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Halliburton and KBR in the News

Halliburton and KBR in the News

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Halliburton and KBR have broken up – and breaking up is hard to do. But no sad faces, y’hear? Everything’s A-OK for the billionaire war and oil profit set.

They are diggin’ the new headquarters in Dubai – way better than Houston. Texas is so over. Everything’s bigger in the United Arab Emirates.

Halliburton’s second quarter profits more than doubled.

Halliburton Co.’s profit more than doubled in the second quarter, getting a $933-million lift from the separation of former subsidiary KBR Inc. But even without that gain, the results still beat the consensus Wall Street forecasts for the oilfield services contractor. Its shares rose 4 percent. Earnings were $1.5 billion for the April-to-June period, which amounted to $1.62 per share, compared with income of $591 million, or 55 cents a share, in the year-ago period, Halliburton said yesterday. Revenue in the quarter rose 20 percent, to $3.7 billion from $3.1 billion a year ago.

Despite various scandals, the war profiteering and corruption continue. It’s such a great feeling to know that we support such great causes with our tax dollars – we are so lucky that they get all those no-bid contracts…

And what a relief! A federal judge has decided that whistleblowers may not sue U.S. companies for fraud if payment for services was made in Iraqi (not U.S.) money. That’s going to save a LOT of aggravation.

Oh, yeah, and good ole’ Dick Cheney is still drawing one and a half million dollars a year from Halliburton for his excellent work – no conflict of interest there, nope. Nope.

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Stellar Delta Employee

Stellar Delta Employee

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I’ve been holding off on this last post about the trip to New Mexico because I had to locate the name of the fellow who saved our trip back from being something like a rerun of the trip out. Considering the content of the previous post, it should come as no surprise to you that – of course – the United Airlines flight was delayed.

We were there super-early for an early flight.
We wanted to check the monster bags together, and then John would run out and return the car.

Our hearts sank when we were told that not only was the first flight delayed, but because of the first delay we would miss our connecting flight in Denver to come back to Atlanta. And yes, of course all other United flights were already overbooked.

This time, we knew enough to request that they find us a flight on another airline. At first they said that there weren’t any. Then they said they had one – late that night. We took it, and went to stand in line at the Delta desk.

We did have to wait in line for a while at Delta, but hey, we had all day. People were very rude and impatient. A couple of people even tried to cut us in line. However, the Delta people were much more on top of the situation and had triaged the people in line. We waited, yes, but it was nothing like the chaos we had experienced waiting for United.

When we got to the front of the Delta line, we were told that our transfer tickets were no good. Because of the heat, they had a lower cutoff on weight – and therefore on passengers. They couldn’t book us on that flight.

John and I looked at each other, willing each other not to lose it.

Then, someone intervened – a very capable, wonderful guy who started pecking at the keyboard with a resoluteness and determination that was both clearly clear and very comforting. For the first time, I got the feeling that someone cared about how things turned out for us. He looked, and muttered, and got someone on the phone, and pecked away.

After about ten minutes, he informed us that he had places for all three of us, sitting together, on the 9:00 flight (or something like that, I forget the actual time). I thought he meant that night. I was grateful that we’d fly the same day, but the thought of wandering around an airport for another whole day….

But NO! He meant the morning flight. It was a direct flight. It was leaving in an hour! We were actually going to be home earlier than we would have on our original flight!

I made him write down his name.

For the record, then, Delta Airlines employee Tom Claeson in Albuquerque (ABQ) is outstanding!

He is competent and efficient and calm and caring. He should get a performance-based bonus, and I sincerely hope he does. Make a note, Delta PR person!

It was a scramble to make the flight on time. We checked the luggage, and John vamoosed to return the car. He got back rather quickly (luck was with that time), and we headed toward security.

Uh-oh. SSS. Again, Selected for Special Screening. All of us.

This time, it was a good thing. We skipped ahead of the long, snaky line. We took off shoes, saw our bags swabbed and tested in a machine, stepped into both metal detector and air puffer. My camping matches were confiscated – I’d forgotten that they were “strike anywhere.” I was only hoping to get a smoke after the flight. I remembered not to bring a lighter.

We got on the flight – it went perfectly, and again we had an excellent pilot that didn’t scare me on the landing (I’m always a little nervous when the plane lands).

We took the MARTA train back to our nearest station, and I sat on all the bags to keep them from moving around. I think I still have a dent on my hip. We got a taxi without any trouble, and lugged our bags inside. The camping bag went directly to storage.

A week later, we’re still sort of recovering from our vacation. It was wonderful in a lot of ways, but it took a lot more energy than any other vacation that I can remember.

Booing Andrew Card

Booing Andrew Card

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Andrew Card was booed big time at the graduate school commencement ceremony at UMass Amherst.

Tell me what they were thinking at UMass, bestowing an honorary degree on Card this year? Is there some federal funding problem? Oh, wait. UMass. Right.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp4MYii7MqA[/youtube]

At moments like this, I am so proud to be a UMass Amherst alum.

Sometimes Atlanta Georgia still seems like another country.

Walls Don’t Work

Walls Don’t Work

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We are wall-eyed, our vision mis-aligned. We construct walls and eye them, while simultaneously looking away. My eyes hurt just thinking about it. We’ve lost our depth perception.

It’s a pathetic, futile thing (and a profound forgetting of history) to engage in wall building. But it’s something to do, and there are hatreds to be stoked, fears to be placated, monies to be gathered.

Shakespeare used the term “wall-eyed” to express reproach, metaphorically extending the literal misalignment of the eye’s vision in order to criticize interpretive vision. A “wall-eyed” wretch has more than distorted literal vision. The implication is that he (or she) is out of alignment with social reality, totally lacking in empathy, knowing no pity – unnatural, alienated, and irretrievably perverted.

I just think of the meaningless, baleful sort of gaze of the fish – the walleye. Nobody home. In denial of reality, in paranoia and fear, in ethnocentrism and narcissism and xenophobia, and in misaligned vision – we construct more walls. Mine! Mine! Here us, there all of you things. Disney nightmares notwithstanding, it is a small world after all – we’re stuck with each other. It’s just not going to work.

Stricter border controls and higher penalties will not stop illegal immigration either. They don’t address the root causes of the problem: a stagnant Mexican economy and strong demand for cheap labor in the U.S. market.

Building a wall may mean safety for some but tragedy for many. I got my indoctrination into the horror of mortar and concrete on August 13, 1961, watching East German communist police close off East Berlin, first with barbed wire, then with concrete. On the West Berlin side, people came up to the wall in tears as families were divided and East Berliners were cut off from their jobs in the West.

…This memory comes back to me because we seem to be afflicted with another spell of “wallitis” – hoping that closing off problems will solve them.

American soldiers have been engaged in a project of closing off the Sunni district of Adhamiya in Baghdad. Israel has been working for years on a 436-mile fence that, in part, closes off the Arab section of East Jerusalem. Pakistan is building a fence to close off Taliban routes into Afghanistan. And, lest the United States miss out on the closing-off festival, it has started work on what will eventually be a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border.

Proponents of that wall speak of keeping out terrorists as well as job-seeking illegal immigrants. That is hard to establish. But what can be established is that the projected fence has helped to stimulate a booming business in tunnel building and another booming business in forging identity documents.*

As Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” – From Daniel Schorr, “Closing off problems with walls doesn’t solve them,” Christian Science Monitor, Friday May 25, 2007

*Not to mention a booming business…. in building walls.

Almost all of us are immigrants. We are the children of immigrants and exiles.
Inscribed on a table within the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
– “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

If that’s over, how about the global community? Or should we only realize our common humanity when we are threated by global extinction (more nukes, more toxins, kill everything – yar).

Work on smarter solutions now. It’s a simple demographic. A shortage of skilled workers approacheth.

Wall-building is so contagious, but it doesn’t really work in microcosm either. The walled complex, the walled community.

We’re disrupting the rhythms of human life and interaction to our disgrace – and peril.

Less interaction, less understanding = more hostility, fake security.

You build the walls, and then you need the guards, and the passwords. And you live behind the wall, or you’re kept out by the wall. You hire bodyguards if you’re rich enough. You hide your children.

Who is the greater hostage of the bunker/fortress/rabbit hole/prison mentality? The gated community (even when you’ve seized a natural resource for colonization), is still a prison. You’re locked inside just as surely.

(Note to self: Objects – intended uses not limit/closer than they appear, panoptican, circulation/exchange, lines of flight, sca-venge.)

Geeking Out

Geeking Out

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Here at VirusHead, I have a different host than at work. If any of you use WordPress at Yahoo Small Business, this post will interest you. If not – really – skip it.

I had to spend almost two days addressing the problems of upgrading WordPress at Yahoo Small Business hosting. Even now, I can’t really update any of the plugins that came with the Yahoo installation because of some funky permissions thing they do.

The first time I tried to upgrade, I could no longer access the blog at all. All that came up was a blank screen in the browser. I couldn’t find a solution. I gave up. I backed up the database with MyPhpAdmin, and recreated the blog at Yahoo.

I was only able to upgrade thanks to the resources at the WordPress codex and users’ forum and some very helpful advice from the comment left here by Ray on the previous post,. WordPress has upgrading instructions here, with common installation problems here.

I’m not sure I would recommend that you even try to upgrade unless you’re really comfortable with the things on the following list. Yes, it’s very much out of date, and so are the plugins. It might make more sense just to have more people giving Yahoo some feedback on servicing their WordPress client offer. Believe me, I would rather have done a one-click update like I do on my own host!

I’ve documented all the bits and pieces. In case you really need to do this, here’s how.

  • First, update your plug-ins (Akismet will update itself in the upgrade).
  • Use the WordPress backup plugin to do a backup of your WordPress directory. Download it for safekeeping. You can also use your friendly ftp program to download the entire WordPress directory onto your hard drive, too. You’ll need this if – after all – you change your mind about upgrading.
  • Use MyPHPAdmin to export a back up your WordPress SQL database, too. Make several versions if you are unfamiliar with this. Make sure that use the right character set for export. If the upgrade fails, you’ll need this.
  • Go to the WordPress dashboard and disable all your plugins.
  • VERY IMPORTANT: From your WordPress backup on the hard drive, open the current wp-config.php file in the main directory. Delete the line “Define(’WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager” and then save the file. Also save a copy of it under another name, like wp-configorig.php. You’ll need this file later.
  • Edit wp-config.php file in the main WordPress directory that you downloaded and change DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD with your yroot user and yroot password (the username and password you set up to administrate your databases. Ftp the new wp-config file.
  • Now run upgrade.php by browsing to http://YOURSITE.com/YOURBLOG/wp-admin/upgrade.php. It should succeed, in theory.
  • However, before you go any further, look at your blog and make sure it’s there. If you get a blank page, then you’ve put the wrong yroot user and password in the config file. Make sure it’s right and try again.
  • You may have to play with the permissions settings in MyPhpAdmin. Make sure that you have any needed permissions. Customer Care can help you with this part if you run into trouble.
  • If none of this is working for you, you’ll have to download the latest version of WordPress, ftp it up, and then run upgrade again.
  • Assuming that your blog is up, check to make sure that your category links and other links are displaying. If you see an error like [Unknown column ‘link_count’ in ‘where clause’], you’ve got to detour at this point (a web search on the exact phrase of that error will give you a sense of how many blogs are affected). If you’re upgrading from the version at Yahoo, there has been a major change in the way categories are indexed. I haven’t been able to find the perfect fix for this if the upgrade doesn’t do it, but there are two suggestions. The first didn’t work for me in MyPhpAdmin on Yahoo – perhaps because of yet more permissions issues, or maybe an older version of MySql – but you could try it because it’s probably the better fix:
    Run this SQL query:
    ALTER TABLE --database--.wp_categories ADD COLUMN link_count BIGINT(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER category_count,
    ADD COLUMN posts_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER link_count,
    ADD COLUMN links_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER posts_private;
  • The second suggestion did work on Yahoo, but I hope it doesn’t mess anything up:
    First, save your home copy of wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php under another name, like you did with the wp-config file. Then, edit the original file and delete where it says
    // We are up-to-date. Nothing to do.
    if ( $wp_db_version == $wp_current_db_version )
    return;
    Ftp it up and run upgrade.php again. Then upload the original version of the file to restore it.
  • Now, go get the wp-configorigin.php you saved earlier. Rename it back to wp-config.php and ftp it up.
  • In your blog template, replace the current call for your blogroll with < ?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>. Some of the older tags have been depreciated.
  • Enable your plug-ins one by one to make sure they are compatible. If something breaks the blog, use ftp or the online file management at Yahoo to delete the applicable folder from the wp-content/plugins.

Another problem that surfaced: The bottom navigation on the index page disappeared. Some think that it has to do with plugins as well. I’m not running a “sticky post” plugin, which seems to be the primary problem for others. There is also a thought that there might be an incompatibility between the upgraded Akismet plugin and the Yahoo hosting. In my case, I finally figured out that I needed to remove a hand-coded call to the FAlbum plugin (which isn’t enabled) on the Index page.

I still have minor problems. Do not attempt to use the newer version of the WP Cache plugin or the Yahoo version of the Customizable Permalinks Plugin! Keep them disabled or they will break the blog, and you’ll have to go back and do a lot of this again. You’re pretty much stuck with the versions of third-party plugins that Yahoo gave you. If they included them, it’s probably because they have set it up in some special way – if you update the plugin, it probably won’t work anymore. If you know workarounds, please comment.

Yahoo Small Business Blogging

Yahoo Small Business Blogging

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When we moved to Yahoo hosting at work, I had hoped that the WordPress blogging would be a real service offered.

No-one in customer support knows anything about it, of course. There is no-one in charge of updating the WordPress installations.

Dreamhost and Bluehost both have one-click updates to the WordPress installation. Not only doesn’t Yahoo, but if you update manually, it breaks the blog.

WordPress as installed in the “Beta” is several versions behind, and there is no-one responsible to business owners for that service.

I put in a feature request some time ago, with no response.

After letting me know that they knew nothing, and had not power to do anything, and knew of no-one who had power to do anything, a representative at “Customer Care” finally gave me a number to call corporate headquarters for the team in charge of feature requests.

They gave me 408-349-3300 and said that once I called there, I would be directed to the right people.

Instead I got a truly rude operator who informed me that unless I had a specific name, she wasn’t transferring me anywhere.

And this is all for Small Business Owners! I’ve had to recreate that blog four times since we started there. What of the small businessperson who is less web-savvy than myself?

I’m really thinking about recommending that we use another host. We went to Yahoo for better reliability on uptime, but this is beyond annoying.

They need to either enable a one-click update, or else allow people to manually update.

The way it’s handled now is shameful. I am disappointed in Yahoo!