And of course, this time around I’ll have better backups.

Also, we were hacked just as we arrived back from Australia, and it took me a few weeks to get around to putting things back together. I’m yet to recover the themes, but at least I’ve got the content back in place.

Thanks, Linda, for marrying me, and for continuing to put up with me.

This just struck me as interesting.

When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn’t expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, they were already posted on another Web site, and a historical map of Tokyo put up in 2006 hadn’t caused any problems.

But Google failed to judge how its offering would be received, as it has often done in Japan. The company is now facing inquiries from the Justice Ministry and angry accusations of prejudice because its maps detailed the locations of former low-caste communities.

Fun Fact of the day: if you search for “Innertube Maracas” on Youtube, you get only one hit.

The case was about a stock option grant at MacAffee/Network Associates for which the date/grant price was changed in some way back in 2000. It was never sold, but it belonged to the VP of Legal Affairs at the time, and over the course of the next four years, he reported it on SEC filings and other forms, possibly opening him to mail fraud charges. Eventually, when the company was investigating the stock issues, he came forward and was promptly fired. And even more eventually, the FBI filed charges against him.

Despite the two banker’s boxes of evidence and several days of testimony, we found him not guilty on two halves of the charges of mail fraud and hung on the other halves, as well as on the question of altering company records.

Things I learned:

• Your email is going to sound really stupid when read aloud by a witness in a federal court. Trust me.
• Please remember to date any papers you sign. While it may not result in the verdict you want, it will probably result in a faster one. Your jury will thank you (even if they convict you).
• If you ever have a conversation about changing the date/price of your stock options with someone, and they later get changed, you should immediately find out if that’s legal.
• FBI agents really do come in pairs. Ours looked like Rob Corddrey and Matt Daemon.
• Yes, they _will_ introduce all the relevant documentation in paper format. We had a binder containing 1600 pages of every stock grant given by MacAfee over 10 years. “Just in case.”
• They will also very likely introduce as evidence the greeting card that everybody signed when you got fired. And possibly bring in one of the people who signed it to testify.
• It’s pretty amazing anyone ever gets convicted. Think of the last time you tried to get 12 people to agree on where to have dinner. Now try to get them all to agree that all five elements of a mail fraud indictment were satisfied by evidence presented by the prosecution over a period of two weeks.
• Code names matter. In this case, an investigation into stock backdating was called “Project Shield.” The defense claimed that this was because it was because the board wanted to shield themselves from liability. The prosecution actually brought in a senior director of the company that did the investigation in order to explain that it was because they thought that MacAfee made some kind of “shield” related product.

There’s some press about it:
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202424944505
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/10/01/in-big-backdating-trial-defense-rests-without-putting-on-witnesses/

Today’s conviction of one of his contemporaries (who signed off on the change). This morning the judge called us in and asked us all if we’d read the papers (since she was going to have to remind us not to pay any attention to this story). She confiscated a few copies of the Chronicle.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/02/BUEU13AKT7.DTL

* I didn’t even get to read off the verdict to the court!

Guess what? For the last week, I’ve been empaneled as a juror in a federal criminal case! While I can’t say much more about it right now, believe me when I say that I was too honest to plead a hardship.

Anyway, it means that I get to spend 8:30 to 1:30, Tuesday-Friday, right in the front row of the jury box listening to lawyers.

It would be tempting to be able to blame this on the fact that we’re working like mad trying to ship some software.

However, the real reason, at least for the last three weeks or so, has been the arrival of our little bundle of joy.  Athena Lily Haberlach was born on August 8th, 2008, at 4:06pm.  Since then, she has been doing her best to keep mommy and daddy awake, while destroying a small forest’s worth of diapers.

So far, more than 13 million people have been tricked into watching Astley, propelling the singer to heights of celebrity he surely thought had passed him by. Riding the wave, his record company are now releasing a greatest hits collection amid talk of a UK tour

As one of my coworkers said: “You can’t just go perpetuating a meme. There are CONSEQUENCES.”

It still makes a great ringtone, though.

Anyway, Tibet appears to be thrust onto the world stage more than usual by the Beijing Olympics, particularly the torch carrying through countries known for their highly vocal support of potentially not-well-understood issues

This article is pretty good, talking about a bit of the history and some of the modern issues. They’re complex and don’t fit on bumper stickers, of course. It’s a somewhat long (and pretty interesting) read.
There are a lot of parallels drawn between the westward expansion of the United States and the displacement of the American Indians in the name of progress. This seems to be occasionally used to justify what China is doing in Tibet, although I would prefer that it be used as an example of what not to do — if only on the grounds that the US expansion opened up huge resources, while the modernization of Tibet appears to be a pretty costly boondoggle. Even the original reasons for China’s interest in the area (as a geographical buffer zone against invaders) are somewhat moot these days (I doubt that Hannibal will be riding his Elephants into Sichuan any time soon).