on their mother’s milk, and do not really start digesting grass well for a couple of weeks, although they begin grazing at a few days of age. It takes time for the right bacteria to develop in their rumen and for their digestive system to get into gear. While they will continue to nurse as long as they are with their mother, after four months grass is their predominant source of nutrition, although we usually don’t wean them until they are about eight months, we have had calves left orphaned at a few months that survived.

Elections are over… I’m O.D. on politics and all manner of social issues. Bah, Humbug. I have also disabled comments on my articles here, because the Wordpress security seems not to be able to trap the spammers. Someone always spoils a good time. I would gladly post comments sent to me via email weshowe {AT} yahoo {DOT} {COM}. As long as they are civil, I can withstand controversy.

I am going to applaud something new I tried, and bought, the C4 game engine. Previous blog entries have shown I own a license to the Torque engine, which is pretty much shelved at this point. I tried some other game engines, but they are not able to deliver the simplicity of solutions C4 does because of the great efforts that have been put into creating a “little or no” programming environment solution.

If you want to work with C4, be prepared to use your Visual Studio 2008 C++ compiler on it (the free express edition works). I managed to compile it with VS 2005, but it was a nuisance to edit all of the project files, so I went ahead and upgraded myself to VS 2008. An early Christmas present from me to me.

Among the things I like is that the game code you construct, which can access any of the game engine capabilities, is compiled into a DLL. You get the entire source for the engine with your license, but one of the issues is support… the further you drift from the stock game engine, the more work is required as new releases of the engine are released to integrate all of your changes with new source files.

In all of my tests here, the engine is quite stable. It ran poorly (just slow and jerly motion) at one point when Microsoft Update “updated” my video driver to an 18-month old one. While I have that update hidden and the newer driver reinstalled, that is probably a sore spot with developers, because MS should not be updating newer drivers with older ones.

The tools for level building are included with the engine, and while they have a MAC look and feel to them (it uses non-windows buttons and gadgets that are available for use in games), which I find mildly annoying (opinion, many people love the MAC look and feel). But they work, surprisingly well. Importing graphics is limited to TGA format and meshes/animations to COLLADA. This presents some issues in designing a pipeline for art assets, but Autodesk has a FBX/COLLADA converter that works well and costs only the extra time required to register before downloading it. With it, I was able to export models in FBX from MilkShape, convert to COLLADA with the Autodesk tool and import into the game engine. I have had an issue with scaling and I think I lost the fourth skin weight, but mesh and animations worked. The COLLADA exporter for MilkShape does not export the animations, at least not through version 1.8.4.

There are some deficiencies, most noticably the absence of support for morphing (blends). This is on the development schedule, but is really important for good facial animations. Movable joints just don’t look realistic enough in higher detail. The author [Eric Lengyel] has put great effort into developing the product, and his technical qualifications are probably second to none.

It occurred to me recently that all of the various class divisions used to explain the deep divisions in the U.S. over public policy seem to fall short of explaining things. We have traditionally postured the Democrats as the party of the working class, and the Republicans as the party of capitalists. However, this seems to fall short of explaining U.S. politics because, at least in recent years, we see a lot of working people voting Republican and a lot of rather wealthy people supporting the Democrats. While this division point may have worked once, it no longer seems to hold.

The real division and class war is between the Working class and the Political class. In the Political class we have people whose jobs depend pretty directly on government, such as government employees, public school teachers, academics and university employees. In the Working class we have all the people whose work effort pays the freight for the political class. One of the prime determinants of the class members would be taxes… if taxes were to go to zero, who would be unable to be paid?

This is causing some very large divisions in political perspective. All of the members of the Political class benefit from a larger role for government… greater regulation requires more regulators and increased taxes. The Working class instead see a larger government role as extra work effort required to deal with increased bureaucracy and an additional financial burden from more taxes.

So now, what you find in the Democratic party are people from the Political class, aligned with people whose areas of greatest concern (such as avid environmentalists, and trial lawyers) benefit from increased regulation. In the Republican party you find the Working class people, whether they be the traditional blue-collar workers, or the highly paid professionals, executives and entrepreneurs.

Now things make more sense. The old class division politics of wealth divisions and labor/management don’t work well anymore, because both labor and management in private industry are now aligned in the same Working class. The healthy, growing unions are all in the Political class, such as teachers and government employees.

This has been a gradual shift, certainly most of it in my lifetime. When I was in high school, Florida had the first state-wide teacher strike ever. Teacher’s unions were a novel concept then, as were many other governmental white-collar unions. Back then, the United Steel Workers were a powerful force in politics, today the AFSCME rules the roost.

Forget explanations of “Wal-Mart Republicans” or “Reagan Democrats”. The old working class has been split by who they work for, and those in private industry have teamed up with their bosses to try to keep the Political class from taking over.