Windicanes

Here in Idaho, the joke is if the wind quits, all the buildings will fall over.

Then there are days like today. Constant winds gusting to 40 and 50 miles per hour, totally demolishing the greenhouse I made for the tomatoes. Fortunately, the tomatoes have not been planted, otherwise they would all have been crushed. You can tell I'm an American because that's the biggest stresser I've had today. Well, that and the stock market falling nearly 400 points. I'm so tired of watching my tiny investments get even tinier. Reminds me of the old Steve Martin routine: "Yeah, I got ten dollars, I think I'll just throw it out in the street. Oh, I can get in here (Steve's show) for ten dollars? OK."

Went to the post office today and on the way in I ran into an old guy. He asked what I thought of the wind, and even before I could answer, he said "I hate it!" You know it's windy in Idaho when the old guys start complaining about it.

I think it's evidence that Mother Nature officially hates humanity. She's tried shaking us off with earthquakes, drowning us with floods, hurricanes and the like, vacuuming us up with tornadoes, burying us with snow and mudding us to death with torrential spring rains. Not all of that has happened in Idaho of course, We haven't had hurricanes, at least.

On windy days like this, our eight-year-old refers to the wind and "windicanes." I like that.

Me for Veep

Dear Mr. Obama,

I’d like you to consider choosing me as your vice president.

I admire your idea of bringing change to Washington, however vague your ideas of change might be. I say vague because, like most Americans, I haven’t been following much the day-to-day primary process, and only get my news from the randomly-heard sound bite, occasional mentions on Digg and those whacked-out folks at the Huffington Post. Perhaps you have very firm ideas of what this change might need to be. Let’s hear them. Like you, I’m all ears.

What would my name on the ticket bring you? It could well change a red state (Idaho) blue. Okay, who am I kidding? The last time Idaho voted for a Democratic president was, I believe, for Lyndon Baines Johnson. And that was, if I remember right, because he promised to KEEP us in an unpopular war. So we’re a little whacked out here. We’ve had a Democratic governor – Cecil Andrus – and a fairly prominent Democratic senator – Frank Church. But such political affectations rotate around personality, and are anomalies for red-state Idaho. But with a native son on the ticket, you might get, you know, 25 to 30 percent of the popular vote here, which is saying something. You could get at least five percent of the vote simply because you’re not Hillary.

True, Idaho’s numbers don’t look promising for Democrats – You did win the state primary by a nearly four-to-one margin, but if the election had already been held, you would have lost to John McCain, who got just over 87,000 votes to your nearly 17,000. Of those Republican votes, I could probably earn you, at most, a dozen – and those would be immediate family members. Or some of them, at least. But there is a sizeable portion of the Idaho Republican party unsatisfied with the current crop of Republican hopefuls. Six percent of those who went to the polls May 27 – a total of 7,974 voters – indicate they’re uncommitted among Republican presidential hopefuls. Even in Madison County – touted as the reddest county in the United States – a full eight percent of those who voted in the Republican primary are uncommitted. That represents, of course, disappointment that Mitt Romney isn’t on the ballot. Choosing a Mormon VP (I’m waiting for your call, Mr. Obama) could help tip the scales. Not enough to win Idaho, of course; plenty of Mormon Democrats have proved that in the past. I’d bring religion into the race by asking everyone who asked a question about my Mormonism the Golden Question: Would you like to know more? That’ll shut ‘em up in a hurry.

What else could I bring? Doritos, probably. But I insist on having my own bag. We have a wiener dog. I have my own pair of steel-toed boots. If those aren’t good in politics, I don’t know what would be. Aside from a protective cup, I imagine.

The biggest thing I could bring is Change, Mr. Obama. Why pick some slick political insider with a hundred thousand skeletons in his or her closet, when you can pick a half-Dutch former journalist technical writer father of three who has an amusing collection of rocks that resemble pig noses? I may have a few skeletons in the ol’ closet, but they’re more along the lines of cornering my sister [name redacted to protect the innocent] in the bathroom when I was six and peeing all over her because my older sister Chris [name included because she’s not all that innocent in this case] told me that if [name redacted] didn’t let me use the potty first, I should pee on her.

I don’t know a thing about politics, the economy, the military, the balance of funds, mortgages (aside from how escrows work) and I’m in favor of putting the violence back in all those old Bugs Bunny cartoons. Give me an assignment and I run with it. All right, I run as far as the nearest pizza parlor, but I do indeed run. As a neophyte, I might find ways to cut through red tape, cut spending, bloat, graft, waste and, at the same time, develop a fuel made from rocks, and give you all the credit because, Mr. Obama, I am, generally, a self-effacing kind of guy. I also might spend all my time at the vice presidential desk surfing the net and whirling around in that big leather chair. But you’ve got to admit that’s more than most vice presidents do, don’t you think? And just think of the Village Idiot vote you’d capture. I won’t even require a secure, undisclosed location because, if there’s trouble, I’ll just head home to Sugar City, and there are people in Idaho Falls, only 26 miles away, that don’t know where the hell that is, so I can’t get more secure or undisclosed, unless I go hide in one of the lava tubes out in the desert. As a plus, I don’t hunt, so there’s absolutely no chance I’ll shoot a lawyer friend, even by accident. Even if I had lawyer friends. Even if I had friends.

Change this year could mean, Mr. Obama, bringing a complete political outsider into the White House. Don’t poll after poll show that Americans are sick of politics as usual? An Obama/Davidson ticket could bill itself as Politics as Unusual.

I promise I won't get all White Boy ethnic with you, either. You and your wife may fist-thump all you want. I'll settle for something along the lines of the Wonder Twins activating their powers or something a la Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy. I'll be Barnacle Boy.



I'm not bitter, though I am religious.

Oh. And I own all eleven seasons of MASH on DVD, plus the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We could have us a time with all those plasma TVs in the white house, unless Dubya takes them all back to Crawford with him.

So, Mr. Obama, I’d like to hear from you.

Vice Presidentially Yours,

BD

Vyvyan is bored

Don't get me bored.

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

I may not be cut out for formal report writing.

This is a good thing.

To each his own, I say. And if my own isn’t dry as toast formal writing, report writing, abstracts and summaries, so be it.

It all started when I used a metaphor to help compare two summaries in an essay I had to write for my formal report writing class. Note I say “had to write.” The other writing I’ve done for other classes hasn’t felt like writing. It’s been fun. This class, it feels like writing, so help me. You can read my full essay here, using this really nifty file-sharing tool I found while researching stuff for my Second Life class. It’s called issuu.com.

Besides the stupid name, the service is great. They offer space to post documents online so they can be read there or posted to blogs. I’ve so far used it for private documents, though I’m befuddled that some of these documents are showing up as being read. Maybe people can still read them. Well, obviously they can. I’m using it because they let you post PDFs online – which most other online document repositories won’t let you do, for some reason I can’t fathom.

Anyway, my professor Dr. Shook didn’t much like how the metaphor got in the way of his reading of my assignment. Oh well. I still got full points for it, probably because he’s tired of dealing with me. I just don’t see why formal has to equal dull, which it does in spades in most of the formal papers I’ve read. I know there’s a place for dullness, but I believe if there’s a metaphor or artistic device that can help a reader understand an interpretation, we use it. I know not everyone thinks that way. I’ve suffered under the journalism teachers who pondered how fiction writers do what they do because “they have to make it all up.” I thought that was the point. But as I am fond of saying, I am no genius. I do not know the atlas.

Yes, I'm having a ball with this issuu.com feature. And the blog in general (as evidenced by all the junk I've been adding here lately. Perhaps it's a bit much. Just don't get me bored. . .

My Take on A Few Things

Hillary Clinton: She will not concede the race tonight. She will, perhaps, acknowledge that Barack Obama is “close” to winning the nomination. She will provide mathematical proofs that she could still win the nomination. The fight will go on to the convention. The undecided Democratic Superdelegates will see a few trickle into the Obama camp over the next few weeks, but the majority will hold off on a decision, pondering, as every good Democrat should, which candidate to support. And by support, I mean the Doonesbury notion of support, as when Alex and Mike are discussing her decision to vote for Howard Dean (I keep wanting to type John Dean; I’ve read too much about the Nixon administration) in the last election cycle: I believe I have the right,” young Alex says, “to pick the candidate I want, no matter if it brings the party down in flames.” “You’re a Democrat,” her father replies. “I thought so,” she adds. (Wish I could find the comic, but I can’t.)

The FLDS situation: Texas Supreme Court orders the kids be shipped home, the church vows not to perform underage marriages. Texas CPS waits in the wings, ready to swoop in if an FLDS parent so much as farts near one of their kids. The church or individual church members file lawsuits against Texas CPS and look likely to win. Texas CPS will blame the whole situation on Arizona and Utah, forgetting that they’re the ones who put FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs behind bars while Texas CPS lurched into YFZ Ranch with the Constitution stuck on the bottom of their shoes. The Christian Right will continue its umbrage because religious tolerance is supposed to be tolerance of things like The Ten Commandments monuments on public property, “In God We Trust” remaining on our coinage and other superficialities, rather than on, you know, religious tolerance. The Left will continue its umbrage because of, as James Lileks puts it, their disgust in not what these people believe, but that they believe.

This all reminds me a bit of something I read this week in Jonh Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. Following Canto XXI, Ciardi includes a fairly lucid commentary on Catholic versus Protestant umbrage, entitled “A General Note on Dante’s Treatment of the Grafters and Their Guards.” He writes:

It has often seemed to me that the offensive language of Protestantism is obscenity; the offensive language of Catholicism is profanity or blasphemy; one finds on a scale of unmentionable words for bodily function, the other on a scale of disrespect for the sacred. Dante places the blasphemous in Hell as the worst of the Violent against God and His Works, but he has no category for punishing those who use four-letter words.

Of course, in America there’s equal-opportunity umbrage. In this instance, however, I think Texas CPS let their obsession over the “obscenity” of FLDS practices overwhelm them. Not that child abuse, proven or suspected, is acceptable, or unobscene. But they want in with some pretty shaky evidence, as the courts have shown, letting their umbrage over plural marriage fill in the details where, in most cases, the detail will likely prove not to be present. The FLDS vow not to authorize underage marriage, if it holds, likely will be tested by CPS, unable to get past the obscenity they perceive.

Oh, Have We Got A Video?

Just for fun.

I made this video of my kids and dog climbing the North Menan Butte -- an extinct volcano about 20 miles weast of where we live -- for Uncharted.net. Until it's posted there, I thought I'd let the tiny audience of this blog enjoy it.

And while I'm at it, I'll make a supplementary message:

WHY I LOVE FARK.COM:

"Window on American Airlines plane shatters, takes out engine shortly after takeoff. Passengers charged $15 "skid-mark removal" fee prior to boarding replacement plane." (Posted there 6.2.08.)

An Experiment

Please bear with me. Another experiment in the works.

In the words of Dr. Fronkensteen: "IT . . . COULD . . . WOOORRRRRK!"

Integrating Virtual Environments in the Workplace

NOTE: Another essay from a class I'm currently taking.

About a week ago, Da7id and I had a conversation while farting around Second Life – he asked the question (I’m paraphrasing here): Do you see any possibilities for Second Life in your professional world? I believe I answered maybe – Second Life has inherent strengths, some of which it shares in common with the MUDs and MOOs Churchill and Bly speak of in their article “Virtual Environments at Work: ongoing use of MUDs in the Workplace.” But Second Life, like the worlds this article describes, has inherent weaknesses that will prevent workplace adoption of SL as a professional tool, especially when compared with professional tools such as phones and e-mail which already have management blessings.

All of this may be a generational thing – Da7id and I agreed that in another generation or two, SL and other, more advanced virtual environments, may indeed be the norm.

I believe successful integration of technology hinges on management and participant acceptance of the technology and the nature of the workplace.

It’s interesting to note that the participants in the Argonne MUD Churchill and Bly describe are desk jockeys, or appeared to be so – many of them mentioned using the MUD to avoid having to visit others’ cubicles, and that they maintained an open MUD window on their computers. Bly and Churchill insist that for the MUD strategy to work, “it is clear that there needs to be a critical mass of users (101).” This arrangement works, however, only if the critical mass of workers are bound to desks, or do much of their work at their desks, whether at home or in the workplace. But if the critical mass leaves out a category of worker that is essential to the discussion, the MUD (and Second Life) has its professional limitations.

Where I work, the people who work in Operations aren’t bound to their desks, as their work is in the field, away from their computers. The accepted management technology plan includes emphasis on e-mails and phones. Top-tier operational personnel are assigned BlackBerrys, so they can get their e-mail on the go. Our document revision and approval process involves a computer program that is analogous to a MUD room, though it is limited to asynchronous communication. To enter this “room,” users have to be at their computers. Often when we need concurrence on a document, we have to literally drag our operators to their computers, away from the work they’re doing. They barely have the time to make e-mail work; they simply don’t put in enough desk time to make a MUD work. This is true for many who work here – ranging from radiological engineers to industrial hygienists. To find them in their office at a computer is a rarity. These people lie in the critical path of the work we do – so for the MUD to work, management would have to realize that these operators need more computer time than they’re allotted. As interviewee Rob notes in Churchill and Bly’s article, the computer is not an official Operational tool – the phone is.

Churchill and Bly write further: “Organizational endorsement is a clear factor in the uptake of any technology. Resistance was clear in a number of our interviewees who either were resistant themselves or feared the resistance of those they considered important (104).” Selling a MUD or Second Life would be a challenge, especially considering the limitations of the technology. Those who use the MUD at Argonne obviously sold it as an important tool in their collaborations. Such an effort would equally be needed to sell Second Life. Such salesmanship is possible -- even considering the limitations described later.

I sincerely believe there are professional potentials in Second Life, and other similar environments. But getting the necessary buy-in (and approved computer time) for all participants will be a limiting factor. Churchill and Bly recognize this as a serious problem. It may be up to individual groups to show the utility of using MUDs, SL, in collaborative, creative ways that get the results management wants – management seems flexible in letting us get our work done in any way we see fit, as long as it meets the regulatory requirements and is done in a timely fashion.

Other restrictions include: Hardware requirements, document limitations, and the potential for goofing off and the mere appearance of unprofessionalism.

Hardware – I think it’s a safe bet only a small percentage – if any – of the computers where I work meet the minimum hardware requirements SL asks for. Our computers are an average four years old and were purchased as “glorified word processors,” with limited processing speed and graphics capabilities.

Document limitations -- The MUDs Churchill and Bly write about share a common shortfall with Second Life – the inability to share documents effectively. “We would probably – at least I would probably visit more if I could, for example, send an equation to, say, Marv, and say, “Marv, what do you think of this equation?” writes Jerry, an infrequent MUD user (105). “Right now, if you want to do that, you either have to come up with some method to translate that . . .” Rather than face the extra time involved in making such conversions, and in the interest of preserving document formatting, outside graphics and other issues, SL users who rely on exchanging documents may simply revert to e-mail, a much simpler method of sharing documents. An obvious work-around is to use SL in conjunction with a word processor and e-mail program – but that would easily convince those reluctant to use the collaborative possibilities in SL that SL does not fit the need – why use an elaborate 3-D environment when the word processors and e-mail we have “works better”?

SL could take a great leap forward Limits on the kind of rich textual information that can be exchanged – it’s great for talking, poorer for documents. SL gives option to go to web pages or play movies, power points, for a fee (albeit nominal in most cases) – should also give option to open up common document formats (RTF, PDF, et cetera) and allow those to be uploaded to avatar inventories in order to make the note card tool much more professional. I have searched for ways to do this, but to no avail. Cut-and-paste methodology may work with the SL note cards, but again, the note cards are not set up as word processors, but simply a method of sharing simple texts.

Goofing off/professionalism -- Churchill and Bly write, “A number of people complained about the rich descriptions and the mapping convention utilized in this particular MUD. This was seen to be frivolous, not in keeping with the organization’s image and a distraction when unnecessary test was being sent to the screen (105).” Again, the same can be said of SL. Even in the professional environments we encounter there, there is an element of frivolity that would be distracting to some, adding fuel to their desire to cut SL from the tools they use for work.

An Experiment

Please bear with me. I'm trying something:

http://www.writer.zoho.com/index.do?shrDocId=meeting-summary1

Thank you.

As Charlie Brown would say: Rats.

Thought For the Day

I'm not a complete idiot. There are still some details to be worked out.