Bill Albertson's Journal

Basking in a life well lived

2008-07-03T21:20:00.001-07:00

Tonight was a kind of kicker, a capstone for decades of experiences that were crazy, wild, lame, good, bad, incredible, and ugly. Inspired Service is doing what I had intended it would do. I am making myself useful to my community in ways I never thought possible- this has been a long time goal in my life, and I am just now meeting it after many many years of hard work and lessons learned.

I have always wanted to be a priest, since I was a little boy. I learned the Tridentine Latin Masses, high mass, simple services, funeral mass, and three others by heart backward and forward (literally) by the time I was 9 years old. I was an acolyte in the traditionalist branch of the Catholic Church, which for those who don't know, is actually the first of many steps toward priesthood. And the reason for this, the real secret reason I wanted to be a priest, is because my real goal was to be a saint.

Everybody has different ideas of what it means to be a priest, or a saint. My definitions varied greatly from those of others. In some cases, I confused their goals and mine, and doing so led me astray. My idea of BEING a saint, is that I have done so much work for God that I am close enough to God to be, in my own way, a PART of God. Being a priest, well, that is just a defined path that leads directly and clearly down that route, as Catholic priests are able to transubstantiate bread and wine into the flesh and blood of God, which will make you closer and part of God at least in a small and temporary way if you consume it.

The above definitions really presume that you and I have the same definitions of God, sacrament, priest, saint, divinity, and a number of concepts that could not be possibly the same between any two people. My own personal idea of God is that if God is omnipotent, and illimitable, the easiest way of perceiving God is to see that God is in all things. This means, literally, we are ALREADY the living flesh of God. So is the rock in the street. So is the air. So is the laptop I am writing on. So is the internet. The Gospel of Thomas, and fragment of the Mary Gospel both go down this route, which would be why the early church tried to burn all the copies it could find.

So, without knowing it, I had put myself at a very tender age on a direct course of conflict of faith vs dogma, ideas vs belief, and heresy vs orthodoxy. By the time I was 14, I knew I could not be a Catholic priest. I just did not know what I could be. I wanted a direct path to being part of the greater divinity around me, and the need to serve was driving me forward even if I had no goal nor direction. Basically, I felt I could not be a Catholic priest because I could not follow all of the rules necessary to be in the required state of grace to perform transubstantiation- being 14 and whacking off three times a day meant a lot of confessional visits, and it was just too much for me...and the priests.

Sainthood was out of the question at that point. I was sinning left and right. According to the Catholic Church, there was no way I would make it into heaven, or be a saint, short of dying saving someone, or the like. So, I joined the Army. Just kidding, I had a lot of other reasons for going into the Army, many of them necessary or selfish, depending on your point of view. But my attitude did not help my cause, so to speak.

Now I am fast forwarded 26 years. Almost twice the time I had been alive when I found I could not be a priest nor a saint. Now I strive every day to be both. Every motherfucking day. Yes, God can say "motherfucking"- I should know, I am part of God, whether I want to be part of God, whether I want to be cognizant of my relationship to the fact that I am one of God's little white blood cells, or cilia cells, or something of the like.

But being a priest is easy. The whole idea behind the bread and wine was to cut down the separations between people, those divisions of class, tradition, and obstinance. This is why Jesus mocked Peter by calling him his rock, his cornerstone (read the reference in Thomas, its priceless). By following a belief that we can all walk in and be a part of the light of divinity, we become transubstantiated, everything we are and we touch becomes transubstantiated, and the mass becomes the entirety of our existence. This is why I hang out with the Society of Friends, aka the Quakers. They believe as I do. So I am surrounded by priests, old and young, male and female, firm and infirm, quiet and rambunctious.

I have reasons for pursuing sainthood on a daily basis. I have to be a living example to my daughter. She needs saints she can access, without the bullshit. She needs an example in her life that says "I can make the world I live in better, I don't have to fall for the trap of the participation mystique." I cannot sit passively and wait for others who could care less about my ideals to make a world I want. I have to go out and do it. That is miracle working, right there. There is no greater miracle I could give my daughter, or anyone else, including myself, than at least TRYING to make a difference, even in a small way.

And it is working, even tonight.

So, what if nobody showed up?

2008-07-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

Really, that should read- so WHAT if nobody showed up?!

It's 7pm, and the first night of the tech and lit discussion is here. I am sitting here with a teacher, and she is reading my copy of the book. Well, she stopped by because she is my mother-in-law, and wanted a ride home from Pam and couldn't get a hold of her.

Yet, she is sitting here, reading, laughing, commenting on the book...and that is why I am really here. I figure I reached out to one person, got them reading Little Brother, and my day is good.

As for the Little Brother Sessions, I had a feeling they are important, but I realized WHY they are important after preparing the first presentation. It gives a starting point for other people to create their own presentations, especially if they don't have a lot of experience with technology. I know that doesn't sound like much, but I felt that Tor's teacher guide didn't really do enough for people who might not be up for going down to the command line.

So, I don't care if anybody shows up. I don't care how embarrassed I get by the silence. I don't care if my friends flake on presentation work days, or don't show up for the big night. I don't care if the rest of the friends are too busy with their own things to be there, even if they told me it was a "great idea". Eventually, some teacher somewhere is going to get a hold of these, or maybe someone in a school computer club, and they will have a blueprint for every chapter that will be useful to people who don't have two decades of computer experience.

And someone else just showed up! Wait, three others are here!

Ahhhh, reality!

2008-05-31T11:08:00.000-07:00

My head no longer feels like exploding. After talking to my wife, having coffee with my projects buddy, and otherwise chilling out, the twitchies from the interview have gone away. This morning I am now faced with the banal view of a messy apartment, the company of a precocious four year old, and a bike that needs grip tape inserted under the stem clamp to the steering tube. This is infinitely more rewarding than getting beaten up with weird questions over and over again.

So, today will be spent chasing the kid, wrenching on the bike, doing chores and, if I am lucky, hacking on my openbsd box as well as ordering some gear that I have been meaning to order for about a month now.

My brain is full, must explode...

2008-05-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

I just had the weirdest phone interview with a major online retailer today. The interview was the first step in a long gauntlet of phone and in-person interviews, and when I found that out, I just locked up and panicked. Couldn't even repeat some of the basic OSI layer stuff, that I know by heart (and is so basic, I never even think of it. It would kind of like being asked to define the difference between something like transitive and causative cases in a sports journalism interview). After it finally sunk in that I was panicking because I really really hate gauntlet interviews, I just ended it. In spite of that, they really insisted on scheduling me for a second barrage. I politely declined.

Gauntlet interviews suck. They are an artifact of the old dot-boom days when you couldn't find a decent admin among all of the wanna-be's (and that included the ones with certifications). You have one to three recruiter/hr droid screenings, then you get a first technical screening (usually with someone who is never going to work with you). Then you have the two to six phone screenings from various functional groups barraging you with questions outside of your immediate area of knowledge. Then you start on the inperson interviews, sometimes going on as long as three full days before an offer is made. Then there is the negotiation phase. All of this is designed to find out how well the person will do under stress, and if they are a perfect fit for the interviews' work environment. In practice, only the ones most desperate for a job ever complete the process, and to be honest, nobody is perfect for a work environment that has to heap that much stress on you to get the job, much less hold it.

A few minutes after that I called up my old ISP and asked them to renew my service, because I had finally:

Gotten through the dispute process with the phone company, which took 4 months to get credit for a mis-billing.
Tried some other connectivity solutions, and they all sucked.
Was wanting something easy and constructive to do while having breakfast on what would normally be one of my days off.

I got my service turned back on, and also had an interview with the owner. Apparently, he was handling phones that morning and was simultaneously going through resumes for a part time sysadmin job there. I had actually submitted a resume, but did not know whether they had the hours or pay to cover what I would need out of part time work- the crux being survival until a second or third contract comes in. I don't really have any idea how it went, but I definitely liked it better than the one that started my day. Regardless, the neighborhood is going to have another open access point up in a few days, which is a bonus :)

Simplicity, an important value

2008-05-26T20:07:00.000-07:00

I have a little sub-notebook (a Dell c400) that I love to take with me to coffee houses in Midtown. It's lightweight, has decent battery life, and is fairly durable. It also has gone through about 3 different incarnations of linux without a stable wifi connection.

I finally got pissed off enough to go back to OpenBSD. Actually, what got me going back to OpenBSD wasn't anything new with the project itself. They have been plugging along nicely, adding new features that I salivate over, and otherwise doing a good job. No, the problem had been that my wife wanted to run flash movies from YouTube on the box, and OpenBSD did not have flash that worked worth a damn for that purpose. I tried WinXP, but that was like trying to swim through a pool of molasses on a summer day in San Francisco. I went through Ubuntu, ZenWalk, and PcLinuxOs, and all failed to run the well documented but poorly implemented rt61 based wifi card in the laptop.

Since then, the wife has started using my "main" laptop, and "the little subnotebook that could" was abandoned in the corner. I took it out to coffee every so often, but the unreliability of the wireless interface under Linux just drove me to distraction. Finally, the wife confirmed that all of her stuff was off the box... and I immediately installed OpenBSD 4.3! I guess the final push was that Adobe opened up their formats to the public, so gnash and swfdec at some point will have stuff compatible with the latest flash out there.

The bonus of finally moving back to OpenBSD is that I am being more productive in just one day than I have been in months on that box. Having something reliable with a really simple interface is worth so much more than all the eyecandy in the world. Well, unless it is eyecandy that I build- my next thing to do is to make an adesklet that will serve as a blood sugar tracker for my undead diabetic ass.

Google Apps- some brief observations

2008-05-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

I was an early adopter of Google Apps, and have been offering feedback in forums on some major issues I have run across. I personally like using Google Apps, but have found that usage of it isn't any different than using Yahoo's Groupware or other products out there. In fact, Yahoo has some better features, though their kludgy interface makes those features nigh unusable. I suppose I could pay for Basecamp instead, but its just not worth it to me and my friends.

Its also not worth it for most small non-profits. I consult on the side (for free) to non-profits in the Sacramento region when they have weird tech questions they need answers, and sometimes I also implement some solutions for them. To be really blunt, I don't see the benefits in using Google Apps considering the ensuing chaos of presenting a new user interface just to share some documents. Google Apps is just too limited in some really important features- which almost puts it on par with having multiple Microsoft Office users sans a fully supported Sharepoint server.

Here are a few observations on why I can't justify rolling this product out to the several non-profits and church groups that I support:

Mailing lists implementation in Google Apps bites because it:

is limited to site admins- bad, bad, bad for the admins.
is unable to do bulk imports- worse than bad for admins.
doesn't pull from existing contact lists for auto-completion of entries. WTF?
Suggestion- get rid of the mailing list tool and add native Google Groups integration into Google Apps. That would be a deal sealer for a lot of small hobby groups and non-profits.

Features like autocompletion are specific only to each user, cannot be shared between different users or within contact group members, and are not enabled for things like, well, mailing lists.
If things are really all that integrated, how come I can't share contacts with other Google App users in my domain? Basically, this is the ONE thing that kills small orgs during growth, is multiple duplicate entries of contacts that aren't kept up synced. Google Apps doesn't address the issue, which will just exacerbate it later.
Same goes for contact groups. Can't be shared under Google Apps, so what is the point in having them? Example: "Hey, Brandy, its Bill. I need you to log in and get me all the contacts from Joe's Workgroup. Can't do it? Dammit, we just blew the contract!". That's what I mean.
Its not ADA compliant. No, really, its not. I have two blind veteran coders who can't use the site. This is simple to fix, Google has the resources, and there are plenty of blind users who would VOLUNTEER so long as somebody at Google would actually take the time to deal with them. Come on, find one of the five non-PhDs out of the gazillion PhDs at the Googleplex, and give someone at a local Society for the Blind chapter a phone call. Its not THAT hard.
Google Sites is a nice idea, but near useless when it comes to data archival. I can't back it up with RSS feeds. Worse yet, some of the features, like the templates for "issues", aka tickets, cannot be spooled off into a document. Neither can any of the other text. This is a migration and management nightmare waiting to happen. I can just imagine one of my less technical users coming to me saying "I don't know what happened to all of our Amnesty International letter writing data, it just disappeared". Ungh.
Google Sites idea of user and data security is a joke. It needs to be more fine grained (like per page, or per branch, not per site).
Google Docs is better, but I DON'T NEED Google Apps to make it any better for me. Yes, it can be a little easier if you have an internal group to choose from based on a domain, but Google Apps + Docs needs a little more than that to get people to log in an share that way. Again, no additional "domain specific" integration available that is any different, so what is the point?
The Google Apps Start page is a security nightmare. Get rid of it, or make sure it doesn't give out critical data when you go to it WITHOUT LOGGING IN. Basically, if I have something to put on there as the site admin going out to all of the users, it should not be visible to the entire world. Unfortunately, this options does not exist yet. I won't even go into what a malicious page widget might do.

After some tweaking around, I have come to the conclusion that Google Apps has some limited functionality, but is otherwise no different from, say, Yahoo Groups or other similarly branded software. The main reason I say this is because the apps from a few of Google's flagship products are there, but none of the group integration is present in any effective way. For other features, a lot of usability was just thrown in and then abandoned, with little thought as to the implications later on. Maybe it will be better in a couple of years, but without feedback from Google on what fixes might be addressed, and some obvious roadmaps for future development, I am not going to recommend it to most people who come to me for advice, but I would recommend it to almost anyone else.

So, who would it work best for? People who aren't at all technical, who aren't going to be impacted if parts of the system get destroyed by some users, and who have nothing to hide, and aren't that organized, and don't care about integration features. Remarkably, that is actually a lot of small businesses and student groups out there- but if you are a stickler for things being "right", watch where you go with this product.

Thoughts for this week in May

2008-05-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

I had no idea that I only had 4 hours of sick leave left for the year. It probably would have been better that at least some of those days involved hangovers, but, alas, they did not.

I am having to invent some bike parts, because most bike parts are made by rejected engineers from the big 5 automakers- which means that the vast majority of them are expensive, and crappier than appliqué chrome detailing.

While I am dealing with celiacs and diabetes (both of which are mostly under control), I am also dealing with my usual sensory integration issues. This results in my feeling worn out after hearing too many unpredictable noises, or not being able to modulate everything I sense down from 11 on the dial. The bonus of having to deal with so many health issues is that I stopped trying to be "normal" any more. If you can't deal with my being anti-social or "weird", its not my problem.

Being able to really feel depressed because my senses are out of whack is much better than denying it and putting on a happy face. I can now deal with my problem and feel better in record time.

The day job is getting weird. Sales droids are attacking me in droves, and my jedi skills are being tested. When that is not happening, I am configuring a notification management system called AlarmPoint. When that is not happening, people interrupt one of the above with unusual questions.

I ate some fries that had been cooked in old oil on purpose, just so my celiacs blood test would have a higher likelihood of showing a positive result. The downside is that it feels like I have a small ferret wriggling up and down my intestines at inconvenient times. The upside is that this is much less painful than swallowing a half-teaspoon of wheat flour. And fries are always tasty.

A friend of mine has a new love interest. While I tried my best to avoid levity regarding certain...differences...but when the subject was breached I couldn't help mentioning that I would send mountain climbing gear and lederhosen in order to help with his conquest of my friend. My wife served as proxy puncher in this regard.

It's past midnight here, but I am wide awake. The delta breeze is moving through town, and I am truly enjoying cool temperatures for the first time in a week.

My daughter adopted a cat. Then she tried to adopt a stray kitten. Then she tried to adopt the cat's already adopted kittens. Then she re-adopted the cat. After that, she cried because she couldn't have all the cats. Our two pre-existing cats are nonplussed.

Tidbits of Joy

2008-05-03T01:08:00.000-07:00

I have some random updates, and the news is mostly good this time:

My bike parts have come in, I ride to work next week.
I am not going blind in two years according to my doctor- my blindness reversed itself with severe diet change and my vision is fully restored.
I am afflicted with celiacs, and it is not all in my head, according to my allergist.
New things are happening at work, and change is always good and welcome.
Computer parts for the first stage of my non-profit I.T. project are being ordered tomorrow.
My daughter is still cute, even when she throws a fit in the bike store.
Pam just bought a bike to pull Sophia's trailer around with.
People are randomly helping me reach my personal goals. That's pretty cool.

Beyond these minor and salient points, my life has mostly been looking up in spite of numerous setbacks and undesirable changes. The things I like are outweighing the things that made me miserable. This means that life is good, and the daisies outside our front room window are still coming up!

The Lack of Proof in God

2008-05-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago a co-worker of mine brought up the idea that some of the concepts of evolution in science were refutable, so that meant the concept of evolution was flawed, and since it was flawed it must mean it is false. I was then obliged to put for that if somehow someone found a lack of facts in a chain of events did not mean that something is proved false, it just meant that because some parts of the theory of evolution seemed refutable did not make the possibility of evolution any more or less probable. And that even if the theory of evolution was proved false, which it is not simply because evidence is missing, that did not automatically mean that God spontaneously caused creatures just to appear when prior evidence did not exist showing a clear path of evolutionary change.

This turned then to the concept of a created universe by a supreme God that just "made it happen". I told my coworker that the concept of causality he was embracing regarding a proof of God was flawed, and that if God were real, He certainly did not need proving, if one could prove something both omnipotent and undefinable existed in the first place. I never went into the discussion that by placing limits on an unlimited being you define and limit that being and eliminate its status as omnipotent and unlimited.

The thought of trying to define God, and we are talking in the "People of the Book" sense of a sole supreme monotheistic entity, is that if God is real, you really can't define something that is determined to be outside of your realm of comprehension due to the accepted facts that God is omnipotent and spans our entire realm of existence. Saying then that "this is what God does" and "this is what God is" just goes to show that most people don't really grasp the concept of unknowns too well. Which, really, gets back to the science discussion we were having.

I had to explain that real scientists don't view the concepts of things like evolution as absolutes. That is why they are called theories- which means they are postulations that are unproven and possibly may be either proven or unproven at some point in the future. I mentioned that most scientists also seem to have a difficult time with the concept of unproven and instead form definite positions based on something unproven. There are lots of scientists who very clearly have a "religious" bias in regard to some portions of the theory of evolution appearing to be provable, and therefore taking those components outside of the theory in general and applying them to a worldview. Much like evangelists for any other form of faith in an orthodoxy, these people abandon the tenets of Descartes and make the egregious mistake of claiming that since some scientific facts are provable, then other things that were not taken, discussed or created in a scientific fashion must be false.

I told my co-worker that while I do play Devil's advocate regarding people who wish to state that the theory of evolution is false, I don't actually support whether a theory of evolution is true or not. I said that people on both sides of the argument- as to whether things were spontaneously created out of nothing, or slowly created themselves out of some basic amino acids- was mostly ignoring that a theory means that the facts aren't known to be proven or true. Theory also means that nobody really knows if any of it is false. People have a hard time living in a state of uncertainty, and that makes it difficult to understand that real science has little to do with arguing a point of view beyond the basics of proven or not proven, and that when people stray from that state into conclusion, then what they are doing is no longer science as they no longer follow the scientific method. Worse, the religious using that same flawed logic to attempt to disprove evolution doesn't help the case of those arguing for intelligent design or some other form of creationism either.

Then I contrasted that viewpoint, and stated that even Descartes was a very religious man, and that other scientists believe and have believed in religions as well. Science doesn't define the world, it just defines those things scientists view and attempt to define in the world as consistent or inconsistent. Also, I mentioned that I don't follow the derisive concepts on evolutionary absolutism professed by Dr. Dawkins either, as I find his point of view just as dogmatic as any other religious nut, except that Dr. Dawkins' orthodoxy is atheism- and that he has an easier time defending himself, as he essentially and rabidly believes in the Big Nothing, which is awfully hard to take a swing at.

Then my coworker had to ask what I personally believe in. Well, I told him that was personal, and while I don't take Dawkins' point of view, I also don't believe in spontaneous creation of complex life forms. Beyond that, I said, I have nothing I need to explain.

And for those reading this, I will explain more on my viewpoints on God tomorrow, as I wish to at least record my own personal point of view for later discussion with my daughter, and don't want to forget what I was thinking about later on. Beyond that, don't expect anything new, and please don't take what I believe personally as Gospel.

How to not get someone to pay a bill

2008-03-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

Since we moved from our old house to our new home, we lost or missed some bills that we thought we had paid. This means that my wife has been receiving some insistent phone calls from people we don't know, and we respond by politely informing them of our new address, please send us, blah blah blah. Then, there are those people who feel that they were contracted to be abusive. Of course, after having been through the year we experienced in 2007, the likelihood of our responding with the expected results to an intimidating phone call is close to about zero.

The very best way to ensure that I become completely intractable is, of course, to attempt to use military interrogation techniques over the phone. I used to be in the service, and was subjected to interviews and knew about more extreme measures employed at the time- though nothing like we do today. So, when I get a call from a man who jumps between reasonable bonhomie, to foul-mouthed irratibility, to carefully modulated giggling, all in response to various changes in my own responses and voices stressors...well, I get peeved. I get even more peeved when the noises in the background also match the caller's jarring attempts at getting me to come off balance and acquiesce because it is the easiest thing to do. Instead, I dig in.

Nothing makes an interrogator more upset than their interviewee anticipating their methods and using them against them. You can tell with US interrogators because the weak ones will resort to threats. The funny thing is that I just got done being threatened by the IRS, itinerant robbers, my ex-landlord, diabetes, and death all in one year. Some strange guy tittering on the phone to annoy me into giving up my bank account information isn't likely to have much success. I almost felt sorry for him, and then drew out the conversation for another 15 minutes before he caught on and ratcheted up the threats, at which point I bid him goodnight.

The good thing that came out of this is that I was able to explain another piece of my past to my wife. She has disliked our government's policies in dealing with interrogations (torture), and I was able to now give her an example of what our pre-torture interrogations might be like- with, of course, the exception that you would be face to face in a little room and it would go on for days or weeks until you broke. My wife's experience on the phone was important to me, because I had known some people who were into the shady side of military operations when I had been in the Army. It left an impression on me, knowing people like that, but it's easier to explain it to Pam when people give you examples.

So, to the gentleman claiming to be from Western Credit (if that is really who you were), we salute and thank you for your time in the service, and are glad that you can find gainful employment using your skills in a slightly less devious and hurtful fashion.

However, we still don't pay unless we see something in writing. Have a nice day

Inconceivable!!!

2008-03-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

There have been issues lately with our DSL line. It stopped working after last week. This was due to a misunderstanding between ourselves and AT&T. They believed that they could bill us for whatever they felt like, and we felt we shouldn't pay them until they explained themselves. After many conversations and negotiations back and forth, we have decided to cancel our landline and move over to a cell based card for our family laptop. We couldn't argue much about the bill once they explained what they did, but we didn't like what we would characterize as a shady way of billing for service.

The rub, of course, is that we would have to migrate back to Microsoft Windows to make our cell based card work. Inconceivable!!! But it was necessary. So, as of tonight, I am not writing from a Linux box, nor a BSD box, not even a Solaris box. No, I am writing from a box running Windows Home XP. If I wasn't still so pissed at the phone company I would want to cry.

The upside is that a clean install of XPHome doesn't run all that slowly, even though I do consider it less stable than most Linux distributions. On the other hand, other things run flawlessly, so its a wash between comparable annoyances. Google pack definitely made it easier to switch, and my free games are still free and usable.

The only downside is trying to get all of our backup volumes off of the LVM storage that we had set up...

Today is brighter

2008-02-27T22:09:00.000-08:00

Today is brighter. The sun is shining. The daffodils are poking up in odd places. My head is bald. I have an interview on Friday. Life is looking good.

More to follow when I have time to write about it...

A New Hope...

2008-02-24T13:10:00.000-08:00

I just found out that Nader is running for President of the US on the Green Party ticket in the states where he can, and Independent in the 15 or so states where the party can't get a line on the ballot. As a member of a Green Party County Council where I live, I remember when he made his first big bid for office. He filled stadiums. He had Michael Moore and Pearl Jam campaigning for him. Union shops emptied out to go to the events. People dropped long-time political affiliations for him, betrayed their business and personal relationships based on party ties for him. He told us what he would do if he gained office. He made promises, shook hands, and told everyone that things would be different.

There were consequences for all of these actions if we failed, and we had a new hope....but it was not him. Ralph was quoted that year, just before the election, that he did not intend to win. The support started drying up. People started to wonder, what they hell were they thinking. Others had permanently damaged their careers, personal relationships, their futures. And Ralph? Ralph ran again.

Ralph Nader has done so much more to harm the Green Party after the election than he ever did in garnering support before the election. From my relative newcomer status, the Green Party is in a shambles after all of this. Segments of the party refuse to challenge the Democratic Party anymore, for fear of reprisals- and a party that can not or will not stand unified for its own interests first is crippled. I've gone to state sessions recently, and there is no unity anymore. People rulesmonger, connive, yell, and complain. Los Angeles County Council is in an utter shambles due to disunity and dismay. We are not an example of the government we wish to create in our own actions. I don't blame Ralph Nader for this per se, but he made this more possible rather than less by preying on and abusing the people's sense of hope. And I see a party that for a number of years has lost that hope.

But the experience has had a leavening effect for the party. New people are coming in who remember the affairs of that campaign year for Nader. They see that people are not working together. They know that change needs to happen...and they do not seek a new hope in a leader figure. They seek that new hope from their own actions. They are finding a new interest in the realization they can and must take control of their own governance and responsibility for their own future - themselves.

These people are running in local county council party elections. They are running for local office. They are building a new sustainable infrastructure for the party. They need your support, much more than Ralph Nader, or Barack Obama, or any other political messiah.

When you go to your next local or state Green event, ask yourself some questions. How sustainable are we? Does our operating budget renew itself through reinvestment, or through constant fundraising? Can we support more than just our own meetings in our facilities? Do our own efforts for the party leave time to create new bonds with other community groups that share our interest but not our name? Who are they? Are they in our house? Do they see that we eat the food of our own efforts?

We must be the new hope. Each one of us, for without our own hope, we can have no future that is ours to own.

I'll sleep when I'm dead.

2008-02-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

There are some things happening in my life now that are signposts of everything getting better. Everything starting to get better has its own consequences, though. Let's break it down...

I've been really busy with new responsibilities at my only paying gig. Same gig I've been doing with the same players for a few years, only now some of the players have started realizing the limits of their own mortality in their daily eight hour kabuki show- and that it might actually be a Shakespearean tragedy, rather than Peyton Place or Sweet Valley Hi. This means people making abortive efforts to start work that should have been done when the first re-org hit a number of years ago. Others are also playing catch-up, and making the kind of mistakes when you play catch-up and forget how long your feet have been stuck in the mud. I've been watching all of this with a keen eye and an appreciation for human folly, but it means that with the new responsibilities, I have been rapidly adjusting to a very strong day-long intake of caffeine.

The downside of a strong day-long intake of caffeine is that the absence of said nectar can cause one of two reactions- people think you are on either heroin or PCP. With all of the new things going on in my life, I am definitely not feeling somnabulistic in any aspect. This means that when I go to coffee with my best homeboy, he has to make sure I don't get out at the next red light after we got cut off, and bash in the guy's rear windshield with whatever may be handy, hopefully not the guy's own head. Well, I honestly would not be tempted to use other people's body parts for that sort of thing- heads are actually kinda squishy, and rocks make a more satisfying noise for breaking glass.

Now we have our third dilemma, which is that I am now on caffeine in order to RELAX. Holy crap, Batman! I have been working on no less than THREE volunteer I.T. projects for local community groups, working on two tech certs, raising a three year old with my wife, and working my gig in addition to maintaining a semblance of a social life. And I do all of that to RELAX, because I need to be feverishly busy while I am caffeinated, or my head explodes as if it were being rammed spitefully into the back window of a BMW SUV.

Well, the good news is that my bonus was worth writing about. I am ordering my first cool bike tomorrow, as well as my new lab gear (VMWare hosting box, woot!), and getting my head shaved so I don't try to attack my own locks when they jump in front of my face before I had my first tea of the day. That last one is so my kid doesn't pick up any bad habits.

Six months ago, six months from now

2008-02-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, my wife suggested I start writing down some of the things I wanted to do. Rather than create that list from the perspective of what I want to do, she suggested I create it from the past point of view- as if I were looking back on a past accomplishment from six months ago.

The list has been very useful, here is the list I created in March of 2007:

Selling my jeep was the best thing I ever did for myself.
Its nice to be slimmer and more fit.
I am so glad that cyst is gone.
Using that jeep money and a family loan was a great idea for paying off the IRS.
The garden is doing outstanding.
Interesting Times publishing nexus is starting to take off!

I can go down the list, but the items are pretty self-explanatory. Almost all of these things have happened, except for the publishing nexus. That, instead, is The Lost West.

Everything else did happen, just not in a way that was expected. We have a garden, but we had to move to get one. We sold the jeep, but didn't need a family loan to pay the remainder of the IRS.

So, I've made my current list, and we shall see where we are six months from now.

Slipping disks

2008-01-13T11:36:00.000-08:00

The weather has been alternating between wanting to rain and pouring like crazy. This has put my bike riding into peril because I never had a chance to winterize my bike before the holidays and now all of our spare cash is gone. This leaves me in the unenviable position of having to bum rides from my groggy wife and sleeping daughter in the mornings or taking the care and returning it later in the day at lunch. That, and my midriff is showing the lack of wear, which does not make me any happier about my situation.

As I sit and ponder my lack of bike fenders in the rain, I am also hearing the chirp of the crickets of doom emanating from my laptops. More disks are dying. In fact, Pam's laptop has finally kicked the bucket, with clear drive errors emanating from her dmesg after some unknown app called usleep went into an endless loop due to a disk misread. Oy. My own laptop is starting to do the same thing, so its time to start saving for a new disk after doing the replace - the - broken - disk - with - a - spare - backup - drive - and - sync - the - drives - mambo on my wife's system.

Sometime during all of this I am supposed to deal with heading over to a hearing to support the creation of a native american focussed charter elementary school, do all of the site updates that need doing, and rebuild my internal network (again, sigh. The mobo I got for the the main gateway was bad, just order another, etc.) while trying to manage the fact that my daughter will be starting preschool on Monday and I still have software I want to write but can't due to hardware reliability issues. Then there is the Green Party presidential debate that I was invited to but can't attend, and various other functions in the area demanding my time.

Sigh. I just want to write a nice little X gui for OpenBSD wireless connectivity. Is that too much to ask?

Just stick your finger in it

2008-01-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

"Throw up, dammit! Put your fingers down your throat and throw up!", cried Pam.

"I can't, it never worked for me! Ooooh, I hate Vallejo's! Who the hell ever heard of using a fried flour tortilla for a goddamned taco!?", I whinged, clearly trying to hedge on trying to make myself puke.

The whole "just stick your finger in it" method of stomach pumping never worked for me in the past. I've tried it before on a couple of occasions. I just bite my finger. I guess I won't be any body's best friend in jail.

"Just throw up! Can you throw up, please?", pleaded Pam, trying on a new vomit track.

"No, its not going to work. I am just going to have to deal with it. At least you caught it before I took a swallow.", I replied. After a couple of deep breaths together, we examined the sink contents.

"Well, it looks like you only got about a fingernail sized piece in you," sighed Pam, "you're lucky."

"No kidding. I never thought tacos would be considered a deadly weapon." I chuckled.

You know, I never thought in my life that I would have conversations like that with my wife. This is life with celiacs.

Lost West Updates

2008-01-06T21:05:00.001-08:00

Updates were made to The Lost West. You might want to read them if you, um, have time to kill.

My time with the needle

2008-01-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

After dropping a friend off at the airport, my wife and I headed over to our family acupuncturist for a quick treatment. When I say family acupuncturist, I mean she is our aunt. Amy has been working all over the world and learning from some of the best practitioners, working as substitute needle jockey, and otherwise been getting a good education on the subject of acupuncture and to some extent Chinese herbalism. She also knows what has been going on with my allergies and is open to learning more about the issue.

When she is not doing that, she doubles as a carpenter, so her "office" was at my mother-in-law's place in Redwood City. When I got there, I was pretty ill, feeling almost all of the symptoms on the last post I made. I was laid up under about 4 blankets, wearing all of my clothes, a jacket and boots as well, with a space heater near my head. I was freezing. They weren't ordinary chills, I mean I could not regulate my body temperature to stay warm.

Amy came in to see me when she arrived and hellos were had by all. She grew concerned after she checked my pulse, and said she hadn't seen someone with a pulse like mine outside of the hospital. That was when she broke out with the needles and the fun started.

Lets explain acupuncture a bit, at least what little I know about it. There is the idea that the energy flow of your body can be manipulated by applying pressure or stimulation to certain nerve endings in the body. I know some people say "no, its energy points!", but its nerve endings. Activating these points in the right places and in the right order can cause your body to react and put some of its own parts back in order, "increasing your energy" and "improving its responses". From my own point of view, it makes sense and there is proof that it has an effect on sick patients. The point is, she jabs me, and it kick starts the parts of my body that haven't been working so well lately.

Normally, these jabs don't hurt. They are hardly noticeable, and you just sit there in this dreamy state while your muscles realign and your insides do weird things. Maybe you have old memories crop up and you laugh or cry. But they don't hurt. Well, except for this time. This time, they felt like someone was jabbing me with 18 gauge piercing needles, hot ones. I wasn't going to say anything, because after the third jab, I was feeling better. The pain eventually went down, and I was starting to warm up again.

Amy and I sat and talked after she turned me into a pincushion. We talked about my wheat allergy, and about how much wheat I had (1+ tsp in a sauce, plus the iffy tortillas). After that, I told her that every point she had hit was a point that I have had shooting pains through since I had my last exposure. That piqued her interest, so we went through a number of other points on my body, and sure enough, every one was a place where my "phantom pains" pop up when I am having an allergic reaction. She pretty much stated that all of those points correspond to different types of autoimmune or poisoning reaction points. We discussed this some more, and she mentioned looking up some herbal remedies for some of my symptoms, and then the treatment was done. Needles out, and I was warm again.

The rest of the morning was spent trying not to bend over. My gut was still sensitive, so putting on shoes has to be done carefully, and sitting down slowly is a must. I watched as her and Eli worked with my daughter to tape the floors prior to painting, and then we headed back home.

Its now Saturday, and I am finally feeling a little better. I only have some upper gastric pain, and my skin doesn't feel like ants are trying to chew their way out from underneath it. There are now bags under my eyes, which means some of the swelling in my face has gone down. I can even make whole sentences when I talk. Life is looking better day by day.

The cost of good taste

2008-01-03T18:41:00.000-08:00

Well, I am still paying for that Christmas ham. The original glaze I made used Beaver Brand Sweet Hot Mustard. Unfortunately for my guts, the mustard had wheat flour as its third ingredient. That, and some of the tortillas I ate at a restaurant were also contaminated as well. So, now I am feeling the pain.

Lets go over just how celiacs feels again. This is just for my edification, because I now know what its like to go from completely clean to miserable. This was my first real "contamination" experience since I started a gluten free diet, so I know what was the wheat and what was just in my head. When I am off gluten again for at least six months or more, I am going to come back to this list to remind me why I need to be so careful about what I consume.

The easiest way to recover from this is to go grain free for a while, and then reintroduce once I have had some time to heal. If anyone else is reading this, be sure to eat organic food as well, since you may have some trouble meeting your dietary needs with conventional crops. This means lots of soups, salads and veggies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Few if any potatoes, yams, fruits, etc. After a couple of weeks on this diet, I will be feeling better so long as I also get plenty of sunlight and mild exercise.

Essentially, the roughage and salad will help clean out my gut. While my villi are healing, I need to avoid carbs or my blood sugar will spiral out of control. The soup will help with the cleansing, but not without the other stuff.

These feelings and ailments tend to alternate freely without any way for me to control them:

Overall:

Skin itches and rashes easily
Random shooting pains, usually following acupuncture points
Oversensitive to sound and touch on my skin, separate from what I also feel from what I hear.
Dizziness
Cysts and painful acne
Never, ever, enough sleep
Overall assholiness and irratibility
Irrational overreactions to others' emotional expressions
Malaise
Nausea
Inability to concentrate
Inability to manage my core body temperature effectively, feelings of heat and chills.
Sensitive to everything- scents, perfumes, smog, everything.

Head:

Fuzzy, can't think straight
Eyes, nose, and throat burn
Sinus pain
Sound and light sensitivity
Swollen face
Hanks of hair coming out during shampooing

Torso:

Difficulty breathing when laying down
Distended and painful gut
Can't bend over due to discomfort
Gas, lots of gas, painful gas.
Irregular blood sugar, often high with sharp drops
Urge to go, random right now, both urination and defecation

Limbs:

Joint pain
Heavy, lead feeling limbs
Swollen hands and feet
Aching muscles
Fungus

Day Of Ham! -a glaze recipe

2007-12-25T20:03:00.000-08:00

Mmmm, nothing like eating a pig leg to celebrate the birth of a Jewish boy. Ham for Christmas is something special, just the right kind of trafey goodness that makes you tell people "Of course its kosher/halal, because ham and bacon grow on trees. You just haven't looked hard enough for it yet."

However, one must treat the meat with the fresh picked joy usually accorded to selecting a winning ticket in the Tuvalu national lottery, namely the winning prize being a pork product that grows on trees. Once determining the ripeness of this wonderful fruit which got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden, there is the consideration of how to make it more than beautiful.

Most assuredly, by the time you are done putting makeup on your porcine parts, you should want to spend more time with your forbidden fruit than you would want to spend with a drunken platinum card wielding Jenna Jameson who just broke up with her last husband. True, this ham should make you want to drop your wife and family, just by sitting there and smelling...sexy.

So, now to the ham bath salts, the kind of spices that Jesus should have been given at birth. Had he been given these spices, he would never have ended up as a carpenter. There would be no cross. But every Sunday would be celebrated with libations around a firepit full of smoking flesh, which does have certain attractions, at least to me. Now, on to the glaze, which is quite gluten free and will make you want to kill for ham in the name of the one true holiday party god:

Gluten free ham and goose glaze (or ham or goose glaze, since stuffing a ham into a goose can be kind of difficult):

Ingredients

1/2 cup of butter
1/2 cup of honey
1 Tablespoon of horseradish
2 teaspoons of thyme
1 teaspoon of dry mustard

Directions
Microwave the mix on half power for about 2 minutes. Once the ham is warmed up (usually 275 degrees @ 10 min per pound), you will want to turn up the oven to 450 degrees and pour half of the glaze on the ham. Cook for 8-10 minutes, and then pour the rest of the glaze on and bake for another 8-10 minutes. Pull it out and spoon the gravy all over the ham while it cools.

Sexy...

Let's Not Forget The Gluten Free Barbeque Sauce!

2007-12-22T03:36:00.001-08:00

Ok, well, we now have a basic gluten free Worcestershire Sauce, lets move on to the killer Barbeque Sauce that I fashioned after this posting. Everyone who tried it was salivating over it, and it works well with shrimp and veggies as well as steak. If you don't like your food spicy, I would recommend the pasilla chili instead of the chili flakes, and cut back on the cayenne and black pepper.

Note that I replaced the brown sugar with molasses, and added some spices:

INGREDIENTS:

1 can tomato sauce
1 can tomato paste
2 tablespoons molasses
2 tablespoons vinegar
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic crushed
4 tablespoons minced onion
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon cayenne
fresh ground pepper to taste
1 teaspoon of rosemary
1 teaspoon of savory
a pinch of chili flakes to taste OR
a cored & minced pasilla or serrano chili

PREPARATION:

Cook minced chili, onion and garlic in olive oil until onions turns opaque. Add remaining ingredients, mix thoroughly and allow to simmer 20 minutes. Makes about 1 1/2 cups.

Gluten Free Worcestershire Sauce

2007-12-22T03:11:00.000-08:00

Well, we just had an excellent barbecue a week back to celebrate winter and our recent move. Plenty of people showed up, and we put a small dent on the tenth of a steer in our freezer. Since myself and at least two others attending have celiacs, I did some label reading on jars of barbecue sauce and found...horrors!...it has Worcestershire Sauce.

Now, Lee & Perrins state that their stuff is "suitable for those choosing a gluten free diet". They do NOT say that they are gluten free. They are not, but the EU has looser standards for gluten cross-contamination than the US, hence the hedging.

Worcestershire Sauce is almost always made with malt vinegar, which is kind of a no-no to people who are gluten intolerant. It is also in almost every barbecue sauce on the planet. So, you know, google is your homeboy in moments of doubt and consternation. I found a Worcestershire Sauce recipe that is gluten free AND vegan. Here you go, and I think it tastes better than Lee & Perrins. Note that the brown sugar was substituted with molasses:

Homemade Worcestershire Sauce

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce (this is just made with soy, no wheat)
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon molasses
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon pepper

Preparation:
Place all ingredients in a medium saucepan and stir thoroughly.
Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Simmer 1 minute. Cool.
Store in the refrigerator.
Makes about 3/4 cup.
Shake well before using.

Changes again...

2007-12-14T23:40:00.000-08:00

Everything has changed again. We are living in a new place, near the center of the city. I am in a new job, though its at the same company. I may be going blind. I may no longer have diabetes. I may be painfully allergic to wheat. I am not who I used to be. Anyone reading this may not understand this, but that is ok, I don't expect understanding except as a rare gift.

My last encounter with death ended another life. I don't know if I just get to become a different person, still married and a father, or if everything changes. This body is different, my allergies have changed, my vision is changing, everything is just...different. Even my scent. People are having to learn the new me as well.

I still see the same things. That has not changed, but the glimpses are focussed differently, as if there was a different lense there. It now all seems tied into my synesthasia more, and I don't know what that is going to do to me.

My weight, and physicality have changed. I am literally becoming a new man, the fat and weight is going away. My joints don't hurt anymore. My reaction time to different inputs has altered. I now have remarkable balance and timing, and can climb like I never have been able to. My allergies have shifted- its now wheat and gluten, but that stuff is literally a toxic poison to me. Every other allergy is just gone, like I never had sensitivities to smog, or certain drugs, or any of that like I used to.

All of this makes sense when taken individually, but taken all together, it is a little frightening. Supernatural. I look younger in some ways, and other things have not changed. And I keep having these conversations with death in my head, we talk like old friends or old lovers, and they keep insinuating themselves onto my waking life.

I need to think more on what all of this means.

Transitional Update

2007-12-14T23:00:00.000-08:00

I have been offline for a month and a half due to changing residences and all of the adjustments that brings. I will not discuss why, but it works best for everyone involved. It does put us closer to schools and services that we will be needing over the next few years.

Those who are very close to us will know more about the last few months. The months have capped off a year I call the Winter of the Soul, which started with the death of my second daughter. It now ends with an impending loss of vision, delivery on promises for a story about Death, and new riches.

Some of the things that I will be writing will be unusual. Others will completely ignore what people know about me. Just realize that my perspective has changed.