Following Edge

Happy Halloween!

You have to agree that this is an amazing Halloween picture. And, no, this is not my costume this year. (Can you even get a stuffed monkey these days? On second thought, I don't want to know.)

This is my dad just after I was born in 1969. Reportedly, the stuffed monkey was brought to the party by Tarzan, but my dad adopted it. My mom saved this picture. Bless her heart for saving this and bless his heart for being who he is!

If I'm ever required to dress up for Halloween, I pretty much always dress as Archduke Ferdinand just to test people, but I think I'll avoid dressing up this year and just steal my treats from our own candy bowl.

Lauren will either be Cinderella tonight or will be Snow White wearing Cinderella's dress. I think she's finally settled on just being Cinderella since we've made it apparent that she can be anyone she wants for Halloween so long as they're willing to wear the Cinderella dress that we already bought (a fire fighter in Cinderella's dress, John Kerry in Cinderella's dress and Spiderman in Cinerella's dress have all been discussed this week). We'll take a driving tour of family and friends for trick-or-treating. Hope you all have a great Halloween night! Stay safe!

35 years ago, on October 29, 1969, the first Internet connection was made. As reported earlier, the first Internet site (a SEX site) had waited 57 days for its first connection. Sounds like modern weblogs, doesn't it?

So, after 57 days, a technician at Stanford, made the first Internet (then the ARPANet) connection and attempted to login to the UCLA SEX site. After entering "lo", the Internet connection crashed. Happily, the second connection shortly after that allowed a full login exchange.

So, take a moment today and reflect on how far the Internet has come and how far it hasn't yet come.

Today, I juggled work and time with Lauren.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)

Yesterday, I moved one of my job's office locations.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)

The first (revived) Eugene Weblogger Meetup went perfectly this evening. Well, except cursing periodically at the outrageously loud movie playing in the background and being unable to hear everyone nor even your own thoughts at times due to the volume and content of the movies. Curses, as I am known to say at times. Seriously, even with the unpleasant change at The Strand, all ten bloggers attending made interesting contributions. For everyone's quick reference, here's the list of those who attended: Kat of Schoolgirl Sophistry ...who explained Japan's megaphone advertising and who allowed us to send the leftover pizza home with her... Ben of Ben's Log at Junk 'n' Stuff ...who told me about his new job and didn't brag on his new Alpine car stereo... Richard Soderburg of floating atoll ...who helped me understand the advantage of Movable Type after I've chosen WordPress and who confirms my suspicion that bartenders are a critical force in the world... Tom of printisdead.net/ letters.from.nowhere ...who had deep insights (in my shallow opinion) on politics/culture and has renewed my interesting in his custom binding based on his modest comments about it... Sleeve of Made Explicit... The Blog of Sleeve ...who confirmed that the Eugene music community is pretty close, and contributed to discussion of MP3s, building permits, and parental influence on technology and who chose the perfect moment to exit... Corona of Corona Hats ...who says she's only had a computer since August and who amazingly is already thinking about MP3 music, tricked-out bicycles and sewing for her blog... Zeb (Zebulin) of killpoets ...who confirmed that he's less interested in discussing politics on his weblog as the election approaches and who admitted that the URL for his blog is awfully long (good thing for Google)... Kinsey of Tvindy ...who said he wanted to keep some focus to his blog and gave it the tagline "a blog about nearly everything" and who I remembered had posted all the great pictures of the ruckus around John Edwards recent visit... David of Dave'ola ...who admitted that he had thought of blogging before I did, but knew when I started, that it was almost too late to start and who described the major problem in his life that he can't tell us about online... Michael Moore of Following Edge ...who avoided his natural introvert impulse to run and hide and who instead almost spoke too much on every subject raised...

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend. I hope many of you who couldn't make it this time will be able to attend next time. Watch for an upcoming announcement.

But first, who wants to make a suggestion for a location for next time? Leave a comment here with any suggestions. Internet access may not be as much of an issue as I initially thought. Although we had 4 Mac laptops there, I don't think they got a lot of use. I'd bet the priorities are seating for 15 or so, quietish, food, coffee, parking, beer and internet access. Help me out with suggestions.

When I got a new bottle of pills in the mail for our dog Sasha today, I thought the contrasting colors in mixing the old pills and new pills was very pretty.

Happily, being the child of two pharmacists and the spouse of a nurse, I know the warning that you should always ask if pills don't look exactly as you expect. Although I suspect that pills may not always be the same when you have them custom-made at a compounding pharmacy, I was glad to find out after a short wait on the phone that the pills were actually a significantly higher dose of Potassium Bromide than Sasha is supposed to get.

Now, Potassium Bromide is a pretty nasty chemical and makes you a little sick even at the right dosage, but Sasha needs it to control her epilepsy (she's a high maintenance dog). Since Sasha normally closely emulates "Hurk the dog", I'd hate to see what would happen with a significantly higher dose.

No worries, though. They're sending me a new batch. Then, I'll be able to make something even prettier with a whole bottle of orange pills and a whole bottle of blue pills.

Thanks for your great support while I was sick. I'm feeling much better now, after a few days rest and to get get supportive comments from all three readers of the blog gave me a real lift.

Update: Does my dog read my blog? Almost as soon as I finished writing this entry, Sasha enters the room, and hurks right next to me, as if to underscore my writing. Happily for you, I do know the appropriate limit for pictures on a blog. Did I mention that Sasha is high maintenance? I guess I did.

Urgh... ache, all ache, head ache, hungry, oooooh - no longer hungry, weak. Burl, did you send this down on me? sweats. drifting in. drifting out. Thank you, Anne Marie -- CostCo package of DayQuil and chicken dinner. Argh, Lauren! Poop all over the bathroom? Laundry, or else. No, David, this is not laundry for added background efficiency, it's poop laundry. Sleep, finally -- oh no, dropped bottle, glass everywhere. Urgh. Sleep. Sleep.

I had heard that there was some ruckus down in Jacksonville yesterday during President Bush's campaign stop. Today, I discovered that one component of that was three Bush-supporting teachers being tossed out of the event and threatened with arrest for wearing shirts with simply the message "Protect Our Civil Liberties". Given that these teachers were Bush supporters (since only confirmed supporters are invited to these private-venue events), it seemed to be a shocking escalation of Bush's effort to totally silence any sort of dissent.

There have been ample examples in the last 2 months of this sort of drastic limiting of access to the president and vice-president's appearances. Previously, it's been limited to citizens with outrageous behavior like 54-Year old Perry Patterson who shouted "No" when Cheney stated how much safer the nation is at his September 17 appearance in Eugene. Obviously, dissent like that can't be accepted, but wearing a shirt asking for protection of civil liberties doesn't seem to be ample cause for trampling a person's civil liberties.

This eerily starts to confirm David's position earlier today regarding the question "How did the Republic turn into the Empire?". While the argument goes that these events are private events and that the days of open motorcades are over, the argument seems to fail when recent candidates in previous elections have made at least one public appearance at a (relatively) unfiltered venue like Eugene's MacArthur Court and when the action seems related to control of any minor opposition and not about security, as in this case.

The good news is that at least Bush supporters expressing concern aren't yet handled the way that dissenters in the opposition in Jacksonville were.

Often technology is NOT the simplest way to solve a problem. I recently run into very strange trouble making a computer send out letters, but solved the problem well enough.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)

In preparation for sending out a reminder to Eugene-area webloggers about the upcoming Eugene Weblogger Meetup on October 20th, I decided to publish the results of my research into local blogs. I had said there were over 50 of them and now I'm able to prove it...

Check out the "Eugene Weblog List".

If you live near Eugene, as I do, I think you'll find that following the local blogs gives you a more meaningful perspective on things than just focusing on far-flung blogs and web sites. Let me know what YOU think.

A new release of WordPress, the software that runs this weblog, was released a few days ago. Alas, there were no release notes, so I have posted my own uniformed release notes below with links to the code changes on the WordPress CVS server.

You could call me a skeptical upgrader. I like to know what I'm getting into before I install an upgrade. That's usually no problem as most open source software is released with release notes or a specific list of changes made in each release, but the folks managing some projects are either too busy to generate release notes and change files or they may be afraid of describing security fixes in detail to prevent slow upgraders from being attacked (although I believe this is not a useful concern since attackers are happy to look at the code to find the changes).

I'm not sure if either of these issues are a factor for WordPress and it's entirely possible that there's a set of release notes published that I can't find. Let me know if you know of one. In the meantime, here's my ad-hoc release notes for WorpPress 1.2.1 presented with the hope you understand I am neither involved with WordPress development or very experienced with PHP (the language behind WordPress):

• removes redirection code from admin page header and disallows direct loading of the admin page header
  [wp-admin/admin-header.php]
• addresses security of admin bookmarklet popup, options page, posting page and edit post page (proper HTML escaping or sanitizing)
  [wp-admin/bookmarklet.php]
  [wp-admin/post.php]
  [wp-admin/options.php]
  [wp-admin/edit.php]
• fix for category id issue in category admin page
  [wp-admin/categories.php]
• updates CSS for admin login page
  [wp-admin/wp-admin.css]
• avoids improper redirects after comment posts by redirecting only to the original entry
  [wp-comments-post.php]
• removes accents from "sanitized title" suggested as post slug (the WordPress CVS shows that this was added in version 1.2, but my download of 1.2 in July did not include it... if you have more info, please let me know)
  [wp-includes/functions-formatting.php]
• update and cleanup of the login page and code ("backported" from WP 1.3)
  [wp-login.php]
• updated version to 1.2.1
  [wp-includes/version.php]

On a related note closer to hoome, David sounds like he's considering moving to WordPress from something he cooked up in his "kitchen sink".

Citizen Dmitri wrote today about his distaste for hunting in response to an article about a bear attacking a hunter in Wyoming.

While I acknowledge a range of beliefs on the value of animals' lives and am hardly one to defend hunting as it seems to celebrate aggression (predation, at least), which is a bit scary to me, it concerns me that he condemns the killing of animals for sport without condemning the killing of animals for food.

Perhaps Dmitri is a vegetarian or vegan (though someone doesn't think so) and almost certainly his "grocery stores" solution was facetious. So, I may not really be poking at Dmitri, but his tirade reminds me sharply of how our insulated culture, where meat is purchased in pseudo-sterile white packages, allows people to both eat meat and feel disgust at the "cowardly, unnecessary" killing of a lesser animal. [quoting from Dmitri's entry]

I am not a vegetarian, and am not arguing against eating meat (nor for it, since I think it may actually be "simply for the sake of satisfying a sick urge", to which vegetarians may agree). I am arguing that eating meat is also the result of "cowardly" and "unnecessary" killing of animals and that it's sick for people to eat meat from the grocery store (as I interpreted Dmitri's grocery store solution) without reconciling this with their ethics. It may be easier for us as we live in the country just a few doors down from the "Elmira Locker Service" and can see the bloody results of the slaughtering process almost daily.

While eating meat is "cowardly" and "unnecessary", it doesn't have to be "cruel" (or "inhumane" if we can figure out what that means in this context) and that may be an important factor both in hunting and in eating meat. Hunting can certainly be cruel, but the handling of most animals raised for meat is definitely cruel. I try to get meat from sources that diminish cuelty [1] [2], but I still have to reconcile myself with using up an animal for my own enjoyment, as hunters must.

That said, Dmitri's point about feeling no sympathy for the Elk hunter who was hunted by a bear is well taken.

Just when I thought I was almost ahead of the curve, I'm once again on the Following Edge. I moved far ahead in digital photo technology just in time to discover that a new technology is "where it's at"...

It should be almost impossible to have missed to (annoying?) collection of big, high quality pictures here since I got my new digital camera 4 weeks ago. I've been posting dramatically scaled-down images here and have been preparing to use the full resolution images to have digital prints made where we get our film developed now that my camera has enough resolution to generate good prints.

Suddenly, as if by cosmic design, I now find out that CVS and other retail outlets will be offering prints of pictures from camera phones. Evidently, camera phones are increasing in quality and their ubiquity is leading them to become the next big thing. Sure, they're not quite there with high quality and my company 5 megapixel camera is still pretty excellent, but the migration seems inevitable. I'm continuing to excel at the following edge instead of the cutting edge.

If you don't vote when you have the slightest opinion on any of the issues or candidates, it has an effect on the election. It's essentially the same as placing half a vote for whatever measures or candidates you oppose. Tallies of votes, since they are competitive, are affected not only positively by votes but also negatively by a lack of votes.

In Oregon, voting is easy once you register. The ballot appears in the mail, a guide describing the issues (voters' pamphlet) arrives in the mail, you read as much or as little of the guide as you like, you vote on only as many of the issues as you care about, and then you drop it in the mail. Even registering is easy so long as you know your name, address and birthday...

I'm joining "pb" of onfocus (and many others) in urging you to make sure you are properly registered to vote. Have you moved since you last registered? Have you ever registered? (Did you get the ballot for the Primary election in May?) If not, you can still register in Oregon if you do it right away by mail using a downloadable form or in person at the county election office or any DMV office without waiting in line and without providing ID, even if you've never registered before. There are other good sources of information about how to register outside Oregon.

You may not believe that elections are credible, but I invite you to visit your county elections office to see how dedicated everyone is to fair and accurate elections. These are people who care deeply about elections, regardless of the outcomes. Don't let your vote be ignored by believing the lie that we don't have control.

Does one vote count? You have to realize the power of the statistics. If you are uncertain about voting, realize that you are a member of a statistical pool of similar uncertain voters. Trust in the statistical probability that, if you make the decision and make the effort, hundreds of others are certain to be making the same decision. While I don't care to argue against each person having free will, it's important to realize that whatever action you take is likely to be multiplied greatly when you consider others that are in your same situation. Do your part and feel the power of others who are doing the same.

In my last entry, I presented marketing and content for a hypothetical business magazine that referred to business managers as "businessmen" that should seem like something out of date by 30 years since it's no longer appropriate to exclude women from discussions of managing businesses.

Unfortulately, this marketing and content was taken from the September 2004 issue of Parenting magazine with parenting terms replaced by business terms and mothers replaced by businessmen. Click the image to see the cover in larger detail to see I'm not making this up.

I am proud to take equal part in raising my daughter, Lauren. As any fully-involved working parent will tell you, it's a tremendous effort to be an excellent parent, work effectively at your job, keep up a home and still try to retain some identity through personal activities. But, I highly recommend it to anyone willing to take it on as the effectiveness of involved parenting is obvious and rewarding. People tell me that they see something excellent in Lauren and I'm happy to be a part of it. I know a handful of dads that are doing the same.

While we can say that not every man wants to be involved in parenting (as they used to say that not every woman wanted to work outside the home), I do believe that significant factors are a societal expectation that a man's primary goal is to be the breadwinner and a societal invalidation of a man's involvement in parenting (as seen blatantly in Parenting magazine). Sure, many men are workaholics and don't know much about parenting. No one knows how to parent before they're given a chance to learn. In a society where many men's fathers probably had little involvement with their parenting and where many men's mothers never involved them in the raising of younger siblings, as they did the girls, men are at a handicap in knowing how to parent. This is why the resources that parents use to learning parenting (books, classes, parent support groups, magazines, etc) must include fathers instead of excluding them. The reward of doing this is that today's boys will grow up with better role models of involved fathers and more practical experience from involvement with younger siblings, just as the last two generations of girls have experienced better role models for working mothers.

The problem is widespread. Last week, the local newspaper published an Associated Press article about how employers are boosting benefits for working mothers. If the benefits being provided (more flexible schedules, childcare and telecommuting) would be applicable to working fathers as well, there is no reason to use "working mother" instead of "working parent" except for sexism (except when referring to Working Mother magazine). If the benefits weren't being offered to working fathers, maybe "working mother" is appropriate and the article should have discussed the gender bias. The only mention of fathers and parenting in this week's local newspaper was about help for improving parenting skills for batterers. Sad.

Please don't take this as a complaint about "reverse sexism". Sexism is sexism. I know that women still are at a disadvantage in the workplace, but much slow progress has been made and that makes me hopeful that things will improve over time for men who want to be excellent fathers. But we won't get there without having shame at the bias of Parenting magazine and hoping they clean up their act or change their name to "Mothering magazine".

Unfortunately, I've really shown them where I stand by recently extending my subscription an additional 3 years. Parenting magazine is crap, but it's the only way to get the bundled Sesame Street magazine for Lauren.