Colosse County has a setup called “early voting”, designed to try to relieve pressure at the polls so that there aren’t 7-8 hour lines on election day. Basically, for ~2 weeks before the election, people are allowed to show up at any “early voting” location in the county (regardless of their normal voting precinct), present their voter ID, and the ballot for their registered precinct will come up for them. This allows people to vote on their lunch break, coming home from work, or anywhere else that fits their schedule.

Unfortunately, when the Colosse County Voters’ Registration Office screws up, it screws up royally. Supposedly there is a little-known “loophole” in Colosse law that states that if someone moves, but their voter registration isn’t moved with them, they can show up at the polls, sign a change-of-address form… and then vote (legally) on the old ballot despite not meeting the residency requirements. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the signage at the polling places did not know of this loophole, and put in very large letters dire warnings about trying to vote for a race in a location you do not currently live in.

The inept, incompetent CCVRO has not honored of any the change of addresses I have mailed them in the past five years and thus mailed my official voter registration card for this year to an address I used to live at five years ago, approximately 40 miles from my current home.

And so, when I went to vote today, I found that my right to vote in local elections had essentially been stolen by the incompetence of the CCRVO… and I have no legal recourse on the matter. I considered voting in the races specific to my old precinct, but I couldn’t (despite REALLY hating the guts of one of the congressional candidates) do that in good conscience; instead, I voted only in the races I was sure that (by my current residency) I was actually, legally and morally, allowed to vote in. Three libertarian votes, one Democrat vote and a vote for an unaligned county judge later… I was out, my vote essentially meaningless in everything except the judges’ race and the one Democrat vote.

And that is how the Colosse County Voter Registration Office stole from me my right to vote. My one bit of solace comes from the fact that my Democrat vote was a vote to fire (with reasonable hope of victory) the utterly incompetent CC Tax Assessor / Voter Registrar Peter Wageringdocket.

Three stories:

In high school, I had a friend named Cruz. In the course of our friendship, I had my faith in friendship rocked by my best friend attempting to steal a girl that I was kinda-sorta-but-not-really dating. If a friend would do that to you, what use was friendship? So I coined new phrases for the people that I used to call friends. Cruz was honestly hurt when I didn’t call him my friend. He stood by me, though, and eventually things returned to normal.

In college, my roommate Hubert stumbled upon some IM conversations where I told a story about something that he’d done and I had portrayed him in a pretty devastating light and implied in the email that I had a pretty negative opinion of him altogether and that me and some friends talked about him in this negative light with some frequency.

Last year, a friend of mine came across something that I had written to someone else about her. Not to mince words, it came across pretty much as a scathing rebuke of her very existence. It was merciless, unfair, and not without some exaggerations and inaccuracies. I felt genuinely bad about the whole situation. I had difficulty sleeping and had to take some long looks at myself in the mirror. The strange thing, though, was that I felt less guilty about what I’d said (save for the inaccuracies) but that I had expressed these thoughts in a way that they could get back to her. I felt bad not so much for having the opinion that I did, but rather for being so careless in how I expressed them and hurting her in the process.

I am one of those people that does talk negatively around some friends behind their back. It’s not one of my more flattering characteristics. I generally do so, however, within certain bounds. I have my own ethical system. On one hand, I believe in being diplomatic with people that you don’t like and not creating any more conflict than already exists in this world. I am not a person that believes that honesty is always the best policy when it comes to such things. On the other hand, I also believe that it’s wrong and an overall bad thing to poison people’s attitudes towards one another by talking about them behind their back. On the first hand, though, if I feel something strong enough I can’t keep it bottled up forever. I am an expressive person.

So I have created my own ethical system of do’s and don’ts. When I speak negatively about people that I would consider my friends or friendly acquaintances, I do so only if the person I am talking to falls into one of three basic categories: (1) They have no personal connection with the person that I am talking about. Their opinion of this person doesn’t matter and will not adversely affect the life of the person that I am talking about. (2) I know that the person feels the same way that I do about this person. I am not poisoning their opinion towards them. (3) The person I’m talking to may know the person that I am talking about, but the person I am talking to primarily knows them through me and I am the access point between them. If I think that they might start of a friendship independently of me, I will probably find another confidante.

In essence, a lot of it comes down to “Will the person find out that I am talking about them in such a manner?” This may sound extremely two-faced and that’s because it is. However, it follows the golden rule. If someone feels the need to tear me down, I’d rather they keep their thoughts to themselves rather than tell me to avoid being two-faced. I’d rather that anybody they tell is someone that doesn’t know me and won’t cause trouble in my life or absent that I would prefer that they be somebody that I have no shot and friendship or alliance with me because they are allied with somebody that apparently doesn’t like me. To me it’s about minimizing hurt while accepting that everyone has a right to their opinion and accepting their need to express it every once and again. Of course I don’t want anyone to have a negative opinion of me and in my selfish heart of hearts I would prefer that if they did they would tell absolutely nobody, but I recognize that’s not realistic and I account for it.

So let me get back to the third story. Her discovery lead to some extremely uncomfortable conversations between she and I. She was of course very hurt about the things that I’d said and unfortunately I couldn’t entirely take them back because I’d obviously expressed them pretty freely. What was interesting about her reaction, though, was that in addition to just being personally hurt and angry, she was angry because I said what I said while pretending to be her friend.

And I did act as her friend. When I found out that she was stuck on the side of the road, I stopped and kept her company until her boyfriend could get there. When I got the sense that she was really upset about something, I’d pull her aside and ask what the matter was and offer any words of encouragement or consolation that I could. That was, in her mind, pure fakery and a something of a lie. Why would I pretend to be her friend when I had such a nasty perception of her? She could understand being cordial because she was dating my good friend, but why lie?

The truth is that in my mind I wasn’t pretending. I was her friend and she mine. This friendship had little or nothing to whether I liked her or not. Sounds strange when you put it that way, but that was how I felt and how I feel. Friendship, in my mind, is something that you do rather than something that you feel. Part of me carried on because I was hoping that my opinion about her would change (and it had started to somewhat, but not enough). But mostly I considered us friends because that’s how we behaved (for whatever reason).

Most of the time we are friends with people that we like. We choose to spend time with people whose company that we enjoy. Sometimes, though, friendship is borne for other reasons. In her case it was because she was dating my friend. When I was a kid I had a friend that I was friends with because her mother and my mother were tight. We weren’t just acquaintances. In some people’s mind we weren’t friends, either, but in my mind we were. And to be honest, in most of the social circles I’ve run, there have been some friends that I didn’t actually like very much. Sometimes because I didn’t let my dislike for them hinder the friendship, I actually came to like them. Sometimes I didn’t and when circumstances no longer required it, I shuffled away as quick as I could.

It may make more sense to you if you think about it in the inverse. You ever know somebody that you really like but you can’t be friends with? I knew one guy when I was working at Falstaff in Deseret. His name was Teddy Forbes. I liked Teddy a lot. He was the kind of guy that I could have hung out with all the time. Unfortunately, the context in which I knew him meant that he and I would constantly be at one another’s throats. I liked him well enough, but he was forever my adversary and I ultimately wished him ill in an impersonal way. A less specific example would be when a romantic breakup occurs, you lose friends that you like because you all get divvied up. A girl break’s a good friend’s heart, she’s dead to me no matter how much I liked her.

Friendship is, as I would define it, being woken up at three in the morning and having to scotch off to the county jailhouse to bail your friend out of jail and to do so without articulating the belief that they “owe” you. I would have done that with Hubert, Cruz, and the friend that I had said some pretty awful things about. I believe that all three would have done the same for me. I would have bailed Teddy out, too, but he would have owed me big time and I would have made sure to collect. When it comes to acquaintances you keep score. You don’t when it comes to friends.

I could mince words and say that she was an acquaintance and that’s what she initially said she would have preferred in light of some of my thoughts about her. Impressively, though, she actually came to understand what it was I was saying. In her circumstances, I probably would have been too hurt to. As the dust settled said that she too would have bailed me out at three in the morning and I learned that I had rather underestimated her.

I got chewed out by my boss this evening… for doing my job. I was supposed to be helping with the Haunted House we’re setting up in the Vault. So the Haunted House is done and I can’t access my desk. I don’t think that I’m going to be able to do my job tomorrow. I asked a coworker what I will be doing, and the answer I got was “scaring people”. I guess I should appreciate the distraction, but the whole concept messes with my mind. I’d rather be testing. It may be monotonous and boring at times, but it’s expected. I have no idea what to expect at work tomorrow.

But even if I actually had work space, refusing to participate would make me a bad sport.

Scaring people?

I’m the one that’s unsettled here.

Man, I am no fun.

There are a lot of stereotypes involving computer people out there. One such stereotype is that of the ubergeek. The guy that doesn’t shower, doesn’t know how to deal with people, never gets laid, and so on and so on. Spungen pointed out a while back that none of the guys that she’s ever worked with in IT fit that profile. Instead, they fit this one:

He’s young(ish). He’s probably funny. He has to have some charm, because he’s got to deal with a lot of people and their problems. He’s got a wife or a girlfriend. He dresses casual-hipsterish. He may have tattoos. He may even bike to work, because he doesn’t have to dress up. He’s the iconoclast in the office, because he doesn’t have to conform to the same rules.

I tended to agree with her estimation at least somewhat. At least I can’t remember the last time I saw an IT department dominated by nerds, though there’s often one or two. There’s also often one or two former military guys. And so on. I commented in that post that it seems that software developers are more likely to fit the stereotypical mold. A couple jobs later and that doesn’t seem very true, either.

The vast majority of the developers that I work with on a daily basis fit a “stereotype” if you can call it that. Namely, they aren’t American. They seem to be Indian, though I don’t really know if maybe some are Bangladeshi or Pakistani or whatever. There are a couple others, though, that fit a different profile. One I’ve actually seen, now that I think about it, every place I’ve worked: The Alpha Developer.

The Alpha Developer is someone that is smart, charismatic or at least friendly, in good or great shape (playing racketball or something like that frequently), and is physically attractive enough that they could appear on TV without looking out of place (though not so attractive that they’d be a star). They’re people that could have succeeded at most things and chose software development because it made a better offer than the alternatives.

I guess it’s a good thing that computer jobs are diversifying. I guess it makes sense that back when it was a niche position that it drew only those people that were most naturally inclined to be interested. It’s sort of like how it used to be that if you talked to people online you could almost always talk about computer things because you could assume that they knew their stuff. The same is obviously not true today. And so it is with chatrooms it is in the IT profession. It attracted a lot of people that are in it for the steady paycheck. Even with the ebb and flow of the IT economy, it remains a lot better than other options.

I’ve hard complaints, mostly from females when looking for reasons for the dearth of females in the IT sector, that one thing that’s tough about working in IT is that it’s often dominated by people that live and breathe the stuff. In other words, to be good at it you have to really enjoy it and have working with computers create energy rather than sap it. I can imagine that this is true in some contexts, but it seems inconsistent with the above observation about people doing it for a paycheck. Maybe the reason for that is that even if they’re doing it for the paycheck, once you start working with all these neat toys, you start seeing where you might have a place for them at home. I know it can be hard for me to have better toys at work than I do at home, though unless I win the lottery that’s something I’m going to have to deal with for the time being.

There has been some concern in the McCain camp that Obama is going to pull off a victory in the generally-Republican state of North Carolina. Well, according to the latest poll, it looks like McCain is ahead in that state.

Unfortunately for him, the same poll has him losing Texas, Idaho, and Utah.

Meanwhile, McCain took a hit in Iowa:

Gunman Kills 15 Potential Voters In Crucial Swing State

PostScript: This post is meant to be light-hearted and humorous and not a segue into antagonistic political commentary directed at either side (or the allies, real or supposed, of either side)

Long time readers may recall that I am generally in favor of a work environment where most people dress professionally. People that get their own offices dress in suits and ties, people in cubicles where no less than slacks and button shirts, and only those people that frequently spend time on their hands and knees wear jeans.

Mindstorm has a very different environment than that. I may write a post on it later, but there are sleeveless shirts, sandals, shirts and pants with holes in them, and I think two (definitely one) cross-dressers that dine in the cafeteria. I actually shouldn’t even mention the cross-dressers because they more than anybody else dress nicely and my semi-complaint are with those that dress for work like they’re going to the convenience store to satisfy the munchies.

So today, as I noticed a dude (not one of the cross-dressers) wearing a shirt that exposed his midriff and came up with an idea for what my Halloween costume should be.

I should totally go to work dressed in a suit and tie.

And when people ask me what I am supposed to be, I’ll answer, “A professional.”

Somehow, I don’t think that would go over very well…

Clancy and I came from remarkably similar backgrounds. We’re both the children of upper-middle class professionals with advanced degrees in the same field. School was considered important for both of us as we were coming up and stated expectations were that we would graduate college and eventually settle down in a professional career. We both went to church on Sunday and kept close ties with one side of our family but not so much the other. And perhaps most importantly, we were raised with similar values. I think it’s because of these similarities that our differences stand out so starkly.

One of our big differences, both in the way that we were raised and in the way that we see the world, involves entertainment. I was raised on television. I watched obscene amounts of it. I wish I could have back the amount of time I spent watching an episode of Matlock for the 15th time. I wish I had spent more time writing and drawing and going out (as I got older). When Clancy and I have kids, I’m not going to let them watch as much television as I watched growing up. I didn’t spend nearly as much time as my peers playing video games mostly because my parents wouldn’t get me a Nintendo because my grades were so bad. But boy did I want one and for the longest time their refusal to budge on that issue was one of the biggest chips on my shoulder.

Clancy, on the other hand, got very little television growing up. She spent lots and lots of time reading. Television was something that her father mostly watched. Notably, when her father watched it, he was not amenable to being interrupted at all. As such, Clancy grew up with something of a negative view of television in part because of that alone. More broadly, though, she views television, comic books, and video games were considered by her to be suspect. She considered reading to be inherently superior to all of these things and to some extent time spent consuming any of the above was time wasted that would be better spent doing something better. Though I can agree that I wasted a lot of time watching television, where I primarily took issue with her was the notion that those things should in and of themselves be considered at best a “guilty pleasure”.

Television in particular is something that I’m remarkably defensive about. Just as part of Clancy’s animus towards TV can be traced back to the way that it sucked her father’s attention away from her when she was young, I suppose some of my defensiveness can be chalked up to the fact that television made me who I am and to repudiate it completely is to repudiate who I am. It may not mean that I am something bad, but at the very least it means that I am something less than what I could be. On some level this is undoubtedly true just as 100,000 things I did when I was younger was ultimately non-productive, but I don’t think that it’s nearly as true as a lot of medical doctors and cultural critics say it is.

The place that most cultural critics point to are medical studies linking television to obesity among other things. While it’s true that if you sit around and do nothing but watch television all day like I did, you’ll likely get fat like I did, the cause-effect relationship is not as clear as the people that point to the studies suggest. Though I exclude my parents from this category, it is undeniably true that the same sorts of parents that don’t monitor the TV habits of their young ones also don’t monitor their caloric intake. Parents that are not around enough to keep tabs on kids’ TV habits similarly don’t have time to cook healthy meals and are more likely to rely on unhealthy alternatives. Parents that don’t know how damaging excessive TV watching might be also don’t fully appreciate how bad for them much of the food they eat really is.

The biggest problem I have with critics of television is that for the most part they consider television a thing. I think that further they often equate television with the least intellectually nutritious brand of it. Most of my personal problem with the television that I watched when I was younger actually had less to do with sheer volume and more to do with what I watched and how I watched the same things over and over again. Granted, there weren’t the kinds of options then that there are now, so it’s possible that if I hadn’t rewatched Gilligan’s Island there wouldn’t have been anything for me to watch and that time would have been better doing just about anything else. Be that as it may, the same isn’t entirely true today.

I could go on and on about how much I actually learned from television growing up and how it’s influenced my life in positive ways. I could speculate that reading would have done the same only better, but that wouldn’t be much more than speculation. I can also grant that the effort of reading makes it unlikely that you’ll waste time reading crap whereas the comparative ease of television makes it easy to be indiscriminate, but I consider that a challenge to be overcome rather than an example of one’s innate superiority over the other.

To go back to the beginning for a moment, I think that it’s true that people watch too much television and in particular watch too much crap on television. I believe muchly that I did the same. What I reject is the notion that television is inherently bad or that cases when it isn’t bad are some shocking exception to the rule. I also reject the notion that television is inherently inferior to reading in all but the most asymmetrical circumstances. I believe that television actually has some rock-hard advantages over reading just as reading has advantages over television. I also believe that video games, a “guilty pleasure” I rarely partake in, have advantages over both television and reading.

So what are these TV advantages? That is for another post…

This one deals with Intellectual Property rights and electronic voting. These are two subjects that it can be extremely easy to be predictable and preachy, but I thought it was pretty good and if I’m feeling ambitious I might pick out a point or two to post about.

Mindstorm is on the whole the second most security-conscious company I’ve ever worked for. At least here we don’t have to use the personal codes to take restroom breaks. Or personal codes for much of anything, in fact.

Instead of punching in codes, we have the increasingly popular security cards. They did the same thing when I was working at Soyokaze. Unfortunately, the security cards double as ID badges so I can’t put it in my wallet where it’s secure. They did the same thing at Soyokaze (switching from plain white to ID), but at Soyokaze I had a much clearer idea of what policies to ignore.

I need the card to get in both the building and the Vault of Secrecy, which means that going without a card is a real pain the rear. I have to knock to get into the vault and getting in the building requires going through the receptionist. After 5 or 6, though, there really isn’t any way to get into either.

Because I have to keep the security card visible, it means that I have to keep it in a holder of some sort. My employment agency provided me with one, but it’s imperfect as far as holding the card. I stopped it a couple times from falling out, but the other day it fell out and I lost it. That’s when a lot of these policies became relevant.

When you don’t have a card, they give you this little sticky paper badge similar to the “Hello, I’m” stickies you get when you go to a conference or something else the like. It’s similar to what you get when you first start before you get your badge in the first place, except that it includes your picture, printed out on the marginal-quality picture that you use.

When the badge includes your picture, people that see it know that you’re not new and that you forgot or misplaced your official badge, so the print-out sticky badge is known as the Badge of Shame.

When I came in the morning after having lost my official badge, it so happened that my boss had forgotten his badge that day, too, which alleviated the embarassment a little bit. When I walked up, I saw that he’d placed his sticky badge on the handrail of the stairs. “How does he get away with that, I wonder?”

When it comes to security policy, some places follow these policies closely and some don’t. Mindstorm follows it more closely than most. Even people that knew me and knew that I was regularly going in and out of the building forced me to swipe my badge rather than just let me in in the off-chance I’d been fired since he seen me last. Or maybe because these things are heavily tracked (though I’ve received no other indication of that).

Yet my boss is confident enough in the willingness of people to let him in that he just tosses it aside once he gets in. I, meanwhile, have to show my badge to each and every person to get in and even when I do from a side entrance I am told that I should go around and have the receptionist let me in. Maybe I have an untrustworthy face.

When I got home that night I looked for the real badge where I thought it would be and it wasn’t there, which means that it fell off in some random place and I would have to get a new one. No telling how long that would take. I was far from enthusiastic. Further complicating things, on the second day the software on the sticky-badge printer wasn’t working right, so my new badge looked extemely inauthentic. I applied for a new badge first thing and crossed my fingers that they would get to it sooner rather than later.

While I was begging people to let me in and swearing up and down my inauthentic sticky was not a forgery (to people that had seen me walking in and out of the building for a couple of months now), the badge people were hard at work getting all of the authorizations so that I could get a new one. They sent an automatic mail to my boss making a request for me to have access to my building and the Vault of Secrecy that I work in. My boss sent them a very sharp email saying “Of course Will has access to this building and this lab. Why wouldn’t he have access?! He only comes here EVERY DAY! Give him access and make sure that this NEVER, EVER HAPPENS AGAIN!!”

I felt a little embarrassed when he later asked me about it and I told him that it was my goof-up. He didn’t flinch, though. “Some people need to get yelled out. Even if this wasn’t there fault, something they did surely warranted it!”

They actually had my new badge by lunch that very day. I wonder if my boss’s terse email might have motivated them to move more quickly. My coworkers say that they’ve never seen a faster turnaround on something like that.

When I had originally lost my badge, I looked in the corner of the bedroom where I rest my pants when I go to bed at night, I looked in the parking lot of the convenience store I stopped at on my way to work, and I looked in my car on the side of the driver’s seat where it would have fallen off while driving. I didn’t look, however, on the floor of the passenger’s seat where it somehow ended up and where I found it the night after I’d already gotten my new one.

So I guess now I have a keepsake to forever remind me of my day-and-a-half of wearing the Badge of Shame.

Do any of y’all have access to free email accounts that aren’t free? By which I mean someone that you have a business relationship with (you buy email, domain hosting, web hosting, or Internet connectivity from them… so long as you are a paying customer) and they give you more email addresses than you can possibly use?

If so, could you spare me an email address?

I don’t need a large email box or anything like that. Just an address and the ability to forward.

Addendum: To expound a bit, this isn’t an email that I would be giving outfar and wide or anything like that. If you ever needed to reclaim it because you’re out of addresses, it wouldn’t cause me any great inconvenience. It’s half-tool, half-experiment.

I don’t know about you, but for the past year and a half or so I’ve been experiencing problems with YouTube and similar video suppliers. Actually, it’s a problem with Adobe Flash. It’ll play for about two seconds and then stop. No matter how many times you reload the image, it keeps happening. Even if you try to open up different videos. The only thing that fixes it is restarting the browser. Happened on all of my computers, so I knew it wasn’t an installation or hardware issue.

It was one of those pandrip things that I worked around for the longest time and just tolerated up until recently when for reasons I won’t get into I couldn’t just close and re-open my browser. Then I figured that there must be someone out there experiencing the same problem. Turns out a lot of people are. A whole lot of people. It seems that Adobe has been letting this crap go on for an absurdly long time. I looked at one solution after another trying to figure out how it could be fixed but it seemed that everyone conquered it a different way and then many reported that the problem returned anyway. Eventually I determined that it had something to do with Version 9 of the software. The problem is that if I tried to install v8 it wouldn’t let me. Holy cow was I greatly angered by this development.

So my only choice was to go up to Version 10 Beta. I don’t like Beta testing when I’m not being paid for it, so I resisted. Finally, after a couple days I said to myself “What’s the worst that could happen? It won’t work right? It doesn’t work right now and it hasn’t worked right in so long that I can’t remember when it did.”

So long story short, I upgraded to v10 and have had no problems either with the freezing or anything else. So if you’re experiencing that problem, I recommend an upgrade to 10.

I would totally be getting a drivers license and birth certificate and college degree under my Hit Coffee name and alma mater. I suppose it’d be a bit tough getting one for Cascadia, Estacado, Deseret, or Delosa, though…

MSN offers up a “10 things” list - they erroneously tagged a “10 Commandments” list on the link I found it at - on “how to lose weight.”

It’s an interesting collection of “conventional wisdom”, some of which are correct and some of which aren’t.

My Ghostland post from a couple weeks, The Honorable Thing, past struck something of a sour note with my wife. Not because she condemns by behavior or whatnot before I met her, but because we had a couple pregnancy scares of our own early in our marriage that wherein she believes I was not at my best.

Clancy has been on the NuvaRing for most of our marriage and it is a product that we both love. Prior to that, there were pills and condoms. The problem with The Pill is that you have a rather short window within which to take to it. The problem with that for Clancy is that at the time she was working a hectic and variable schedule. It’s not all that hard to remember to take a pill after brushing your teeth at night or after your shower in the morning, but it’s a little more difficult when you don’t know where you’re going to be during those usually-timed domestic adventures. In other words, her schedule, which included 30-hour shifts every third or fourth night with no regular M-F workweek, made her have to remember under circumstances it was easy to forget.

She started looking for alternatives to The Pill after our second pregnancy scare. The first was only a question of waiting a couple weeks and taking the test and there were no signs in the meantime. The second time, though, there were signs. There was spotting and more importantly there was constant nausea which is not something that Clancy gets on even an irregular basis. I actually had to have Clancy remind me what the signs were because I forgot. She didn’t forget, partially because she has a better memory than I do, and partially because it was a more traumatic experience for her than it was for me. Therein lied the problem that my Honorable post reminded me of.

Clancy is not at all the type of person to fake a pregnancy for any reason whatsoever. It was hard to her to relate to the Honorable post because she can’t imagine convincing herself that she was pregnant when she wasn’t and she definitely couldn’t imagine crying when discovering that she wasn’t pregnant. Her behavior was not the behavior of the girl in the story. My behavior, however, was not entirely so different. In retrospect, as she explained it to me the other day, I can see that as a definite error on my part.

I was, from the moment that she became concerned, not all that worried at all. Mostly because I’d been through pregnancy scares before. I’d had two or three with Julie, three after Julie and before Clancy, and Clancy and I had ourselves had one. After each one, I chided myself for being so worried about it. What were the odds? The fact that (at least in the three scares that weren’t grounded in a serious relationship) a positive would have been a terrible circumstance (until, I imagine, I held the little bugger in my arms), the terribleness of a Pink Means Pregnant made the likelihood absolutely no greater. It just gave me something to brood on.

So I wasn’t that worried. It seemed unlikely that the one or two times that we made love and later found out that she had maybe missed a pill or taken it on the border of what was the window of opportunity within which she could take it would be the one time (or one of the two times) when one of my little race cars crossed the finish line into the winner’s circle. Beyond that, I’d just been through this one too many times and (not knowing that the NuvaRing would make it so that we would never go through it again) my neurosis was not powerful enough to gin up the worry, brooding, and reckless chain-smoking that characterized it on all the previous instances.

Her perspective was different. First, she had not gone through the number of scares that I had. This was much newer terrain for her. It was to her what my first couple scares with Julie were, which had completely freaked me out. Beyond that, though, she was the one experiencing signs of possible pregnancy. She was the one that was spotting and nauseous and I wasn’t. I could put it out of her mind while her body would not let her.

Adding to the overall stress-level of the affair was my seeming indifference. To be clear, I was not indifferent so much as I was confident. That was how I looked at it, anyway. I was confident that she wasn’t pregnant. That was, of course, not how she looked at it. And fairly so. I had told her in no uncertain circumstances that if she were pregnant that we would work through it and it would all be okay. I described it as a logistical nightmare (a summation that she agreed with), but one that we could work through. At least, I’m pretty sure that I told her all that (I know I told her “logistical nightmare”, at any rate; she remembers that quite clearly).

That brings me to the other thing. When it came to Julie, she was someone that I was not bothered about the prospect of having children with, but I would have had a lot of difficulty supporting it. With the ones that came in between Julie and Clancy, though I’d been able to support the child with the appropriate sacrifices, they were not committed girlfriend where I was comfortable with the prospect of having children with them. In fact, in all three instances, I was already on my way out there door and in one case it might have brought on a legal war where I would have tried to get sole custody. Clancy was the first where I was comfortable with the prospect of raising children of her and that we would get by. Her perspective there was different, though, for a big reason I’ll get to in a minute.

Whether I wasn’t as clear as I could have been or whether I didn’t get through because the brunt of the logistical nightmare would have fallen on her and not me I do not know, but it certainly is clear in retrospect that I was not sufficiently reassuring. The biggest mistake, in retrospect, was that I I think I gave her the impression that until it turned out that she was pregnant, she was in this alone. That was not remotely my intent and I think on some level she knew that, but it probably was the impression that I gave. For someone that was working harder than she had ever worked in her life and was under burdens that would test the most composed of individuals, it was a very bad impression.

Looking back, I think that my mind had put this into the category that it had with others that were more prone to become paranoid about pregnancy. Sure, Clancy wasn’t a drama queen, but I think that somewhere in my mind I must have figured that because she delivered babies as a significant part of her career and she had the medical expertise to know what each and every ambiguous sign could mean, that she was inferring more than was probably accurate from the signs that her body was giving her. This was a rather unfair way of looking at it. Particularly because I had been in her shoes. Errr, not because my body had ever given me the signs that her body was giving her, of course, but in the shoes of one that is thinking “Oh, my God. What if it is happening.”

My biggest mistake, I think, was not looking at it that way. My confidence, whether I had vocalized it or not, should have allowed me to be more a pillar of strength for her during a pretty trying time. It should have allowed me to say “She can lean on me, because the way that I feel about this I don’t need to lean on anyone.” Unfortunately, that’s not where my mind went.

As readers can probably guess from the fact that I say “scare” rather than “miscarriage” (or the unlikelihood that I have a three year old child that I happened to never tell you about), she wasn’t pregnant in the end. The whole incident did push us into saying “Isn’t there something that we can do so that we can be assured that this doesn’t happen again?” After a brief stint with The Patch, we discovered the then-new NuvaRing, and it hasn’t been a concern since.

Of course, now that we’re looking at actually having children, I have a completely different worry. I worry that I will look back and wish that she had been pregnant because it was when we had a chance to.

Newsweek has an interesting piece on how it’s junk mail that is keeping the United States Post Office afloat:

Earlier this year Plimpton became tired of the credit-card offers, catalogs and advertising fliers that clogged her mailbox. So in February she paid $20 to GreenDimes, a firm that helps consumers reduce their inflow of “junk mail” by contacting businesses on their behalf. “[Junk mailers] are cutting down trees willy-nilly, and that has got to stop,” says Plimpton.

To the post office, consumers like her are a serious threat. “Efforts to convince people not to receive mail are really going to hurt,” says Steve Kearney, a Postal Service senior vice president.

The Postal Service lost $1.1 billion in its latest quarter. That number would be even larger if it weren’t for direct mailings, which now constitute 52 percent of mail volume, up from 38 percent in 1990. Revenue from direct mail “is the financial underpinning of the Postal Service—it could not survive without it,” says MichaelCoughlin, former deputy postmaster.

I wondered if after the whole “Do Not Call” thing they’d start a “Do Not Mail”.

I haven’t had a problem with junk mail in years. Sure, I get it, but only a little bit here and a little bit there. There’s only been one time in my life when it got pretty bad. It was back when my ex-roommate Karl and I moved into an apartment complex in a relatively nice part of Colosse near The Mall of the Gulf. The apartment complex had a lot of young and childless professionals and I think that we must have fit some sort of target demographic because it was amazing the sheer volume of stuff that we got. It became a real hassle because if I forgot to check my slot for a day or two, the box would get full and I wouldn’t get the mail items I need cause the box was stuffed with stuff that I didn’t.

On the whole, though, I just don’t consider junk mail nearly as much a hazard or an irritant as I do telephone solicitors, spammers, or back in Estacado door-to-door people. Telephone solicitors and door-to-door folks invade your life when you’re trying to do something else while when it comes to getting your mail you get some choice over that. Sending out mail is also (I think) a little more expensive telephone solicitation and a lot more expensive to the sender than spam. That means that it becomes expensive for them to just blanket everywhere with all their advertisements and so they have to do things like limit themselves to places where their product might be useful or where the demographics of an area are full of people such as young professionals without children.

There is an environmental cost, though, as the article points out. I’m not a particularly big environmentalist, but in this vein junk mail is harmful in a way that spam isn’t (unless the energy costs outweigh the lost paper?). I am a pretty big fan of the mail system, though, and a selfish little part of me says “I don’t care if people in posh neighborhoods can’t get their mail and South America is being deforested, I don’t wanna pay 50c or more for a stamp!”

Question of the day: In 40+ states, the highest-paid state employee is one that holds what job? See if you can guess it after each hint.

Hint I: In 48 states, a person holding this job earns more than the governor (not including cases where the governor forgoes pay), with a rate ranging from 108.5% of the governor’s salary to 3451% of the governor’s salary.

Hint II: The position does not exist in the other two states.

Hint III: Which are Alaska and Vermont

Hint IV: In addition to making more than the governor, he makes more than the person he reports to and the person that the person he reports to reports to.

Hint V: Much of the money that he makes usually is usually given to him by people outside the official hierarchy under which he works.

Hint VI: Most of the people that report to him don’t actively get paid anything.

Hint VII: People get in trouble all of the time when Hint V Hint VI turns out not to be true when it is supposed to be true.

(more…)

An Arkansas court has sort of declared that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints does not qualify as a “protestant” faith. The case in particular comes down to an agreement in the divorce that the children should be raised within the protestant faith. When the father started advocating the LDS Church, the mother took him to court. The court found that the contract was valid and enforceable and it was applicable to this case.

The latter part of the ruling isn’t hugely controversial since the LDS Church itself does not consider itself protestant. It does complicate the notion that Christianity primarily divides into two camps, Catholic and Protestant. Some would argue that the distinction still exists because Mormons (and any other groups) that don’t fall into one of those two categories aren’t actually Christian. Many of these people would use the LDS as an example of this. Others might use the Unity Church, which is vaguely Christian but becomes less so the more you scratch beneath the surface, or the Unitarian-Universalist Church, which used to be Christian but has become less so as time has rolled on. What makes the LDS different from the Uniteers and Unitarians, though, is that while the latter have beliefs that are somewhat vague, new-agey, and open-ended, the LDS is none of these things. Another example of a church of what some would call dubius Christianity but that nonetheless sees itself as Christian are Pentacostals, who are denied the right to call themselves Christians by some because they reject the concept of the Trinity but who are generally (moreso than LDS) considered Christian. Also along these lines are Christian Scientists.

The court case itself needn’t have been decided on theological grounds. The question in the divorce settlement was not whether in the spiritual sense the LDS Church is theologically protestant but more whether the parents, when they signed the agreement, both believed that it was. Only if there was no consensus on the issue do you start asking questions of theology and church history. Since generally neither Mormons nor Protestants consider Mormons to be Protestants that’s an easier question to answer than it would be whether the agreement had said Christian rather than Protestant.

Whether Mormons are in fact Christians is a subject of debate at least within the Christian community. By and large the answer is that they are not and Mormonism is a separate Abrahamic religion that shares much in common with Christianity (as Christianity does with Judaism) without actually being a part of it. On the other hand, Mormons project themselves as being Christian and publicly emphasize the similarities with the general Christian community rather than the differences. On the other hand, when I was in Deseret, the general view seemed to be that these were two different groups rather than being a part of a single community. On the other hand, you get the same sort of things in Catholic areas even though there isn’t much (some, but not much) debate that both fall under the Christian label.

The question does naturally arise as to whether or not self-identification is (a) valid and (b) determinative. Can Mormons be Christians just by saying they are? I would say that they cannot. But they have more than just self-identification to go on. Jesus is a substantial figure in their teachings and the stuff that was added on in the end is positioned as a continuation Christ’s teachings and legacy. One may think that the uniquely Mormon beliefs of what came after Jesus and the Bible are false, but believing something that is incorrect does not get you kicked out of the Christian community in any helpful use of the term. Sure, a lot of denominations think that they are the only ones to get it right (comes with the territory!) and some that they are the only True Christianity and that the others preach False Christianity, but we’re still debating True and False Christianity and brands of Christianity rather than Christianity vs Something Else.

Even using more than self-identification, though, a lot of dubious groups could get themselves under the Christian Tent by the methodology that the Mormons would use. Members of the Unification Church believe that their guy is merely a continuation of the Christian story (and the Muslim Story, and the Buddhist Story, and on and on). Even the Branch Davidians fall into this category.

I don’t see any easy answers to these questions. The easiest answer may be that the courts should never be put in the position of having to decipher theology. I think that this is generally true. I’m not sure that I agree with the court’s ruling that the agreement was valid. It could be on the basis that one parent explaining his or her religion necessarily involves the other spending an eternity in Hell and that could cause trouble or maybe on the basis that it could simply be jarring to a child to hear alternating explanations of our existence and of the supernatural depending on what parent the kid is with.

Maybe it’s because I was raised in the staid Episcopal Church and I was not raised to believe with absolute conviction everything that the Bible or our church leaders say, but I’m not entirely convinced that the children couldn’t process multiple explanations of our existence and whatnot. I’m inherently skeptical of religious systems that are fearful of people being taught alternative religious systems. Children alternating between churches until they can decide which one is right for them is not a thought that particularly troubles me. Naturally, I would be a little concerned that they might make the wrong choice, but I’m inherently uncomfortable with blocking them from coming to that conclusion by depriving them access to contradictory information. I guess this is why I am not a particularly good Believer even if I do believe in believing in God and I do not think that all religions are created equal in thought or in action.

In the comment section of a previous post, Barry asked what I meant by “Vault of Secrecy”. That’s what I call the lab where I work. Access is extremely limited even to other members of the company. What this should mean is that you have to have clearance to enter it. What it actually means is that you have to knock.

“Guest workers” do not know how to knock with gusto. Doesn’t matter if they’re Indian, Chinese, or East European. they knock apologetically. I get it that they don’t want to be rude, but I can’t hear them if I’m listening to anything and I have to keep an ear open just to hear it which is much more of an inconvenience then a more hardy knock would be.

One of the downsides to working in the Vault of Secrecy is that they are very particular about what we can bring inside. For instance, I couldn’t bring a laptop to work on the bus because I would have nowhere to put it. Not allowed in the lab and I have no workspace outside of the lab. The same problem exists with my Pocket PC. which is similarly banned.

They essentially ban anything that is capable of storing or producing information. Printers, CD burners, thumb drives, and digital cameras are all prohibited from the lab.

The main exception to the above is cell phones. Technically, cell phones are capable of storing information and most (including mine) can take pictures. I could point out the inconsistency of their policies, but I sort of suspect that their answer to the dilemma would be to disallow my cell phone.

Fortunately, and this is actually relatively unusual for an employer, they at least somewhat compensate for the inconvenience of some of these policies by not implementing some relatively easy cost-saving policies that nearly every other employer I’ve ever worked at has. Namely, since we can’t bring in music from home, they let us listen to streaming audio.

Unfortunately, they don’t compensate as well in other areas. Because we can’t bring any in from home and there is a bureaucratic process for procurement that makes you justify even small expenditures. Between eight of us, we have exactly one thumb drive that we pass around and keep track of as if it were the Holy Grail. The drive is a 256MB PNY jump drive. You can get a 1GB on Newegg for $5.49.

The main reason given for the policy is that they’re worried that we take information. I’m not saying that their concern is misplaced because we obviouisly deal with some pretty sensitive stuff. But their policies aren’t particularly effective. I could pretty easily get the sensitive material outside the lab and the building if that was what I wanted to do.

It’s rather difficult to come up with policies that in the end don’t simply rely in large part on the good faith of employees. This represents a potential problem for Mindstorm since so many of the employees are temps shuffling in and out of employment on The Turnstile of contract work.

Bobvis offers up a thought for a radical change in law enforcement: the elimination (or near-elimination) of prosecutorial and police discretion.

In looking through this, I see three basic complaints. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of them, but here’s a paraphrase:

#1 - The law is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, to the point where literally nobody can say with any certainty that they haven’t ever (or even haven’t recently) broken some law. This becomes especially annoying when we apply the legal principle “ignorance of the law is no defense” - since most laws are written such that only a lawyer specializing in Field X really understands them (and even then, plenty of debate usually rages). Expecting everyone to manage to keep abreast not just of the content of all laws that affect them, but also the changes to that law constantly being made, seems pretty absurd.

#2 - “Police disproportionally choose to enforce certain laws against certain groups.” As I’ve said before, I don’t buy the whole “police are always racist” line of thought. However, I will certainly believe that certain laws are enforced more than other laws (and even to the point of “enforcing” when there hasn’t been a violation, see below), simply because it is more profitable (fines, etc) for the police to enforce those laws rather than other laws.

#3 - Where multiple laws become involved, prosecutors can too easily abuse the discretion they have to choose which charges to file. This becomes even worse as the system becomes more and more broken, too many people are coerced into pleading guilty when they are actually innocent by the disparity between plea sentencing and post-trial sentencing (see also here), and of course the system is designed to coerce you directly from the moment you first start talking to the cops. This is especially true when even taking the stand in your own defense becomes a punishable offense if you’re found guilty, under sentencing guidelines that will either (a) attempt to convict you of “perjury” (if you say “I didn’t do it” and a jury finds otherwise) or will bump up the sentencing guideline for your being “not remorseful” (obviously, if you testify in your own defense, you’re “not remorseful”) or “obstructing justice.”

On the flipside, I think there needs to be room in the system for at least some police and prosecutorial discretion. As an example: if someone’s taillight goes out, there’s a good chance they don’t know about it. A police officer pulling them over and giving them a warning (and I believe “warnings” should be logged so that other officers can tell if someone’s already been recently warned or has been simply ignoring the warnings and not altering their behavior) is not a bad thing; it helps get the vehicle repaired and keeps the streets a little safer. Likewise, there are times when the law is simply badly written or otherwise not wisely applied to a situation, and I’d like to think that - on average at least - the police officer would have sound enough judgement to recognize this.

As for the oversight option… we’re dealing with humans, here. If you start analyzing cops by a quota of how many tickets they write, then you give them a quota and we get into the problem of cops who ticket innocent people for imaginary offenses in order to meet quota. If you stick observers with them randomly, all you do is increase the number of eyes in the vehicle looking for crimes - and “missing” a crime can be as simple as having your vision obstructed while taking a sip of your coffee. If you run a camera in the vehicle, same deal; the camera may not always be where the officer is looking (though I DO think that dashboard cameras are laudable for traffic stops, and that retention of the video ought to be mandatory by law to prevent “he said, she said” problems between the cop and the citizen later).

Ben Casnocha suggests:

When you’re out on the town and want to solely optimize on picking up a woman/man for sex, travel with friends who are slightly less attractive than you. If they’re more attractive than you, you look relatively less hot. If they’re absolutely ugly, you might look relatively good but such relative benefits are outweighed by being associated with ugliness.

I’m not sure that I buy this. I think the comparative disadvantage is outweighed by the perception that you are a cool enough guy to hang out with cool-looking guys. Now if you’re all wearing Neon Genesis Evangelion shirts or are otherwise demonstrating weirdness, that could be true. Likewise if you’re all displaying utter conventionality But generally speaking it seems that one of the things that women look at when appraising a guy is whether he has friends and of what stock. In those early moments of being approached or exchanging glances to invite or discourage approachment, women have little information with which to go on which means that they have to go by their gut and a sense of the guy. Who he’s with informs that. That was the conclusion I came to, anyway, when I noticed that there was a difference in the frequency with which girls would smile at me when I was out with friends, with misfit friends, and out alone in a place where people usually go in groups.

I’m reminded a bit of some advice from my brother Mitch, who is smart as a whip, was kind of nerdy before college, and had to explicitly learn what a lot of popular people learned by touch-and-feel. He said that in a bar situation, the best place to look is at a group of women that has one extremely attractive person and then pick whoever in that group you find most attractive that is not that person. It’s kind of Roissiesque, I guess, but he found that women that expect you to approach the herd (or pick off a member of the herd) for someone else are more receptive when they find out it’s them. I never took his advice because I didn’t patrol the same sorts of venues that he did and I have always had an exceptional ability at detecting compatibility with people on scant information. In other words, I already have an idea of who might be responsive to my approaches and who won’t be. In the dating scene, I’m a niche-market product in a way that my brothers are not, so I have to take care of knowing my market rather than trying to shoehorn into a market that I am not ideal for. Whenever I tried to expand my market-presence, it rarely amounted to any good even if I did have some initial success.

I am also remember back in high school when my friend Clint and I would each lunch together. Miraculously, we found these two girls to sit with day in and day out. One was quite pretty and had a way that she dressed (stockings!) that maximized her appeal. The other would have been gorgeous wearing a paper sack and clown make-up just because she was that innately beautiful. What’s funny is that even though Stockings was perfectly suitable for either of us and indeed would have been a great catch, we both fell all over ourselves trying to impress Paper Sack. A rivalry was founded upon it, even though neither of us had even a remote shot. He would give her his pudding (which sounds hopelessly grade school, but she wanted it and he had it and he gave it to her) thus leading me to call him the Pudding-Pushing Bastard or, if she happened to be present, the PPB. Because of her proximity to beauty, Stockings only barely existed. We were dopes.

So I guess it varies as to how effective it can be to surround yourself with more or less attractive people. He’s probably right that it’s best not to surround yourself with people that will embarass you. That’s a separate lesson and one I had to learn the hard way.