A letter to the Rest of the World

Dear Rest of the World… VOTE FOR BUSH!

I am here to ask you to please do everything in your power to reelect George Bush Junior. (Does he by the way become Senior ever, and if so when?) But before I go into why we must work for his reelection I think I better define, for those that don’t know, who you the rest of the world are.

Obviously Tony Blair wants Bush to be reelected president and so by default, even if they don’t want him, the United Kingdom has to go along with it. Unless they of course decide to recall or impeach Tony, which the English, being so civilized and restrained in all matters except football would just not do. So, obviously Britain is not the rest of the world, therefore anyone outside of that country and the United States, are technically The rest of the world.

You might say “but if what you really are talking about here is the Alliance of Goodness, why are you not including Spain, Australia and Italy and all those other little countries that supported the crusades against unrepentant Iraq?”

Well, simply put Australia, please forgive me down there, is not a world power, I don’t even think they will ever be, they may have participated in the war effort to get the “next to big brother feeling” but really the Los Angeles police department is more destructive than any aussie commando.

The Italians were there too, shame on the Vatican for not stopping Berlusconi, the Pope should have refused the religious tax that the state pays the Holy See until all Italian troops came home. But really Italians are suppose to be food lovers, and romantic lovers, and passionate and aesthetic, I know that is a stereotype but that is a stereotype that I wish my own country Colombia would share. However Colombia and Italy are equally insignificant in the game plan; I don’t take Italian soldiers seriously, they should do the same as Spain, which is simply to adopt a foreign legion, at least that way deserting cowards can be excused for not being patriotic.

There are of course a bunch of other countries that supported the war effort and they are not mentioned here because frankly they should close their foreign relations imaginings, shut down all embassies, you may keep the consulates for visa revenues, but really, please, stop wasting our time.

Now then, anyone who can follow logic has so far deduced that the rest of the world is anyone outside of the United States and England.

Having said that I must now project forward the fact that I did not support the war against Iraq, currently credited with 9436 Iraqis deaths, and 957 American and alliance soldiers dead, with ignored, not dead, thousands injured. But part of the reason I did not support the war was because I did not realize that it would be a watershed point, perhaps even I dare say, the climax of American power. A downfall which while unrecognizable started when the Soviet Union collapsed as it was the cold war polar opposites that held the two dichotomies in gyroscopic equilibrium.

Indeed the war in Iraq has been, even if it is won in the end, which would require a wide definition of victory, indeed the war has been an Spectacle Emasculator of American prestige and power and has then, the most likely capacity to humble America and then perhaps to help it to join the world community as more of an equal partner.

Certainly the events have displayed courageously that being brave is not the same as being successful, and I believe they will further demonstrate that culture is more powerful than might, and so in the end, the results expected from this war, outside of marketing, will publish a record of infamy.

And it is not just an infamy of what has happened to Iraqis, it is what Bush has done to his own nation, even McCarthyism does not compete in the level of destruction harmonized against American respectability in the world. Dully put, today America is suffering from their own internal terrorist, Bush!

That the American people needed this is questionable, there is nothing wrong with greatness and they certainly have had it, but Bush has put that greatness to question: he has turned immortal America into an error-prone, helpless, vulnerable and finally doubtful and objectionable power.

Again I can not imagine that this is good for America, but I think it is fair to say that Bush has become an extension of the terrorist rather than a front; and as such he is creating a more level playing field where American morality and its approach to world domination, through its subjective ideals and values, will become suspect and challengeable.

Over all, for America Bush is a bad omen, but for the rest of the world… Vote for Bush: he levels your playing field.

RC

SUPERBOWL

Manifest Destiny
From sea to shiny sea
The melting pot
Of iron fisted fears

Alarm wakes up
Shower and deodorant heavenly
Coffee wired
450 horsepower traffic jams
Giving it back to the environment
Radio fanatic humor
Radio fanatic politics
Turn left
Turn right
Work
Jockeying meetings
Review by your boss
Review by your peers
Review by your customers
Review the new girl in accounting
Testing your gossip
Review by your bank
No layoff’s today
Don’t drive drunk
Happy hour salty peanuts
Review by your children
Book review
Movie review
Restaurant review
Culture worn on t-shirts
Economic growth 3%, better than average but needs improvement
Traffic news
Weekend weather
Sitcom fast food laundry
Sleep

World News Today or Find A New Enemy

The rest of the world wants to kill you
They have bombs
They have gas
They have germs
They have tuberculosis
They have malnutrition
They have the mob
They have the underground
They have many children
They have Islamic tendencies
They want to steal your money
They hunger for your intellectual property
They want to bribe you
They want you to bribe them
They want to corrupt your freedom
They want to kidnap you
They want to drug you
They are malicious and cruel
They circumcise women
They don’t let them drive cars
They don’t let them wear makeup
They don’t fear your Christian god
They don’t fear the law
They don’t fear you
They are illiterate
They are underemployed
They all want to come here
Overly armed and going nuclear
They are anarchist
They use child labor
They beat their wives
They sodomize boys and rape girls
They elect dictators
They blow things up
They don’t like news reporters

And now for your local news:

New drug cures cancer
Physiology is not destiny gene therapy is
Scientists have discovered a gene that when turned on it is an alarm clock
95 percent religiosity and going for 100
Don’t stop drinking or smoking alone
The stock market bullish bound bear
The longest aging populace a short term voting majority
Elderly pay homage to Indian casinos
Teens are drinking and smoking more
Teens are having more unprotected sex
Out of this world colonies
Gloating chemotherapy
Ripening cesareans
Your kids’ education is the worst that it has ever been
Garbage collectors get paid more than teachers
Your forever abnormal local weather
The Internet is changing your world unlike the phone, the wheel and world war II
The nuclear family invented in America barely a decade after the atomic bomb
Moral breakdown of the social fiber that would shock Genghis Khan, Cleopatra and Henry VIII
America adolescent isolationist ever masturbating with its toys
And the winning lottery numbers are…
Not yours
Computers are getting cheaper faster and smaller
And smarter, they can beat you at chess, at poker, at being difficult
Child abductions prove how caring milk companies are
A dozen new dieting plans make liposuction the last self improvement option
Phone scamming nice seniors
Seniors using their voting majority to scam the rest of us
Doctors recommend that you intern yourself for colon and breast cancer exams
Everything is genetics, you can have every illness ever known to Adam and Eve and beyond
The Christian right wants to reverse reengineer humanity
Homeless people on city streets making it harder for businesses to make a decent living
Not enough cops
Not enough jails
Not enough protection
We are too free
New surveillance cameras allow police to protect you without detecting your privacy
Cross training for sex
Rising low sperm counts
Traffic jams
Love jams
Happy ecstasy

And now back to our regular commercials programming

The wild world of animals, they just don’t know
The exciting world of sports from your couch
Soap opera incest, affairs, and money hoarding, not like you
Cop show rape murder mystery, premiering
Detective show murder mystery, remake
Lawyer show murder, scam, betrayal mystery, sequel
Doctors save lives, have affairs, lose face
Purchasable nanny-toons will entertain your kids tomorrow
Comedy, best out downs put downs
And now for our movie of the week: aliens invade the planet, or your body, or your sister
A special report on illegal aliens and welfare recipients

In the final moral analysis it is good to remind the ever struggling moral right that:
In 98.2% of all books, movies and television programming good always prevails in the end!
And of the 1.8% remainder, when the bad guy wins he turns out to be a misunderstood good guy
The bible stands out because it has nothing but promises and a bad ending; even so, it is still the best seller of all time
“That which God has brought together no man can bring asunder.” Translation:
In the entire history of humanity not a single good marriage has ended in divorce!
Patriots always become victors or martyrs
Traitors are always discovered, jailed or shot to pieces
Success comes to those that never stop trying
The rich know we live in a classless society
The middle class knows we live in a meritocracy
The lower class doesn’t know anything
A strong dollar buys you more vacation fun abroad
Angels are secretly working your life better everyday
Someday you are going to Mars

Go to sleep SuperBowl

RC

GO FROM COBOL TO JAVA!

In the 90’s the world of the internet took on mythological proportions; there wasn’t an ill in the world that wasn’t going to be cured by proper use of this online panacea. Businesses would be able to know their clients’ needs and wants before their customers even thought them. Universities would go online and teach the world from the comfort of their living rooms. Governments would not only be able to deliver on-line voting, but, through democracy and expenditure accountability, become paragons of leadership.

Almost a decade later we have come to realize that the internet is only a reflection of the real world with all its human limitations and potential. That, rather than radicalizing our existence it has merely become another tool that we use to perform our usual assortment of daily tasks.

The truth is that it is difficult for humans to change the way that they do things. Survey after survey from the likes of Gartner and CDI shows that an internet centric company can effortlessly reduce operational cost, increase ROI by 400% and deliver closer to real time benefits to customers, vendors and owners. Despite this, we find that companies consider a migration to the internet a Cost rather than an Investment towards their future success.

Yes, the Internet future with all its benefits was there, but our ability to change was not. However this isn’t the tragedy one might suppose, because, after all, the Internet was not a mature product.

Fortunately for us here in the Southern hemisphere, all Latin America is still using mostly Legacy technologies with COBOL and Visual Basic, C, Proprietary Databases and Client/Sever environments. Businesses are running unique solutions that are proprietary and expensive to maintain. Meanwhile, Europe and North America have happily invested billions of dollars to migrate towards Internet centric solutions. South and Central America remain largely untouched by this model and the reason why is our opportune resistance to change.

Resistance to change in a world that seems to be changing its methodology every six month is not a bad thing. If Latin America had caught the Internet fever in 1995, today it would have been involved in a quagmire of Internet technologies, contradictions, evolutions, and billions spent without proper results to show for it.

While Europe and North America have spent billions in migrations to the latest technologies, they have failed to gain the true rewards or productivity increases because the technologies had simply not matured. Technology was too rapidly evolving and early adopters inadvertently became no more than paying test dummies. In fact, it wasn’t till Gartner released its now famous report noting how inappropriately companies were overspending for IT solutions, that corporations finally got the picture. They were pursuing the perfect solution and the perfect solution kept on changing standard horizons, and costing more and more.

We could all blame Microsoft because it fragmented the industry by refusing to migrate to Open Standards and Open Technologies, but the real blame lies in the infancy of the Internet technologies and, more, the infancy of Global Standards. Who knew in 1995 which programming language or which communication protocols would truly dominate the NET? No one knew, myself included. We weren’t that worried about standards back then, we actually thought that the Internet was the solution and never really concerned ourselves by which methodology we got there. If we programmed in C or Cobol or Visual Basic, and used an emulator to publish on the Internet, we thought we had accomplished our aim, of course we hadn’t accomplished our aim, we were only making it more difficult to reach. But then again back in the early 90’s the Internet was no more than a glorified messaging system with the ability to publish information. It did not take too long for us to realize that the ability of the Internet to grant global access to millions of potential clients while handling business processes meant that each penny you spent on servers and communications could empty your bank account. The model to turn Client/Server architectures into emulated Internet solutions was defunct. Early adopters of this faulty concept had to go back to their bankers and ask for more money to bail out their operations.

While early adopters jumped online and fuelled a demand for Internet solutions and Engineers, Internet companies saw their raging popularity aggregate billions of worth to Wall Street. It seemed that the bubble would never burst, but we now know better; one day the Net’s net value did not meet any logical criteria for return on investment, and there the bubble popped!

Contrary to popular expectation, after the Internet bubble burst the Internet continued to thrive. Never in the history of the Net has there been fewer users, more and more people and more and more businesses hop on the Internet every year, yet the industry continues to grow, and has never had a year where its growth went negative. It has always been positive! Sure, large and small Internet players faded or went bust, but the Internet as a whole, and as an industry, kept growing, creating jobs, maturing, and with maturity it only got better and more realistic.

But first, the mindset of the eighties and nineties had to be eradicated… That you had to own and develop the technology and that everything had to run on a client/server environment was an attitude that had to be archived.

ENTERPRISE FOUNDATION STANDARIZATION
A very strange thing happened on the way to the Internet, the industry became obsessed with interoperability, compatibility, process interaction and communications. It is no longer considered a brilliant idea to own proprietary computing environments. In fact, proprietary has become the persona non grata of the industry.

Today we find that there are only two serious Enterprise standards playing in the market: .NET, sponsored by Microsoft, and J2EE, sponsored by the likes of IBM, SAP, Peoplesoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and BEA, etc.

The defining architectural standard for how we develop a software program is now Unified Modeling Language (UML). This magnificent and elegant methodology for defining a solution is programming language independent, that is, once designed in UML you can program it in any language. UML also gives companies autonomy from IT professionals; by allowing anyone able to read a UML schematic access to the logic innards of an application.

Based on development infrastructures, security, global deployment, adoptability, scalability, object orientation and reliability, there are really only two true Internet Centric programming languages: Microsoft’s C# and Sun Microsystems Java.

Impressively, there is an industry wide agreement for communications and interoperability: SOAP (Simple Objects Access Protocol), which will greatly embody the new bold world of WebServices, and a solid MetaData defining model, XML Extensible Markup Language), which finally allows for the data to intelligently advise client applications of its character definitions. Best of all, these protocols are followed by both the .NET and J2EE camps, thus allowing for a clear approach to heterogeneous interactions.

The Internet and Java have also done away with the localized simplicity of the Operating System. While Linux, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems might be slugging it out to control the OS server market, the truth be told, that war no longer matters. The operating system is a has been, destroyed by the Internet’s demanding architecture of distributed processes to bring in the benefits of load balancing, clustering and peer to peer process distribution, where you don’t know, nor does it matter if your Internet server is going to be in Japan or in Chile. Nor do you care if parts of your application are running whole or as parts of a virtual whole throughout a server farm.

What matters today is not your Operating System, it is your Middleware. IBM-Websphere, Web Logics-BEA, Sun Microsystems-SunOne, Oracles-IAS, Open Source JBOSS, these are the Internet’s operating systems. Designed to communicate with the rest of the world, these are not server or PC operating systems, these are Internet Operating Environments that compile, publish and interoperate your process and/or applications across logical geographies without concern for time or physical location.

Even the simple fact that today we really only have one browser, Internet Explorer from Microsoft, has helped to simplify the way we view and use applications. In the old days, every application had its own look and feel and it took time to master. Today, thanks in large part to the limitations imposed by browser technology, most applications look and feel very similar, and require minimal training to have a user up and running.

Standardization is now a solid reality within the Internet foundation.

WHY OWN IT?
But perhaps the most defining change, and the change that need to occur for the internet world to become the standard method of application and service delivery system for Businesses, Government and the Educational communities, is the precipitous fall of the in-house, IT department, or the In-sourced Application.

Gone are the days when IT was a paradise that could only be inhabited by Fortune 1000 corporations because they were the only ones that could afford the technology gurus and their expensive supercomputers. Gone are the days when small to medium size businesses made a valiant effort to own an IT department, while they were held hostage by inadequate budgets, error-prone programmers and proprietary technologies.

Today’s savvy Managers know that precious time, energy and money have been thoroughly wasted in trying to own the technology. It is now widely understood that owning technology is a high-risk enterprise that should only be attempted by those with flexible budgets and professional IT on staff. Today we know that businesses lost their core competency edge in the 80’s and 90’s because they were also trying to be technologists. We can accept that the technology should be left to core technology houses, and that it is more productive to avoid the in-house solution and to adopt Outsourced or Application Service Providers that give you standardize processes, faster time to market, and quality, offering the latest and best enterprise technologies at affordable prices.

Gone are the days of huge, risky investments in IT, which, during the inevitable downtimes, would stick you with high fixed cost and inflexible infrastructures. Today’s ASP and Outsourced solutions delivery models adjust your cost and infrastructure based on your business cycles.

The entire Internet has dramatically evolved thanks to its standardization and adoption of complementing technologies. Equally, software developers have learned an important lesson: that it is not about the technology, it is about the solution. Customers don’t want to see the technology; you don’t have to learn auto mechanics to use your car, so why should you have to know technical acronyms to invest in software solutions. These days, customers want solutions, they want results, and they want to gain in efficiencies. When IBM bought the consulting services division from PricewaterhouseCoopers the message for the industry was clear, we are not selling technology anymore.

The Internet today offers clear cut choices with definable benefits and a positive Return On Investment. The days where migrating to the Internet was a trip into uncertainty are over; the technologies are now more affordable, the industry and expertise has grown professionally, and the dirty work of debugging Internet technologies has been done by Asia, Europe and North America.

For Latin America the immediate benefit is real: Go from COBOL to Java without the painful steps in between.

RC

QUE SE VAYAN!

I keep of hearing figures of the exodus of the Colombian population to foreign lands. They are moving away to escape the violence a civil war torn country offers and its lack of opportunity.

The people that are leaving the country tend to be well educated, or from the middle or upper classes of Colombian society. All willing to work hard where there is opportunity, which is what they can’t find here, an opportunity to earn a decent living within a stable environment.

Where there is war and depression the first to leave are the intellectuals, the educated and the well to do. The poor are the only one’s that have no choice but to stay patriotic. Fortunately over 55% of the Colombian population lives at the poverty level, it is then safe to say that there will be enough patriots around to keep our nation status instead of being downgraded to village.

So far the figures are that approximately two percent of the population has left the country, these are only the legal figures. Most countries that suffer difficult times find their populations and money taking a walk. Mexico has long been the victim of labor exodus to the US. Russians are not only leaving their country they are also not marrying. Marriage being the atomic unit of the social structure this can not be good in the long term. Russians are also refusing to be born, the rate of deaths to the ratio of births is higher, which means that the Russian population is shrinking by process of attrition. Ireland has had a history of economic, calamity or terrorism driven exoduses. The potato famine certainly helped to push many to foreign lands. An Irish bartender once told me: “All the good Irish have already left Ireland.” If so Ireland may actually be the only purely bad place on earth. Interestingly, Ireland is currently going through some beautiful economic growth, not bad for bad people.

Even the number one economic power in the world has gone through hard times. But the interesting thing about the United States of America, and not the only case, is that Americans, when there is a depression at home don’t leave the country, they change jobs or they move within the country to where the jobs are, regardless of what those jobs might be. They stay home! Some might say: but the US is a big country, moving from California to New York, is the equivalent of moving to another country and perhaps even a totally different culture. I would simply point out that during the great depression from sea to shiny sea America was all the same poor broken down country, and the exodus never externalized.

The paradox and problem that Colombia faces today, is that the people that are leaving the country are also the ones that have benefited the most from the establishment. Colombians that have made their money in Colombia are leaving with their money. Colombians that have been educated and given the most opportunity are leaving. Colombians who have had good jobs are leaving. People that have been well trained and well paid are leaving. People with political and media influence are leaving. And the problem is, that they are leaving when their country needs their expertise the most.

They are abandoning Colombia because of the lack of security, lack of stability and lack of opportunity. And to all of them I say: QUE SE VAYAN! If they are so bright and intelligent why don’t they help us change Colombia? If they don’t see opportunities here why don’t they help us create them? And if there are all these problems in Colombia how are they, as bright members of the better educated and better paid, not responsible? Colombia’s political and economic problems did not rise out of the farms, they rose out of the cities where they are managed. To them I say: QUE SE VAYAN!

Colombia has one fundamental problem, its people want peace but don’t want to pay the price. Its people want jobs but they don’t want to create them. They want to work for someone else and they want a title, Doctor, professor, gerente, a title is nice. As Colombians we also seem more concerned with going to the supermarket tomorrow than where we are going to be five years from now. We need instead to learn how to demand more from ourselves and our government; to learn how to employ ourselves, and to create skilled jobs that make a difference. We need to forget that we have been taught to work for someone else. Colombia needs planers, promoters, developers and doers. Most Colombians going abroad want just a good job, and so to them I say: QUE SE VAYAN!

RC