This morning I happened upon a mention of Gwynne Dyer‘s 1983 NFB documentary, Anybody’s Son Will Do. In one succinct hour, it explains the motivation behind military basic training, using intimate footage from the U.S. Marine Corps’ notorious Paris Island program.

The full documentary is available in piecemeal YouTube-sized portions: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.

The article that first led me to the film seemed convinced that the US military was in some way suppressing the documentary, but I remember viewing it a couple of decades ago, so I guess the suppression didn’t reach north of the 49th parallel. Not to mention that the US tends to ignore — rather than suppress — any cultural artefact created beyond the borders of the Lower 48.

One interesting tidbit, which has the full faith and credit of the intertubes behind it, is that Dyer’s documentary influenced Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket, or at least up until Pyle shoots the Gunny.

Like all of Dyer’s work — my favourite military and geopolitical writer — the film is a matter-of-fact account of what has to be done to young men to make them soldiers. Regardless of what the article contends, it’s not an anti-war piece. Just hang-dog Dyer tellin’ it like it is.

somewhere along the line i decided that my little company‘s title would also be little, and so i always spell it in lowercase. that makes it especially difficult to begin a sentence with.

anyway, geof harries just posted a profile of yukon dude on his blog. thanks, geof.

boy, it’s high time that i updated the company’s site. especially now that i’ve dropped the “software” part from the name.

I tore through Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine over the weekend. In it, he tells the sorry tale of the subprime mortgage crisis that in 2007 brought low the major U.S. brokerage houses and banks, along with a certain ignominious insurance firm.

As suggested by the title, Lewis narrates the subprime chronicle from the point of view of the few — the very few — who dared to bet against the shady mortgage bonds. (In finance terms, “short” means that you expect the price to fall, as opposed to the more conventional “long”.) It takes a one-eyed near-autistic shut-in investor to deduce the problem — mortgages were being sold to people that had no hope of repayment — and also to figure out how to bet against bonds made up from these mortgages. Only a couple of garage-based amateurs and two big-time bond traders managed to hit on the same formula.

Despite the intense pressure to abandon the carrying costs of these short bets, these few investors eventually did very well for themselves. Unfortunately, the big traders that lost billions for their firms and their customers also did very well for themselves, pocketing obscene bonuses just as the market caved in upon itself.

Lewis unfolds the story in a gentle descriptive account, suitable for any reader of intrigue, regardless of financial background. In fact, in all my years of following the subprime mishegas, his was the first explanation of credit default swaps (CDSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that I fully grokked…after two re-readings. The more difficult concept to understand was how anyone thought these mortgages had any value whatsoever, regardless of the nearly risk-free rating assigned by the bamboozled credit rating agencies. That the mortgage resellers had a clause to cover homeowners that defaulted on their very first payment should’ve been a clue.

The book is also a strong indictment of derivatives, particularly the so-called synthetic derivatives that are money-multiplying side-bets made on securities; during the crisis, the money nearly multiplied itself beyond the total currency worth of the planet. So you can see the problem.

I’m now keen to try Lewis’s first major book, Liar’s Poker, which recounts both his heady days as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers and the — purely coincidental – decline and fall of that same institution.

Under the couch in a far corner of a small university pub, four 20-something fellows find an unlocked briefcase containing:

• one paperback thriller novel,
• one crossword puzzle printed on a sheet of 8-1/2 by 11 paper, and
• one 1/2-pound solid milk chocolate Easter rabbit, intact.

The lads think themselves honest, so close the lid and tuck the briefcase back under the couch to wait for its owner’s return.

“Let’s have another look at that puzzle.”

The clues seem unusually difficult, and so back goes the briefcase. Somehow the ears of the bunny fall off along the way.

“Let’s see if the novel’s any good.”

Critiques are offered, and the briefcase returns again, the rabbit slightly decapitated.

“Let’s just eat the damned bunny already.”

At the end of the evening, the briefcase is handed in trust to the barkeep containing:

• one paperback thriller novel, and
• one crossword puzzle printed on a sheet of 8-1/2 by 11 paper.

The events as I have described them occurred some twenty-three years ago this week. The mystery of the briefcase’s contents and owner remains unsolved.

April third! iPad day! Or, iPad day for those in the States. Or, iPad day for those so infatuated with the latest Apple gewgaw that they’re willing to fly down to Seattle and stand in line in the rain at 2:00am. What’s the duty-free limit for a 48-hour trip again?

I’m not likely to have an iPad anytime soon. I haven’t even laid eyes on an iPhone yet. But I have the sneaking suspicion that iPads and other ersatzPads will be a hit with casual internet users.

Notice I didn’t say “computer users”: no one wants to use a computer – people just want to do internet stuff. The Start bar and caps lock and Are You Sure? popups can all go to hell. The iPad-style interface, as limited as it is, has simplicity working for it. Technology geeks generally don’t appreciate simplicity, but my mom does.

There’s the argument for the iPad right there: no more calls from back home asking about missing files and uninstalled device drivers. Sign me up.

But I suppose I should at least wait until someone invents an iTriangle to rest the thing on. Oh wait, someone already did.

Firefox has got to go. It was terrific in its day, but has now succumbed to two horrid Microsoftisms:

1. Software that grows slow and fragile with age, and
2. Reboots are necessary to correct #1.

To log in to Chrome, repeat the sequence of musical tones in the correct order.

My own installation had become ramshackle, forgetting toolbar customizations haphazardly, and completely spazzing-out on the Google Reader site.

So I chucked it and hopped aboard Google Chrome, the latest browser bandwagon.

Soon will come a day when your choice of web browser is as meaningful to you as your favourite brand of celery. We’re almost there: when asked which browser they use, my students will respond “MSN,” or simply, “the internet.” But I’m not yet prepared to stipulate browser fungibility.

What Firefox had going for it was extensions: little add-on customizations to, let’s say, hide advertisements, report the weather, signal incoming e-mail, and generally add a dash of NASCAR design sensibility to your humdrum windowed existence.

Chrome followed with its own extensions: smaller, slightly less capable, but <megaphone> installable without restarting the program </megaphone>.

This sort of thing can get out of hand right quick.

Dear reader, I’ll spare you the full accounting, but in the above image, Chrome is telling me that I have three newly-arrived e-mails, one hour until my next meeting, forty-one irrelevant things to read, no ads disturbing my view, and a partly cloudy, -7°C day outside.

Yet with all of these add-ons, uh, added-on, Chrome doesn’t seem to succumb to the lethargy of a similarly blinged-out Firefox. Overall, Chrome appears to be one of the snappiest browsers available:

A good looking, but otherwise meaningless performance chart. But good looking.

As you might expect, Chrome has googly-search-goodness baked into the address bar, with a swifter touch than Firefox’s awesome bar.

For the second year in a row, Chrome was the only browser impervious to hacking attempts at the Pwn2Own competition.

Of course, Chrome is not all smiles und sunshine. In particular, the tab placement and operation takes some getting used to. Closing the last tab, for instance, shuts down the entire browser. The optional decorative themes also seemed designed to camouflage the tab and window buttons.

You will frequently close the wrong tab. Store Nerf balls within reach to express your frustration in a socially responsible manner.

Chrome has crashed on me a couple of times; something Firefox hasn’t done in a while. It does feature some form of session recall, however, as the same tabs reload the next time you launch the program.

Finally, it is upsetting to trust something so fundamental as browsing to a large multinational. At least Firefox was produced by (Google-sponsored) volunteers. But there’s always “who couldn’t love cuddly Norwegians?” Opera for the unassuaged (or, cuddly-Cupertinian-produced Safari, for that matter).

Once I suppress my inner socialist, I can bring myself to really enjoy surfing with Chrome. It’s early days yet, but I’m impressed with the browser’s demeanor. True, while that is an anthropomorphic opinion of a web browser, it’s not as though I’m claiming that Internet Explorer is mean to me.

I was dating a woman with Dutch parents for a short while in the late ’90s. Her father had served in the Dutch military and had been shipped to one of the former colonies in Indonesia. As part of their jungle training, the soldiers had been taught not to use soap on their skin as it would strip the body’s natural oils that defend against infection and parasites.

And the jungles of Indonesia contain some terrifying pathogens and parasitic creatures indeed.

After returning to the Netherlands, I guess he had reverted to the common — yet not stereotypically European — custom of washing with soap. However, on that particular autumn day in 1997, in the midst of a large family gathering, he decided to inform me that he had once again given it up. I remember scooching ever-so-imperceptibly away.

On New Year’s Eve of last year, I happened upon an online discussion of going without soap or shampoo. “Now there’s a resolution for 2010,” I thought.

And so, I have gone soapless and shampooless for the past three months. It was only after two months had elapsed that I revealed all to my wife. She didn’t seem the least bit bothered. No one else seems to have noticed either. About the only difference I’ve found is that my hair is a bit frizzy, so I’ll have to keep it cut short — you’d think it would get greasy, but it doesn’t.

Now, I do wash my hands with soap or antiseptic quite regularly: I spent a good chunk of this winter in hospitals and didn’t want to catch or transmit anything. Otherwise, I credit my invisible shield of oil for keeping me healthy all this time.

Take that, Proctor & Gamble.