Fractals of Change

My New Gig

JAMES H. DOUGLAS

            GOVERNOR

 

State of Vermont

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR

For Immediate Release:

March 2, 2009

 

Contact: 

Dennise Casey: 802.233.9436

Tom Evslin: 802.760.1226

 

 

Governor Announces New Office of Economic Stimulus & Recovery

 

Former VTrans Secretary & High-Tech Entrepreneur

Tom Evslin to Lead Intensified Effort

 

Establishes New Director of Accountability with Auditor’s Office

 

 

Montpelier, Vt. – Today Governor Jim Douglas announced the creation of the Office of Economic Stimulus and Recovery (ESR) to coordinate the State’s use of federal funds authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.   The Governor has tapped former Vermont Transportation Secretary and high tech entrepreneur Tom Evslin to head the Office as Chief Recovery Officer. The Office will be located in the Agency of Administration and report to Administration Secretary Neale Lunderville.

 

The Vermont Federal Recovery Office, which was established in January before the recovery bill became law, has been fully incorporated into ESR.  Jim Bush will continue to serve in a leadership role as Director of Physical Infrastructure, responsible for oversight and delivery of the nearly $200 million in new state and local infrastructure projects.

 

 “The scope of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act extends beyond the original intent of Medicaid and transportation funds,” said Governor Douglas.  “In turn, we have expanded the Federal Recovery Office into the Office of Economic Stimulus & Recovery to ensure the federal money flows into our economy quickly and with strict accountability measures in place.”

 

The Office of Economic Stimulus & Recovery will assist and coordinate efforts of State, community and private organizations to obtain funds for projects that not only alleviate the pain of the current recession but build the infrastructure necessary for Vermonters to succeed in the second decade of the 21^st century.

 

“The Office of Economic Stimulus & Recovery will work at entrepreneurial speed to make certain Vermont obtains all possible funds and gets maximum effect from tight coordination between programs,” said Evslin. “As much as possible, we need to use new technology to preserve Vermont values while building the foundation for a strong economy that can compete in a changing world.”

 

Accountability and transparency are key elements of the newly constituted Office. Working with Auditor of Accounts Tom Salmon, the Office will appoint a Director of Accountability from the Auditor’s staff to assure that federally funded projects are designed from the beginning to meet stringent requirements for audit and accountability.  The Director will serve as a direct link between the Auditor’s Office and Office of Economic Stimulus & Recovery.  “This important partnership is essential to ensure that Vermont exceeds the new federal standards for transparency, accountability and effectiveness,” said Auditor Salmon. “We want to ensure compliance and accountability right out of the gates.”

 

Evslin has agreed to lead the Office working at minimum wage – and has volunteered to return his entire salary to state coffers. “I’m thrilled and honored for the opportunity to help advance Vermont and position us for a strong economic recovery,” Evslin continued. 

 

The Office will be staffed by existing state employees on temporary assignment from agencies and departments. In addition to a Director of Physical Infrastructure and a Director of Accountability, the Office will include staff resources for Network Infrastructure, State Programs, Planning, and Community Partnerships.

Tom Evslin Bio

Tom Evslin was Secretary of the Agency of Transportation under former Vermont Governor Richard Snelling, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Vermont State Colleges, and is currently vice-chair of The Snelling Center, a non-profit dedicated to good governance in Vermont. Evslin’s civic career began as town moderator in Worcester, Vermont in the 1970s.

Evslin ran a software business in Vermont

for many years before going to work for Microsoft, where he was responsible for communication products.  Evslin went on to work at AT&T where he founded their first Internet business, WorldNet. In 1997 Tom and his wife, Mary Evslin, founded ITXC which was a pioneer in the use of the Internet for phone calls.  The company grew to be one of the world’s largest wholesale carriers of international calls. The company went public in 1999 and is now part of Indian telecommunications giant Tata Communications. Mary Evslin was the founding chair of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority. The Evslins live in Stowe, Vermont

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Dennise R. Casey

Deputy Chief of Staff

109 State Street

¨ The Pavilion ¨ Montpelier, VT 05609-0101

Telephone: 802.828.3333 ¨ Fax: 802.828.3339 ¨ TDD: 802.828.3345

 

Signed up for Medicare!

Ouch. I don't remember giving informed consent to becoming this old. Alternative is worse, though.

In case anyone else is ancient, Medicare starts at the beginning of the month in which you turn 65. Not knowing that almost made me procrastinate too long. Forcing factor for us is that our private insurance will terminate if we don't do all the Medicare stuff on a timely basis and make Medicare our primary payer; found that out in a nice letter from Blue Cross which, unfortunately, spent a lot of time getting forwarded.

So how do you sign up for Medicare?

You CAN'T do it online unless you also want to retire and signup for Social Security benefits which I don't (strange that you can do both but not just Medicare alone but very clear on the Medicare and Social Security websites). You can go to a Social Security office. Better, you CAN sign up by phone although the process leaves something to be desired.

You call Social Security, not Medicare. You listen to a long spiel on how the economic stimulus checks are being sent out – no apparent way to escape. Then you're asked if you want Spanish or English; perhaps Spanish-speakers don't care about economic stimulus checks; more likely someone programmed the AVR wrong. Voice prompt asks you what you want; "Medicare enrollment" doesn't help; ditto "enroll in Medicare"; "I want to enroll in Medicare" gets you to "I can help you with Medicare".

Another long and uninterruptible monologue – this one on many aspects of Medicare. Only when it's done can you say again "I want to enroll in Medicare". "I'm going to transfer you to someone who can help with your Medicare enrollment" says the female-emulating bot.

"All of our staff are busy helping other callers. Our automatic equipment can handle many callers at once. Many issues can be addressed on our website. We get most calls early in the month and early in the week (yesterday was both). Please call back at a less busy time. Goodbye."

"Yuk!" (that's not really what I said).

So I called back at seven this morning. Learned again about economic stimulus checks. Failed again to make an untimely breakout from the monologues. Finally forwarded to "someone who can help you".

A new bot, also female-emulating, says she is asking me some verification questions that an agent would ask. She has a hard time understanding my oral spelling of "Tom" but picks up "Evslin" right away and does a pretty good job of pronouncing it. OK on my mother's maiden name, too. She says she'll give me to a person.

I hear someone talking – then silence! Oh, no. I wait before slamming down the phone. Wait longer. A person comes on! She tells me I can do this on the web site; I tell her no. She then agrees. She tells me I will be rejected for SSI even though I'm not applying for it. I don't argue. She then transfers me to the real signup agent.

He tells me that the verbal (sic) signup is equivalent to signing a form and is under penalties of perjury. I agree that I understand. Lots of reasonably relevant questions. Then he asks me everything the bot asked. Since I get the answers right, I AM eligible for phone signup. I affirm –again – that I know the answers are under penalty of perjury and that, when I get the forms, I'll tell them about any errors. Stuff is gonna be mailed tomorrow. This conversation took about ten minutes – not unreasonable assuming the stuff really comes in time for me to get it to Blue Cross to keep the rest of my coverage.

Probably more that you want to know. And doesn't even address whether I should be in this government program or should have been forced to pay for it while I was working – even though I do think there should be a medical safety net for old people.

Auditioning for New Roles

Below I am practicing to supplant pigs and toasters as a screensaver.

In case that doesn't work, I could always be a demo dolly (what's the masculine of that?). I'll buy a BUG like the one I'm demoing below for anyone who can correctly identify the polo shirt I'm wearing in this picture before the end of April.

If all else fails, it's back to email.

 

All pictures are from Kinnernet 2008. Great fun as usual.

Introducing the BUG at Kinnernet

There are about 250 nerds gathered here at Yossi Vardi’s Kinnernet camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee; there couldn’t be a better place to introduce the BUG to the Israeli development community. By the grace of the demo gods, the BUG worked flawlessly and I didn’t make any mistakes I couldn’t recover from and I avoided a shower (more on that below).

The BUG is going to revolutionize consumer electronics; it’s going to enable a huge wave of innovation in consumer devices just as the PC unleashed software innovation I’m an investor in BUGLabs, BTW; not only because I believe in the product but also because, once I heard about the BUG, I realized it’s something I always wanted.

See the BUG lets software hackers who can’t solder become hardware hackers; now we can invent and build new gadgets as easily as we’ve been able to program personal computers. I’m building the world’s best anchor alarm so sailors  can sleep at night in an anchorage knowing they’ll be awakened if the anchor drags or even might drag. Every cruising sailor’ll have to have one.

So what’s a BUG?

It’s a 128MB Linux box about the size of a pack and a half of cigarettes. What makes it special are four ports onto which modules can be snapped – that’s where the hardware building capability comes from. The four modules available today are an LCD, a GPS, an accelerometer/motion detector, and a camera; many more are coming soon. Until BUG, you couldn’t get a consumer-usable box put together with the components you need for your application unless you were willing to order 100,000 of them or so – that’s limited innovation in consumer electronics pretty much to companies which can take gambles of this size and have the marketing muscle to make at least some of them work.

The pieces I need to build my gadget cost me $525 – early adopter price.  Presumably once am buying in some quantity, I can get these kits for even less per unit, load my application on to them, and sell to my sleepless sailor market at a price point below $1000 and pay for ads and marketing and still make money.

My plan had been to demo my own app at Kinnernet – that would be cool and re-earn my nerd credentials before my younger peers. The BUG software developer kit (SDK), which I’m doing a workshop on at Kinnernet, is easy to use (if you know Java) and even features a virtual BUG so you can test without hardware. Both BUGlabs and the growing developer community are helpful. Everything is open source and interface specs published so anyone can develop software or hardware for the BUG. There are lots of sample apps and my Hello World app was running in just a day or so (I had to learn Java).

But Baby Jack got born early and got priority (good excuse, huh?) so my app not ready. Quickly BUG coding genius John Connolly put together an impressive demo using the camera, LD and accelerometer – shake’n’show. It was fun; it made the point; and, above all, it worked.

On stage here is a little dicey. Thirty seconds before your time is up, there’s an ominous roll of thunder; at fifteen seconds a shower above the presenter’s head starts to mist; at zero time there’s a deluge. I might have been willing to take a shower to make a point but couldn’t afford to get the BUG wet. Just stepped forward towards the audience in time to avoid the flood and still deliver a closing line.

I’ve been doing small demos since. Most frequent reaction is “where do I get one?” (remember, this is still a nerd device; it needs to be programmed to do anything; and this is a very skillfully nerdy group). The fun thing is watching people immediately come up with cool gadgets that they’ll now be able to build. Next week I’ll get back to work on mine.

Note to Newbie Jack

We’re here in London now, Jack; will introduce ourselves as soon as hospital rules allow. Strange as it’ll seem to you, your mother was once a baby, too. Here’s what I wrote about her when she was a newbie.

A few weeks ago my daughter Katy was born. She started out terribly; grey, streaked with blood, and with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Central Vermont Hospital took care of all that very well and now she is less the worse for wear than I am.

But she is helpless, incredibly helpless. It’s been a few years since I’ve had an infant to watch and I’d forgotten. She can’t hold her huge head up; she can’t use her hands; and her eyes discover the world piece by piece at random.

No other mammal has babies nearly as helpless as ours. Even blind puppies walk to their first nursing.  And the reflexive curling of Katy’s toes reminds me that, if she were a monkey, she’d already be able to hold onto a branch.

One theory is that the head is the problem. For better or for worse, humans have brains proportional1y far bigger than those of other species. The head built to contain this giant brain has run into an evolutionary trap. It’s almost too big to be born.

That is why humans have more trouble with childbirth than other species. And so, the theory goes, in order to be born at all, humans must be born prematurely. In other words, human babies are so helpless because they are still in an advanced state of fetal development. If they waited until they were as developed as other mammal babies, their heads would be too large for delivery.

I think there is another reason in the grand scheme of things why our babies are born with so much to learn.

The babies of other species come preprogrammed. They already have most basic motor skills. In general, the lower down the evolutionary ladder a species is, the more adult skills its babies have built in.

Our babies know how to nurse. Everything else they have to learn. It seems very inefficient that we have to learn to lift our heads, then learn to roll over, then creep, then walk. But I think this inefficiency serves a purpose.

While my daughter Katy is learning the simple task of making her hand touch what her eye sees, she will also be learning how to learn. As she tries and fails and tries again, her mind will learn how to retain experience. As her left hand learns what her right hand knows, her mind will learn to reason and extrapolate.

As Katy takes a year to learn the motor skills a monkey is born with, she will be preparing herself for the great task of mastering a spoken language. As she struggles pitifully to make a rattle work right, she will he learning to learn to read and write.

Above all, we are nature’s best learners. We have very dull eyes, puny teeth, a weak sense of smell, and we don’t hear very well. Our physical prowess is probably the laughingstock of the animal kingdom. But we can learn. We learn how to learn while we learn how to walk.

Welcome, Katy, to a genuine learning experience. And good luck.

And welcome, Jack, from Grandpa Bear and Grandma Mimi.

Jack is Here!

Jack Isaac Morris was born today, our first grandchild courtesy of daughter Kate and son-in-law Hugh. Three weeks early but over seven pounds, he, she, and he are all doing fine.

Mary and I are overjoyed and about to board the flite for London where he is granting his first audiences.

Top 'o the Mornin' from the Top o' the Hill

Guess which one of us is Irish.

What I Did on Town Meeting Day

It was just like the old days on the trade show circuit except I finished the software a comfortable twelve hours before show time instead of on the plane coming out.

Mary and I got to the Stowe High School about 7am and set up our booth (really a table) in a great location that everyone had to pass right next to the Girl Scouts and their cookies and on the way to the polls. Mary used to like to get a booth location on the way to the restrooms because of the traffic although I did convince her that some people ought to be left alone until they were on their way out.

She taped her posters to the wall while I fastened my EVDO antenna to the window and set up my computer and the big monitor facing out. Polls were open so we had people coming by immediately. I was supposed to just be there for setup and then go on my way but there was too much traffic for that. Besides Mary never stays in the booth or behind the table; her position is always out in front buttonholing the prospects and this was no different.

“Hi, we’re helping the town committee which is working for better Internet access,” she said. “We’d like to ask you a couple of quick questions .”

“I don’t have anything but dialup,” some people said.

“Great,” she said. “You’re just the people we want to help. What’s your address?”

I’d key in the address if I wasn’t already working with someone else in which case she’d write it down for later inputting. The EVDO connection worked fine and, almost instantly, a new pin white pin (white was for dialup) would appear on the Google map of Stowe on my monitor. “Is that where you live?” I asked.

“Yes,” they’d say. “I hope you can help us get better access.”

“We already have broadband,” some other people said to Mary.

“Great,” she said. “If you tell us where you live, that’ll help us help other people get access.” Their pins would be red for DSL, blue for cable, green for wireless, and orange for cellular (like my EVDO).

Pretty soon the map was well enough filled out (see below) so that we were often able to say “Look at this; your neighbors on both sides seem to have DSL. Maybe you can get it to.”

Sometimes they’d say back “I’ve been calling Verizon every week and they keep telling me not yet even though they send me an ad for DSL with every bill.”

We asked the people who had recently gotten DSL (of which there were quite a few) how they’d managed to get it. Quite a few times the answer was “I was obnoxious” or “I started talking to a technician in a Verizon truck and he told me we could probably get it and helped me out.”

Some people said they had satellite access. We didn’t talk to anyone who liked it; they all wanted something better. They complained about stringent limits on the amount that can be downloaded, slow display of web sites, pathetically slow upload – especially for those with home-based businesses – and not working in rain or snow. But they said it was better than dialup and what else could they do.

Often people told us that they couldn’t find a tenant for an apartment or a buyer for a property because of lack of broadband availability.

If you look at the upper left hand corner of the map, you see no color; only white pins for dialup and black pins for satellite. That’s an affluent area called Robinson Springs; it’s a huge opportunity for some provider despite the fact that the large, expensive houses are spaced out. In the lower left, the string of white dots is Nebraska Valley; not even any satellite, perhaps because mountains obscure the southern sky. It’s a beautiful place to live with great hiking but you can see that cable (blue) didn’t go very far down the road and DSL didn’t make it at all. The telephone poles march down the street; clearly another line needs to hang from them.

You can see how cable and DSL peter out at the end of the roads away from the center of town. “Yeah, they got to my neighbor,” people said about cable; “but they want $10,000 to continue to us.”

Our hope is that the map above and maps like it that people in other towns might fill in will show providers where the opportunities are, help neighbors band together for better service, and help the State Telecommunications Authority (of which Mary is the chair) achieve their mission of 100% cellular and data coverage for Vermont by the end of 2010.

Twelve hours later we broke down our equipment, packed the car, and went home. I hadn’t eaten all day and Mary’d had just a few Girl Scout cookies. It was fun and the software didn’t even crash.

Phew… Made the Deadline

Faithful readers know that I promised Mary to have an app ready for her to beta at town meeting tomorrow to collect information on who has what kind of broadband in Stowe and from whom they get it.

I used the Google maps API to build this. It runs as an application on my laptop rather than as a window in a browser because it’s not until my next project that I figure out what many of you already know – how to configure a server to receive all this information. The survey results are saved as an XML file which can go into Excel and lots of other places.

Took me at least forty hours of work to do this simple app. But that’s not a reflection on the Google tools; it just shows how much I had to learn about many things that working programmers already know. Reversing the usual, the first 10% took 80% of the time; the last 90% was a lot easier because I increasingly knew what I was doing.

I could do a new task with these tools of similar complexity in three or four hours.

BTW, the Google sample code was very helpful and got incorporated wherever I could.

At the last minute it looked like we might not be able to use the app. Town Meeting (oh yeah, and primary day, too) are at the High School. No way at the last minute to get my Internet access through the school. Oh, oh. We went up to the school to test today. Despite the fact that cellphone coverage is marginal there (ask the kids), Verizon EVDO with my new battery-boosted USB modem AND the antenna I bought managed to see a bar or two and that was enough for this to work as long as I don’t put the maps in bandwidth-hungry satellite map view.

Wonder if it’ll crash on its first real outing. Did put lots of care into making sure data will not be lost in that case; I’d be in lots of trouble if that happened.

Great Time to be a Nerd

My friend Jeff Pulver was just telling me that it’s a great time be a nerd. Right on cue I walked past the poster above which I think advertises a new TV show.

On the same theme, Mary asked the other day what all us nerds would’ve done for a living if there weren’t computers or other electronic devices for us to play with. It’s a very frightening thought. I thought I’d be a writer like my father but met my first computer, an IBM 7090 mainframe, in the computer lab at college when I was nineteen (1962) and found this was a much better way to make a living. Didn’t get around to writing fiction again until a couple of years ago when I wrote hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble – not surprisingly, nerd Dom Montain is a major character of that book.

So what would we have done? Took some thought. Not many of would have been gymnasts, super warriors, craftsman (takes fine motor skills), or very good farmers.

We would’ve counted, added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. Before there were computers, there were lots of numbers that had to be crunched by hand. When you go over the George Washington Bridge or ascend the Empire State Building, remember that the only mathematical tools for all the engineering calculations were adding machines and slide rules (easy to use for a nerd); presumably the calculations were done at least twice.

All the accounts of everything had to be done by hand. All monthly statements manually totaled (at best on an adding machine).

So we would’ve been accountants or engineers or employed by such.

It’s much more fun to teach computers to do all that work (what programming is all about); we never have to do the same thing twice – at least until we reimplement it for a new computer or operating system. And we get great toys to play with.

Jeff’s right.