Viva la revolucion

What was the theme of my last post?

It kind of got away from me. I think the original theme was supposed to be something along the lines of “idealism sounds better in poetry than in prose” or maybe “Don’t canonize your hammer before you find out how it is going to wielded.”

Either way. One of the things that I mentioned last time was the revolution in Egypt.

Now that is truly awesome. People standing up against their oppressors for a slight chance of a better life for their families. Look around your room, at your loved ones, your pets, your things. Imagine the risk.

It takes a real Hero to do that. Me? I would keep moving forward with my increasingly difficult life. Hoping to hold on; hoping for a turnaround.

It makes you wonder what it would take for someone to riot, to revolt, to break the shackles of their ordinary life. ( somebody throw me a Fight Club reference, quick! )

I remember years ago there was an editorial cartoon published that depicted Allah with a bomb turban. People were upset. People half a world away were rioting and vowing revenge. Because of an insulting picture.

I remember a conversation that I had at the time. What type of people could be that concerned…over a picture?

Well. It seemed pretty obvious. The people who would riot over a picture were normal people who had nothing more important in their life than a wish for a better one after death. They had lost all hope for a better now, and were clinging to the hope that only a religion could provide.

I tried to communicate this, but there was no eloquence on my side of the conversation, and no understanding on the other side.

It still seemed a foreign concept. For all the loss of liberty over the last ten years, we haven’t had a tank in a public square. We have increasingly invasive airport security theater, but we still don’t have soldiers openly brandishing weapons. Through all of the recent economic struggle, America still hasn’t hit rock botom.

But then again, it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine that breaking point. Even though what happened at Kent State happened before my birth, it was only a generation away. It isn’t impossible to find single minded adherence to a set of beliefs today. No matter how hurtful those beliefs are. **cough**cough**Westboro Baptists**cough**Arizona immigration laws**cough**

Where is the fine line between impotent frustration, and reckless action?
It is something that I wonder about with some regularity. It is also a question that I hope I never answer.

Next post I think will have to be a little lighter. For my sake, at least.

Cyberspace is Free, long live Cyberspace.

February 8th, 1996 John Perry Barlow declared the independence of Cyberspace.  It is a beautiful, striking piece of idealism that 15 years ago was poignant.

This past month there was another strikingly beautiful piece of idealism.  Egypt’s people forced their dictator of 30 years to resign.

Besides the fact that Cyberspace, and Egypt are now more or less free, there is another relation between the two.  Before the revolution was fully underway, Egypt shut down the internet traffic in and out of it’s country.  Seems the free republic of Cyberspace can contribute to attacks on real space.

This also relates to another story where the people were not as successful.  Before Russia invaded Georgia, in August, 2008 there was a coordinated attack on Georgia’s cyber infrastructure.

Recently a small group of rebels decided to leak US secret documents online.  Wikileaks took advantage of the relatively distributed nature, and the relatively anonymous internet to keep operating funds coming in, and keep the information public and available.

Whether wikileaks was right or wrong to release the documents is outside of my current concern.  What I believe is more interesting  is that in the middle of fighting to distribute the secret documents, the group had to also fight against the internet that they had used as their initial protector.

Their DNS servers refused to continue to resolve their website’s name, their online source of income closed their account.

No matter how free the bits are, the electronics that create the bits is real.  And that real hardware resides in machines that exist on land that is controlled by governments and corporations.

Each one of those is subject to control and greed, coercion and weakness.

I could continue to provide examples about corporations and governments choosing to wage their battles in the free state of cyberspace.  In fact, I think I will.

There was speculation that some group in China hijacked part of the internet’s traffic in April of 2010. There also speculation that a computer virus was designed specifically to attack two nuclear weapons sites.  And I could have sworn that I had a link around here that said we were conducting a cyberwar against Eurasia.  ( All I can find now are links to some war in Eastasia )

Before anybody complains that I am a pessimist, and I am ignoring all of the happy cybserpace stories, let me acknowledge that yes it is wonderful that the low cost of publishing and general availability of the internet allows modern miracles.  People with Autism can use technology to communicate.  Sufferers of rare and uncommon diseases are able to find understanding within worldwide communities of similar people.  Computing power distributed across the internet is even being used to research new drug treatments.

But the oppressive interactions of cyberspace are only going to continue and strengthen.

The Google knows me better than my manager.  The communications companies have the processing power to perform real time matching on what customers say.  And we freely give our personal information more and more every day for a chance to grow virtual food.

This wasn’t supposed to be a conspiracy post.  But before you remove your tinfoil hat, I just wanted to comment that the film Brazil was probably more visionary than Mr. Gilliam had ever wished.  So, should I rename my children to both be John Smith for the anonymity, or both to IPv6 compatible names so that they can remain unique and distinguishable from any other Tuttle.

Da Man

So, who am I? Likely if you are reading this, you don’t know who I am.
Not because I plan to write anything subversive. Not because I plan to really write anything personally limiting.

Rather it is a bit of the Bachman effect. Stephen King wrote books under a pseudonym.
In the forward for “Long Walk” he wrote this:

“There’s a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are always full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives.”

I can’t even say that my woods are filled with monsters. Only creatures in my woods are a few feral cats, and maybe an armadillo.

What I can say is that I sometimes feel mired in the sticky goo that is middle class, big business. I am hoping that this Bachman effect will allow me to hack at that goo in an honest way.

So, again, who am I? I’m the man. Not in that oh so cool, seventies theme music way.

The way where my paychecks have come from a large multinational corporation for the past 11 years, and my job responsibilities don’t transfer well to survival after society collapses.
Unless I can follow a foraging process, or use a TPS report to bring down a deer.

Ah well, that’s not quite right, either. You are not your job ( unless you want it to be. )

So, one last time, who am I? This sentence I have typed over and over again. I guess the answer is hard, and I guess it really is still in progress. Here’s the best I got:

Parent, and husband. Code monkey.
Photographer, kind of. Go player, kind of.
Sometimes taoist, sometimes pacifist.
Sometimes angry cynic. Sometimes a mushball.

Dump Truck

Too much general bile and disappointment. I have focused only on the messed up world, and my children’s need for their father to be a hero. My unfitness for this purpose will repeatedly show itself, I am sure. The third facet to this blog is my children themselves.

Today I am going to type a couple of words about my youngest. At 19 months he is 36 inches tall, and weighs over 30 pounds. Over 90th percentile for both.

For now, I name him Dump Truck. Not because of his immensitude, but rather because he is at the stage of his development where the only acceptable order for cartons of toys is dumped on the ground.

This understandably vexes my wife. She stays with Dump Truck during the week, and there is no break to the toys under her feet.

I tend to be much more laissez faire. As long as the toys can be shoveled into any carton, or pushed into one room, I am ok waiting until the weekend to check and see if the floor is still there or all the pieces of Dump Truck’s tea set are still there.

The weekend is when I try to vacuum and sweep the hardwood floors so that my allergies don’t bother me. Yes, allergies. To my cats. Yes, cats. And cedar. Yes bad cedar allergies. Yes, I realize, no super hero has cats, or allergies. But I digress.

Back to Dump Truck. After witnessing him trash the freshly cleaned playroom in three seconds, I have decided that it is time to take action. The first step in changing behaviour is understanding it. Why does Dump Truck dump?

I have a theory. Our organization attempts make no sense to the finely tuned pattern matching ability of Dump Truck’s brain. This theory may not have empirical evidence to back it up, but I am just going to have to roll with it.

Putting all of the pieces to the grocery store in one bin, and all of the weebles in one bin, and all of the dinosaurs in one bin, makes sense to me. Maybe he is looking for a better search algorithm. So tomorrow all of the red things will go in one bin. Doesn’t matter if it’s a fire truck, or a red rubber ball. All of the balls, except the red rubber one of course, will go in bin two. I’ll keep going as long as it makes sense. There may be a few test iterations, but I am sure we can find an acceptable algorithm. Just may take a year or two.

Now to convince my wife.

An engineer by any other name

I read a story recently.

A city was going to widen a road to four lanes in North Carolina.

The community complained. Not about the construction, but because there was no thought given to necessary traffic lights. With the medians blocking turns at some intersections, and the increased traffic throughput, the community thought that it would be a good idea to add two traffic lights.

The City Council acquiesced, and promised that if the Department of Transportation deemed it necessary the traffic lights would go up.

DoT hired an engineering firm who said no extra traffic lights were needed.

Here’s where things become amazing. The community group got together, and provided an eloquent counter argument, an eight page paper fully explaining their position with explanations and diagrams and all other types of finely crafted arguments. This was provided to the City Council as the work of a concerned citizen’s group, with no claims on the expertise of the submitter.

Here’s where things become awful. The chief engineer for the Department of Transportation reports the community for professional level work without being a licensed engineer.

Yep, the report was too good. Should licensing be really that important? Well, yeah, maybe …I mean it is supposed to ensure that when you seek a qualified opinion that the opinion was actually worth listening too. You don’t actually know if the enginer scored perfectly on his or her tests, and a doctor is a doctor even if they are a barely passing doctor. So, I guess you still can’t be too sure, but even the least qualified doctor knows more about organic chemistry than I do, and the least competent engineer knows more trigonometry than my wife.

But that is really the opposite of what is happening here. Should I make sure to never post with spell check turned on? So that no one mistakes me for a writer. Or should I make sure to never provide too meaningful an opinion in case someone mistakes me for a philosopher, or for goodness sakes… A prophet? That would burn me up.

Now, if the head engineer really cared about safety, and validity of work, then when he received the community report he certainly should have picked up the phone. But maybe he should have called the firm that signed their name at the bottom of the report with a big Mr. Professional Engineer and asked them a few poignant questions. Did they make the same considerations as an amatuer group? Did they document why these considerations led the firm to an opposing opinion to the community group? I am sure with seeing the report, someone else could come up with some other questions with regard to licensing.

It irks me to no end to see a public or group construct that was designed to maintain public safety to be subverted for the unreasonable benefit of a select few.

You want more examples? Maybe one day I will go into the limitations of a licensed home inspector. The dilution of purpose behind unions…

Meh. Instead, I think I will just have a beer.

Is there hope for the world?

So, a Girl Scout came to the door today selling cookies in a snowstorm.

Maybe there is hope for the world? Probably not.

One problem solves itself, another appears: Smart Cars.

Never drove one, never rode in one, never looked inside one.
Actually, I only have a problem with one specific Smart Car.

I almost squished the Smart Car  and it’s not so Smart driver while it tried to merge across three lanes in front of me.

Let’s set the scene a little more. It’s homeward bound rush hour.
There are three lanes in each direction with shopping malls on either side.

I see the slow plead of an unrealistic turn signal up ahead of me.
He is trying to drift from the right lane across my lane in order to make a left turn, and he is obviously close to missing his turn, because he has slowed down to a crawl.

Oblivious of the line of cars behind him, he waits for his opportunity.

Chuckles turns the steering wheel slightly as if he thinks he can pull in front of my 10 year old full sized van.

I didn’t slow down.  There was a line of traffic behind me, and if there was going to be an accident, I would prefer that the person getting squished was the person making the bad choice, instead of someone behind me just trying to get home.

I am sure someone else let him go after I passed.

Don’t judge too harshly. I saw John Stewart’s Rally to Return to Sanity. I get it, you go then I go, you go then I go… The road of progress is filled with the compromise of an implied social contract.

But how does that work when you have people working outside of that paradigm? You go then you other go? How does that work when accomodating Chuckles would mean me suddenly slowing down in a line of traffic.

Isn’t there more to it?
Isn’t there a little more social responsibility to …well…any social contract.
Shouldn’t Chuckles have taken another exit from his shopping mall so that he could have made his turn in time?  Done the merge a little earlier?
Taking it even further, when did Chuckle’s selfish personal decison become my social responsibility? How does a social contract work at all when everyone in the society have a different view on what is acceptable, and what responsibilities they signed up for?

I am not sure of the answer, if you can find a paradigm that fully encompasses the generous, the selfish, the pragmatic, and the foolhardy, please let me know.

When did the Girl Scouts get Lazy?

Tis’ the season for fund raising.

Time to get your addictive caramel boxes of goo and chocolate minty cookies.

Why do I know this?  Not because any girl scout has knocked on my door with a wagon of treats.  No, I know this because mummy put a sign in your front yard, and mummy put a magnet on her SUV.  “Ask me how to get Girl Scout Cookies.”

I don’t think so.  I was never a girl scout, so I can’t know for sure…But It seems to me from reading countless boxes as cookies slid into my fat stomach that there was a higher, greater purpose in selling cookies.  Something about every girl reaching her true potential.

I know the cookie badge is all important and places a good counterpoint to the glucometer badge, but maybe, just maybe the most important part of the exercise is the opportunity for young girls to stretch beyond a socially condoned comfort zone and become assertive?  Isn’t it too easy to let mommy’s SUV sell the cookies, or to sit at a table at the exit of a chain department store?

So, Here’s an idea.  Buy some methodone cookies from those keebler elves.  They sell a damn good facsimile.  And then make a commitment to challenging one of the children in your neighborhood, boy or girl, to reach their full potential.

Kids have super vision

I have two sons.

Today my oldest was trying to convince me that he needs a flashlight
in his room.  Because if all of the lights are out at night, he would need a flashlight to see.
In his almost five year old mind,  this makes perfect sense.
In my more practical mind, he should be sleeping if this happens, and shouldn’t give a damn either way.

Well, no…you see, I can see in the dark.
if all of the electricty goes out, I will come find you, and help you.

Dad, you can see in the dark, How?

Look at my eyes.

#stares for a second#  Oh, I see.

It’s amazing the imagination that an almost five year old has.
The truth is that no matter what my son thinks, I can’t see in the dark,
and more importantly I am not a hero.

The truth is I am a cynical tech worker trying to make it through every
day with my edit function intact.

This blog is a place to deposit some of my cynicism so that hopefully I can be closer
to the hero that my son seems to think I am