Come Monday, June 3rd, I will be an intern at MITRE‘s Center for Connected Government for eight weeks in McLean, Virginia.  So off I go to the land of the Beltway Bandits!

How did I land this?  I was looking at MITRE’s career site for jobs here in Huntsville, saw the internship tab, and decided to give it a shot.  In my best of minds, I was hoping that something would have opened up around here in the meantime, as this was November.  I’ve had a temp job in the interim, along with going to graduate school, but this was the first thing that was really great for a while.  So I’ll get two months up there, it’ll be fun, and it’ll be educational because of what I’ll be doing.  Here are the job descriptions that they threw at me:

• As a member of MITRE’s Program Management team, you support the Project Management Framework (PMX) PM Architecture and Roadmap Validation initiative by conducting the project reviews which includes preparation of a survey instrument (supported by MITRE SMEs).  This includes defining criteria for identifying current projects for Project Reviews, supporting identification of the projects for review, conducting Current Project Reviews and assessment of results, compilation of the Current Project Review Report, and conduct Lessons Learned and revise PMX products based on Lessons Learned.   This information will be used for the PMX Pilot is the next step in the goal of providing a visual representation of the domains and concepts of management in a modern government organization and the minimum set of interacting processes needed to support it.
• As a member of MITRE’s Program Management team, you will review commercially-available project leader training and identify the terminal learning objectives. You will work with a pilot group of aspiring project leaders, review their self-assessments against the organization’s competency model, and craft individual development plans at a learning objective level.  You will prepare and deliver a briefing to the Division leadership. The aggregate effect is to raise the project leadership maturity of an organization.

MITRE is very evidence-driven, and as an engineer, I really appreciate that.  I’m going to split my time between those two job descriptions as well as be run through some of their training.  This dovetails very well with my grad school curriculum and, for better, the things that I care about in our field.  It’s a chance to flex some muscles, have some fun, and get paid a little bit.

I’ll be living at George Mason University for the summer, so any of you who live in the area from MSMS, UAH, or other parts of my life have me at your disposal when I’m not working my rear end off, which I expect will be most of the time.

I’ll grow it back out when you’re growing back yours. If I could do more to support you in a helpful way, I totally would.

Alisa and I have been a part of the same community for over a decade now.  Anytime a group of people have been together for that long, there are underlying grumbles around, well, most everybody.  I just never hear that about Alisa.  I haven’t met anyone yet that has met her and doesn’t at least like her; most everyone that I know loves her, as I do.

So if you know someone struggling with cancer, just love them the best way that you know how: making dinner for them, taking out the trash, picking up their mail, bringing them a latté, reading in the same room with them for an hour, just whatever.  She’s two states away, but this is something that I can do from here other than send the late-night emails when I can’t sleep and send her crazy emails.

I’ll think of her every (third) morning when I am shaving at a minimum.

I love you, dear.  Keep kicking ass.

Geof

Geof,
Ten minutes ago, I posted a lolcat version of The Trouble With
Tribbles.
Just now, I got a link from boingboing.
Stephen

My only response was: “I’m doubling your [hosting] fees.”  Four minutes later, Stephen told me that Misty might be in labor.  It was a bit of a day.

I was mainly excited that my friends would be bringing another awesome kid into the world (and Liza is indeed awesome), but I was also worried about my server going into massive heat death.  Single server, four CPUs, moderate amount of RAM, SCSI hard drives, Web and SQL stored on the same drives.  You can imagine how that went.

I only came across this anniversary the other day when one of my choir kids posted the following:

I responded with a link to LOLTrek, and when I did so, I noticed the date stamp.  I thought I’d bring it up, because it still makes me laugh.  The funniest thing for me are the commercials.

My friend Stephen is funny, smart, loving, and supporting.  But mostly funny.  I was happy to nod to LOLTrek with a Whiskerino shot that, disappointingly, no one seemed to care about.

Go enjoy LOLTrek if you’ve never seen it, and remember that, six years ago, lolcats were a new thing on the Internets.  [Note: I'm really glad that Stephen has held firm to never trying to take another bite at the apple.]

Twitter’s dangerous, though.  Sometimes you’ll say something and then … well, what happened, FV?

Mr. Webb followed your humble correspondent for about a month, and as we’ve established that I’m a prolific tweeter myself, I understood his exasperation, but I was more than a bit surprised that Quest’s follow-up was a block.

So where has this gone since?  The Houston Chronicle has covered the matter fairly extensively, in light of possibly educating ? about why he should reconsider.  In fact, Jason Bellini appears to have tried to broker a truce to this little Internet rap feud, pointing Quest to the story.  His one answer: “Well”?

Then Derek took it the extra mile.

Will this work?  Is it shameless promotion on Derek’s part?  Is it something that Questlove will respond to?  Will he bring Webb on the show and unblock him publicly?  Will I drive to NYC if that happens?  We can only wait and see.

C’mon, Q.  What kind of taco did you have for lunch?  D, I had a bagel with egg, bacon, cheese, green pepper, onion, and roasted red peppers around 2:45 this afternoon.  I got a bit of a late start.

What do I tweet about?

• Whatever’s on my mind.  You know, like when I used to blog about being sick, except shorter.
• I used to have this whole GEOFCON gag.  I get complain-y.  I do this to blow off steam.
• Going back to whatever’s top of mind: if I am physically present with someone, my tweeting generally grinds to a halt, because the extrovert part of my personality gets all into having someone to engage.  I tweet when I’m alone.  Clearly I’m alone a lot.
• I really do think out loud on Twitter.  Posts for here often come from Twitter.  Sometimes, that means that I’m letting half-formed thoughts out there in a brainstorming experiment that makes me look really stupid.  Occasionally, I delete things; most of the time, I don’t mind looking daft.
• I tweet a lot about insomnia.  I created the #OIT tag for Obligatory Insomnia Tweet.  To wit: my 99,999th tweet was about how I didn’t sleep well last night.
• I used tweet a lot about sports on that account.  Now I have an account specifically for that.  I’m sure that this makes the lives of people who follow me for non-sports-related tweets very, very happy, especially when I start getting angry.
• I have a lot of accounts, but only three that are truly by-me.  The third is a private account that I probably won’t give you access to, and it’s the one where the really fun stuff happens, mostly late at night when I am distressed.  Anyway.
• But a lot of my tweets show my love for people, I think.  I got a lot of that back on 20 Sep 2010 — it kept me going and out of a really bad place.

I’m very thankful for Twitter.  Now I can go back to tweeting without caring what post number it was.  I’ve been worried for the last month that I’d roll past 100k and not notice.

Take, for instance, a self-driving car. One of the assumptions we have is that allowing computers to drive cars will allow a lot more cars to be on the road, since computers are better drivers than humans (a fact I don’t want to dispute). But imagine we do fit 30% more cars on the road. Imagine a traffic disruption. There will surely be far fewer traffic disruptions because computers are better drivers than humans. But when they do occur, they will cause massively more congestion than now, because the system will have been optimised that much further.

A driverless car will be best implemented when it communicates with its peers in a networked way that mimics the old CB network band: “Get off at Exit 351 and take US 31 north; I-65 is a parking lot.”  But there’s fragility, of course: not all cars will have humans out of the loop, not everyone will have a car that communicates in the same way, there will be network outages, etc.  That’s why peer-to-peer on open technologies will make that work.

See, my technological bias is showing.  But I will also admit my own bias against driverless cars: I’d rather drive, and if not, I’d rather take mass transit to have it be worthwhile.

For these “Big Six” apps, price is almost irrelevant. If your app is useful enough for many of its customers to use it almost every day, they’ll pay a decent price for it. (Not allof them will — but you don’t need all of them.) The challenge is either making your appthat much better than the alternatives, or finding new app roles that are that useful to a lot of people.

Marco certainly knows of what he speaks.  Here’s my iOS main/home/first screen:

Seven of those apps are iOS-bundled applications: Phone, Messages, Maps, Calendar, Clock, Mail, and Safari.  You can see that those last two are used enough that they’re in the omnipresent Dock; the other five are there out of convenience because I actually use them.  (Most of the rest of the bundled apps are on that fourth and final screen since they cannot be deleted.)

But everything else is third-party, and of the other 17 apps, seven are paid: Instapaper (articles saved for reading later); Letterpress (addictive game); ESV Bible (duh); 1Password (invaluable password storage — I know very few of my passwords because I don’t need to know); Flashometer (inexpensive weather forecast app that has a flashlight function embedded in it); OmniFocus (task management — I might let you chop off a finger before I let this go); and Twitterrific (manage multiple Twitter accounts from a fun interface; I’ve used it for years).

Of those seven, three — OmniFocus, Twitterrific, 1Password — are indispensable and get used multiple times per day, while the other four are opened at least once a day.  Marco has a Big Six; I have a Big Seven — and those dominate my home screen use, with the other nine + Folder getting more use than everything else.  (Of the 12 in my folder, only two — Federalist Papers and Terminology — were paid, and I’m pretty sure those two were $0.99 or $1.99 when I bought them.)

Marco’s point is quite valid: for the people who need a niche app, they’re going to really pay for it.  OF is $19.99, but I got it on an introductory/upgrade special; Twitterrific 5 is $2.99 and worth every penny; 1Password is $17.99 and worth every penny even if I did get it on an introductory price.  There is price elasticity for me in all three applications — far more than the other for four sure.

Your use cases are going to be different than mine, of course.  I use OmniFocus and 1Password on my iPhone because I’ve used the desktop applications for 2-1/2 and four years respectively.  I’ve used Twitterrifc on the Mac since it first came out for free — it was one of the first third-party Twitter applications.  I have brand loyalty because I have buy-in for these three, and this isn’t likely to be the case with you.

No matter your mobile OS, you’ll have must-have apps to fit how you handle things, and the chances are that you’ll be paying good money for those apps because you want them to live on.  For people that use their phone past free gaming and Facebook, you’re probably going to end up paying something north of $1.99 for at least a handful of apps.  This fact is what keeps the ecosystem running.

We have to watch our use of the word terrorist.  Merriam-Webster defines terrorism as “the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion”.  Let’s think about that for a moment.

What happened on 9/11 was coercion: Muslims around the world were encouraged to shed Western influences by using direct force to expel Americans and shock and disorganize their enemies on foreign shores.

What’s happening in Syria is not coercion, no matter how many times Bashir al-Assad says it is.  It’s civil war.  In the same way, what happened in Libya was revolution and civil way, despite all of Qaddafi’s statements to the contrary.

What happened with Timothy McVeigh in the 1990s was not terrorism.  It was the deranged act of an asshole bent on homocidal expression of his personal rage; there was no coercion to his way of thinking.  [Note: I opposed his 2001 execution.]

What happened with Eric Robert Rudolph during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics wasn’t terrorism.  People barely knew that Rudolph wanted to advocate against abortion.  They just knew that he was an asshole.

We throw “terrorist” around too freely.  Could this be a product of al-Qaeda or some other international terrorist that wants American influence removed from the Middle East?  Yes, and if that is the aim, I think that we can safely call it a terrorist act.  But if this is the work of a deranged asshole or team of deranged assholes who decided, “How do we wake a great day in Boston and fuck it up?  Let’s find the largest public outdoor gathering of people and kill and maim a bunch of people!”  You don’t have to be a terrorist to be an asshole, but you do have to be an asshole to be a terrorist.  Unless they are terrorists, let’s don’t give the motherfuckers the pleasure.

There was a period of time when I would watch Bruins games and see Greg Campbell on the ice and go, “Now who does he remind me of?”  A few months ago, I figured it out: he looks like Jake Anderson of the F/V Northwestern.  That image of Soups is the one that I think best captured the angle.

I know one thing: each of these guys works they’re ass off and are good at what they do.

“If the cost of compliance to our rules outweighs the penalties for breaking them, companies just take a ‘catch me if you can’ approach to worker safety and health,” [OSHA Director David Michaels] said. And serious violations of the rules should not be misdemeanors, he said, but felonies, much like insider trading, tax crimes and antitrust violations.

The NYT piece compares poor inspection regimes and fines for this kind of health risk — which is more pervasive and, frankly, more easily solved — with obvious and simple safety risks as well as the more absurd Federal fines for industry recalcitrance (dairy companies not paying marketing fees, FCC fines for indecent content).  Workplace safety can often be a series of small steps working towards larger goals.  I’m not sure that plant owners are so much dastardly as they are incompetent and ignorant.  OSHA and the EPA do workers few favors when evaluating new industrial chemicals and monitoring their use, but it’s frankly unconscionable to me that plants are run in this way, given that you’re trading short-term savings for long-term costs.  Of course, it’s all an affront to systems thinking.

This story is worth a read: it discusses the use of industrial adhesives in small-town western North Carolina furniture manufacturing plants.  You see the effects of the adhesives on the workers that use it, the doctor who treats many of these patients, and the gross negligence of Royale and OSHA in effectively managing the problem.  It’ll make you sick and want to write your Congressman, but the problem is that we’ll have a half-ass solution, more than likely.  But where my libertarian friends would argue that you can’t regulate your way out of a situation like this, I’m going to rebut that and ask what would be done in this situation with no downside risk at all.

So it’s Spring Break time, and it’s over for most everyone.  Some people had a bad time, sure, and let’s look into one small subset of it: the number of people in a group.  One of my friends was talking about a bad experience from a three-person trip that she took a few months ago, and something that I’ve always thought occurred to me, so here is my hypothesis:

When taking a trip with a group of people, you need to have no fewer than five and no more than ten people.

Let’s look at how it breaks down:

• A two-person trip isn’t a group trip.  Also, two people are gonna bicker.
• Three people has a huge problem: when the group breaks down.  If all three members agree to do something, it’s great!  But if it’s not unanimous, it’s almost always two people wanting to go one way and one another.  When that breaks down, you either have one unhappy person in the group or two people who go off and leave the third, leaving you with either an unhappy group or a fractured one.
• Four people is a bad idea, too: if it’s 2-2, that’s fine, but it’s generally going to regularly break down that way, and that’s not a group trip.  A lot of 2-2 comes from romantic relationships — “Let’s go to LA together!” — and, well, that’s not a group trip, nor is that fair to the other couple, at least one of whom wanted to hang out, or the trip never would’ve happened in the first place.  When it’s 3-1, the one is going to feel very, very ganged-up-on.
• Five people is a good number.  Rarely will it be 4-1; if it is, the one person usually sucks it up and deals.  The other breakdowns are 3-2 and 2-2-1.  While those breakdowns aren’t really great, they’re usually dynamic.  I’ve been on trips with both three other people and four other people, and I love the latter ones way more.
• Six people is an okay number, but it is going to break down into even numbers more than odd ones.  Having an even number doesn’t make for a lot of churn, and I always find that churn is what makes group trips fun.
• Seven people is like five: 6-1 is rare, 5-2 is okay, and 4-3 and 3-2-2 work for shorts stints.
• Eight has the same problems that six does.
• Nine, being odd, has the same advantages as five and seven.  Also, when you have nine people, you can have one hell of a time if you go to a bar as a group.  All those group churn dynamics can happen in the span of 10-15 minutes.
• Once you get to ten, you’re really not a group anymore.

And now that I’ve posted something foofy about group dynamics to get it out of my head, I’ll go back to … planning a solo trip halfway across the country.

0) What’s your name and website URL? (optional, of course)

Well, my full name is Geoffrey Franklin Morris. I have many URLs, but I guess I prefer linking to GFMorris.net the most these days. That has varied over the years.

1) What’s the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why? (two sentences max)

Without a doubt, it’s putting managing the build of unpressurized flight support equipment for on-orbit replacement units on the International Space Station.  When stuff breaks on-orbit and the astronauts have to go outside to make a fix, the chances are (>80%) that it’s something that my company built, and of that hardware, it’s about 50-50 that I managed the job.

2) A. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did? (one sentence max)

I wish that I wrote here far more often, but the stuff that I want to write about these days shouldn’t be publicly available (but it will be in the future).

B. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? (one sentence max)

Become a hobbyist computer programmer: I have all the good intentions and the O’Reilly texts to match and none of the output.

3) A. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? (two sentences max)

I’d like to be better at being fully cognizant of what I’m doing and what I should be doing, which are only occasionally the same thing. 

B. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn? (two more sentences, max)

This is an easy question: I would dearly love to have been an apprentice rocket scientist under Wernher von Braun. I can learn all the management stuff, personal and professional, from just about anyone, but in terms of designing rockets? I’ll put WvB up against anyone, warts and all.

4) A. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

I think that they’d say that I’m loving, passionate, and giving.

B. Now list two more words you wish described you…

Tall and athletic.

5) What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes– three sentences max)

I’m really passionate about project management: I’m working on a master’s degree in engineering management, and I just obtained my Project Management Professional certification (#1571776) last month.  I have a strong passion for the hockey program at my alma mater, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, and I played a small part in keeping that program alive and forward into a hockey conference that will help us thrive into the future.  I guess you could say that I’m passionate about manned spaceflight in a time when that’s not seeing any traction.  :(

6) (sue me) Write–and answer–one more question that YOU would ask someone (with answer in three sentences max)

What is your worst habit, and what do you believe is the underlying cause of that habit? How can you best eliminate it?

I didn’t answer this then, but the answer is somewhat the same: it would have been “procrastination” six years ago, and this time it’s “the failure to start”, which is somewhat the same thing but not completely.  One of the reasons that I can be bad about procrastination is because I haven’t broken the work down into small enough pieces.  If I’m stuck with a project, I often break it down into smaller chunks that I can do with 20-minute efforts.  When I do that, I’m successful.

[Bonus: What is one question you wish people would ask themselves?]

What are your good qualities?  Do you define yourself by external things (work, family, home, church, car, etc.) or do you focus on your inherent qualities that will be true regardless of season?

Well baby, there you stand
With your little head, down in your hand
Oh, my God, you can’t believe it’s happening again
Your baby’s gone, and you’re all alone
and it looks like the end.

— The Eagles, “Wasted Time”

Too few meetings have agendas.  Too few meetings think about the cost of what they’re wasting.  Here’s an idea from my instructor that I want to try out:

1. Figure out who needs to be in the meeting.
2. Get someone in finance to give you burdened labor rates for all people in that meeting.
3. Write your agenda, including an expected duration.
4. At the header of that agenda, write the dollar cost of the meeting, which is the sum of the product of each person’s labor rate by the duration of the meeting.
5. Calculate the dollar cost of each additional minute in the meeting and put it just below the total cost on the agenda.

This will drive home the real cost of never-ending meetings.

I remember what you told me before you went out on your own:
“Sometimes to keep it together, we got to leave it alone.”
So you can get on with your search, baby, and I can get on with mine
And maybe someday we will find, that it wasn’t really wasted time

So what are to learn from Evans’s book? That the Bible is a complicated book and that if we stick the word “biblical” in front of chosen topic we are inevitably selective and ignore passages that make trouble for our favored opinion. As much as I can sympathize with this point, it is somewhat banal. Whenever one engages the process of interpretation of Scripture, it is inevitable that one set of passages will be taken to interpret another set of passages. That’s just part of the process of interpreting Scripture with Scripture, a time-honored hermeneutical practice if there ever was one. Calvinists, Arminians, and Open Theists do this, as do Complementarians and Egalitarians, as does anyone who is trying to hear the central message of the Bible. It is true that we come to the Bible looking for things we want to get out of it; I guess I am just more optimistic that one can hold those things in one hand and work objectively through a method of interpretation that “gets at” what the writer was trying to say.

If that makes you want to read what is a critical review, I think that you should.  I like the timing of Adam’s response, because it’s clear that he’s taken the time to read it and has had time to formulate a response.  I think that the community of people that discuss theological books are like the people who rapidly rate software in app stores or post reviews of items on sites like Amazon with just a day or three of use of the product.  I trust the review of someone who’s had an item for six months and can tell if it’s cheaply-made or durable more than someone who went with “Rated ****, good value for my money, sounds good”.

When it comes to any book review, I simply question context: who is the reviewer, and does it seem that they’ve taken the time to read it well?  Often the former is easily deduced—this is the Internet—but one never really knows if a book has been carefully considered or read simply to be discarded.  [Or, in my case, thrown across the room because it was bullshit—one of Marcus Borg's books.  I damn near broke the spine.]

I think that a lot of Evans’s initial critics likely read the book in a huff, which is okay in general but poor practice in terms of preparing a review.  Evans spent a lot of time writing it—although Adam notes that she appears to lose steam in the last third of the book—yet I think you need to spend time thinking about a book if you are going to lend/demand authority to your response to the reading.  I think that too many high-profile theology types rush through book reviews purely knowing that their authority rests in their brand.  I think that’s a dangerous mistake.

When I began to recount the list of books that I read last year, I realized that I could spend a lot of time putting my thoughts back together on those books, but that doing a good job of describing any of them would involve re-reading them at least once to both get more out of them and to think of a good way of approaching the subject material and lensing that through to the customer.  I can think of one book that I’d like to re-read so as to present it to you: Nassir Ghaemi’s book on bi-polar disorder and how it can have positive effects upon leadership.  That first reading was for me; the next one can be for you.

Lastly, I would like to congratulate Adam on getting selected for a Ph.D. program in South Carolina.  Maybe I can make it over some weekend, Ochuk.

1. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness [Jan 21]
2. Alice Walker, The Color Purple [Feb 2]
3. W.E.B. Griffin, The Double Agents (Men at War #6) [Feb 8]
4. Ken Dryden, The Game [Feb 29]
5. Lauren Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity [Mar 9]
6. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [Apr 21]
7. Steven Frank, How to Count (Programming for Mere Mortals, #1) [Apr 21]
8. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility [Jul 3]
9. Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw [Jul 4]
10. Cormac McCarthy, The Road [Jul 7]
11. Rev. William H. Willimon, Why I Am a United Methodist [Jul 10]
12. Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love [Jul 11]
13. Jeff Greenfield, The World’s Greatest Team: A Portrait of the Boston Celtics, 1957-69 [Jul 14]
14. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [Jul 23]
15. Gregory A. Boyd, Is God to Blame?: Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering [Aug 5]
16. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [Aug 21]
17. Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life [Aug 30]
18. K.J. Parker, Sharps [Sep 24]
19. Lewis Boone, Great Writings in Management and Organizational Behavior [Oct 4] (for class)
20. C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works [Oct 24] (as a devotional; I started it 25 Oct 2011 and am continuing to use it)
21. Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies [Nov 11] (for class)
22. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t [Nov 13] (for class)
23. William Byham, Zapp! [Nov 15] (for class)
24. Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: Unleash the Power of Authentic Life in Christ [Nov 24]
25. Vilbord Davidsdottir, On the Cold Coasts [Dec 3]
26. Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking [Dec 9] (professional development, after a fashion)
27. Marti Owen Laney, The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World [Dec 20] (professional development, after a fashion)

In looking at the pace of my reading, you can see my year: a brisk pace until I attempted Jane Austen for the first time, which also hit as my semester increased in difficulty; the break where I was in Tennessee for three weeks and got no reading done while helping Dad get back from his heart surgery; more slogging as I read S&S against a five-week speech course; my reading rate speeding greatly in July as I drew down to just one class; a gap for bartending school in mid-August following time spent watching the Olympics instead; the dry season of my fall semester against my in-course reading; the final flurry of December.

I carry forward two books into the new year: a book on passing the PMP exam that I’ll be taking on Tuesday the 8th, and Austen’s Persuasion, which I’m 20% through and would be tackling were it not for this impending exam.  I expect that graduate studies will continue to weigh heavily on my completion rate of books, but I’m happy with getting 27 of them read, even if six of those were for professional purposes.

Lastly:

• Books I recommend without hesitation, Walker, Dryden, Austen (P&P and S&S only)
• Books I think you should read: Ghaemi, McCarthy, Kesey
• Book I’m prone to re-read first when I need fiction to break up my list: Baxter

I’m happy to discuss any particular book on demand.

SHOULD TEACHERS CARRY GUNS?

We all have fantasies of rescue when it comes to a story like Sandy Hook. We all would like to be the one who spotted Adam Lanza as he first lifted his gun at the glass near the school door and, quick-thinking, somehow tripped him up before a single first-grader had to see his face. We would like to be the person in the cartoon who sets up the bad guy’s pratfall. And by all means, if a shooter’s gun jams, if there is a moment, like the one in Tucson, when a woman can snatch the next clip out of his pocket, all of us should be ready to seize the chance. But serendipity and dreams of glory are not policy choices; reducing the number of guns is.

I think that we should be very careful to make policy changes in a post-Newtown world; you’ve already heard from me on that score.  But if we seek to arm teachers, I think that we should consider peak threat vs. average threat.  If we optimize our system for peak threat, we limit ingress to one or two access points, have an armed guard at each point, and arm all willing teachers.  Is that really what we want?  Because I worry about the fact that kids—curious, mischievous kids—are suddenly going to have more access to firearms than they ever had before.  I think that sizing for a peak threat in this case would create an average threat.

My personal aim would be to review all semi-automatic firearms with high-capacity magazines.  I’ve put 25 rounds through a Ruger 10/22 in under eight seconds.  It was fun!  It’s also impractical as a self-defense mechanism and completely useless in a hunting situation.  All of the Bill of Rights come with limits.  [And yes, the linked piece is strident and left of my position.]

According to Eric Seemann, a psychology professor at UAH who is working with [UAH biology professor Dr. Joseph] Ng on the research project, most PTSD candidates never develop it. He estimates that only 10 to 20 percent are appropriately diagnosed with PTSD and that other candidates gradually recapture normalcy or suffer from lesser issues than PTSD.

“Most of the time, 85 percent, people do not develop PTSD,” Seeman said. “Why is that? Joe’s hypothesis is based on biological markers of resilience.”

Drs. Ng and Seemann are into some interesting stuff here.  You have the molecular biologist and the psychologist coming at the problem from the nature/nurture axes.  Who’s right?  That’s why you research.

“Every one of us has a different experience in terms of building up our immune system,” Ng said. “The day you were born, even by virtue of whether born by natural birth or C-section, will give you a different biome. So every human individual will have a different type of biome. That defines your immune system.

“So that means, why are some people more prone to getting sick? Or even to the extreme of being very sensitive to cancer? We said if that’s the case, if your immune system can be compromised or defined, is there a pattern of gene expression for immunity that may be associated with PTSD?”

Seemann brings an additional perspective to the study. In addition to possible biomarkers that Ng is searching for, Seemann said he believes environment plays a role as well in how PTSD affects a person.

I look forward to seeing what they find out.

“When you have the most vulnerable folks, all you need is one chink in the system and you lose them,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “Whether they lost their housing, or the outpatient services they usually go to were closed and they were lost to follow-up, they have become disconnected, with predictable results.”

Those predictable results? For the mentally ill who’ve landed inside the correctional system, 2/3 will re-offend.  Frontline‘s “The Released” gives an excellent look at the revolving door of mental health challenges with America’s bursting-at-the-seams prison population.

It’s a public policy problem with no easy solutions, but it’s still one worth tackling.  If it’s less expensive to provide mental health support to convicts to keep them from returning to prison than it is to house and patrol them on the inside, then I think that we have a financial and a moral incentive to make that change.  Blanket public policy changes regarding the mentally ill can have disastrous consequences, but we can try some things.  That’s the beauty of a multi-level governmental system: we get small populations where we can experiment with good governmental solutions.  More of the same just won’t cut it.

In the confusion, some patients lost contact with their families and caseworkers. At Community Access, the same case managers who struggled to get hospital treatment for the young woman with the meat cleaver had to hunt for an elderly female tenant who had been taken to Bellevue by the police before the storm. The police had picked up the older woman for public urination near a schoolyard. But two weeks after the storm, which knocked out Internet access and telephone service at the apartment building, neither the staff nor her sister could find her.

Dorca Rosa, the elderly woman’s case manager, eventually located her at Gracie Square Hospital on the Upper East Side, behind several locked doors.

“I cried when I saw her,” Ms. Rosa said. “I found her in horrible conditions. She was lying in her own feces, she had a fractured leg and the provider could not explain how her leg was fractured.”

Under these conditions, companies have to sell themselves because they do not have a sustainable business. And when they’re sold, they either A) get shut down or B) become part of an advertising machine, like Facebook’s.

Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It’s amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.

In a world where I have the money to support it, I probably toss Facebook US$20 a year in return for a premium service with 1) no ads or 2) a guarantee that people who choose to see my updates will see all of them, rather than their current algorithm that requires you to Promote status updates or Life Events.  I use an or because I’m quite sure that Facebook makes more than $20/yr off of me in ads, and the current price for me to promote a status is US$7.

Instagram’s new ToS has me considering discontinuing my account.  I’ve only used it for a few weeks, and while it’s nice, I could do without it.

@domesticat I'll have to break out the batteries. The number isn't going to be enough. Being sick for 10 days has killed forward momentum.

17-Dec-2012 21:32 via Twitterrific for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@gfmorris

Geof F. Morris

It looks like 30 in 90 won’t happen.  I was on very good pace in early December: I was down to 361, 20 pounds down, with only a few days gone in the month.  Keeping up that pace seemed realistic, holiday eating be damned.  Then I got sick.  I came down with a bear of a cold starting the night December 7th.  Since then, I’ve not eaten that well, and I’ve not been walking, and I’m up to 365.4.  That’s still 15+ lost since the beginning of October, which is nothing to sneeze at, but I will miss my goal since I’m unwilling to do a crazy diet to hit some number.

But 1) I will update here on 12/30 and 2) I will probably try this again in 2013.  Having some external accountability has been helpful.

But that is still 90 pounds gone, in case you were wondering.  ;)

Then I used a .com for most of this space, and a .org with the idea that I’d write some code and give it away. For a while there, having a Web presence meant having a bunch of blogs. I think I got up to six before I started to pare down.

First imperfectmirror.org was merged with IJSM.org, then the pair moved into the .com, and a new IJSM reborn; then IJSM.org was paired into the .com, and recently, the .com and .org were silently merged.

There was a time when all of this made sense in my head, but none of it does anymore. One place does.

I remember a conversation with the inimitable Noah Grey back in like 2003. He wisely said, “You may tire of that domain name”—meaning IJSM.org—”but you’ll never tire of being you.” He was right.

So it’s all here under one roof. I’ve mapped things over and left forwarding addresses. I’ll hold on to the domains given that they have my name and that I don’t want them poached by a spammer or used for weird purposes.

I’ve used this domain name as a home base in thousands of links since 2004 or so. It’s truly home. Welcome.

[Oh, who cares?]

I found out on Saturday morning that Doug has to work first thing on Monday morning, which spoiled my underground plan to leave for south Mississippi in about nine hours to surprise him. I mean, I have one brother, right? And he turns 40 today! And I haven’t seen him since May, so we’re due. But we’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll greet him with a shaving cream pie.

A number of you who read this site have met me, so that photo in the header may leave you wondering if we really have the same parents. He’s slight built, dark-haired, dark-complected, and so dark-eyed that it’s nearly impossible to know where his pupils end and irises begin. He’s introverted, but not shy. He has a big radio voice.

But we both have the same propensity to tell bad jokes—although his are worse!—the same family, and the same values. (Okay, I’m the family Democrat.) We’re pretty different, but we were in tandem back in May as Dad recovered from surgery. We have a rhythm, and when we hit our stride, we’re a hell of a lot of fun.

Doug Morris is my brother, and you may not have him. Nope.

Why All the Trouble?

I’m a night owl. My most productive hours are 2200-0200, as shown by the timestamp on this post. I sleep better in the morning after the sun has come up than I do most of the time at night. My best sleep hours start at 0400. I have more than a year’s worth of data to prove this, as I’ve been tracking my sleep with Sleep Cycle alarm clock for more than two years. My ideal work schedule would be 1200-2100, as I could sleep in until 1030 or so.

The world does not live on my schedule.

My mother can tell you that waking me up is not easy. [I told her about this setup and she laughed for like 10 seconds. "Does it work? I bet it doesn't work. THANKS, MOM.] When I am at their house, she will stand at the door and repeat my name for a minute or two before I sleepily wonder just what in tarnation is going on. My MSMS roommates will tell you that I can get out of bed, walk across the room, turn the alarm off, get back in bed, and go right back to sleep. I can tell you that I’ve moved my alarm clock any number of times. I used to re-arrange my bedroom furniture every sixth months to fight this.

Yet what I’m doing right now is working. I explained it a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, and they were stunned to see the process. As such, I feel that I owe you an explanation.

What’s Happening Here?

I am piping audio around my house. This is starting to come into vogue with hardware and software solutions that replace things like Sonus systems, setups that run into the high hundreds and low thousands of dollars. This isn’t necessary anymore, especially if you use a Mac.

Equipment needed:

• Any old Mac
• Airport Express (AE)
• Stereo speakers, self-powered, that accept 1/8″ input.

To make this work, connect the speakers to the AE. The AE serves as an AirPlay point that can be used for all sorts of things, including this alarm system. I pipe all sorts of audio to my bedroom, mainly a Web stream of BBC World Service and radio captured on my radioSHARK. [I'll talk about these later, especially if there's interest. The AppleScript that I have for the BBCWS stream is kinda fun.]

Software needed

Airfoil has a Windows version, too, but it’s still aimed at AirPlay. You’ll have to figure out how to automate Windows on your own, though.

Let’s Go, Baby

Here’s the chain of events:

1. The night before, I use Audacity record an M4A of what I want to hear the next morning when I am waking up. I Export this file to ~/Documents/Alarms/. I name the file YYYYMMDD of the date I’ll be waking up. I found out tonight that using the same datestamp twice will cause the next step to fail.
2. I fire off meridian-alarms.scpt using Launchbar. [If you're trying to do this and haven't been using Launchbar or Quicksilver: WTF, yo.] This 1) quits Meridian then 2) moves the file from ~/Documents/Alarms/ to ~/Library/Sounds/ and 3) re-activates Meridian. The quit/restart option is required for Meridian to know that the new alarm exists. [I'd like to thank the dev for telling me how to do this.] The only hitch is that you do have to click on a dialog box to quit.
3. Go into the preferences for the Alarm and set the new wakeup sound to the file that you’ve just made. Failure to do this gets you the previous day’s alarm. Make sure that the Continuous option is checked, or you’ll hear yourself for 12 seconds and nevermore.
4. Set up a fire-off time with Cronnix to run meridian-pipe.scpt. This will set you up for piped audio from Meridian to those speakers at alarm time.
5. Go the fuck to sleep.
6. Come wakey time, your cronjob will fire. Airfoil will be routing sound from Meridian to your bedroom speakers. Once your alarm fires, you’ll be hearing yourself from the night before.

Here are some screenshots that may help you understand what’s happening:

You click the highlighted line to get the alarm preference set.

Use the Play a Sound: drop-down to move to your new alarm sound.

Make sure to set times in Cronnix that correspond with the times that Meridian is set to send an alarm.

To kill the alarm, you’re going to have to get out of bed, walk out of your bedroom, find the computer in whatever room you keep, sit down, and turn the alarm off. I find that the combination of a) hearing why I need to be awake and b) having to do a lot of work to stay asleep makes things work for me.

How to Make This Work for You

I generalized the scripts, which have things like YOUR_HD, YOUR_USERNAME, and YOUR_AE in them. Please change those values to appropriate ones for you. Spaces are okay: my HDD is “HAL 9000″, which plays a part in the weird world of how I name my computers and attached hardware. [That naming system is now out of date.]

Is this overly nerdy? You bet. If one person uses this craziness, I’ll be happy.

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