The Parenting Dilemma

So, if you are eating dinner, and your 5-year-old falls asleep with his head on the table, and you know he had been excitedly waiting for raspberry sorbet for dessert, and know there will be tears when he later realizes he missed it, what do you do? Let him sleep, or wake him up (with possible tears right then in the dining car?)

As it turned out, I tried to quietly ask him if he wanted dessert. He woke up with a start, banged his head on the table, and then, yes, there were tears. I asked him if he wanted dessert or if he wanted to keep sleeping, and he gave a pathetic, sniffling, “dessert.”

But by the time dessert arrived, he had fallen asleep again. I finally woke him up again, asked if he wanted to eat, and he just ignored me. I asked twice more and then he all of a sudden realized what he was being asked, sat bolt upright, and dug in.

Graffiti

Jacob noticed graffiti in Los Angeles. He called it “silly words” and kept commenting about it as we passed it.

Bears

Oliver always sleeps with a stuffed bear, which is his favorite comfort animal. But Oliver is 2, and when he says “bear”, it sounds more like “beer”. Plus, the boys still seem to be operating on Central Time. So at 4:15AM yesterday, Oliver awakened us saying:

“Beer! Beer! Beer! Where’s beer? Where’s beer? Need beer! Beeeeeer!”

Butterflies

Jacob always sleeps with a stuffed butterfly, which he likes just like Oliver likes his bear. Jacob had this conversation with me this morning:

Jacob: My butterfly knows all the people in the world. And all the animals, too!

Me: Does butterfly even know Nash? (our cat)

Jacob: Yeah, and he knows Sam and Edna too! (the cats across the road)

Me: Wow. I think butterfly knows a lot more people and animals than I do.

Jacob: *brief pause, then* Oh, silly dad! *collapses laughing*

We all trooped outside, and for a minute, the boys kind of ran around while I found a saw. We needed to saw off a few branches that were down but still connected. I did one. Jacob wanted to try, but it was a little too hard. But on the second one, which went a little easier, he helped out and with my guidance actually did some sawing. He was very proud of his work.

Then we got into the pickup — always a highlight for the boys, even if we only drove it around on the yard. I brought it up close and started loading brush onto it. Jacob went around finding whatever pieces of wood he could carry, and happily threw them onto the pickup.

Oliver, on the other hand, meticulously picked up smaller pieces of wood and carefully set them on the rear tire — then shoved them off the back. This really annoyed Jacob because Oliver wasn’t doing it right, so Jacob kept trying to find the wood Oliver was dropping. And then, of course, they got to play in the pickup bed.

Next it was off to the brush pile (also on our yard) to unload our 5ft high pile. I got the really heavy stuff mostly off. I told the boys they could throw whatever they wanted off the pickup. Jacob threw things onto the brush pile, and Oliver, who doesn’t really have any aim yet, just threw things and enjoyed trying to figure out where they went. But the big highlight came when the boys got to sit in the back while I pulled the truck a few feet forward and the rest of the brush just fell off the end “all by itself”!

I complimented both of them on their good work – they both really did contribute. Terah commented that when they came in, they both kind of strutted in, looking very tall, proud, and like they did some Good Work with their dad. And later, when Terah said to Oliver, “Dad tells me that you were very helpful, Oliver,” Jacob overheard and came running in to say, “I was very helpful too!”

Jacob: “These pancakes have sprinkles in them! Parties have sprinkles. I think we are having a party! Right, mom?”

Terah: “Sure, this could be a pancake party.”

Jacob: “And all parties also have ICE CREAM! So we should have some ice cream.”

Terah: “Uh, Jacob, I’m not so–”

Jacob: “Oliver, we are having ice cream!”

Oliver: “YAY!”

It’s amazing how fast sprinkles can get out of hand.

Later that day…

I had gone downstairs, pulled out one of the wonderful old hymnbooks I have in my collection but have rarely looked at, and sat down at the piano to play a bit. Oliver came in, sat down next to me, played a few notes, and promptly got down.

Jacob came in, sat down next to me, and took over our digital piano. He set it to provide some automatic accompaniment, selected a salsa beat, then hopped down as I continued to play a 4-part Mennonite hymn in my best imitation salsa style (not so good, in case you’re wondering). Jacob happily announced, “IT’S DANCING TIME!” He then picked up a large blanket and ran around the house, reminding us every minute or so that it’s dancing time at the top of his voice, while Oliver ran around randomly yelling “AAAAAA!”, and I went for maximum dissonance by attempting to play “Praise the Lord, Sing Hallelujah” to a salsa beat. Meanwhile Terah was sitting on the couch looking, well, a bit stunned.

Just another quiet evening at home.

It’s not because of a problem with Debian or with apt-get. It’s because of things upstream authors are doing.

It seems that upstreams, for some reason, like to remove features from new versions of software.

The two recent examples to bite me are the removal of the Gnome Terminal features to play the bell through sound card rather than the console speaker, and the recent upgrade to gtkpod — the best iPod music manager out there — which removed the ability to actually, well, play music. Wha…?

Earlier examples where when Gnome removed the ability to type a filename in the Open dialog box (remember that? thankfully reverted eventually.) KDE 4 was infamous for this too, with maybe thousands of instances (and they broke Amarok so badly that it didn’t actually play music from my devices either.)

I don’t understand this. The Gnome people somehow thought that they knew better than I what options I might want, I guess. But I am totally baffled about gtkpod. All it ever did was call xmms (or something like it such as qmmp) with appropriate arguments to play a file. Simple, configurable, and supremely useful. Probably just a few lines of code. And even that is gone.

There is a post by Ingo Molnar complaining that perhaps Gnome and KDE are trying to mimic the Apple and Google result without internalizing the process. Perhaps. It all seems so baffling to me though.

Updated: rewrote introduction.

I was able to do this without console access to the source machine, though console access wasn’t really required for either. This will work with any basic Linux install on the destination, or it could be prepared directly from a rescue environment.

Before I explain how I did it, I thought it was interesting to think of the different places that the machine that was known as complete.org has lived over the years. Here’s a map (click for detail):

Here’s the general process.

First, well in advance of the move, crank the TTL on the domains way down. This way, old IPs won’t be cached for very long once the system moves.

Next, start rsyncing data from the old machine to the new. Do not yet shut down daemons on the old. Shut down as much as you can on the new. You’ll want to focus on static data, such as /home. /usr is a good candidate as well. /var if you are selective — databases may be a good candidate, or may not. The idea is to seed the destination with data so that when we do the “real” rsync, most of the data will be there; it will have to tidy things up after daemons are stopped, and update some things, but the bulk of the work should be done.

Next, start preparing some exclude lists for the final rsync, which will copy an entire machine to the other. You will likely want to exclude files such as /etc/fstab, /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/default/grub, /sys/*, /proc/*, /dev/*, and the like. I used rsync -v -P -a -H -A -X -S –numeric-ids –delete-after.

Now, start editing config files for the new IP, but do it on the old server (these will be synced over to the new one). Start with the bind config files, and touch anything else that needs it — maybe Apache configs, whatever.

Next, get ready to do the final sync. In an ideal environment, we’d just shut both machines down to single-user mode, but that’s not going to quite cut it here. Use ps and shut down all daemons except sshd and udev on the destination. Yes, including even syslog. This is to prevent anything actively accessing the disk during the rsync, and also to prevent any issues with clients accessing server daemons that aren’t ready yet.

Now, on the source machine, reload bind. This will start answering DNS queries with the new machine’s IP, and should also propagate the changes to your secondary DNS. Next, kill off all the daemons on the source machine, except for ssh and bind. You might want to set /etc/nologin to prevent regular users from logging in on ssh, if you have them. Now rsync things over to the new machine. Do any final tweaking over there (merging in /etc/hosts maybe, dealing with the udev rules.d persistent net thing, etc.). Reboot the new server and you should be up and running.

Rupert Murdoch’s corporation (owner of FOX News, Wall Street Journal, News of the World, etc) would have been found to have illegally accessed other people’s voicemails.

These included voicemails from a cellphone belonging to a recently-murdered girl, which interfered with the police.

And they had also bribed Scotland Yard officers for information, and actively covered it up.

The story would close one of Britain’s biggest newspapers, and force the resignation of various government and Scotland Yard officials.

That it would lead to the first high-profile investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of an American corporation bribing British officials.

That one of the central figures in the scandal would suddenly die at a young age.

That there was a question of how the former editor of Murdoch’s newspaper — whom he steadfastly defended until one day he didn’t — would be taken from jail to testify before Parliament.

That CNN would live stream a hearing of a British Parliamentary subcommittee instead of the news conference given by the President of the United States.

And that during this committee hearing, some guy would attack Rupert Murdoch — who, until then, looked like he had a few drinks too many the night before — with a shaving cream pie.

And that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV channels would portray News Corp. as a victim of the liberal press in all this, and that they should just be left alone.

So maybe the last one was believable, but my goodness. Just when it couldn’t get any stranger, a SHAVING CREAM PIE?!

Friday morning, we woke the boys at 2:30AM to get to the train station.  The only Amtrak trains through our area are middle of the night departures.  Jacob is normally hard to wake up, but when I tell him that I’m waking him up to go to the train station, he wakes up faster than I’ve ever seen him before.  It takes about 3 seconds for him to process that in his groggy state, and then he sits up straight, throws off the covers, and is instantly ready to go.

Both boys were excited even in the station waiting room.  Oliver has been on an Amtrak train before, but it’s been awhile and he probably doesn’t remember it.    He constantly talked about it, jabbering as much as his vocabulary lets him.

Once we were on the train, Terah and I would have liked to get some more sleep.  The boys, on the other hand, were now wide awake, and didn’t fall back asleep until about 5:30.  That means Terah and I didn’t, either. Here’s what it usually looks like:

When it came time for breakfast, we went to the dining car as usual.  Jacob had already been telling us for days what he would eat for breakfast on the train: “I always have French toast on the train, dad.”  And so he did.  A few minutes later, I heard the waitress telling other people they were out of French toast, so I was glad I didn’t have to disappoint Jacob over that!

But it was Oliver that really came alive on this trip. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so excited. It was almost constant. He happily talked about anything he could see or touch. But he also listened to other conversations, and would frequently pick out one word from a sentence and try to say it. He does that at home too, but not nearly so often as on the train. Both boys wanted to “go exploring” a lot — my word for taking them for a walk in the train and seeing what they might find. We walked up and down the train several times, Jacob excited over opening the doors between the cars, and Oliver excited just to be there.

Oliver’s excitement kept him from sleeping well. He did eventually get a short nap, but that wasn’t quite enough to avert a couple of tantrums later in the day.

The reason for the trip was the 80th birthday party for Terah’s grandpa. And it so happened that Oliver’s 2nd birthday would be over the same time. So, Saturday morning, we all went for breakfast at Das Dutchman Essenhaus, one of the favorite local restaurants in northern Indiana. After that, it was over to a relative’s place for some birthday festivities. The children got mini cakes to decorate as rail cars. There was frosting and all sorts of toppings. Great fun was had by all, and it was wise that this activity took place in a garage rather than indoors.

Yes, that is a marshmallow stuck to Jacob’s nose.

Then in the evening, it was off to another relative’s place for some more family time. Jacob had a great time all day, and was in high spirits. He asked me to sit by him at dinner, and started one of the longest conversations I’ve had with him in some time. We just talked about the things that happened in the day, but it was nice when I told him, “I like sitting by you, Jacob,” and he said, “Dad, me too!”

The big highlight for the day happened in the evening. We were gathered around a fire with a guitar to do some singing. Jacob was happily perched in his lawn chair, but got very excited when he saw some lightweight airplanes flying overhead. These kept flying at some distance, and he kept pointing them out to us. But that wasn’t even the most exciting part.

That came when the fireflies came out. Jacob ran around, catching them in his hands, and excitedly showing them to whatever person happened to be closest. He was laughing with joy for such a long time. At one point, someone asked him if the bugs were tickling his hands. He said, evidentally just realizing it, “Oh yes, they ARE tickling my hands!” He was one very happy boy.

Sunday I had to leave to get back home, while Terah and the boys will return a couple of days later. Although I do sort of look forward to a train trip that I can relax without having to manage two young boys, I do miss them already and will be happy to have everyone back home in a few days.

(This post written during the trip and posted a week later after arriving home)

• Email: 24 years
• Usenet: 13 years
• Facebook: 2 years
• Google Plus: ?

First, an analogy. Facebook reminds me of the sleazy guy selling stuff from his car down the street. They do things like change privacy defaults when they think it’s good for Facebook, rather than good for you.

Google+ reminds me of an Apple product. It’s beautiful, easy to learn, but locks everything down and is lacking some critical features. So here goes with the details.

The good

I think that this can be best summed up by: it’s not Facebook. Facebook has, perhaps, set an incredibly low bar but still, this holds. Facebook is the only website I can ever remember using that changes things so much, so often, and so completely that I keep having this feeling of not knowing how to do things. Try maintaining a Facebook page or two and you’ll especially feel my pain then. But even the basics: how many times have I accidentally posted a partial comment because I pressed Enter to start a new paragraph (that has only been the button used for that for, hmm, let’s see now, decades), and instead it posted the comment. Principle of least surprise, anyone?

Google+ has a simple and, on the surface anyway, intuitive interface. However, it does get muddy; more on that below.

I’m going to spend a lot more space on “the bad” below, but don’t let that diminish my excitement about having a viable alternative to Facebook. I am keen to get rid of that monster.

The Bad

I’ll start of this section with the fact that Google+ is a tightly-controlled walled garden. There is no way to take a copy of your status updates, comments, etc. and back them up with your own devices. If your Google account goes away, so do all your updates about your kids’ first words. Facebook does have this feature these days. It has broken half the time, but it exists, works, and I use it. Twitter doesn’t have the feature built in, but its API makes it pretty easy; you could easily use my twidge program to do this, for instance.

But whatever you put in G+ stays in G+. There is no autoposting it to twitter or Facebook, no backups, nothing. I’m disappointed in that, given Google’s prior attitude about openness to individual data ownership. (Update 7/12/2011: There is a way to get a backup, which I hadn’t noticed; see comments below.)

Almost as bad, there’s also no way to get data in. So I now have identi.ca, twitter, Facebook, and now also G+ accounts. When I post an item in identi.ca, it autoposts to twitter, and then it autoposts from twitter to Facebook. Handy – one place to notify people of my public activities. My uploads to Flickr and blog posts also auto-post to Facebook, so people I’m friends with there get a picture of what I’m doing outside of Facebook without me manually having to link it in.

Not so with G+. There is no way to even add an RSS feed for my blog to auto-post to G+ as there is with Facebook. If you use G+, the only way to get stuff into it is with a keyboard.

Poor integration with other Google apps is also an issue. G+ is nowhere near Google’s first social app. They also have Blogger, Google Reader, Buzz, Gmail, etc. So here’s the rub. These aren’t integrated well, and when they have tried to integrate them, they’ve done an exceedingly poor job of it.

As an example: Buzz is a twitter-like service for posting updates. Very similar to what G+ does, right? Well, the best you can do is link your Buzz account to a separate tab on your profile. You can’t even have your Buzz updates flow straight into G+, from what I can see. You have a separate list of followers in Buzz from G+. Reader is even worse; it has a sharing feature, but it’s not G+ aware, so it goes to a reader inbox.

But what takes the cake is the integration with Gmail Contacts. Sounds easy? Not entirely. When you add someone to G+, apparently it sometimes links the record with their entry in Contacts. And the help gives you the handy warning that when you remove them from G+, you have the option of removing them from Contacts, which could impact what you see on a mobile device. It is unclear what happens when it doesn’t link the record, or how it decides which record to link (some people have more than one person in a family sharing phone numbers and email addresses, for instance.)

One very nice feature of G+ is you can add email addresses, even if they aren’t G+ members. Then when you post updates to the circle you’ve added them to, G+ offers to send them an email with an update. Very handy.

Except the undocumented part is that if you select “Your circles” (meaning all your circles), rather than individually ticking the box by each circle, they don’t get the email. And they also don’t get it if you set it Public. You have to select their specific circle, which is a significant difference from how people with G+ accounts are treated.

And that’s just an example. There are a ton of things that work one way 95% of the time, but have non-obvious exceptions. Some of these exceptions are documented in the help, and some aren’t.

I’m still confused about the integration with Picasa. G+ help says that you can upload unlimited numbers of photos for free (though they will be downscaled at a certain point). Picasa has definite storage limits. But G+ uploads are showing up in Picasa. Do I really get free storage by uploading to the same place via a different tool? Very odd.

And finally, a gripe about web standards. I’ve been using Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5, which came out in Debian squeeze and is still supported there. It is also pretty darn new by corporate IT standards. And Google Plus refuses to let me log in with it, saying it’s “incompatible.” Perhaps it can’t do some fancy animation, but then again I don’t really care. Seems Google has forgotten the old RFC adage: be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you generate. If you can detect that my browser won’t animate something right, then you could give me a stripped-down version of the page rather than an error message.

The biggest image that remains in my mind is of the first time I saw a person picking through a large pile of rubble. The person was standing on top of what used to be a house. Now it was a pile of wood, glass, carpet, siding, and roofing material. I’m sure there was hope for finding some treasure or other — maybe a photo album or videos of children. In any case, it made me feel so lucky, even unfairly lucky, to have not had to go through that.

This scene was repeated several times, but mostly the houses that devastated appeared abandoned by the time we were there, now two weeks after the event.

But I heard stories, and lots of them. The victims of the storm, who were perhaps trying to rebuild that part of their house that got smashed by a tree or a pickup, or trying to get their intact belongings out before abandoning the house, or whatever, were mostly surprisingly upbeat. They were working out in 95-degree heat, many without electricity, running water, or sewer service. Almost every person I met that suffered a loss from the tornado wanted to tell their story. Many also told of their plans for the future, which were full of hope and even upbeat. These were people doing a hard job in terrible conditions and still showing hope.

Another testament to the disaster was the most unusual set of vehicles you’ve ever seen parked at any hotel you can care to think of, for at least an hour-and-a-half radius in the direction I came from. Besides the usual cars and minivans, there might be FEMA vehicles, electric company trucks, Red Cross vans, construction trucks of every kind, police and law enforcement from all over, etc. There was quite obviously an influx of people helping out in Joplin.

My primary task there was to provide communications support for the effort as an amateur radio operator. Amateurs (or “hams”) are something of a volunteer first responder of sorts during times of crisis; most of us own and are very familiar with operating equipment that can communicate over very long distances without the need for any on-site infrastructure. Amateur radio was the only method of communication for some Joplin hospitals in the immediate aftermath.

The communications emergency is over, but the response isn’t. I was assigned to work with the Salvation Army. They were doing a lot of things in Joplin, and had hundreds of volunteers working with them. I don’t think I even know what many of them were doing – I do know they had set up several warehouses across the city working with donating clothing, food, etc.

The part I was involved with was primarily the canteen operation. The SA sent in food service trucks from several parts of the country. These trucks would roam up and down the streets in the damaged area, trying to get past every single street several times a day. Anybody that we could see would be offered food and water. No strings attached, no questions asked. This included homeowners, electric line workers, construction crews, sanitation workers, and quite a few nonprofit groups that sent well-meaning and useful volunteers into the area but didn’t think to provide them with a large supply of water due to sending them into an area without any. Oops. In any case, with extreme heat and no running water, conditions were dangerous. The canteens also knew of certain at-risk families that were living in homes that were mostly intact in the disaster areas, and made a special point to check in on them. They also generally looked to make sure that people looked like they were healthy. Each canteen also had a counselor on board that would visit with people while we quickly prepared their meal — they all seemed to welcome that.

Amateur Radio’s Role

The operation of this size had quite a logistics challenge. I’d hear of things like an unexpected need of 70 lunches, or a semi showing up with donations before there was space, or an unexpected but very welcome donation of a large quantity of ice cream without a place to store it (so the canteen trucks, which have freezers, needed to pick it up quickly). That’s where us hams came in. Each canteen had an amateur radio operator on board. Each major location also had a ham stationed there, and the head of operations also often had a “shadow” — a ham that would follow him around wherever he went to relay messages back and forth. We also had hams with pickups (with radios in them, of course) that could transport things around the city to places that needed them, hams at headquarters managing all the communication and generally investigating questions that didn’t have immediately obvious answers, etc.

Radios were used instead of cellphones for a few reasons. One big one is that everybody on the operation can hear what everyone else’s needs are, since it’s a group communications situation rather than one-to-one. It’s easy to give a general alert to everyone (“come get your ice cream now please!”) and people that have suggestions can chime in. This came in extremely handy more than once. Also, it frees the people doing other jobs from having to spend time chasing someone’s voicemail, finding phone numbers, etc; that gets delegated to us in some cases. I heard from the head of canteen operations, for whom this was the first disaster he’d worked that had amateur radio support, how wonderful it was to have this going on. I also heard a secondhand report that some police officers that were also amateurs had listened to our operation and reported that “we sound more professional than 911 dispatch and do a better job.”

On Sunday I was assigned to a canteen. This meant I didn’t have a lot of radio traffic to pass, so although I had it in my ear all day, I wasn’t actively talking on the radio very much. So I rode in back, helping hand out water, carry meals to people, and so forth.

On Saturday, I was the shadow for the head of operations. That was a difficult task, because he barely ever moved at a pace slower than a run, sometimes would abruptly zip out somewhere, etc. But it was also enlightening and vital. He was a real “get it done” sort of guy, and was the key to quite a few things. Having someone available to relay questions to and from him was a good thing.

And today I worked as a transport person and at headquarters. Due to not having a pickup there, I didn’t actually get called on much to transport things, but in general between jobs the whole time I’d act as a runner if needed, or simply try to figure out the details of how things were run for next time. I wound up taking “net control” (being the control operator at headquarters, and generally managing communications so that people don’t talk over each other and such) for about an hour. So I got to do a little of just about every amateur radio task.

Thoughts

I am thankful for the opportunity to go, and the good feeling of helping people in need — the first I’ve ever had the chance to do that in a disaster. It’s a good feeling to have a skill that is useful and appreciated. Sometimes it felt like handing out food and water is something pretty small in the scheme of things. But on the other hand, it gives people a chance to have contact with someone that cares, an opportunity to have people that can notice problems drive by a few times a day, and an opportunity to help meet people’s basic needs. And sometimes in a fluid situation, there might be more volunteers than are needed, so I did spend some time sitting waiting for the next task.

But overall, I’m convinced that the work I helped facilitate was a good thing and provided a good and needed service in Joplin. This has been quite the experience and I’m sure it’s changed me too, though I don’t yet know how.

I’ve had a lot of people, both in person and in comments responding to my blog post, express surprise with statements I have made. The view of Christianity that many people have is of a group that devalues scientific inquiry and places a lot of emphasis on things like opposition to gay marriage, evolution, and abortion, and enjoys political leaders that say “bring it on.”

While I know some Christians that fall into that mold, there are quite a few that don’t as well. Some churches, such as the one we attend, have a surprisingly diverse set of people and yet still function and get along well.

Today they accepted me with joy. Nobody was concerned that I started my statement with a reference to ancient Greek philosophy, wound up suggesting that the church ought to make sure to make illegal immigrants, gays and lesbians, and prostitutes feel welcome, and embraced both religion and scientific inquiry, feeling them complimentary.

Mennonites practice adult baptism rather than infant baptism. A traditional age for people to be baptized is during high school, though emphasis is placed more on the individual than their age, so it’s not unheard-of for someone to do so a bit later in life as I have.

Part of the baptism involves the candidate sharing their faith story. These are typically intensely personal, widely varied, heartfelt, and honest. Some people’s stories involve struggles with depression, physical disabilities, or the place of religion in their lives, while others reflect little struggle at all. Mine involves letting go of a lot of things, and also seeing some things, such as serious intellectual inquiry or existential questions about God (such as “is there a god?”), as a positive rather than a negative feature of a Christian life. But it also involves a recognition and deep respect for those that don’t approach things in this way.

Though given publicly in a church, baptism testimonies are rarely published or shared more broadly. But I’m going to share mine here. I have edited it only very lightly to remove a few local references that wouldn’t make sense out of the context of this community. This was delivered in front of a rather different audience than is likely to be reading this post, so if you have questions, do feel free to ask in the comments.

But before I begin, I just have to pass along a joke a friend told me: “John, you picked quite a day for your baptism — the day after the rapture.”

Baptism Testimony

John Goerzen

May 22, 2011

Those of you that know me well will probably not be surprised that I will begin my Christian baptism testimony with a story about an ancient Greek philosopher, and also touch on the philosophical nature of truth. These are key parts of my story.

As legend goes, Socrates famously said, “I know that I know nothing” — in other words, he believed that nothing could be known with absolute certainty. The Greek Oracle — thought to be infallibly wise — said that Socrates, the man that thought he knew nothing, was the wisest man in all Athens. An interesting paradox, and one that sheds light on my own religious story. My story involves coming to grips with the understanding that I know very little, that no person can ultimately know much about God, and finding a way to make peace with that situation.

Growing up in this community, I thought I knew some things about faith and Christianity. At a certain age, it all seemed so simple. We took the Bible to be literally true. We marveled in Sunday School at how the apostles could sometimes appear so blind. And, modeled both implicitly and explicitly, was this notion: the stronger our faith, the fewer inner questions or doubt we have about the nature of God, the literal accuracy of the entire Bible, or our relationship to God. Those I perceived held up as examples never seemed to question any of these things, and showed — outwardly, at least — complete certainty about them. Moreover, holding certain intellectual beliefs was key to Christian identity, and even more importantly, to eternal life.

This model has quite obviously worked well for many people for many years. The good that has happened, and continues to happen, from people that have that kind of certainty is manifest all around us. And yet, it didn’t seem to work out for me.

I’m not the kind of person that accepts a lot of things at face value. It is helpful to be able to examine and challenge ideas — and even more helpful to have other people challenge my ideas. From well before I was in high school, I was questioning some things about the Bible, God, and religion in general. My thoughts ranged from the impact of evolution on religion to the apparently vengeful God of the Old Testament to the very existence of God. In the Christian context, I perceived having these questions as a personal failing, something that I ought to repress.

The more I tried to repress them, the more troublesome they became. Why, for instance, should a loving merciful God decide whether to let us into heaven based on whether we hold certain intellectual beliefs?

In high school, I participated in the catechism class here at this church, and was frustrated because it didn’t tackle deeper meanings or the kinds of questions I had. I wasn’t yet able to articulate all my thoughts and questions very well, and I probably had an overactive case of teenage cynicism. As a result, I didn’t get baptized like most others my age did. As I learned more about the early history of Judaism and Christianity, I only found more reasons to question the model of faith I thought I had received — the one in which Biblical literalism and a “divine guarantee” of sorts was key.

More recently, I gradually became aware that the model of Christianity I had in mind was one of many views. Christians, Mennonites, and even this church are incredibly diverse groups, and in retrospect, I am surprised that it took me so long to realize this. Three major steps led me to baptism.

The first step was the realization that, whatever our understanding of the literal accuracy of the Bible, literal truth is often inferior to metaphorical truth. As an example, many of us have read the works of Shakespeare. They are fictional, but the reason they have been revered for so many centuries is that they are true. They teach us things about ourselves and our world in a way that no history book can.

By placing such an emphasis on literal truth in the Bible, I was missing out on the message right there for me. By concerning myself with creationism or evolution, I missed out on thinking about what the story in Genesis meant for the Jews, and what it could mean for me. Evolution ceased to be a threat to religion; it became simply a tool for learning about a different sort of truth than we get from religion.

N. T. Wright mentions an incident that illustrates this point. A woman attending a religious conference asked the speaker, a prominent theologian, “Is it true that the serpent in Genesis actually spoke like you and I speak?” The theologian answered, “It doesn’t matter whether the serpent could speak. What matters is what the serpent said.”

The second step I took towards being baptized was realizing where the real core of Christianity lies. It’s not some debate about Genesis, but rather the death to one’s old self, and the rebirth and continual remaking of oneself in the example of Jesus. Given that, a lot of questions seem unimportant or even irrelevant. Good can be expressed in many ways, and if one person achieves a remarkably Christian life via a literal understanding of the Bible, and another via a more metaphorical reading, then it is my place only to affirm both and say that they both got it right. If we say that the task of remaking ourselves is like climbing a mountain, then what matters is not how we are climbing the mountain, but simply that we are climbing it.

I used to equate faith with an intellectual belief. I have come to see that was a narrow view. Faith, to me now, is more about vision: do we see the world like Christ did? Where do our loyalties and our trust lie — in God or in human institutions? What are our goals in life?

We humans have failed to understand God, and probably always will. I too share in that incomplete understanding, but I have come to accept that it is OK. I know enough to know that I want my loyalty to lie in Jesus, to know what kind of vision of the world I want to have, and I have learned to accept that intellectual questions can even be a form of meditation, enlightenment, and prayer.

The third step toward baptism was moving past my own shortcomings. For a long time, I thought I didn’t believe the right things, didn’t believe them strong enough, wasn’t certain enough about God, didn’t pray enough, didn’t read enough, didn’t understand enough, didn’t love enough — and ultimately, that I wasn’t good enough. I request baptism today understanding that, despite the various imperfections I still have, and we all have, everyone is good enough and deserving of love and peace. God’s love is for everyone. No exceptions!

Following Jesus boils down to this: I too must be an agent of love and peace to everyone, without exception. My vision must be centered around the fact that we are to emulate the God that loves the entire world, sinners all, and therefore I should as well. I hope I can show others the kind of love that has been shown me.

I hope, too, to share with this congregation and the global church in the vision of love. I hope that we can continually strive to re-focus on Christ’s vision. As an example, we all know that many different viewpoints about whether homosexuality is sinful exist in Mennonite Church USA. These opinions are deeply held and personal for many, and have been discussed over and over and over. But ultimately, they aren’t terribly relevant to the church’s mission. The example of Jesus unites us all: he embraced everyone. He accepted criminals and prostitutes and showed them love and kindness. Our difficult task, which is also my difficult task, is to show this same love to absolutely everyone, regardless of our varying opinions about them and their conduct. The forgotten and repressed of our day — perhaps criminals, homeless, Muslims, addicts, gays and lesbians, illegal immigrants, ethnic minorities, and still prostitutes — deserve the love of Christ’s church and all its members. My hope is that any one of the earth’s 7 billion people could step through the doors of our church, or any church, and immediately feel Christ’s love, and the unconditional, non-judgmental, welcome and love of Christ’s followers, no matter what.

This prayer from Ephesians 3 sums up my hope and my vision, for myself and everyone:

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being. I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. And I pray that you will know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (3.16-19)

This week started out with temperatures as high at 99F. Today we didn’t even reach 60, and tonight will be cold almost to freezing. It’s Kansas, so while we remark on the strange weather, we’re not particularly surprised by it.

This morning, Jacob and Oliver went over to play across the street. Jacob then went with Terah to a birthday party for one of his classmates, while Oliver helped plant some trees with his grandparents. I was at home this morning, which gave me a small but welcome break from the past week: we had something going on 6 out of the last 7 evenings, and little time to do anything else.

So I got out the Kindle and read from War and Peace. I started at the kitchen table while eating some granola, and then sat on the couch. The day was cold, windy, and overcast, and I like to use natural light, so there were only a few places to sit with enough light.

I sat there reading the account of Napoleon’s capture of Moscow in 1812, the characters lives uprooted by those events, and stories of violent mobs forming. And, of course, Tolstoy’s essays on the mistake of overstating the importance of famous figures in history were common. I am now about 3/4 through War and Peace, which means I’ve read 1,044 pages and have (only) 348 to go.

As I got up to try to find slippers or a blanket for my cold feet at one point, I remembered a conversation I had while eating lunch this week. I was reading on the Kindle while reading, and a person I knew happened to walk past. She asked what I was reading. I said simply, “War and Peace.” There was this stunned silence, so I added, “for fun. It’s great!” Which is true. She said, “Oooookay, John, you just enjoy that then” and went on her way. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a conversation like that about this book. It seems to be held up as some example of long, dry, literature that people are made to read but don’t want to. I think that only “long” is accurate here.

Anyhow, pretty soon Oliver arrived and, much to my surprise, said “Doh!” (meaning “no”) when I asked him if he was ready for lunch. Instead he stood there looking at me sweetly. Taking a guess, I said, “Oliver, would you like to watch train videos?” “Yeah yeah yeah yeah!” So we did. He particularly enjoyed the steam engines today, and eventually was ready for lunch at 12:30. Jacob and Terah got home just as he was finishing. Oliver got his nap, and I played with Jacob for a bit. Ever since he had heard of the British wedding in preschool, he’s been interested in weddings, so I showed him pictures from Terah and me at our wedding. This was a big hit. Then he went with Terah to decorate a Sunday School room at church, so I read a bit more Tolstoy.

Tolstoy’s characters sometimes are prone to not just changes in mood but changes in outlook and worldview — changing from cold, logical, and uncaring to warm and loving, or from despair at the vanity and shallowness of humanity to elation at the simple honesty of a peasant and renewed trust in the human spirit. At first I marveled at this tendency in certain characters, but on reflection, and in consideration of the timeline of the novel, which spans several years, it didn’t seem quite so strange. Things can happen to change the mood of individuals, or even a country; I can remember the national mood changing after 9/11, and again after Obama’s election, for instance. I also felt a contrast with some of the characters who, due to their decisions or circumstances, lost things that mattered while chasing things that weren’t as important. I felt fortunate to be at this place, with Jacob, Oliver, and Terah, and decided that we all ought to do something fun in the evening, but hadn’t quite figured out what.

And about that, the clouds started to break and Oliver woke up from his nap. I went up to his room, and much to his delight, played peekaboo with him for quite awhile. Eventually he was done with that game, but spotted my phone, so I helped guide his finger to launch Youtube and watch a train video over the wifi. This was certainly a Big Deal to him.

After Terah and Jacob got back, I figured it was time figure out something fun to do. And what could be more fun, I decided on the spur of the moment, than a drive into town to pick up some cans of Silly String for the boys, neither of which had ever used it before.

So we went to a restaurant, then bought the “surprise toy” (I hadn’t told them what it would be beforehand), then went to an ice cream place, and finally back home. Oliver loved it. He needed my help to press the nozzle to make it come out, but still had a great time and shrieked with delight.

Jacob then tried out his can, and stood in one place spraying his bright green strings all over the place. Then he took to running around the yard spraying string randomly in every direction until he finally completely emptied out the can. And after that, he gathered up some of the different colors of string and rolled them up into a ball which he was very proud of.

A nice day.

”I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

–anonymous (often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Seen many times today.

I said that I’d love to go back to Europe — enjoy some more history, have a fun adventure together, see more of the countryside perhaps. This didn’t sound all that relaxing to Terah. So I commented that Europe also has plenty of water, beaches, and resorts and perhaps we could find a place in Europe with history and adventure, plus also a relaxing beach — so we can have some adventure but not too much <grin>

We’ll probably be looking to travel in September or October and would hope for reasonably warm weather — though if we need to go at a different time of year, that option is still open.

I’m at a loss for where to start looking here, so I’m hoping readers of this blog can give a suggestion.

I very much appreciated the great tips last time I asked. Our first trip to Europe last year was great — it was nice to stay with some old friends and make some new ones, to see some amazing cities and buildings, and live for a few days someplace with a culture different from home.

Our boys would not be coming with us on this trip. We did get passports for them recently and are looking at some options for a trip with them, but that wouldn’t be this one.

Today was Terah’s day off. Initially I thought of taking the boys to The Cosmosphere, one of the world’s premier space museums, or to the Kansas Aviation Museum. But then I realized that the Midland Railway, a historic excursion line in Baldwin City, KS, was having their first train trip of the year. And it’s the Easter special: you take the train a few miles out of town, get off, the kids do an Easter egg hunt, then also get to get their picture taken with the Easter bunny. Kid paradise, right? What could be better?

So this is how my alarm came to be set for 5:15 on a Saturday morning. Oliver woke up early, but I had to get Jacob up. He was groggy, trying to cover his face and ears, and annoyed at me for trying to wake him up. Until I said, “Jacob, it’s time to get ready for the car trip to the train ride. Can you go get dressed for the day?” Silence. Then about 5 seconds later, he jumped up, said, “OK dad, I will do it,” and he did.

We drove our 2.5 hours. I had set out a non-dirty breakfast in the car for them the night before, so they munched while we drove. Then had to wait in a huge line for our tickets. An hour later we had them — got the last 3 tickets for the first departure of the day, 10AM — and ran to get on the train before it left. Jacob and Oliver both got very quiet. Sometimes Jacob especially does that when he’s very excited about things. He doesn’t always look it right then, but I knew I’d be hearing about it later. He had his face almost pressed to the window the whole way.

Oh, and yes, he dressed himself and I didn’t check to make sure he had the correct shirt, or that it wasn’t on inside-out, until it was too late. Oops.

We rode in an ex-CP car built in 1936. One of the cars on the train was built in the 1890s — quite some neat equipment.

Anyhow, next came the hunt. There were two large lawns covered in eggs, separated by age group. Jacob and Oliver were in the younger group, but still only got a few eggs (there were lots of other parents, uhm, “helping” their kids by picking up eggs the kids were too slow to get and putting them in baskets…) But they were thrilled with the experience so that’s what counts.

They moved the locomotive to the other end of the train for the trip back using an adjacent track. Lots of the kids watched them couple it back on. Jacob and Oliver were particularly interested — nothing could have distracted them from watching that train — though they didn’t particularly like the noise of the horn.

On the way back, someone in an Easter bunny suit was on the train for pictures. I took the boys there. They usually refuse to sit on laps of Santa and such, so I didn’t figure much success. They actually agreed to do it. And despite their expressions in this photo, Jacob later told me over and over how much fun it was to be with the Easter bunny.

After we got back, we headed for the car. Jacob insisted on carrying his own Easter bag, and predictably wound up carrying it upside down for awhile. So his bag had some grass in it from picking the candy back up. Oliver discovered some rocks by a ditch and had fun throwing them in to make a splash, so we paused for that for awhile. By this point it was about noon.

So at this point, what does a dad who has managed to keep two active boys in line for an hour, help them with an egg hunt and giant rabbit, and keep them from falling into the ditch they’re throwing rocks into, do? Say that it’s time to eat lunch and then head for home so we can be there in time for supper? Or go for MORE ADVENTURE?

I said, “Jacob, how would you like to eat lunch inside a big train station in Kansas City?” Pause for a couple of seconds to think. “YEAH! I have never had lunch in a train station before! Let’s go! Shall we go NOW?”

So I gave them the leftover breakfast to eat during the hour drive on towards the beautiful Kansas City Union Station. It’s one of the few grand American train stations that survives intact, and is just stunning.

Jacob and Oliver both fell asleep on the way there. We parked, walked inside, and Jacob just froze. “Dad… WOW! That ceiling is SO HIGH! I can’t even reach it!” He then raised his hand as high as it would go and said, “See dad, it is so high I can’t touch it!” (Most ceilings are, but this one is indeed much, much taller than most.)

We ate lunch in the second level of a restaurant right in the Grand Hall, which Jacob really enjoyed. Here’s Jacob, annoyed that I pulled out the camera again:

Then we went exploring for an hour. Jacob talked about his “adventure”. We went up the elevators and checked out the balconies. Then we found the “Model Railroad Experience.” And oh my. The boys were visibly the most excited they had been all day. Oliver just froze at the spot he walked through the door, not caring to move and see the rest of the exhibit because he was so fascinated by what he already saw. There was a huge layout in the middle of the room, and smaller ones in adjacent rooms. We finally made our way there, and Oliver just ran round and round one of them, following a train, excitedly yelling “There it is! There it is! There it is!” Here’s a photo from the big layout:

Jacob cried when it was time to go, but I had promised them some dessert before we left, so after a bite of ice cream we were on our way. On the way home, every 15 minutes or so, Jacob would make a remark like this:

“Dad, the train ride was SO fun!”

or

“Dad, I really liked Kansas City Union Station!”

and so forth, naming every highlight of the day for him several times over: the Easter bunny, the egg hunt, train ride, and everything about Union Station.

On the way home, we stopped at our favorite restaurant in Emporia: BobbyD’s Merchant St. BBQ. This is always a hit for everyone in the family. A down-home place that has excellent food, is not far off our path, and never seems to have a wait. Yum.

Oliver has really started to form up words. We can pick out words like lettuce, truck, book, look, and “dad John”. He also has a way of saying “there it is”, most particularly when looking at trains.

Jacob still loves trains. In church, he will take his markers, connect them end to end, and have a marker train that will keep him entertained for quite a long while. He will slide it back and forth on the pew, and eventually it will slide in a “tunnel” (behind my back). This actually started with “hymnbook trains” — get a few books in a row, and it’s a train. Anything can be a train to Jacob. Driving down the road, we might see what he calls tree trains, which are just trees in a row.

Last Sunday, the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus had its first concert of the season. I sing with this group, which has nearly 300 men in it. It’s a lot of fun to be a part of that group, and the music is wonderful. Jacob and Oliver were there on Sunday, and both started to take more of an interest in the music that before. Jacob particularly loved the song Dry Bones, which had a number of odd percussion instruments in it. He was laughing at spots, and wanted to hear me sing it for the next several days. He even wanted Terah to read the program from the concert to him before his nap one day. Oliver enjoyed it too, and kept saying “dad John” (his word for me) whenever there was a soloist. I didn’t sing a solo, but apparently to 1-year-old eyes, 300 guys all dressed alike all look like dad.

Jacob and I recently have been reading Winnie the Pooh stories at his bedtime. Not the Disney books, but the original A. A. Milne stories. We read a few pages every night, and have made it to page 214 by now. Jacob loves it. And he’s becoming increasingly interested in reading things. Sometimes we’ve been unsure if he’s reading something or just had it memorized. Last night, I got out the book, and we were on a page he had never seen or heard before. He pointed to a word, and said, “It says ‘Roo’ there!” And indeed it did. Then he added, “It says ‘said Roo.’”. Yep. And then he read me the whole sentence:

“I love jumping,” said Roo.

I believe that’s the first time I’ve been certain Jacob has read me an entire sentence without having memorized any of it beforehand. And he won’t be old enough to start Kindergarten for another year and a half.

We then read the story, and when I came to the sentence Jacob had read to me, he interrupted, saying, “No, dad, I will read that one!” And he did.

Today my car needed some work. This morning I dropped it off at the mechanic, who lives right off a well-traveled state highway. They don’t have a dropbox for keys because, well, they don’t need one. I left the keys in the car.

They called to say that they’d have to close early this afternoon, but not to worry — the keys were in the car along with the bill, which I could drop by and pay or put in the family’s box at church.

And sure enough, the car sat there the rest of the afternoon, and until about 9:45PM, with the keys in the ignition, bill tucked in under my ham radio speaker, ready to pick up.

And it wasn’t at risk for being stolen. Things just sort of happen that way out here sometimes.

I remember one time we were taking a train out of Newton, KS, which departs at about 3:30AM. The only other train through there departs at 3:00AM. And back then, there was sometimes no station agent on some days. We got there our usual 15 minutes before the train departed, and struck up a conversation with a couple from California. They were almost beside themselves with shock. First off, they had arrived an hour and a half early, being used to doing that for getting on planes and, apparently, trains.

But what really stunned them was the fact that the station was simply left unlocked all night. There weren’t any cops there, and in fact there was nobody there at all for most of the night. And yet it had no signs of graffiti, no vandalism, and no apparent concern from anybody that it was unlocked. I think they also felt unsafe, having no guards or officials present. And they were literally the only people in the station for an hour, I’m sure.

And sure enough, along came the train. We all heard the whistle and had our things ready to go by the time the conductor got off the train, walked into the station, announced it, and led us all out to it. 3 minutes later, we were all on our way to California and the land of, apparently, locked doors.

Back in 2002, when we bought a house in Kansas, the inspector commented that none of the outside locks worked. At closing, the sellers gave us a key, commenting “We never use it and it took forever to find it.” I guess that’s why they didn’t know the locks were broken.

There’s something good about a setting like this. I know that my car is safe at the mechanic with the keys in it. He knows that I’ll pay his bill. We all take pride in our community institutions. And besides, if anybody did try to spray some graffiti in the train station, they’ll be living with people that will remember it for the next 40 years. Accountability is implicit here.

2010 started with a 3-day ordeal of taking out the trash, nearly snapping the hood off my pickup while closing it, and Greek poetry. I then dived right into reading the Odyssey, and my post suggesting we read the Old Testament of the Bible like we read Greek mythology generated almost 100 comments. I guess I said something controversial…

I also read a number of other books last year.

Our family had quite the year. In March, Terah and I got to visit Europe for the first time. A few months later, we visited New York City for the first time and I attended Debconf10. Jacob predictably loved our train trip to NYC, calling our room in the sleeper “the best place of ever.”

Terah had thyroid surgery, and Jacob survived a tractor accident with amazingly minor injuries.

But as I look back at my posts from last year, I’m struck that most of them were about more everyday, ordinary events of life. Jacob loved the switchbox he and I built, Oliver somtimes acts like Yoda, and they both loved camping. I have made probably way too many posts with photos of them last year, but I’m making no promises to slow down this year!

Jacob and I built a computer together, and he loves bashing random words at the Linux shell.

He also developed an interest in some half-broken FRS radios, and had tons of fun with them. Eventually this kindled in interest in amatuer radio in me.

At the end of 2009, I finally completed my computer science degree and mused about what I might do next. I’m a curious, inquisitive person that enjoys both challenge and knowledge. I thought that perhaps I would dive into reading more, or perhaps take some more college classes. Turns out I instead picked up amateur radio — one of the big unexpected twists of the year. Jacob really did kindle that interest in me, and by July I had passed my technician and general exams and was on the air. I continued to study, and passed my extra class exam in October. Since then, I’ve rigged up my bicycle for amateur radio operation, made some fun contacts, set up outdoor antennas, and got going with digital operation. It has been a lot of fun, and will keep providing opportunities for a challenge for me for a very long time.

Also on the technical side, I made my archive of Gopherspace available for download.

It’s hard to cut off the list — I have dozens of other things I could mention — but I suppose I should end it with the Christmas gathering / piano moving episode.

1. Storage fees of $0.15 per gigabyte-month or less
2. Free or cheap ($0.20 per gigabyte or less) bandwidth fees
3. rsync-like protocol to avoid having to re-send those 20GB files that have 20MB of changes in their entirety every night
4. Open Source and cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris ideally; Linux and Windows at a minimum)
5. Compression and encryption
6. Easy way to restore the entire backup set or individual files
7. Versatile include/exclude rules
8. Must be runnable from scripts, cron, etc. without a GUI
9. Nice to have: block or file-level de-duplication
10. Nice to have: support for accurately backing up POSIX (user, group, permission bits, symlink, hard links, sparse files) and Windows filesystem attributes
11. Nice to have: a point-and-click interface for the non-Unix folks to use to restore Windows files and routine restore requests

So far, here’s what I’ve found. I should note that not a single one of these solutions appears to handle hard links or sparse files correctly, meaning I can’t rely on them for complete system-level backups. That doesn’t mean they’re useless — I could still use them to back up critical user data — just less useful.

Of the Free Software solutions, Duplicity is a leading contender. It has built-in support for Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files storage. It uses rdiff, which is a standalone implementation of the rsync binary delta algorithm. So you send up a full backup, then binary deltas from that for incrementals. That makes it bandwidth-efficient for incremental backups, and storage-efficient. However, periodic full backups will have to be run, which will make it less bandwidth-efficient. (Perhaps not incredibly *often*, but they will still be needed.) Duplicity doesn’t offer block-level de-deuplication or a GUI for the point-and-click folks. But it DOES offer the most Unixy approach and feels like a decent match for the task overall.

The other service relying on Free Software is rsync.net, which supports rsync, sftp, scp, etc. protocols directly. That would be great, as it could preserve hard links and be compatible with any number of rsync-based backup systems. The downside is that it’s expensive — really expensive. Their cheapest rate is $0.32 per GB-month and that’s only realized if you store more than 2TB with them. The base rate is $0.80 per GB-month. They promise premium support and such, but I just don’t think I can justify that for what is, essentially, secondary backup.

On the non-Open Source side, there’s JungleDisk, which has a Server Edition that looks like a good fit. The files are stored on either S3 or Rackspace, and it seems to be a very slick and full-featured solution. The client, however, is proprietary though it does seem to offer a non-GUI command-line interface. They claim to offer block-level de-duplication which could be very nice. The other nice thing is that the server management is centralized, which presumably lets you easily automate things like not running more than one backup at a time in order to not monopolize an Internet link. This can, of course, be managed with something like duplicity with appropriate ssh jobs kicked off from appropriate places, but it would be easier if the agent just handled it automatically.

What are people’s thoughts about this sort of thing?

Friday night, Jacob was super excited. He was running around the house, talking about trains. I had him pack his own backpack with toys this time, which were — you guessed it — trains. Plus train track. His usual bedtime is around 7. He was still awake in his room at about 11, too excited to sleep.

The train was an hour late into Newton, so got up, got ready, and then went into Jacob’s room at 3:15AM. I put my arm around him and said his name softly. No response. I said, just a little louder, “Jacob, it’s time to wake up to go to the train station.” There was about a 2-second pause and then he sat bolt upright rubbing his eyes. A couple seconds later, in a very tired but clear voice, “OK dad, let’s go!” That is, I believe, a record for waking up speed for Jacob.

We went downstairs, got coats, mittens, hats, etc. on, made sure we had the stuffed butterfly he always sleeps with, and went out the door.

As usual, Jacob chattered happily during the entire 15-minute drive to the Amtrak station. One of these days I need to remember to record it because it’s unique. He described things to me ranging from the difference between freight and passenger trains, to what the dining car is all about, to tractors and how to ride them safely. Newton has some “winter lights”, and a few places still had Christmas lights, which were of course big hits.

We had to wait a few minutes at the Amtrak station, and Jacob hadn’t shown any signs of slowing down yet. He wanted to look at every Amtrak poster, picture, logo, or sign in the building. This generally meant me holding him up high while he leaned over to touch it and make out a few words. Then, of course, he would pick out minute details about the trains, such as how many coach cars he thought they had, and we’d visit about that for awhile.

We got on at about 4:20. We found our seats, and Jacob showed no signs of calming down, despite having had only 4 hours of sleep (instead of his usual 11) so far. We checked out the buttons for lights. And, of course, he excitedly yelled out, “Dad, the train is moving!”

He spent the next while mostly watching out his window, but also still exploring his space. Finally at about 5, I said, “Jacob, I am really tired. I am going to sleep now. Will you sleep too?” His response: “Oh sure dad, I will sleep with my eyes open!” As a result, no sleep was had for Jacob, and only a little for me.

The dining car opens for breakfast at 6:30, which is normally a rather foreign time for breakfast on the train for us. But we were both awake so I figured might as well go. So Jacob and I went to the dining car. We sat with a woman going from New Mexico to Lawrence for her grandpa’s funeral, though it was expected and she was having a good time on the train. Jacob turned completely shy, and refused to say a word, except maybe a few whispered into my ear.

He got his favorite railroad French toast, and had me “drizzle” some syrup on it. I used the word “drizzle” for syrup the first time he had French toast on the train, and if I fail to use that word in the dining car, I will hear about it in no uncertain terms from Jacob.

He loved his dining car breakfast, but we spent about an hour and a half there. He was really slow at eating because his face was pressed up against the window so much. But that was just fine; we had nowhere else to be, the person eating breakfast with us enjoyed visiting (and, apparently, scaring the dining car staff with tales of bears in the New Mexico mountains). This was what the train trip was all about, after all.

We played in the lounge car for awhile. The almost floor-to-ceiling wrap-around windows provided a great view for him, and more opportunities to press his face against a window. We talked about freight trains that he saw, noticed the snow on some of them. Then we found the back of the train and he got to look out the back window.

Back at our seat, he played with his toys for about 10 minutes, which was all he used them on the entire trip. There was just too much else to enjoy.

When we used the restroom on the train, he’d comment on how much he liked the Amtrak soap. “It smells SO very very good!” He wanted to wash his hands on the train. By late morning, he had decided: “Dad, I LOVE this Amtrak soap. It smells like peaches! Shall your hands smell like peaches too?” And, when we’d get back up to our seats, he’d put his hands in my face, saying, “Dad, smell that! My hands smell like peaches! It was from the AMTRAK SOAP!”

At some point, he discovered the airline-style safety brochures in the seat back pockets. These were filled with diagrams of the train car, a few photos, and lots of icons with descriptions. I don’t know how many times I read the thing to him, or really how many times he then recited it to me from memory. It was a lot. He spent hours with those brochures.

Jacob had already told me that he wanted pizza for lunch, so I got him the kid-sized pizza. It wasn’t all that big, and he could have devoured at least half of it when hungry. But he was getting really tired and ate only a few bites of pizza and a few chips. Pretty soon he was leaning up against me, the window, and eventually had his head on the table in some tomato sauce. But he didn’t quite fall asleep by the time we went back to our seats, and of course was wide awake by that point.

Jacob loves spotting the word “Amtrak” on things. It was very exciting when he noticed his orange juice at breakfast, and milk at lunch, were “Amtrak juice” and “Amtrak milk” due to the logo on the cups. At dinner he noticed we had Amtrak plates, and when I pointed out that his metal fork had the Amtrak logo on it, he got very excited and had to check every piece of silverware within reach. “Dad, I have an Amtrak fork too!…. And dad, YOU also have an Amtrak fork! We ALL have Amtrak forks! *cackling laughter*”

I finally insisted that Jacob lay down for some quiet time. I closed the curtains, and he finally did fall asleep… less than an hour before our arrival into Galesburg. So by 2:15 he was up to 4.75 hours of sleep, I guess.

We stopped in the train station briefly, then started our walk to the Discovery Depot Children’s Museum, which was right nearby. Although I made no comment about it, Jacob said, “Dad, there is a train museum RIGHT HERE!” “Yes, you’re right Jacob. I can see a steam engine and some cars here.” “Let’s go in!” “I don’t think it’s open today.” “It IS open — shall we go check?” It wasn’t, and that was mighty sad — though when he spotted another old caboose sitting outside the children’s museum, the day suddenly seemed brighter. He complained of how cold he was, although my suggestion that he stop walking through the big piles of snowdrifts was met with a whiny, “But dad, I WANT to do that!”

We went inside the museum (having to walk right buy the locked caboose — thankfully the people at the desk promised to unlock it for us when we were ready) and Jacob started to explore. There was some wooden play trains big enough for children to climb in which he enjoyed, but in general he went from one thing to the next every minute or two as he does when he’s really tired or overstimulated. Until, that is, he discovered the giant toy train table. It had a multi-level wooden track setup, and many toy trains with magnetic hitches. It was like what we have at home, only much bigger and fancier. He spent a LONG time with that. We then briefly explored the rest of the museum and went out into the caboose. It wasn’t the hit it might have been, possibly because there are several at the Great Plains Transportation Museum that he gets to go in on a somewhat regular basis.

After that, he was ready to go back into the museum, but I was feeling rather over-stimulated. On a day when the highs were still well below freezing, it seemed just about every family in Galesburg was crowded into the children’s museum, making it loud and crowded — which I don’t enjoy at all. So I suggested maybe it was snack time instead. A moment’s thought, then he started to pull me out of the caboose before I could get my gloves back on — “Yes dad, I think it IS snack time. Let’s go. Let’s go NOW!”

We walked over to Uncle Billy’s Bakery (Google link or minimal website). Jacob spotted some sugar cookies shaped like mittens. Despite my reluctance to get him more sugar, he was so excited — plus I had barely prevented a meltdown at lunch by promising him that he would get dessert later in the day — so he picked two red mitten cookies. I got myself a wonderful peach muffin and a croissant and we sat down at one of the tables by the window. I taught Jacob how to hang his coat on his chair and he lit into those cookies.

I spotted a guy at the next table over wearing a BNSF jacket, and asked him if he worked for the railroad. He had retired as an engineer a couple of years ago, and had worked various jobs before that. He grew up in Manhattan, KS and so was interested in our trip — and very friendly. While we visited, Jacob devoured his cookies and increasing portions of my snack as well. He told us about a new shop — The Stray Cat — just two stores down that was having a grand opening event today. They make decorations and art out of basically discarded items, and had some really nifty things that I may have bought had I not been wanting for space in our backpack.

Then I spotted Sweets Old-Fashioned Ice Cream, Candy, and Soda Shop across the road. I figured he’d love it and I was already in for the sugar so might as well. He picked out some “birthday cake” flavor ice cream for himself. I got huckleberry ice cream, which he insisted on calling “purpleberry” and managed to get some tastes of as well.

After that, we went to the train station. It was about an hour until our train would be there. I wasn’t sure if we’d find enough to do, but I shouldn’t have worried. Earlier, we had made the happy discovery that the station’s restroom featured the Amtrak soap, so there was that. Then there was the model Amtrak train in the ticket window, which Jacob kept wanting to look at while I’d hold him. And also, the California Zephyr came in. We watched it arrive from the station window, saw people get off and on, and saw it leave — maybe the first time Jacob has witnessed all that in person. And, of course, we looked at the pictures in that train station. The ticketmaster gave Jacob a paper conductor’s hat with puzzles and mazes on the back side.

And then it was time to get onto our train back home. We ate dinner — Jacob again ate little and almost fell asleep — and got back to our seats. I let Jacob stay awake until about 8, when he was starting to get a bit fragile. It took him awhile to fall asleep, but he finally did at about 8:30.

Today he’s still been all excited. He will randomly tell us about bits of the trip, that the man at supper called his grilled cheese sandwich piece “little” when it was really big, what we did at the ice cream store, etc. And I do think that he is now a train safety expert.

All in all, I think that is probably the most excitement he’s ever had in 24 hours and it was a lot of fun to be with him for it!

I started off with Homer’s Iliad, which I tremendously enjoyed and found parallels to modern life surprisingly common in that ancient tale. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I quickly jumped to a book that wasn’t on my 2010 list: The Odyssey. I made a somewhat controversial post suggesting that the Old Testament of the Bible can be read similar to how we read The Odyssey. Homer turned out to be much more exciting than I’d expected.

Jordan’s Fires of Heaven (WoT #5) was a good read, though it is one of those books that sometimes is action-packed and interesting, and other times slow-moving and almost depressing. I do plan to continue with the series but I’m not enjoying it as much as I did at first.

War and Peace is something I started late last year. I’m about 400 pages into it, which means I’ve not even read a third of it yet. It has some moving scenes, and is a fun read overall, but the work it takes to keep all the many characters straight can be a bit frustrating at times.

Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith was one of the highlights of the year. A thought-provoking read by someone that embraces both science and religion, and shows a vision of religion that returns to its earlier roots, less concerned about what particular truths a person believes in than it is about more fundamental issues.

Marcus Borg’s Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary began with a surprisingly engaging history lesson on how agriculture caused the formation of domination societies. It also described in a lot of detail how historians analyze ancient texts — their drafting, copying, etc. It paints a vivid portrait of Jewish society in the time that Jesus would have lived, and follows the same lines of thought as Cox regarding religion finally moving past the importance of intellectual assent to a set of statements.

Among books that weren’t on my 2010 list, I also read — and here I’m not listing all of them, just some highlights:

The Cricket on the Hearth in something of a Christmastime tradition of reading one of the shorter Dickens works. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I enjoyed A Christmas Carol last year. Perhaps I made up for that by watching Patrick Stewart as Scrooge instead.

How to Disappear Completely was a fun short humorous read, with a very well-developed first-person narrative.

Paralleling my interest in amateur radio, I read and studied three books in order to prepare myself for the different exams.

In something of a surprise, I laughed a lot at Sh*t My Dad Says, which was more interesting and funny than I expected it to be. All I can say is that Justin’s got quite the dad and quite the interesting childhood.

I even read two other recent releases: The Politician (about John Edwards) and Game Change (about the 2008 presidential race). Both were interesting, vibrant, and mostly unsourced — so hard to know exactly how much to take from them.

And finally, reflecting on and travel before my first trip to Europe, Travel as a Political Act, which encourages us to find the fun in “my cultural furniture rearranged and my ethnocentric self-assuredness walloped.” And that was fun.

Now to make up the 2011 list…

• Completely reliable syncing between multiple devices, even if each one is being used and actively bookmarking things simultaneously. My browser is Firefox. Back when I chose Delicious, nothing else accomplished this.
• The ability to present bookmarks as a toolbar in Firefox, either using its own system or a different one.
• I prefer tagging to hierarchical organization.
• I can run a service on my own server, IF it is Free Software, trivial to set up, and needs little care and feeding. If it’s not part of Debian, that’s a strong negative here.
• If it’s hosted in the cloud, I am concerned about privacy, security, and long-term stability. I must have a way to export my data, preferably automatically. I will be reading ToS and privacy policies carefully.
• A system that can be trusted to encrypt my bookmarks on the server side is another nice to have.
• Being able to create bookmarks directly from my Android phone is nice but not required.
• Being able to access bookmarks from a regular web browser is a feature I use a few times a year; again, nice but not required.

What should I look into?

Incidentally, if you need to export your Delicious data, go here.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5465-alternatives-to-delicious/feed 19 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5462-kr0l-amateur-radio-wikis-and-linux http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5462-kr0l-amateur-radio-wikis-and-linux#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:45:29 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=5462 Since I got my amateur radio license back in July, I’ve had a lot of fun with it. It’s a great hobby for anyone technically-inclined or anyone socially-inclined, and between those categories that includes a lot of people. I’ve learned quite a bit over the last few months and really enjoyed it all.

I passed my extra class exam back this fall, and thus got my new callsign, KR0L. So long, KD0MJT. I’ve enjoyed some contesting, as well as general conversations on the system. I’ve also done some work with the keyboard-to-keyboard digital modes on HF. Debian includes a very nice program called fldigi for this.

Of late, I have developed an interest in packet radio. Packet radio uses a networking protocol called AX.25 over RF links. AX.25 bears a familial resemblance to TCP/IP, and in fact, you can run TCP/IP over AX.25 and AX.25 over TCP/IP. My learning curve on packet was somewhat steep. It has declined in popularity significantly since the growth of generally-available Internet access, though seems to be once again growing now. So a lot of information about it is 10 years old.

As I was learning about packet, I of course was using my Debian system. The Linux kernel has long had AX.25 support integrated as a first-class networking protocol. You can open AX.25 sockets, monitor AX.25 traffic, etc. from the Linux kernel. You can use soundmodem to make a software-defined packet modem (called a TNC), or you can use kissattach to hook up to a traditional TNC via a serial port and a protocol strongly similar to SLIP (which, for those of you with shorter memories, is a predecessor to PPP). Linux can do what you’d expect out of a modern networking system: multiplexing with AX.25, handling lots of simultaneous users, etc.

So I was a bit surprised and baffled to keep running into systems that only supported 1 user at a time, couldn’t easily do some things I was taking for granted, etc. Until I realized that Linux is the only major operating system with integrated AX.25 support in the kernel. Things started to make a bit more sense. I hadn’t realized just how awesome a setup I had until I started learning about the hoops some other people went through. It is pretty easy to run a basic client on Windows, but to run the “server” side of things as I am doing — well some of the features just aren’t there or are really kludgy.

Anyhow, I have decided to start documenting things I learn as I go. Beyond amateur radio, I also have sometimes wanted places to stick bits of information. Things that other people might benefit from if they Google, but that maybe aren’t the best blog fodder or website material. So I have set up a wiki, openly editable of course, at http://wiki.complete.org/. To date, only the amateur radio section has much content in it.

I’m also sending in patches and bug reports to the various projects involved in amateur radio in Linux, and am glad to see development has resumed on several of those.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5462-kr0l-amateur-radio-wikis-and-linux/feed 10 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5226-game-suggestions http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5226-game-suggestions#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:25:39 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=5226 I’m not an avid gamer, but I do occasionally enjoy playing video games. I sometimes have time to do so over the holidays, so I’m looking for suggestions. I have a PS3 and a PC available.

Thinking about what I like, most recently it seems to be immersive world games: Oblivion, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1 & 2, and GTA. I’ve also enjoyed simulation games, such as Civ, SimCity, FreeCiv, and Railroad Tycoon in the past — and could again. Some of the Star Wars games (Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi Academy, Force Unleashed) I’ve enjoyed, though the ones that have essentially no plot I didn’t really.

What suggestions do you have?

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5226-game-suggestions/feed 26 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5103-the-tsa-stupid-owned-or-complicit http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5103-the-tsa-stupid-owned-or-complicit#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:08:00 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=5103 I have long been in Bruce Schneier’s camp, thinking that the TSA is a joke: nothing but security theater.

A few recent examples come to mind:

• In the famous recent event, a man refuses to go through the backscatter machine, and then refuses to be groped. They tell him he can’t board the plane, take a report, and say he is free to leave. Then they say he has to go back to the screening area and be screened before leaving the airport, despite his wishes. Obviously they don’t believe he really had a bomb, because if he did, would they really want him in a cramped area surrounded by hundreds of civilians? So why make him go back?
• Reading about these screenings, one of my thoughts was, “I sure wouldn’t want to have my kids have to go through that, or a millimeter wave machine whose health effects are completely unknown!” Then I read the TSA’s bulletin, intended to calm people like me: don’t worry, kids under 13 will never be patted down. OK TSA, so either your patdowns are completely ineffective or you are so naive that you think that nobody under 13 could ever be an attacker. If the latter, why fuss with making them go through security in the first place?

I don’t get it. They have been completely reactionary since they began. They have a complete failure of institutional imagination. Something happens, and then a new rule comes out to prevent the thing that everybody is now expecting. And what happens about the thing that people aren’t expecting yet? Nothing. So we now have to take off our shoes because one guy tried to use them for something nefarious. OK, fine, but the next guy is probably going to try something other than shoes.

Which is why, I’m sure, many people are pointing out that the TSA is over-reliant on technology and device detection and completely underemphasizing evildoer detection — as, we are repeatedly reminded, the Israelis excel at. The TSA’s attempt to remedy that was foolish at best, and, according to a recent report, “not grounded in science.”

Which is why I am heartened that, almost a decade after 9/11, Americans are starting to let go of their fear and be ready to reclaim some sense of intelligence at the security line. The fact that politicians think there is something to be gained by being tough on TSA’s invasive screening procedures, rather than risk looking soft on terrorism, is evidence of this.

So, what I haven’t yet worked out is this: What gives, TSA? Are they:

• Stupid or incompetent? Do they really, deep down, actually believe it when they say this is excellent, best in the world security? Do they really not see how stupid it is?
• Afraid? Are they afraid that if they don’t deploy every possible technological solution, and then there is an attack, that they will be fired? (This surely doesn’t explain the botched behavioral screening program though)
• Pressured? Are the vendors of security technology getting at them directly or indirectly via politicians forcing them to deploy this stuff?
• Apathetic? They simply have a job, don’t really care about it at all, and are just doing the minimum necessary to bring home a paycheck?
• Stuck in a culture of rigidity? Unable to come up with any sort of process that gives screeners the ability to use discretion, they insist that everyone be treated equally — and that those that aren’t are treated differently on a completely random basis. Some bureaucrats probably spent years on the plan, which is totally useless.

(Note: this criticism is directed mostly at the upper levels of TSA management; I do not believe the people most of us see have the ability to change the system, even if they wanted to.)

One final word: I also get annoyed at all the people that grouse at the TSA checking 80-year-olds as thoroughly as everyone else. An 80-year-old could be wearing a hidden device just as much as anyone else could, and if we don’t check them, then someday they probably will. The key is to be smart about who we check carefully. Use data, behavioral analysis, simple questioning, etc — it works, and is a lot better than exempting people under 13 and over 80 from screening on arbitrary grounds.

Also, it might help anyone with a blurry groin. And it might just save a bunch of us from getting cancer.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/5103-the-tsa-stupid-owned-or-complicit/feed 5 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4885-misc-jacob-tidbits http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4885-misc-jacob-tidbits#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 03:13:15 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=4885 A few random other thoughts about our recent experience with Jacob.

Doc: “You should know I’m making this up as I go. There are no studies about kids that survive being driven over by a tractor because it doesn’t happen. Jacob is a sample size of one.”

—

Jacob: “I slept at the hospital last night. I did not like that.”

—

Nurse: “Jacob, this IV is like a hose. We’ll put water through it to give you a drink through your hand.”
Jacob: “Hmmmm!” (very intrigued look)

—

[a few hours later]

Me: “OK Jacob, let me get that IV tube untangled”
Jacob, exasperated: “Dad, that is not a TUBE. It is a HOSE!”

—

[ looking at the bowl that collects his urine for flow measurement, which has a scale labeled in ounces on one side and ml on the other ]

Jacob: “Dad! Look at that! I had 6 ounces of pee….. and also 200 ounces!”

This was probably the most intriguing thing to him about his stay.

—

I didn’t realize until the other evening what it meant that Jacob was admitted to the surgical instead of general medical floor. I had thought that odd but hadn’t really processed what it meant. Terah pointed out that it meant that the doctor expected the tests they were running on Jacob to indicate what kind of surgery he would need, not that he wouldn’t need surgery at all.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4885-misc-jacob-tidbits/feed 0 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4799-a-scary-day-and-a-walking-miracle http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4799-a-scary-day-and-a-walking-miracle#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 03:18:26 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=4799 I had been planning to write today about my great uncle Milt Goerzen. Milt passed away last Thursday after a long struggle with dementia, and his funeral was this morning. I was there, and was inspired by a few things I heard.

But that will have to wait, because today brought one of those few moments in life that’s a sense of an impending possible great loss. I can remember two others: one was when Terah passed out, and the other was when we heard that our place was on fire and our house had burned down (it turned out the house hadn’t, but much of the rest had).

I got a call during Milt’s funeral. I didn’t answer because I was, well, at a funeral, and the phone was on vibrate. When I had the chance to check the voicemail, it went something like this: “I think we have an emergency with Jacob. He got run over by a tractor. He says he’s OK, but I’m taking him to the doctor right now.” I tried to return the call, but cell phone reception wasn’t cooperating. The most I got was “he’s OK”.

It’s hard to describe how a moment like that feels. My mind jumped to telling Jacob “I love you”, and how lately when he hears that, he will snuggle in for a big hug, and say, “Dad, I love you toooooooooo!” On the one hand, I heard the “he’s OK” part, and on the other hand I couldn’t forget the tractor running over him part, and my mind leapt at the worst.

It turns out that, while I was at the funeral, Jacob had been standing on his usual spot on the tractor, sort of to the side of the driver. He was enjoying himself like usual. The tractor hit a large hole that wasn’t really visible. The combination of the jolt and the dip the tractor took towards Jacob’s side knocked him off and he went directly under the big rear wheel before the tractor could be brought to a stop.

I caught up with him and his grandpa after he had seen the doctor and just as he was being admitted to the hospital. He saw me and crawled over, making his sort of sad and scared sound — he sometimes doesn’t want to verbalize things when he’s in that mood. I held him close and he seemed to appreciate it.

He had to have blood drawn, and he was scared of that. I remembered his inquisitive mind, and reminded him how much he liked watching the tube fill up with blood last time he had a blood test (which he calls a “blood shot”). That wasn’t helping, until the actual blood test started. He cried when the needle went in, but then calmed down as the nurse, getting into the act, pointed out that there was blood filling up the tube. “Hmmm!” said Jacob. Then she gave him a band-aid. “It has an airplane,” said the nurse. “Um-hmm!” said Jacob. I pointed out that it looked like the airplane we were on when we flew home from New York. Jacob got a big smile and said, “Yes, it IS that one!”

He got a sticker there too.

Then it was off for an x-ray to check for broken bones and a CT scan to check for internal injuries — the tractor had gone right over his abdomen. He had to get an IV at the CT scan, which he certainly didn’t like. After it happened, however, he found it very interesting — especially when the nurses explained that they would give him a drink through the hose attached to his hand.

After that, we went to his room, with orders for him not to eat or drink anything until it was clear he didn’t have digestive problems.

While we waited at various steps along the way, Jacob wanted to sit on my lap and watch train videos on YouTube on my phone. He loves train videos, and brought my phone’s battery nearly to depletion through the course of the afternoon.

Jacob eventually seemed to get back to a bit of his usual self. At one point, while Terah had made a run home to pack an overnight bag and grandpa ran some errands of his own, Jacob wanted to leave the room. He had gone “exploring” in the hospital with me before: when Oliver was born, and when Terah had her thyroid surgery. So this was something he just associated with the hospital. That and lemonade, which is free any time of the day or night in the cafeteria.

So we went exploring, even ventured outside into a courtyard for a bit. He was walking fast and seemed good. We had several visitors: grandparents and his aunt and uncle. Jacob got a stuffed rabbit and a colorful bug box with windows (for putting bugs inside for observation).

Eventually the doctor came by and gave us the results: the x-rays showed no problems. The labs showed some elevated liver enzymes, which he expected, but no serious trouble. The CT showed contusions on his lung and bruising on his heart — which would heal completely in time. He allowed Jacob to have a liquid supper (so I quickly got him the lemonade he had been wanting while the nurses got him some Jello).

The doctor examined Jacob, pushing at various places, asking “Does it hurt here?” “No.” “Does it hurt here?” “No.” “Here?” “No.” “Are you hungry?” “Yes.” “Does it hurt here?” “No.” He gave me a look that said: “really? It doesn’t hurt ANYWHERE?” What could I do but shrug my shoulders?

Jacob has some abrasions on his face, arms, and back, which will probably eventually hurt (and sure enough, about 10 minutes later he started getting a little pain when he tried to move, which the doctor checked out)

Then the doctor said, “I hope you know you have a walking miracle today. This is just amazing. You have some thanking to whatever guardian angels you like tonight — all I can say about this is that the Lord must have had some other plan for him. There’s no way he could have survived that.”

Jacob’s doctor is one that we really respect: he’s scientific in his analysis, cites studies as a matter of routine, doesn’t prescribe antibiotics for things that he knows they have a small chance of helping, is common-sense about not over-treating things and yet always engaged in an emergency. That little speech from him was something I’d never expected to hear from him.

He went on to add that “I always visit my sickest patients first. You were my last visit this evening, so that should tell you something. Any other kid as healthy as he is, I might discharge already — but I’m just not justified doing that with a boy that’s, well, been driven over by a tractor this morning.” He also wanted to monitor Jacob’s progress throughout the coming day, especially his digestive system.

They wanted to measure his urine output, which he, predictably, found to be very interesting. Terah said “I think it is about 150 ml.” Jacob said, “No mom, it is closer to the two hundred line.” Me: “Since when does Jacob know about the number 200?” Terah: “I… don’t… know…. he’s 4, where would he have gotten it?” Between that, and using every opportunity to tell people that there were not one but TWO red light switches in the x-ray room, Jacob’s definitely himself in some ways already.

So, that feeling of some impeding great loss is gone, replaced by being more than a bit overwhelmed by how fortunate we were today. We also appreciate all the help we’ve had with Jacob and Oliver today.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4799-a-scary-day-and-a-walking-miracle/feed 18 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4592-some-amateur-radio-statistics http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4592-some-amateur-radio-statistics#comments Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:46:23 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=4592 I’ve had a lot of fun with amateur radio since I got licensed in July! Here are some numbers regarding my HF contacts. Not included in this are probably hundreds of more contacts on VHF or UHF, which are more local bands and not typically logged.
• Number of contacts: 542
• Countries contacted: 30
• US States contacted: 40
• First country contacted: Argentina
• First state contacted: Indiana
• Most common countries: USA, Canada, Mexico, Germany

One of my favorite moments happened recently when I turned on my digital program (fldigi) and happened to tune to 17m. I don’t have antennas there and don’t usually bother, since there’s rarely something I can receive. But I saw two PSK-31 (digital) signals. One of them was a Japenese station calling CQ. I replied, and although we had some noise (perhaps due to my lack of a 17m antenna), made my first contact with Japan! Things like this are part of the fun of amateur radio. Sometimes things that have no business working actually do, and I get a surprise like this.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4592-some-amateur-radio-statistics/feed 2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4238-pump-organs-and-music http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4238-pump-organs-and-music#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:30:18 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=4238 Two years ago, I wrote about Elvera Voth and the power of love. Back then I wrote about her memories of seeing of service workers, who would be away from their home for 7 years at a time. Elvera remembered a gathering of people at the train station to see them off, and how they sang some German hymns at the occasion.

Elvera’s done a lot since, including starting an arts in prison program. And today, she hosted a hymn sing at the pump organ in the Friesen House parlor.



The Friesen House is nearly 100 years old, and was on my parents’ property before it got moved to the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum.

We were among maybe 20 people that showed up for the event. We walked in a few minutes early and Elvera was sitting at the organ already, along with a few other early arrivals. Many of the people there were over 70, and the moment we walked in, she said, “Oh good! Another generation!” And, of course, asked about us, where we live, who we are related to, etc.

The announcement in our church bulletin said to bring a copy of Gesangbuch mit Noten if you have one. That was a common hymn book in Mennonite churches in Kansas (songbook with notes — and yes, there was one without notes that had only words.) I pulled out my copy, and just opened it up. I saw my grandma’s beautiful handwriting saying it belonged to “Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Klassen”. This I brought along, but was perhaps the only one. Elvera recognized it and was pleased to hear where it came from.

We had a great time, and it turned out to feel like the kind of afternoon people around here used to have: time with friends and family visiting and maybe singing on occasion.

After some introduction and some stories, we got to the singing… and started with hymn #1 in the 1969 (English) Mennonite Hymnal. That song had German words below as well, which we sang: Grosser Gott, wir loben dich! (Holy God, We Praise Thy Name) Elvera played the organ while we all sang.

And then we turned to #556, O Have You Not Heard. We read through the German lyrics (to help those that don’t speak German):

Ich weiss einen Strom, dessen herrliche Flut
fliesst wunderbar stille durchs Land,
doch strahlet und glänzt er wie feurige Glut,
wem ist dieses Wässer bekannt?

O Seele, ich bitte dich: Komm!
Und such diesen herrlichen Strom!
Sein Wasser fliesst frei und mächtiglich,
o glaub’s, es fliesset für dich!

Elvera translated this herself, a much more powerful translation than we usually get in English. And then we sang, this time a cappella.

Elvera told the story about the train station to this group, and then, of course, we sang O Power of Love, one of the songs sung on that occasion. For that, she asked us to stand up and form a circle around the organ, and again we sang mostly a cappella. Singing that song with Elvera left few dry eyes in the room for sure.

Someone brought up Nun Ist Sie Erschienen, and so of course we sang that. It wasn’t in any hymnal, but I suspect we were the only ones there that didn’t have it completely memorized.

Elvera told us the story of the museum’s pump organ; it had been in her family, and she had paid to have it restored and eventually donated it to the museum. It had been used every evening at twilight for singing and devotions in the family.

She also told us that the singing at the Newton train station — the same one our family uses a few times a year — was what inspired her to a career of choral music.

In the end, we probably spent more time visiting than singing, but that was just fine.

Next the group went over to the Preparatory School, an old schoolhouse also on the museum grounds. There we had a traditional Faspa, an afternoon meal with coffee, Zwieback and jam, cheese, and various cookies. We all visited for awhile longer and then went on our way.

It was a wonderful afternoon, and I hope to have a chance to do that sort of thing again.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4238-pump-organs-and-music/feed 3 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4127-why-all-the-obama-hate http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4127-why-all-the-obama-hate#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 03:31:05 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=4127 I am really struggling with all this anti-Obama rhetoric, coming from both the right and the left. From where I sit, while he hasn’t been perfect, he’s accomplished quite a bit for us since he’s been president. Consider:
• Obama got through the most comprehensive healthcare program we’ve ever had, which will provide a needed safety net to many, and yet will save the government money.
• The “bailout” (TARP) happened when Bush was president, and consisted of loans and asset purchases. Current forecasts are that the government will get 90% of that money back.
• The recovery & reinvestment act — passed by Obama — has exceeded the estimates of 3 million jobs saved or created, as graded by non-partisan groups. Most economists argue it should have been bigger to make a better change in the economy. It’s widely credited with having stopped the bleeding.

I don’t get it. Liberals are claiming he’s not doing enough, but look at what he’s got to work with: Republicans filibustering just about everything in the Senate. I don’t think that’s Obama’s fault.

And the conservatives, as far as I can tell, are just yelling. I can’t figure this out. They want to cut taxes, cut the deficit, and increase defense spending. Good luck with that.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4127-why-all-the-obama-hate/feed 28 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4085-amateur-radio-excitement http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4085-amateur-radio-excitement#comments Wed, 06 Oct 2010 17:42:04 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=4085 I’ve been keeping up with my amateur radio activities lately. The big news is that I passed the amateur extra exam at a hamfest in Wichita on Saturday. That’s the highest level of amateur radio licensing available, and only about 17% of hams have it. I passed it with 100% correct, as I did with my other two exams as well. Pretty happy with that.

I’m also getting ready to get a radio installed in my car. My FT-857D, which I’ve been using in the house, is really a mobile. I picked up antennas and cables for that at the Wichita hamfest. My brother, who is great with cars, will probably help me do that. I’m excited about that.

I also think I can get radio going on my bicycle. I need a half-wave vertical antenna to mount on it. Really the only challenge is how to attach that to the bicycle, as there isn’t exactly a thriving antenna mount industry for bicyclists.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/4085-amateur-radio-excitement/feed 3 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/2925-stories-of-amateur-radio http://changelog.complete.org/archives/2925-stories-of-amateur-radio#comments Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:33:38 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=2925 It was back in July that I got my amateur radio license, and I haven’t written much about it since. It’s about time I do.

I’ve been really enjoying it. I am now wishing I hadn’t put off getting into it for so many years. It’s a lot of fun and promises to be a lot of fun for a long time.

Why?

I am frequently asked, “What can you do with amateur radio?” Yes, you can talk to people all around the world, but of course you can do that with the Internet. Talking to people all around the world can be done with no infrastructure in between, so that’s a pretty neat feature, but not compelling to everyone.

I have realized that the question is poorly-framed. I had asked that question myself for a long time and only recently realized that I was asking the wrong question.

I think the better question would be, “What makes amateur radio fun and a good way to spend your time?”

One thing I’ve discovered is that the amateur radio community has an amazing sense of community. Hams, almost universally, seem to love helping out each other, whatever the task may be: setting up antennas, learning how to operate a radio, even fixing a flat tire. I’ve seen this directly, and heard about it from others, time and time again. There’s an excellent article out there by Nate Bargmann called Why I consider Amateur Radio an asset in my life that makes for good reading.

There is a lot of fun in amateur radio. It was quite exciting the first time I talked to someone out of state, realizing that the piece of wire in my trees, and 100W of transmitter power, were all it took to get a message 700 miles away. And even more exciting when I talked to a person in Kazakhstan the same way. No satellites, no phone lines, no undersea cables — just my antenna, his, and radio waves.

Then there’s the fun in talking to somewhat random people. It’s not completely random, as I’m only talking to people that have passed a test — there are about a million of us in the USA. (And for the long-distance HF communication, a more rigorous exam is required, so the number is probably less than that.) But when I call “CQ” — an invitation for anyone listening to reply — I never know who will reply. I’ve talked to a retired Canadian museum curator, a Mississippi farmer, a resident of Long Island, Russians participating in a contest, two Hawaiians participating in a different contest, and the list goes on. Some of these have been brief contacts lasting only seconds, while others have been conversations that stretch on towards an hour.

I liken amateur radio to buying my first iPod. I had never owned a portable MP3 player. I had always figured, “why bother? How often am I away from a computer or a CD player?” But once I got one, I realized how nice it was. It was convenient to just store my entire library on there and not have to try to sync it across multiple devices. It was convenient to not have to carry CDs with me in the car, and to listen to music at places I hadn’t tried to before. The same sort of thing applied to getting a Kindle, and to amateur radio. I didn’t realize how much fun it would be until I tried.

Some Memorable Moments

Towards the end of showing you some things that have been exciting, here are a few memorable moments from my ham radio experience so far.

Saturday night was one. I was tuning around listening to anybody to talk to. I heard some people calling CQ in heavy accents. I eventually realized that the All-Asia contest was going on, and figured out how to participate. I made my first voice-mode contact with people on a different continent — and it was with Kazakhstan! Within a few minutes, I also talked with three stations in Russia. I had not expected that.

I’ve made contact with several stations in the Indianapolis area, where I used to live. It was particularly fun to talk to W9IMS, located at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which operates around race times only. Again I discovered that station simply by tuning around on the band.

I took a 5W handheld radio with me to New York City during my trip there for Debconf. It was a lot of fun to talk to random New Yorkers while visiting, and they were all very interested in my impression of the city, what I’ve done so far, and what they thought I ought to do. Some offered specific tips (such as which train from Manhattan to Brooklyn offers a good view while elevated).

A local ham, W0BH, gave me some basic training on how to operate during amateur radio contests. During these contests, hams try to make contact with as many other hams in as many places as they can. I didn’t think this sounded like a lot of fun. Until I tried it. It was indeed a lot of fun, and interesting being occasionally that rare Kansas station that a bunch of people are trying to talk to at once.

One evening, we lost power. I tried calling the electric company, but there was no answer over there for some reason. We’re out in the country, and there are no neighbors visible that can inform us whether it’s a big problem that the power company probably knows about, or whether it’s localized to us.

So after wondering what to do for a minute, I thought I’d get on the radio and ask. (We own a backup generator for these situations.) Almost right away I heard from a person driving in his pickup. He told me he saw a widespread outage, and heard on his police scanner about other towns that were down for the same reason. I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/2925-stories-of-amateur-radio/feed 2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1535-being-a-butterfly http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1535-being-a-butterfly#comments Mon, 09 Aug 2010 02:48:59 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1535 Well, I’m back in Kansas after a bit over a week in New York for Debconf. I didn’t have time to write much, so I’ll probably be posting about it a few times.

I already wrote about the trip to New York, and now will say just a bit about the time there and trip back home.

I have to start with a quote from Jacob. We went on the Q train from Coney Island a few stops down to Brighton Beach. It’s elevated, and provides an excellent view of the amusement park. Jacob’s excited comment, face pressed to window, was:

“Wow! I see lots of everything!”

Which, come to think of it, sums up NYC itself pretty well.

Speaking of faces pressed to windows: this was Jacob’s default mode of operating in NYC. Get into any subway car, bus, whatever and he wants to stand on the seat nearest the window and look out it. It’s a real problem if no such seats are available. More than once, though, we’ll get on the subway and he’ll run to the nearest window seat to claim it, no matter who will be his neighbors for the next few minutes. And after a few days of this, Oliver started picking up on it. Pretty soon both boys wanted to be pressed to the windows watching interesting things (to me, it was a dark tunnel with occasional lights, but interesting to them) go by.

Which brings me to today. Today was Oliver’s first time flying, and Jacob’s second — though he was an infant the first time he flew and doesn’t remember it.

Jacob has been perhaps cautiously optimistic about flying. The idea of it was exciting, but then again it’s something completely new, which he doesn’t care for so much. So we had no idea what to expect.

What was got was excitement. And lots of it. From the La Guardia terminal, “Dad, is this our plane?” “No, not that one.” “Well, is THIS our plane?” “No, not that one either.” “Well, is *THIS* our plane?”

At this point, a parent has to confront the question: which is worse, causing serious disappointment to a 3-year-old and possibly inviting a meltdown in the middle of the D concourse, or a bit of harmless encouragement that might not be 100% literally true?

“Uhmm…. that might be it…” (Ah, so I went for the literally true but still exciting route…) “YAY!! *jumping and clapping*”

Terah reminds me at this point of our security adventure. I, wearing socks, carried Oliver (1 year old) through the security checkpoint at La Guardia. But oh! I failed to remove his “shoes” (not really shoes). TSA made me go back through, put them in the bowl, and run them through the scanner. A nearby pilot, getting screened, noticed this and made this ironic comment well within TSA earshot: “Look at his face! He’s gonna get us all! Good thing you’re checking his shoes!” Terah and the pilot both just about bust up laughing. Meanwhile, I’m carrying Oliver through, and the agent that made me take off his shoes had this look of “I’m sorry, I know this is stupid, but I have to.” (For an excellent pilot’s rant about TSA, read this).

Anyhow, we got on the plane, and of course Jacob nabbed the window seat.



There was plenty interesting to see. At each step of the way, I told him what was going to happen next, so there wouldn’t be any surprises. I told him once we got in the air, and got a breathy “Woooooooow…..” I told him, “Jacob, we are flying!” And his reply has to be his best quote of the week:

Dad, I don’t know that I’ve ever been a butterfly before!

I pointed out that we were above the clouds, which was also exciting. About every 5 minutes, he’d poke me, and say, “Dad, look out the window. Look down. WE ARE UP IN THE SKY!”

Meanwhile, Oliver slept.



On the second flight, Jacob slept (and was in a very foul mood when he woke up on the ground) while Oliver tried his best to squirm out of the seat and onto the ground.

Now, to wind up this post, I would like to leave you with some statistics and photos comparing my home with New York.

Item	NYC	Marion County, KS
Land Area	469 sq mi	954 sq mi
Population	8,391,881	12,952 (6871 excluding the 3 largest towns quite some distance away)
Population Density	27,532/sq mi	14/sq mi (7 if excluding large towns)

I think of this as a wonderful difference! I’ve said before how much fun it is to spend some time in NYC, where we can just walk to a fruit stand, any number of grocery stores, restaurants, etc. And finally, I leave you with two street scenes. The first is from our hotel’s front door.



That’s our fruit guy there, and the bagel and roll place is across the street by the RadioShack.

Now, the street view from our front door after we got home:



OK, so that’s sort of misleading. You can’t actually see the street scene because it’s on the other side of the hill. That’s just our driveway to get to the street. (Not that the street looks much different. It has the weeds growing on the sides instead of in the middle, as one notable difference.)

We loved New York and I’m certain we’ll go back again. It’s also nice to be home and enjoy the peace of the countryside.

Thanks to Debconf for a wonderful conference — a topic I’ll have more to say about in the coming days.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1535-being-a-butterfly/feed 4 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1522-daniel-schorr http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1522-daniel-schorr#comments Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:15:38 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1522 For many years now, I’ve admired Daniel Schorr’s reporting on NPR. I could instantly recognize his voice, and perhaps to the irritation of Terah, whenever I heard him on the radio, I’d turn it up and ask that we be quiet for a couple minutes so I could listen.

The thing about Dan is that he was a reporter for 60 years. He reported from Moscow for CBS, from the Netherlands, Berlin, Washington. He interviewed Kruschev, got on Nixon’s enemies list — a fact he famously discovered as he was reading the list for the first time live on the air — and was fired from several jobs for insisting on sticking to his standards over the objections of more profit-driven executives.

The reason I listened to him was that he had a perspective nobody else does. There’d be some contemporary story, and inevitably he’d relate it to something Eisenhower said, or a G7 meeting in the Reagan years, or something Kruschev or Gorbachev mentioned. And not only was it accurate, it was incisive and enlightening.

Some things well worth reading:

• NPR’s Obituary, which includes a link to their 1-hour memorial special
• CBS Evening News story and video
• Dan Schorr interviewed by his son for StoryCorps
]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1522-daniel-schorr/feed 0 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1513-kd0mjt http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1513-kd0mjt#comments Sat, 17 Jul 2010 06:14:28 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1513 Wow — tonight was thrilling. It’s hard to explain why, but it’s pretty exciting to have a radio setup that is all wrong in so many ways work well enough for me to sit in my kitchen in Kansas and talk to someone in Indianapolis using only two-way HF radios.

I recently passed my technician and general amateur radio exams. I’ve been talking to some very nice people locally on the 2m band, which permits local (say, 100-200mi radius) communication. It’s been fun, but Kansas is sparsely populated enough that sometimes there just isn’t any activity. At all.

Earlier this week, my Yaesu FT-857D and two antennas arrived. I tried it first on VHF, and had a nice chat with Kent (KB0RWI) a few miles away. But tonight was the big experiment.

I bought a 20m dipole antenna. This is basically a 30-foot-long wire, connected to a balun and a coax feed line in the middle. You’re supposed to put it at least 30 feet off the ground, and away from trees, houses, etc. You’re supposed to have a nice RF ground for your transmitter, power supply, antenna tuner, and all that stuff. You’re not supposed to just run the coax under that (until today, annoying) small hole in the seal under the kitchen storm door. You’re supposed to have to have the correct connectors on your coax, instead of soldering an RG-8 PL-259 onto some RG-8X because you’re new at this and didn’t realize that you need to buy an adapter.

And, I’m really pretty sure that you’re not supposed to have an aggressive outdoor cat — complete with a full set of claws and teeth — attack the coax RG-8X cable as it’s being pulled through the grass.

Fail to do any of these things, and the thing might not work well, or might not work at all, or for people that use old equipment, might burn out your radio or something.

So anyway I got out the ladder today, and I got the antenna maybe 10-15 feet in the air. I have three trees in a row with the perfect separation to hang each end and the center balun from. So while Jacob went around playing with water and trying out the ladder on occasion (with my help), I used some string to hang the antenna. In the trees, not far from them. Near the house. Not 30ft off the ground.

I strung the feed line into the house, set up all my equipment on our kitchen table, flipped the switch. And — nothing. Just the occasional familiar whine while tuning. I tried the 20m band, then the 40m, then even 15, 12, and 10. No activity anywhere. So what was wrong?

I improvised some grounding — extracted the ground conductor from an old strip of AC house wiring, shoved it into the ground, and grounded the tuner and transmitter. No difference.

I unplugged the coax, and tested it with my multimeter. It tested out OK.

I plugged it back in and wiggled the connector. Turns out the connector isn’t in great shape, but it had been working.

I tried transmitting. The tuner made a whole bunch of alarming-sounding clicking noises (sounded like a symphony of relays), indicated SWR over 3, and the ammeter on my power supply went a bit nuts. Later I realized that I just wasn’t giving the tuner enough time to tune up; with a few more seconds, it tuned up just fine on every frequency. (So yes, it was supposed to do that.)

And, it turns out, that all I needed to do was wait a little while longer to hear some signals. Pretty soon I was finding stuff all over the 40m band. I heard a discussion from Chicago, another from Oklahoma City, some apparent broadcasters from Africa.

I decided I would try and transmit. I was hearing one side of a discussion very clearly and decided I would wait for an opportunity to try to contact that person. I heard his callsign, K9RM. I looked it up, and realized he was near Indianapolis, where I had lived for awhile.

Eventually he invited a station trying to get in to participate. And:

“KD0MJT” (I announced my callsign, as a request to join the conversation)

He said he only made out the 0, but eventually we were talking quite well. It was a brief conversation, but interesting; the person he was talking to was in Portland, and couldn’t hear me (and I could barely hear him, but not loud enough to make out).

That with no phone lines, no Internet provider needed, etc. And with a rig that is far from being at peak efficiency. I had no idea what to expect tonight — and was surprised that just tossing an antenna up in a tree let me talk to someone in Indiana. That’s 650 miles away. I wonder what I’ll be able to do once I get things done the right way.

This hobby is going to be fun. Many thanks to Mike_W for equipment suggestions, Kent and Dan from Newton ARC for encouragement and coming out to the house to test things, Kent for being my first ham radio contact ever (on 2m while I was using an old 1981 radio), Chuck (K9RM) for taking a few minutes to be my first HF contact, and my dad for helping plan out exterior wall penetration methods that will eliminate this coax under the kitchen door and lack of grounding business.

Jacob, by the way, still loves his radios and is starting to take an interest in mine. It wouldn’t shock me at all of he’s one of these kids that gets his technician license in the 2nd grade or something. I think he and I can do this together for a long time.

Update 11/1/2010: My callsign has changed to KR0L.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1513-kd0mjt/feed 3 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1511-radios http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1511-radios#comments Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:55:54 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1511 Those of you that follow me on twitter or identi.ca know that I’ve been working on my amateur radio license. This started a few weeks ago when Jacob got excited about radios, and must have infected me too.

I’ve been studying and learning a bit. I had called a local ham (amateur radio operator) I know from church. He gave me one of his apparently newer radios, a 1981 2m Icom IC-22U 10W unit. That was great and got me all the more interested. Then last Friday, a couple of local hams came over to check out that radio and see what repeaters I could hit with it. They discovered a handheld 5W unit could hit at least one local repeater, and this 10W unit could too. One of them also had an HF rig in his pickup, and it was fun to stand out in the driveway and listen to conversations in Michigan and Utah. That evening erased any doubt in my mind about whether or not I would become a ham — and it’s a bit hard to believe it was only a week ago.

I had been studying for the Technician-class amateur radio license, the lowest of three levels of licensing. One of the guys that came over Friday gave me a book to study for the General license, the intermediate level. It warned me to allow a month to prepare, and here I was planning to take the exams Tuesday. I picked it up Sunday, so really got 2 days of studying in.

Tuesday I drove to Independence, KS, about 2.5 hours away for the exams. I went so far primarily because the Wichita exams weren’t going to be offered until mid-August and I didn’t want to wait that long. I found a fun group of people in Independence. I hadn’t expected to have fun taking exams, but really, I did. We visited before the exams, and they wanted to know where I was from, of course.

When it was time to take the exams, I guess I sort of surprised them by already having my FRN (FCC registration number) and photo copies of my IDs with me. One of them said, “You’re going to have no trouble with this, are you?” I took the Technician exam, checked my work carefully, and turned it in to be graded. They checked it twice and had two people looking over it before they announced I passed with all 35 questions correct.

I should note at this point that I was the only person taking the exams that night.

Anyhow, on to the General exam. Same drill. It was harder, of course, and I turned it in to be graded. One of them looked at the test, looked at me, put on a grave face and said, “Uh oh, not one right.” I knew he was joking… and they announced I passed THAT one with 100% correct as well. I hadn’t expected that, and neither had they. That was what I planned to do, but they said that nobody had ever walked in, taken two tests, and had a score like that — and pretty much insisted I try taking the Amateur Extra exam as well. I said I haven’t studied for it at all and really doubt I could pass, but eventually went ahead and took that one too. I didn’t pass, but I don’t think they’d have wanted to let me leave without trying.

After the paperwork was done, they invited me to hang around and chat with their group that was meeting next door for a bit. I did, and drove home.

Then was the frustrating part of the week: waiting for my license. I can’t transmit until the FCC issues my license, even though I had passed the exam. My handheld radio arrived later in the week, and of course I still couldn’t do much with it. Finally the FCC posted my license late yesterday so I was able to talk to people. It’s been fun and I look forward to doing more. I was able to talk to people 55 miles away while driving, and with suitable equipment at home should be able to do much more than that.

Several of the people I talked to were offering me tips. I’ve never seen a group of people so eager to help out someone new. It’s an amazing community and I think Jacob and Oliver will enjoy it one day too.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1511-radios/feed 7 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1487-hardwaremachine-reporting-tools http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1487-hardwaremachine-reporting-tools#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:01:27 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1487 We have a tool at work, Kaseya, for our Windows machines. It handles updates, but also can report back information gathered from them: OS version, patches installed, time since last checkin, last user logged in, user most frequently logged in, plus details about hardware: RAM, disk size, serial number, etc. I’m looking for a tool that can do this on Linux as well.

Of course, we could roll our own; all the above is readily cleaned from standard commands plus examining /proc and /sys. But before we roll our own, we want to be sure there’s nothing else out there worth using.

Down the road, we might also like it to grow in another direction: centralized configuration, storing links between machines and people in a database, and generating DNS, DHCP, etc. configurations out of it. Whether that would be the same tool as this is another question.

There are, of course, expensive and overkilling well-known commercial packages to do this. We’re after something simple that gets the job done.

Any ideas?

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1487-hardwaremachine-reporting-tools/feed 9 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1484-free-range-kids-a-parental-rant http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1484-free-range-kids-a-parental-rant#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 02:10:37 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1484 There’s a lot of unreasonable panic out there these days. Parents that don’t want to let their kids even walk to the mailbox because of an irrational fear of abduction. (Children are more likely to die falling out of bed than be abducted, and before anyone panics, that’s also exceptionally rare.) A woman that let her 11-year-old travel unaccompanied on the NYC subway he’d been riding all his life unleashed a huge controversy.

And there’s also this maddening tendency for some parents to be so worried about wounding their children’s self-esteem that they never want to say they’ve done something wrong, and be so positive to them.

Recent studies, as well as common sense, suggest that both attitudes are rather harmful. Terah and I are believers in letting children have “cheap mistakes”. If I see Jacob running through the kitchen about to trip over a toy he left out, I probably won’t say anything. Him crashing to the floor after running on it won’t even hurt him enough that he’ll cry, but it will probably be far more effective at teaching safety than 20 days worth of me saying “no running in the kitchen.” Of course, we’ll provide comfort for him when he’s sad and be there to support him, but also give him more and more freedom to succeed — or fail — as he grows.

This starts even younger. When he first started feeding himself, he got into this habit of throwing food on the floor. We had some “natural consequences” as a result. If his supper landed on the floor, then he would be all done eating. (Note: Jacob was always on the heavy side at that age anyway.) He couldn’t reach his supper on the floor, and we weren’t going to keep bending over to pick it up for him. Fixed that problem pretty quickly — at least until he learned that he could wait until he was pretty full before throwing his food down on the floor (at which point we added a brief time-out).

Or how about our reaction when he has mistakes. When he breaks something, whether accidentally or on purpose, we don’t give him some sort of affirmation like “Oh, that’s OK, we can fix it” or “good try; you’ll do better next time.” It is NOT OK to rip the pull-up flaps out of a book or to stomp on those peas you dropped on the floor, and there will be predictable and reasonable consequences for doing so.

As a result, when he does a good job, it’ll mean more. He, at 3, has started sounding out letters, knows his alphabet, and can count to about 15 in English and about 3 in German. And those are things we give him a “good job” about.

Two of the best things we can do for our children are: 1) be honest about their successes and failures; and 2) give them room to succeed and room to fail, so they can learn from both while the consequences mean a skinned knee or broken toy instead of a broken rib or foreclosure on a mortgage.

The Free Range Kids FAQ makes excellent reading, and discusses how many of today’s parents grew up enjoying this kind of freedom, and for various reasons are too scared to allow their children that today. Rather sad, really, especially given that today’s world is safer.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1484-free-range-kids-a-parental-rant/feed 4 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1472-bicycling-update http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1472-bicycling-update#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 12:37:05 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1472 I’ve been bicycling to work for awhile now. It’s become pretty much routine for dry days. I can reliably ride the 10 miles to work in less than an hour, even with heavy winds.

My biggest enemy right now: rain. My first few miles are on gravel and sand roads, which aren’t maintained to the highest of standards. When it rains, there will be mud. I ride a Trek 7.3FX, which I bought with the idea of just riding when it’s dry. It works quite well for that. But its slick tires don’t work so well in mud. Plus our mud is sticky, and the tires pick it up, then deposit it on the frame that goes around the wheel and the brake arm. So I have a mess to clean up.

My current dilemma is: do I buy a second bike for use when it’s wet, or there’s a chance of rain? My 7.3FX can’t use tires that are very wide, and a different bike of course could. There would be expense involved, obviously, but I would really like to be able to ride more often than I can now. Winter was pretty damp here and I didn’t get to ride much at all over the winter months. Or, would different tires plus fenders do the trick on the 7.3FX? (I’m thinking not.)

If I do get a different bike, then the question would be whether to sell the 7.3FX. I really like that bike, and imagine it would be faster on the 7 miles or so of paved roads that I ride every day. Perhaps I’d keep it as a fair weather or long-distance bike.

I plan to visit the bike shop tonight and see what my options are.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1472-bicycling-update/feed 14 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1469-some-more-gopher-data http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1469-some-more-gopher-data#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:30:32 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1469 Yesterday, I invited you to download a piece of Internet history. Today I have unearthed a bit more data to add to it.

There is a new torrent with 1.5GB more data (3GB uncompressed). This includes the FTP site from boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher, which was a large collection of Gopher client and server software. Also included was ftp.unicom.com/pub/gn-tools, the old GN server, and wiretap.area.com. This last site was mirrorable via FTP, and included the UMN Gopherd .cap and .Links files, so it can be served up via PyGopherd. The full contents are available in my post to the Gopher mailing list.

Incidentally, thank you to everyone that has helped seed, download, store, host, and otherwise preserve the 2007 archive. It is much appreciated. I have contacted several institutions recommended to me in comments or emails to try to arrange a stable long-term home for the data.

Enjoy.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1469-some-more-gopher-data/feed 0 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1463-moral-obligations-of-free-software-authors http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1463-moral-obligations-of-free-software-authors#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:14:08 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1463 I’ve got a bit of a problem.

I enjoy writing software. I often write software to solve some sort of problem that I’ve had. Usually virtually any code I write winds up in my git repositories, on the theory that it might be useful to someone else. Some of the code that I think might really be useful to people gets even better treatment. OfflineIMAP, for instance, has a very comprehensive manpage, heavily commented example config file, wiki, mailing list, public bug tracker, etc. Most of these I did the majority of the work to create, but OfflineIMAP does occasionally receive code and documentation contributions from others.

Now here’s my dilemma. For my purposes, OfflineIMAP is, well, finished. It does everything I ever wanted it to do, and does it better than I ever expected it would. There are some people that would like it to do other things; for instance, optimize performance for IMAP folders with 100,000 messages in them, do UTF-8 folder name translation, and retry a sync if a connection is lost rather than crash (OfflineIMAP was designed to crash gracefully and be automated, so this has never bothered me.)

None of these are features that I care about, and I don’t have much time to devote to OfflineIMAP these days. It is not an interesting problem to me anymore as, well, I’ve solved it already.

Yet I’ll be honest and say I feel guilty about the bug reports that are stacking up in the OfflineIMAP bug tracking system. OfflineIMAP is used by people that have an expectation for improvement. My efforts to hand over maintainership of OfflineIMAP have failed (the people have gone AWOL shortly after agreeing to maintain it).

This problem is even more acute for hpodder, my command-line podcatcher. hpodder works great and is simple. But I no longer listen to podcasts. At all. (I blame my Kindle for that.) Therefore I no longer even use hpodder. Again, I feel guilty for not working on it; for instance, when language changes broke its UTF-8 support, I haven’t gone in to fix it. Neither has anybody else, for that matter.

This leads me to a dilemma. If I do nothing with my code but toss it on git.complete.org, few people will benefit from it. Most people need documentation, packages for their distribution, etc. git repos don’t tend to show up highly in search engines. So, although technically I’ve shared things with the world by putting them there, practically speaking I haven’t done people many favors.

On the other hand, if I go the whole “responsible maintainer” route, writing documentation, wiki, mailing list, Debian packages, etc., then I have the problem of, well, actual users who want actual support. I feel bad if I’m not in a position to give it to them. Many people seem to have the expectation that software is never “finished” and will continue to be improved. (Ah, if only my name were Knuth I might stand a chance to evade that one. But only a chance, given all the TeX spinoffs.) This expectation, in turn, reduces my enthusiasm for publishing my code online as Free Software. Because now I can’t just toss it up there and say “help yourselves”. Now I get angry emails about all the bug reports piling up. On the other hand, I also get occasional small contributions via my PayPal “tip jar”, which are awesome and motivating.

Despite my grumbling, I do continue to maintain OfflineIMAP, primarily as a patch reviewer these days. I take an aggressive stance on quality, and when I get patches that add features without documentation, I usually write documentation for them before committing them. If I have evidence that a patch hurts quality, I yank it (as I had to do with IDLE support, which was a great feature, but the patch caused all sorts of stability problems due to its requirement of imaplib2.py). For that reason, I suspect, forks haven’t taken off.

So what’s a person that writes niche software to do? OfflineIMAP isn’t at the level of popularity of something like Gnome, or even debhelper, and never will be; its userbase consists of people that think that IMAP support in $MUA isn’t good enough. hpodder is the somewhat small domain of console-loving podcast listeners.

What are your suggestions? Should I abolish the bug trackers and just go for simple? Is there something more I could be doing to make the community feel more empowered? Is simple posting on git.complete.org not as bad as I thought?

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1463-moral-obligations-of-free-software-authors/feed 46 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1441-begin-questioning-my-sanity-now http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1441-begin-questioning-my-sanity-now#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:50:52 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1441 It’s been a long and wet winter here. We live down a dirt/sand/gravel road, and when it rains, it’s difficult to get a car down the road due to mud. And impossible to get a bicycle down it. As a result, I’ve only been able to ride my bicycle to work once since November, and that was in January.

Last Thursday, I intended to ride in to work, but discovered my front tire wouldn’t hold air. I had heard about a wonderful local bike repair shop, so I dropped off the wheel there. The owner replaced the tube and checked it out, and charged me, yes, $4 — including labor and the tube. Nice.

So today was my first ride of the season. I rode a total of 21.8 miles (35 km) today, which was probably unwise enough for being as out of shape as I am. It’s 9.6 miles each way to work, plus I did some errands over lunch.

But add to that the winds — 30 MPH (48 kph) with gusts to 43 MPH (69 kph). This morning, they were weaker and also mostly at my back. This afternoon, though, they were mostly a vicious crosswind. If you’ve bicycled much, you’ll know that’s less annoying than a headwind, but is still quite annoying and takes a lot more energy to battle than you might think.

So, I am now rather sore. And the question is: will I be silly enough to do this again tomorrow?

The answer to that probably depends on how late I stay up watching the Butler/Duke game tonight, as I have to get up an hour earlier on days that I bicycle to work.

I found that the bicycle rack at work — which, somewhat to my annoyance, was moved indoors last year — has been rather disused. It is in a rather dusty and dirty part of our manufacturing shop, and there were large metal bins completely blocking the path to it, which I had to move before I could park my bike.

Then, of course, it was the usual comments — which I take with a smile — about somebody that shows up to work wearing cycling shorts & shirt.

It should be noted that I change into professional clothes at work. But my commute is too long to wear them on the way in and expect to be presentable, non-smelly, and pain-free.

In any case, evidence that this may not have been the best day to start my commute: it hurts to sit at the moment.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1441-begin-questioning-my-sanity-now/feed 7 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1430-its-that-time-of-the-decade-im-reinstalling-debian http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1430-its-that-time-of-the-decade-im-reinstalling-debian#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:07:53 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1430 My main home workstation (previously named katherina, after a distant ancestor) was originally bought a few years ago — probably 2002 or 2003. Since then, it’s had its motherboard upgraded twice, new hard disks, and then even was moved to a completely new machine back in January. Throughout all of that, it’s still running the original sid that I put on it when it was new, dist-upgraded since then, copied to new disks via tar and netcat, but never reinstalled. So it’s probably been less than my average of 10 years on a given Debian install.

But it’s time. For one thing, despite the fact that I was one of the people that helped start Debian’s amd64 port (then known as the pure64 effort), I’ve been running i386 on my 64-bit workstation. For another, I want to switch from XFS to ext4. And finally, it has not escaped my notice that my laptop running Gnome with xmonad feels a lot faster than the far more powerful desktop running KDE4 with xmonad, plus Gnome integrates better with xmonad. And there are some nice gnome bits installed by default that my KDE system doesn’t have, and 400 packages installed on my system that are no longer in any archive. I could, of course, clean that stuff up — but all this adds up to enough of an excuse to start from scratch.

I continue to be very impressed with the quality of squeeze. This will be a very nice release when it comes out.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1430-its-that-time-of-the-decade-im-reinstalling-debian/feed 7 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1343-numerous-updates http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1343-numerous-updates#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:44:23 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1343 It’s been awhile since I’ve posted some family/home updates, so here they are, sorta random-like…

Jacob is 3.5 now, and Oliver is about 8 months old at this point.

Jacob

Jacob has a few trends going on lately: pretending to be a cat, and inventing new games to play. He has one game he likes to play with me called “tunnels and slippers.” He will have me sit on the couch, put my feet up on the footstool, and crawl on top of my legs. He’ll want me to bounce him, then he can crawl underneath the “tunnel.”

The slippers part came because he started to steal my slippers one time during winter. He’d struggle furiously to get it off, then shriek with delight as he ran away, listing to my indignation at having a cold foot now. Then I was supposed to run after him, pick him up in the air, and get the slipper back.

Here he is, trying to steal a slipper while I happened to be holding a camera:



He’s said quite a few memorable quotes this winter:

Dec. 8: Jacob looked outside this morning and yelled, “WOW! Look at that!”, ran across the room and yelled, “MOM! WOW! There is snow outside this window too! WOW! Snow is ALL OVER THE PLACE!”

January: When told his grandparents were going back to Indiana: “The kitty doesn’t like that.” (the pretending to be a cat thing) The next morning when he remembered they were gone: “Oh. My kitty is so very sad now.”

February: My name is kitty. Jacob Cat!”

March: “I didn’t realize the basketball could go so far!”

He’s been starting to make his first attempts at sounding out words. He’s been interested in 2- and 3-digit numbers, trying to figure out how to tell time, and asking me the German words for all sorts of things. (And showing some disappointment with my German vocabulary.)

Jacob talks about Oliver as a “sweet baby,” and is often very caring about him. Jacob wants to make sure Oliver has *plenty* of toys. Though there have been some times when Jacob has pushed Oliver over.

Here’s the Christmas photo of the two of them:



And another:



Jacob has also started to pick up an interest in singing: his favorite song is one that he made up, and it goes “Engine, engine, passenger car…”

I still sing a song to Jacob at bedtime each night, but Home On the Range doesn’t cut it anymore. No, now I have a make up a song on the spot on a topic of Jacob’s choosing each night. Last night he chose “a song about the ceiling light and the smoke detector.” Other nights, it’s been about his toy butterfly, his night light, various smoke detectors (that’s a popular one), or something from his day.

Oliver



Oliver recently has started being able to sit up by himself. He can also scoot all over the room. I think he’s saying “dad”, but Terah disagrees and thinks he’s just babbling. Her case wasn’t helped the day I asked him, “Are you saying Dad?” He got a big smile after the question and laughed at me.

He loves playing peek-a-boo, playing with us — or playing by himself.

Oliver has been eating the mashed-up baby food for awhile. Terah recently gave him a rice puff, and he put it in his mouth but wasn’t sure what to do with it. He has been taking quite an interest in watching the rest of us eat, though, and sits at the table with us in his high chair.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1343-numerous-updates/feed 1 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1315-the-big-publisher-ebook-scam http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1315-the-big-publisher-ebook-scam#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:07:32 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1315 There’s been a lot written about the Amazon vs. Macmillan dust-up. I’ve seen a lot of posts by people that work for publishers saying that there are costs to making a book, and that $9.99 just won’t cut it for an ebook. They say that publishers invest in typesetting, editing, selection, art, and various stages of quality control. All of that is true.

Too bad they aren’t doing it with ebooks.

I’ve had some books published, and while the process varies from publisher to publisher, the editing process usually involves technical editors (people that check my facts), copy editors (people that help the writing and grammar), cover designers, and QC staff. Often I will see PDFs or printed pages at the final stage, and at that point can catch things like bad table formatting or lines split at inopportune places. My point here is that there’s a lot of editing going on, and there are many pairs of eyeballs looking at the printed page before it goes to the presses.

In the year or so since I’ve owned my Kindle, I can absolutely guarantee you that this process is not happening with ebooks. Most of the time, it is quite obvious that nobody has even looked at the finished product. Some intern has whipped up a quick conversion from whatever typesetting software they use, give it a quick glance, and call it good. One of my own books, Real World Haskell, is available in Kindle form. O’Reilly took better than average care of that process, but even so, I certainly didn’t approve screenshots before it went out like I did for paper (not that I’d have had time after the paper project was done anyway.) From memory, some of the flaws I’m aware of:

• Huston Smith’s Why Religion Matters included some illustrations, but they were scanned at such a low resolution that the text was completely unreadable, even at maximum zoom.
• All electronic editions of Lord of the Rings, not just the Kindle version, suffered some serious issues including missing words and deleting 19 characters after each instance of a particular letter.
• Shmoop converted Project Gutenberg versions of The Iliad and Odyssey, but converted each line of Gutenberg text to a Kindle paragraph, wrecking word wrapping.
• Countless examples of hyphenated words in the middle of lines (probably from someone forcing a hyphenation point in a print edition), paragraphs that should have been block-indented but weren’t, etc.

In some of these cases, it is quite obvious that a human didn’t even bother to look at the result. Harper Collins got a huge black eye after their LOTR fiasco, and still took quite a long time to fix it.

Now, if the publishers were actually going to put as much care into the quality of their ebooks as they do into the quality of their paper books, then sure, I’d pay almost the cost of a paperback. But very few of them are doing that. It is quite obvious to me usually by the end of the first chapter of a book whether anybody even looked at the result of their conversion.

Bottom line: If they’re going to sell me an inferior product, don’t expect me to pay near full price. If they can get their act together on quality, only then would they have room to start arguing for higher prices. If all you’re going to do with the ebook is run the paper version through some buggy filter, you haven’t incurred much additional cost, and it is plainly visible to all.

Note: I would like to say that Lonely Planet and O’Reilly have done good jobs with the tools available, and while their results aren’t perfect, they have done a good job working with rendering their sometimes very complex print layouts for a Kindle.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1315-the-big-publisher-ebook-scam/feed 5 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1313-hands-on-with-thinkpad-x200s-and-debian-squeeze http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1313-hands-on-with-thinkpad-x200s-and-debian-squeeze#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:35:35 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1313 I have recently been evaluating small laptops, and wound up purchasing the Thinkpad X200s. It arrived a few days ago, so here are some first impressions.

The Hardware

The X200s is, in a word, awesome. It is light and portable, built solidly, and very fast. With the 6-cell battery, it feels light. The 9-cell makes it physically bigger and heavier, but even so, it is still a light unit even then. The fans run only rarely, and battery life looks to be towards the upper range of what I was expecting, so I am pleased with that.

The screen is a very high-DPI one, and quite bright. However, it is also one of the only drawbacks: its vertical viewing angle is quite poor compared to most other screens I’ve used recently, meaning I’m frequently adjusting it to get the best angle relative to my head.

The keyboard is a pleasant change after having using the Eee 901 for so long. I hadn’t realized just how much of a pleasant change it would be.

I was concerned about the lack of a touchpad, but it appears that the touchpoint device is a lot better than it was on the Thinkpads I used a few years back. I miss a touchpad, but not very much, and far less than I thought I would.

Debian Squeeze

Of course, one of the first things I did with it was to wipe off Windows 7 and install Debian. Now a word about Debian. I rarely do fresh installs. I normally tar up my machine and move it over to new hardware when needed, and upgrade the software over time. However, I wanted to make this a 64-bit install and had no suitable image to move over. I decided to try the default Gnome install in squeeze since I hadn’t tried Gnome in awhile and was about due to give it a shot.

I was very impressed. Squeeze will make an awesome desktop OS. Everything worked perfectly out of the box. It suspended and resumed. X came up in full resolution without me having to do anything. Ethernet worked, and I was helpfully invited to supply the non-free firmware for the wifi on a USB stick during install time. Hardware brightness and volume keys work. The docking station is fully compatible with Linux. Sound works. The hardware “lock screen” key even works. Bluetooth works out of the box. It is a well-integrated, extremely fast, and smooth setup.

Cups is installed out of the box by default, and accepts network printer broadcasts by default too. So I snapped in an Ethernet cable, and when I went to print a few minutes later, I just could. It didn’t even strike me as special until later. Yes, that’s right — I plugged it into the network and, with absolutely zero action on my part, could print to all the printers at work or at home.

The update-manager that Gnome uses by default (I wonder if Debian’s KDE installs yet use one? I have never seen one in KDE) is a wonderful work of simplicity compared to Windows 7′s madness. You click the update icon, click the button to start updating, and 30 seconds later get a message that 45 updates have been installed. With no ominous “reboot now” message. This is no surprise to me as a long-time Debian developer, but I just wanted to highlight it here. I think I should file a wishlist bug on update-manager asking them to improve the wording in the box to say “There is no need to reboot your computer” :-)

I still have my gripes about Gnome. It only lets me choose some pre-defined settings for screensaver timeouts, for instance. I still feel that KDE gives me more control. But Gnome seems to be better integrated with the entire system, faster, and less buggy. This difference is especially acute at login time. This laptop logs me in far faster than my Core 2 Quad machine at home running KDE (from sid) does.

So, of course, my next task is to integrate xmonad with Gnome. Should be fun.

Now, a final word on why I wrote this. None of these components have been a surprise really to me (aside from the completeness of the hardware support for this laptop). But what I want to bust is the myth that somehow Debian is difficult to use on the desktop. It isn’t. This setup was easier by far than the Windows 7 install I did on a different machine recently. Although it has less eye candy than Windows 7, it exudes solidity, performance, power, and yes, ease of use in every way.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1313-hands-on-with-thinkpad-x200s-and-debian-squeeze/feed 23 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1307-greek-mythology-and-the-old-testament http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1307-greek-mythology-and-the-old-testament#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:25:49 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1307 I have lately been reading Homer’s epic poems: first The Iliad, and now I am nearly done with The Odyssey.

I figure there isn’t anyone alive today that believes that Zeus literally caused thunder in answer to a prayer, or that Athene really transformed Ulysses between having a youthful and an aged physical appearance at a whim.

Despite our understanding that these poems don’t reflect a literal truth, we still find meaning and truth in them. It is for this reason that they are read by high school and college students all over the world. This same reason drives our reading of more modern plays and novels — everything from King Lear to Catcher in the Rye. We learn something of the author’s world, something about our world, and if we are truly lucky, a deeper understanding of the universal truths of human life.

And it is with that preface that I suggest that the Old Testament — or parts of it, at least — ought to be read in the same manner.

Modern Christianity speaks of a loving, caring God, one who is deeply concerned for the wellbeing of all. Under this understanding, forgiveness is more desired than retribution, and helping the week is better than enslaving them. How then can one square that with a literal reading of the Old Testament?

This was a key question I asked over a span of perhaps 15 years. I was perplexed that the God of Love ought to turn someone into a pillar of salt for turning her head the right way, that almost all life on earth might be extinguished by a flood, that slavery is condoned and regulated, and all sorts of people being stoned to death, animals killed for no reason. In short, the God of the Torah, at least, didn’t seem to me to be even the same person as the God the Church talks about.

I raised this question with many people, and there was even a seminar on it at a convention I went to in 2001. The answers I got usually were of one of two types: 1) God is beyond our comprehension, and this is one of the mysteries we will never understand because that’s just the way it is; or 2) the arrival of Jesus changed things, and it’s impossible for a modern person to fully appreciate the laws as they existed prior to that. These are really two sides of the same stick: they’re both saying, “Yep, that’s odd. But we have to believe that the Bible is inerrant and literally true, so we just have to accept the mystery and move on.”

Except I’m not so good at accepting mysteries and moving on.

It strikes me as odd that nobody even mentioned the third option: that some of the stuff in the Old Testament is, to be blunt, made up. This even though I have come to learn later that some of those people probably believed this to be the most correct explanation.

Now, that doesn’t mean it has no value or that is doesn’t show us truth. Romeo & Juliet was made up, but we learn from it.

A typical example of this is the creation myth. There are some that are very defensive about it, perhaps thinking that it weakens their religion to admit it might not be literally true. To me, I find that insisting upon its literal truth weakens the religion; can we not see how a piece of literature speaks to us today and leave it at that? Need we say that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is an inferior play because it is a work of historical fiction?

The position I suggest here is not some crazy nutjob position. Wikipedia has a concise overview of some of the scholarship surrounding these ideas.

I now count myself as somewhat inspired by Homer to read the Old Testament in the same way that I read Homer: as a story that can speak to us today, one that inspired a nation in captivity and after, and launched perhaps the most amazing religious movement in history.

I only wish that more people would admit the possibility of a non-literal reading of the Bible. This return to an earlier era of Christianity is, in my mind, the only way that Christianity can maintain its relevance in this age.

Update: A note I received suggests I ought to make a bit of a clarification. I am not bothered by the fact that people have differing opinions about the historicity of Genesis. I’m all for putting all the opinions out there for sure. I think that really the concern over whether Genesis is literally true or not is mostly irrelevant. I have no problem with Christians that find Genesis to be literally true. What I’m lamenting is the attitude that “you’re not Christian if you’re not sure that Genesis is literally true” or “saying anything else about Genesis undermines Christianity.” I believe neither of those statements, and would really rather that we collectively got past the creationism vs. evolution debate already.

Update 2: It appears that my use of a bit of technical language has caused some confusion. A creation myth can be defined as “a supernatural story or explanation that describes the beginnings of humanity, earth, life, and the universe (cosmogony), often as a deliberate act by one or more deities.” It is a category of explanations. Simply calling the Genesis story a “creation myth” is an act of categorization only, and doesn’t imply anything about its accuracy or value.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1307-greek-mythology-and-the-old-testament/feed 102 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1305-98-9-of-kansas-may-die-next-month http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1305-98-9-of-kansas-may-die-next-month#comments Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:18:16 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1305 My subject line is a little over-dramatic, but only a little.

Like many states, Kansas is facing a severe budget problem. Last year, the state cut many programs to the bone and beyond. Nursing homes, schools, universities, and charities have all been hard-hit. A 10% cut in Medicaid reimbursement rates and similar cuts to education have been devastating. Institutions are wondering how they can survive.

Here’s the thing: in rural communities, the very survival of the community is often dependent upon the survival of its schools, nursing home, hospital, or college. Take any one of those things away and the community begins a slow and painful death. This has happened over and over, and right now the Kansas legislature has a simple choice: Do they make a temporary 1% increase in sales tax, and also some increases in tobacco/alcohol taxes, or not?

If they do, they can get funding back to normal levels. If they do not, funding will be cut even further, which will certainly cripple many institutions.

There are a lot of people opposed to this tax. I’m not one of them; I think it’s key to the survival of our rural communities and the competitiveness of the state as a whole.

98.9% of Kansas is rural.

See the gravity of the situation?

Please, if you are a Kansas resident, write your representatives and leave a comment here saying you did (and what you wrote, if you like). The easiest way to find your state senator and representative is to go to a state website, then scroll down to “information by county”, click on your county, and then click on the districts to see a map if you need one. (The find by address feature seems to be hopelessly broken.)

Here’s what I wrote:

Subject: Please raise my taxes

I write with a request I don’t make lightly: please raise my taxes, and support the 1% sales tax increase with the 3-year sunset provision.

The consequences of failing to do so are terrible. Losing nursing homes or schools would mean the long-term death of many rural communities. Our community leaders are fearing not just for nursing homes being gone; there is a real threat of entire communities facing a slow extinction.

The 10% Medicaid cuts already made are having a devastating impact on many quality institutions, and if left in place for any length of time could result in quality organizations closing, or refusing to accept Medicaid. And even deeper cuts are being contemplated. Even for those that plan well and have long term care insurance would be harmed if the nursing homes they might contemplate living in one day have closed due to today’s Medicare cuts.

I fear for our schools as well. Our two boys will be of school age
soon, and we live in a district that is of one of Kansas’ exceptionally strong rural schools. So far, our school is coping, but I am concerned about the drive to consolidate our rural schools, which would result in unreasonable travel distances and would be unlikely to duplicate the excellence of the schools we have now.

I fear for our early childhood and university systems; without a good beginning in life, Kansas will face higher costs later. Without an affordable university system, Kansas will be less competitive.

If small communities lose their schools, nursing homes, college students, or hospitals, some of them won’t survive as towns. This hurts everyone in the state.

When my wife and I moved from Indianapolis to rural Kansas in 2002, we, like many homebuyers, carefully studied the quality of schools and medical facilities available. If Kansas wants to be able to attract residents and the businesses that want a qualified labor pool, it must remain competitive. Forcing our best institutions to close — a permanent problem — over a short-term budget problem isn’t going to help with that at all. It will hurt all of Kansas, rural and urban alike, if vast portions of our state become less attractive due to these problems. We likely would not have moved to the state at all if its rural communities were dead or dying. How many taxpaying Kansans will we lose if we let their communities suffer?

Americans these days have plenty of choices where to live. I don’t see many people choosing where to live based on a 1% difference in sales tax. I do see plenty of people making decisions based on quality of schools, hospitals, universities, roads, and even nursing homes.

Please help save our rural communities and keep Kansas — all of it — competitive.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1305-98-9-of-kansas-may-die-next-month/feed 7 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1301-netbook-notebook-update http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1301-netbook-notebook-update#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:10:08 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1301 Two days ago, I posted about looking for a new netbook or notebook, and asked for people’s advice. Since then, I’ve done some investigation based on these suggestions.

Rejected Candidates

First, I’ve outright rejected several options. The Thinkpad X100e was out, mainly because it doesn’t compare favorably to the Acer 1810TZ. The X100e’s battery life is worse than the 1810TZ, it is heaver, and has a single-core CPU. Secondly, the EeePC 1201N was ruled out. Again, its battery life was quite a bit worse than the 1801TZ, and also worse than my existing Eee 901. Finally, the EeePC was out because of its extremely slow performance.

Remaining Candidates

I took information from notebookcheck for models I was interested in, and those suggested in the comments at the earlier post. After reviewing them, I made a comparison chart showing issues that matter most to me.

Candidates: Battery Life

Let’s start with battery life. The X200s presents an interesting picture here. In the 9-cell battery, we can expect over 15 hours of life in idle mode, and 7 hours when surfing the Internet over wifi. This was best in class performance for the idle and surf tests, but when under load it drops to one of the worst ad only 2.57 hours. This could correlate with what Lars Wirzenius commented, saying the X200s battery life is poor: obviously it is doing a lot of power management in software to achieve its runtimes, and if a default Linux installation isn’t doing that power management, battery life could be poor.

The other standard in terms of battery life was the Acer 1810TZ, with 12 hours runtime in idle usage and almost 6 when surfing the net with wifi: that’s an hour longer than my Eee 901. It was also the best performer under full load of anything on my chart.

Disappointing results were turned in by the HP 2530p. Even with a 9-cell battery, it couldn’t match the 1810TZ’s battery life. The Dell E4200, with its 6-cell battery, fared even worse — though I should note notebookcheck hasn’t tested the E4200, so those figures come from elsewhere.

Candidates: Size and Weight

Looking at weight, the X200s and E6200 turn in amazing weights at under 3 pounds for a 12″ notebook. HP’s 2530p is the heaviest in the group at 3.84 pounds with the 6-cell battery (the 9-cell will be heavier but I couldn’t find specs on it). The 1810TZ checks in at 3.1 pounds, a bit more than half a pound heavier than my Eee 901.

Considering size, the E4200 is the thinnest in the group at just 0.79 inches thick. The 2530p is also thin, but is one of the deepest. The Eee 901 is smallest in terms of length and depth, but it is the thickest of all.

Candidates: Performance

Here you can really see why I complain about the Eee 901 being slow. On the PCMark 05 test, it had a third of the performance of the 1810TZ. The best performer was the X200s, followed by HP’s 2530p.

In terms of hard disk speed, the E4200 was fastest due to its SSD (though I suspect these tests are not fully evaluating write performance). The SSD on the EeePC 901 didn’t help it; it finished with less than half the speed of the E4200.

Conclusions

From this chart, it looks like there are only three really interesting models: the X200s with its top-of-the-line performance and display, the HP 2530p, and the 1810TZ with its stellar battery life. The disappointing battery life on the E4200 rules it out for me. The battery life on the HP 2530p is modiocre, but it has a touchpad.

For the 1810TZ, my main concerns are size of screen and the fact that the screen is glossy. I am not at all a fan of glossy screens.

For the HP 2530p, we’ve had an HP 2510p in at work. Its size is virtually identical to the 2530p, and felt a bit bigger than I’d like. It was also lighter than the 2530p, but still a bit heaver that I’d like to see. But the 12″ screen might be worth it.

The X200s lacks a touchpad, which is a major annoyance in my book. I have reports of 7-hour battery life on it with the L9400 CPU under Ubuntu. Another person has reported 12 hours on Arch Linux using a power saving guide (which looks helpful in general as well).

Considering size and weight, the X200s is lighter than the 1810TZ, though only by a little if using the 9-cell battery. It’s very slightly bigger in every dimension than the 1810TZ, but perhaps not enough to influence the decision.

What are your thoughts?

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1301-netbook-notebook-update/feed 16 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1290-system-administrators-might-save-your-life http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1290-system-administrators-might-save-your-life#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:39:35 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=1290 There’s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of system administrators. Unless you’re one, it’s probably hard to grasp the full weight of it. This week has been full of reminders for me.

This afternoon, shortly after lunch, I got word that people were having trouble with phones. A few minutes of testing showed that calls within our city were working fine, but it was completely impossible to place or receive long-distance calls. A little while later, a local newspaper’s website indicated that numerous cities over a multi-county region, all served by the CenturyLink local telephone company, were out of service in this manner. I figure that represents hundreds of square miles, or a patch of rural Kansas roughly the size of Los Angeles.

Adding to the problem was the fact that emergency 911 services are accessed via these long-distance lines that were down. For roughly three hours, 911 was completely down across this entire area. What’s more, many cellphone towers and Internet access options were also taken down, since they feed from these same lines.

This adds up to a situation that could very easily cost lives due to delayed response of emergency medical, fire, or police services.

In the end, the problem was traced to “a bad controller card on a Titan 5500 owned by AT&T.”

Now, here’s the system administration angle: If you worked for the phone company and had to troubleshoot a problem that you knew had taken down emergency services for thousands of people, what kind of pressure would you be feeling? Would you be able to keep your cool? I’m glad that I don’t have that kind of job.

I also wouldn’t like to be the engineer (or, more likely, accountant) that decided that they didn’t need any more redundancy to provide good service to the area. Especially considering this is the second time in the last year or two this has happened.

But, ironically, yesterday I signed a purchase order for a new Asterisk PBX (corporate phone) server. When selecting a machine for that task, I am always completely conscious of the responsibility on my shoulders: several hundred employees rely on the machine that is ultimately my responsibility to select. Our own access to 911 would be cut if the machine were to go down. I never forget that the correct operation of the systems that our team sets up and deploys could help save someone’s life, and that a malfunction could cost the company dearly in terms of revenue, productivity, image — or worse.

Nearly four years ago, we switched from an analog PBX, with outsourced support, to a digital VOIP system running Asterisk. Note that we use VOIP in-house, but do not use it externally. Anyhow, I can not say that the Asterisk PBX has been 100% perfect; I doubt that this could be honestly said of any PBX of any complexity.

I can say, though, that it saved us well over $100,000 AND has proven far more reliable than the system it replaced. Outages are exceptionally rare and brief now. Plus we have internal expertise to fix it, rather than having to wait for a technician to be dispatched from a city 2 hours away to fix anything. I know I don’t have the resources to build a perfect PBX that will never go down (if such a thing is even possible), but I take my responsibility regarding a reliable PBX extremely seriously.

We used to have a frequent problem: someone would call 911, then hang up. We suspected this was often on accident — maybe people hit 9 for an outside line, then misdialed their number. In any case, 911 dispatch would then call our main office, saying they got a hangup. A person or team would then go across our entire campus making sure nobody was in distress — that nobody had managed to dial, then passed out, for instance.

With Asterisk, I was able to help this situation. Whenever somebody calls 911 now, two emails are generated: the first contains details about the call, such as the extension number that called and the duration of the call. This goes to all people that are likely to receive a callback from 911. It may not always pinpoint the source (as with somebody using a wireless phone), but almost every time will give us a very good idea where the call came from. The second email is a recording of the call, and serves as an additional clue, but goes to fewer people.

I am aware that email isn’t a perfect medium, but: it let us make a dramatic (albeit imperfect) solution to a problem that very few institutions our size are able to address nearly so well.

There’s a lot of weight on our shoulders: keeping the accounting system up, the Internet links up, the web store or the sales phone lines, the shipping systems or the document archives up. These things going down can spell deep trouble in many ways.

And sometimes the systems we maintain might save a life. Such as this morning, when someone was feeling symptoms of a heart attack, used our phones to call a colleague for help, that person called 911, and an ambulance was dispatched. I know the system worked exactly as it should, because I had two familiar emails from Asterisk in my mailbox this morning when I got to work.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1290-system-administrators-might-save-your-life/feed 7