I grew up in central Arkansas and for those of you from other places, growing up there is like growing up twenty years in the past. The place never seems to be culturally caught up to the rest of the country. Fashion trends hit there last. Back in high school, I had a friend who was a full-on punk with Doc Martins, trench coat, and a mo-hawk. He was from out of state and people always asked me about my "gay" friend. The was the best they could do with punk since he was the only one they'd ever seen.

Race, however, was a part of every day life. I could not get through a day without hearing the N word. I remember first noticing this when I was in third grade and we played Star Trek on the playground. Demetris was one of my school friends and we let him play Captain Kirk because he was the only kid who had an authentic gold Star Trek shirt. This was the only criterion to play the coveted role of Kirk we seemed to respect. On days Demetris didn't wear the shirt, he was Scotty because he wanted to try his best at that outrageous Scottish accent. Demetris was one of my first black friends. He was a nice kid and I wanted him to come over and play. I didn't have many friends back then because my home life was a nightmare. And you probably guessed by now when I wanted to invite him over, he wasn't allowed, even if he wore the gold Star Trek shirt.

Right around that time in my my life, my mom was on her second marriage and this guy was quite the dick. His name was David and he did things like hit my mom and beat me with a boat paddle. He kept loaded guns in the house and I was nearly killed by my step-sister. David was as stereo-typical white trash as you can image. After duck hunting, he plucked the dead fowl in the front yard causing a fog of feathers that spread out in a radius of two adjacent homes.

Around the time I was seven, I found out a black family moved into our neighborhood. I can't remember exactly where they moved in relation to our house, but they should have known better by looking at the mushroom cloud of feathers, dead fish guts on the carport, garbage-strewing Labradors, and the overt public yelling and beatings all within the constrains of our lot alone. Alas, they moved in. David was furious. This was personal for him. So personal, he did something I've never told publicly before. David bought black house paint and sneaked down to this new family's house and defaced their house with the black paint. He finished off his work with a burning cross. I know this happened because my mom told me about the paint and the whole neighborhood buzzed about the paint and cross. I suspect David had accomplices. I also suspect he was privately cheered in that neighborhood. However, being seven and continually hiding from an abusive step-brother kept me away from most adult conversations.

Rose City Middle School (formerly Elementary; Credit Google Maps)

During this time, one of my places of refuge was my grandmother's house. She drove into "nigger town" twice a week to pick up one of two ladies to do her house cleaning. On Mondays she would get Lucille and Thursdays it was Rose. Both of these ladies were nice to me and busted their asses to clean my grandmother's house. Now, my grandmother was busy all of the time running the family construction business and wanted cheap housekeeping. So my grandmother took time to drive over to one of the poorest place in North Little Rock, Rose City, to bring these ladies to our house. I clearly remember one trip playing in the back of my grandmother's 1976 Ford Country Squire station wagon with my mother riding in the passenger seat. I remember my mom saying "nigger babies are really the cutest of them all."

Yeah, I grew up around racism. I know what it feels, sounds, and tastes like. From the subtleness of my grandmother ignoring my repeated questions as to why I couldn't use the same bathroom as Lucille to the ugly behavior of David trying to drive a black family from our street. I've seen a lot of it. Growing up white in this environment was like some sort of club. Other white kids felt comfortable saying the most vile and hate-filled comments because I was somehow in on the joke. I grew to hate people in general.

There is something about me even my family never understood. I'm way different than they are. I always have been. My grandfather was all about construction and mechanics and working the earth. I wrote stories, drew comic books, and lived in my head. I had few real friends and was generally considered a weird kid. I never liked the racist talk at the dinner table and remembered being embarrassed when they said things in public. It wasn't until I became self-aware that I could pin-point my disgust at that behavior. I hated it just as I hated working construction, as much as I hated David.

Eventually I left Arkansas and the biggest reason was its seemingly irreparable broken culture. I grew to loathe the way everything was racial. Martin Luther King Day always stirs up this complex torrent of memories, feelings, and images. I am reminded white resentment that Dr. King received a day of honor and how racist Southerners unofficially embrace it as Robert E. Lee day. I am reminded of Central High School and the forty-year struggle and financial nightmare that central Arkansas schools became. I am reminded of taking a black girl on a date to the Arkansas State Fair and being publicly ridiculed by whites while she was publicly harassed by blacks. I am reminded that there are many types of trauma a person can suffer, and one of them is growing up around so much hate.

Surely I'm not the only out there who grew up this way and who has similar feelings. If there are people like me, they recoil at any racism and try to avoid any appearance of it. It has nothing to do with white liberal guilt or making up for their own sins of the past. They are who they are because deep inside they know right from wrong in spite of how they grew up.  I'm not trying to present myself as special. The truth is I'm just an average guy who can barely take care of his own family. I hate politics and I especially hold disdain for racial politics. I avoid openly talking race but I enjoy reading publications like The Root because I know there are different and reasonable sides to every story (and it's a damn good read too).

I do credit Martin Luther King, Jr. as a role model. I know reading about him in the fifth grade made a life-changing impression. I clearly remember his picture in my history text book. I believe it's the same photo I included in this article. I'm still in awe of his driving desire to make a difference in a world where most of us have a sphere of influence only within our own households. Honestly, if I had been Dr. King, I'd have given up long before getting the national spotlight. As long as I live I will never fully understand his optimism, faith, and drive. Such things seem to evade me even to this day. However, Dr. King made a difference in my life. At a time when I began to question who I was, I read about a great man who confirmed I did know the difference between right and wrong even though it had not fully articulated as such in my mind.

Ironically, fifth grade was also the year I was bussed to a school outside my neighborhood to, of all places, Rose City Elementary. My teacher, Mr. Allen, an extraordinarily tall, thin black man, loved being a teacher so much I remember him working with me as I struggled with math and athletics. It was this man who so passionately taught us about Dr. King. I've never forgotten Mr. Allen or his kindness, or the fact he was so incredibly tall. Sadly, my mom pulled me out of public school because I got the snot beat out of me daily by a gang of five white kids from my class. They beat me up on the way to school and on the way back. So began my all white private school education for the next three and a half years. But that's another story for another time.

Martin Luther King Day is special to me. Like all holidays, it's personal and evokes memories, some of which are painful and some are painfully wonderful. However, every year I go through these memories trying to figure out what to do with them. This year, I decided to share. I hope somebody somewhere can identify with the pain of growing up around this kind of hatred and turn it into something positive. None of us have to be like our parents, on any level. I'm proof of that.

Previous Related Posts:

• Little Rock Central High School Museum
• Central Arkansas Schools, Desegregation, and 50 Years of Government Micromanagent

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• 10 Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotations (huffingtonpost.com)
• Father Paul Mayer: MLK Day and Arizona Evoke Memories of Selma (huffingtonpost.com)
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Mary Wagoner

I just found out a good friend of mine passed away. Mary Wagoner (@MaryroseWagoner) was introduced to me by a mutual friend fifteen years ago. We worked more projects together than I can count. I helped her with website work, application design, and documentation. She did marketing and PR. The thing about Mary was she knew PR like nobody else I ever met. She shared her experience and knowledge and taught me a lot about that side of the business.

Mary has two daughters I've met once or twice each. But I feel like I know them well because Mary told me all about them often. She loved being a mother and raised her children as single mother, which always deserves my deepest respect. She told me two weeks ago, when I was in Arkansas, how proud she was of them both. They are both smart, independent women because of Mary.

Mary is also one of two people I credit with dragging me into social media kicking and screaming. Mary hammered on me constantly to get on Twitter and Facebook. Eventually I did and she told me a couple of weeks ago how much she enjoyed my blog, tweets, and Facebook page as she dropped me off at the Little Rock Airport. That was the last time I saw her.

Her family has put funeral information on her Facebook page. Sadly, I cannot make the funeral. But my heart goes out to the family. I considered her one of my best friends and will miss her terribly.

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FusionOne was so far ahead of its time it collapsed on itself before people even knew how to sync. I loved that service and it was my first experience in losing a cloud-based app you truly deeply love. I had to break up with it.

Later on I discovered Plaxo. And here is where the story gets interesting. You see, Plaxo has been around a while and they used to sync contacts and calendar events very well. I'll forgive their whole Pulse thing and I was hoping they would go back to the basics of solid syncing. However, as of late, Plaxo has changed their service offerings and have screwed the usability pooch. I used to be able to sync my calendar with my Google Apps accounts. One day that stopped and I started getting this error message:

What Plaxo tells me but it's so artfully vague, I don't know what to do with it.

I thought I needed to change my account settings. When I try to do that, I get this:

Yeah, I have no idea what to do with it either

So then I read the online help and made sure I followed the instructions:

Nothing about Google Apps versus Gmail

It took me chatting with a service rep to discover they only support Gmail, not Google Apps. I'm fairly certain this was never clearly communicated and I made a basic assumption most of us who use Google Apps for personal domains make: "Google Mail" means both Gmail and Google Apps.

I saddled up and went on a quest to find a better solution for syncing. My first stop was Soocial. Soocial will sync contacts between Outlook and Google, but they warn you it's still experimental. Also there are many reports online of lost contacts and duplicates. Even better is they completely ignore the calendar, because, you know, nobody would ever want their calendar synced with their contacts.

Then there is bolt-on-ware for Outlook like gSyncit and CompanionLink. gSyncit is updated so often it's a little scary. When not updated, it deleted my wife's contacts several times. It also takes so long to sync her calendar she'd rather just put the event in two places. CompanionLink seems more reliable and I'm still testing it, but I don't think I can do multiple Google accounts with it.

I have an Android phone now and I could sync with HTC software but that's not what I need. I need reliable could-based syncing. And yeah, I know I could pay Google $50/year per user for their sync tool, but come on, I'm talking about my personal domain here. Like I'm going to shake down my wife, children, and mom for that. They already pay me enough in protection money; there's no need to break any bones over this.

So what's a boy to do to sync? The answer: there is no answer. When you get down to it, even if you pay Google, their support is practically non-existent. There is no real free alternative to Google Apps. Microsoft has aggressive pricing for similar paid services, but their track record at maintaining consistent online services is only slightly better than the average elementary school.

When you think about it, it's all about the groupware problem. Outlook defined a way for email, calendar, tasks, notes, and contacts to all work together. Nobody has successfully figured out how to distribute an online service that takes all of those elements and as seamlessly mesh them into something you can easily port your information in and out of.

We are at an impasse.

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Business Week's War!

While looking for something else, I found an accidental time capsule, a box of old magazines. Good god. Uh. What was I looking for? Say it again.

This is the January 28, 1991 Business Week. I was working in Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base the day of the invasion. I've not seen people scramble like that since.

Central High School as it stands today

First some background: I grew up in central Arkansas. I dreamed of leaving that place for many reasons, one of which was the blatant racism I witnessed in the 1980s.

Central High Museum has great interactive kiosks with a lot video

True story: One night, I was at a Circle K right off of Interstate 40 in North Little Rock. I was buying beer or something and going to visit a girlfriend. A black man came in while I was checking out. He was obviously fatigued. He told the cashier he had been assigned to Camp Robinson. From the line at checkout, I saw his wife and children asleep in the car and noticed a DoD sticker on the car's windshield. I assumed they'd been driving a while.

The dumb-ass redneck cashier gave the man the wrong directions. After the black gentleman walked out, this guy had the audacity to look at me and said, "I ain't got nuthin' against blacks–everybody ought to own one." I left my stuff without paying, ran out, and caught up with the guy. I told him he had gotten wrong directions and that I was in the Air National Guard. I was going to visit my girlfriend and Camp Robinson used to be a shortcut to where she lived. I had him follow me, while I sat in my car fuming over the stupid ass, dumb redneck, racist, throwback culture I loathed. This was 1990 or '91.

This is something I grew up with around Arkansas and I hated it. It was in my family and some of my "friends" were bigots of the highest order.

Central High was closed by the governor

Yesterday, I took my family to the Central High School Museum, which is a federally funded park now. My loathing of the backwards, white racist legacy in the state didn't prepare me for the videos and stories told in each exhibit.

My 12-year-old just finished reading, Warriors Don't Cry, and with the video footage and stories in the museum, it really brought home to her the frothing hatred populating Little Rock in 1957. This is nothing to be proud of. It was only 60 years ago and it's painful. I cannot express my distaste for that part of my Southern heritage. I want nothing to do with any of that. I want nothing to do with bigoted assholes who threw feces and urine inside two young black women's lockers. I left Arkansas for many reasons, but my hatred of the racist culture was at the top of the list.

Crisis at Central High display as you enter the museum

Even today, after living in Chicago and then the Dallas/Fort Worth area, going back to Arkansas is shocking. Racial tension and division is an undertow nearly everywhere we went.

Don't forget the hell the Little Rock 9 survived just trying to go to high school. Not only are they heroes for being the first blacks to integrate in Arkansas, they are  role models, authors, and speakers.

Never forget how lucky we are to have had these nine children blaze the first trail in what would later test our entire legal system. I respect them and those who stood up for them more than I can articulate.

I've written about this topic before: Central Arkansas Schools, Desegregation, and 50 Years of Government Micromanagent

Also note: I am not against all Southern culture. I highly recommend everyone from the South subscribe to Oxford American magazine. It's the best of the South in music, food, movies, and writing.

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Palm/HP is giving away $1 million in goodies for developers to port their apps over to webOS. I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased. I have a Palm Pre and I love my phone nearly as much as my own children.

Head over to Palm's development site for details.

My hopes for HP's involvement with webOS development are high. My wife has an Android phone and it's not bad but it certainly doesn't have the usability of my Pre. However, since I've had it, a few things are lacking:

• No voice dial. By this point, it's silly it hasn't been implemented yet. So many pedestrians are needlessly exposed to me finding numbers by hand. Just saying.
• No support for appointments received in email via POP or IMAP. Only Exchange appointments actually work. Appointments received in other mail services result in an error message. Come on dudes!
• No basic photo editing. Before I upload any photo to any online service, I should be able to perform basic cropping and resizing.
• Basic file management. I want to be able to rename files and organize them without connecting to a PC.
• Audible still hasn't created a client for the Pre. I've been an Audible customer for years and I'm about to give up on them altogether.
• 4G. Duh.

With layoffs pending at Palm and HP admitting phones are their highest priority for webOS, I probably won't get my wishes. I will also probably end up on an HTC EVO, which  is a great phone, but it's still Andriod-based and so many things about webOS have spoiled me.

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Over the years, I've heard of people having issues with Paypal randomly freezing funds, mostly related to eBay. I never paid that much attention because I never knew anyone personally that happened to. Well, it's different now. Some good people trying to do a good thing are feeling the random Paypal wrath:

Over the past several weeks we’ve had 3-4 random calls from various people at PayPal, all of whom only identify themselves by their first name, none of whom have direct phone numbers or email addresses, and all of whom are asking the exact same questions over and over…

• What is this OpenCamp thing?
• How many people will be coming?
• Why are you doing this?

Every time I go through the same speech with them. They are aware that we held WordCamp the past two years and have verified the previous registrations those years. They are aware that I personally have had a PayPal account for many years with them, and that I even have the Woopra account through them with far more volume than OpenCamp will ever have.

But despite the long term and multi-account relationship we enjoy, they’ve gone so far as to force me to send them copies of my drivers license and social security card to some strange physical address, and even run a personal credit check to allow us to keep accepting payments for OpenCamp.

OpenCamp is running all registrations through EventBrite and then into Paypal. It's an easy way to put on a conference, right? As a Big Design organizer my hackles are up. After reading this, I was on the phone immediately to co-organizer Brian Sullivan and he is with other organizers at lunch. We can take our Big Design business elsewhere. In the meantime, I encourage you to complain to Paypal if you registered for OpenCamp.

The irony of all of this is that OpenCamp needs access to the money to have a successful conference. By freezing their account, Paypal is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Paypal has successfully put the conference at more risk. Go read the whole article and pay attention to the information they are asking from OpenCamp. This moronic behavior cannot be justified.

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That's Not Going to Buff Out

On the upside, I had spinach lasagna with a caesar salad.

Brian's sister's SUV full so full

While the conference doesn't start until Friday, Thursday, Thursday is the day to be there. The loading and unloading of so-called "swag" and the French mimes with their constant voices telling me to put the books for the bookstore into Ballroom West. So I moved the boxes. All of them. Volunteers telling me something I can't hear like death of a microphone.

Vendors with their giant signage building around me. Handshakes all around. Why do they know my name? There's something about "exhibit coordinator" exhaled lifelessly from the vendor with the nice hair. Alfonzo. Userzoom. The company with nice hair. I wish I had nice hair.

More trips to and from cars with signs, boxes, and other awkwardness. Brian Sullivan's borrowed Hummer is at capacity and so is Brian. I'm bleeding inside from the death grip of hunger. Eating my soul and my Twitter stream.

Thursday night mixer with speakers. Oh there goes Jared Spool walking by. I'm taller than him but his passing crushes my spirit and I collapse into another room only to find Russ Unger staring away from me. Maybe I'm invisible or just really fat.

There is beer in this place. It is the beer of acceptance, the beer of peer pressure. The beer of unobtainable intellect swirling and fizzing. Thoughts abound. Phillip Hunter finds me and I hide inside.

Chris Hester is about, easily talking about design with the micro-celebrities of this plane. There is laughter. Cackling laughter. Adobe people are there. They laugh too. So much laughing.

Friday

I'm late. I'm early. But late.

More vendors. So. Many. Vendors. We've turned SMU into a trade show and no one seems to care. Not one bird falls from the sky. Dead.

Susan Weinschenk speaks and people gather and listen. Heads nod. Tweets tweet. Future books sell. Big Design becomes a blur of activity. Donuts with orange icing mock other donuts with their Aquent sponsored superiority and their heavy-handed yumminess. And Aquent collects people, like a harvester robot. I don't know how many but so many were collected. So many.

They Stare Back At Me

It's a day of meet and greet. Some speakers don't show. But fortunately a sub-woofer steps up.

At 1:00 pm, I find myself on a stage. They stare at me. People staring. I talk about ideas I have and it makes attendees argue with each other and I feel bad. But really I don't. Only later do I realize Giovanni Gallucci will mock me, openly and without mercy. Curse him and his western capitalist jackhole persona. I'm only a hippie and am afraid to rush the stage.

B.J. Allen is rushing around getting stuff done. I decide I don't like marathon men both real and in my head.

Mad*Pow after party lets me down because I was hoping to see infected cattle. I think my hearing needs to be checked. But I stay anyway.

Later, Giovanni and I eat dinner together and his monster is turned off. I no longer fear him, but I'm still fat. Ben Smithee watches us both with superior thinness.

Later that night I meet Darren Hall who wears his life on his arms. He connects with me and steals my mojo. I want to curl up into an alien baby fetus. Then I meet Brad Venable. He does voices. Voices. Lots of them. More than the ones in my head.

Saturday

Chris Bernard speaks about John Hughes. Why is everyone so focused on death? Chris finds the Christ figure in all of John Hughes' movies. I am moved. A little. I'm still not sure Maizy is Uncle Buck's Judas.

Can't attend sessions as work needs to be done. I'm jealous of the attendees drinking from the knowledge pouring from the heads of intellects who share at goats. Joshua Bright runs around me making stuff happen. How I loathe his energy and I try to trip him. It doesn't work. Damn.

Like surreal melting clocks, I get pats on the back from people I don't know. But I remain fat.

Lara Becker plans to put a body in the ice chest. She's always thinking behind those glasses. Thinking thoughts.

Jared Spool closes and brings the house down. Literally. Somewhere someone is homeless and wailing about their house.

After party: Jared wears a toga. I become infatuated with Jeremy Johnson's hair. I think he hides things in it like Sweet Lou from the Super Globtrotters. One minute he has all of this camera gear and the next it's gone. I will call him Gizmo from now on.

Beer is poured. Nathan Shedroff is too nice. Something must be wrong with him like he was hatched from a pod. He must be stopped.

Some whacked-out beer commercial is played followed by awkward silence.

Sunday

Nothing.

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Gosh, I remember when I first got Facebook. It was so little and cute. It had big, round, watery anime eyes and just begged for attention. I would play with Facebook for hours and not once did I have to water a crop or make flair. Like everything else, Facebook isn't so cute anymore now that it's grown up.

First of all it keeps wanting out of the yard with my dirty laundry in its mouth. I've set up all of the fences and thought I had every hole covered with a checkbox. I turn around and the damn thing has dug another hole. Some of these holes are where anybody can see in. So now I have to check the yard nearly every day to make sure Facebook didn't go and start plowing under the fence.

Lately I noticed that all of the training time I put into Facebook has gone out the Windows. It keeps changing how it looks to me. I thought I understood what it wanted and how to get it to do tricks. Then one day, bam! Facebook had gone and changed its appearance, but in a completely non-consistent way. I was totally lost when we started to play. I thought one thing and it took me somewhere else. I learned the hard way that I had to keep going home and starting over just to get Facebook to behave like I wanted. For example, when we played "fan page", Facebook would only play if we started from home.

I will admit, if you get a Facebook, it's much nicer than a MySpace, which is a terrible investment. All the MySpaces I've had experience with were unruly, untrainable, and could not be housebroken. Some MySpaces are so horsey they can't even fit in a netbook and reek of talentless band urine. You can't do much with Myspaces other than tolerate them for what little they offer.

Facebooks have much more potential. It's why it's so disappointing when they crap all over your feed. Taming them in the ways of the feed is time consuming. I spent hours blocking unwanted behaviors only to have Facebook offer me virtual flowers and Russian singles. It doesn't know when to stop.

The worst Facebook behavior is wallet chewing. It really wants at my wallet. Just when I think I have it under control, I'll catch it trying another way to get to it. And it's not just straight wallet snatching either. It's subversive. You won't catch it in the act but hear about it on the news.

Every Facebook owner should know the following risks:

• Facebook can turn on its owner at any time. It also cannot be killed by ordinary means. Always keep this in mind when playing with it out in the open.
• Facebook is prone to spreading diseases. If you play lots of games with Facebook, don't be surprised when your Facebook catches some sort of virus. I recommend regular dipping in new passwords.
• If you do like to play lots of games with Facebook, don't be surprised when your friends start ignoring you. Not everyone thinks a Facebook is cute.
• Never, ever, let Facebook on the couch. It will never get out of the ass-groove.

Good luck with your own Facebook. Remember there are no bad Facebooks, only stupid people.

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In memory of Rob Williams

On February 28, 1993, I drove to my fiance's apartment to pick her up for lunch. From the parking lot, I noticed there was a note on her door. I ran up the steps to the second floor and read the note. I read it again. And I read it again. It sank in after a few more reads. "Keith, Rob was killed in Waco today. I'm going to  meet Cindy." I took the note and drove myself home, still in shock.

My fiance worked for ATF and her co-worker, Robert Williams, and his wife, Cindy, were close friends. Rob befriended her as she was young, new to law enforcement, and new to the South. She applied for an internship with Customs and was offered a job with ATF a year after graduating college. Adjustment to working Little Rock, Arkansas was not easy. She was told by fellow coworkers that white women don't date black men, for example. She was completely out of her element. Rob saw that and it wasn't long until she was meeting with Rob and Cindy socially.

Rob had been out of town for a few days. I heard about his investigation through my fiance, but I didn't know the details. I would get snippets of things like he was looking into a cult leader in Waco, Texas who was stockpiling weapons, the cult leader had sex with young girls, and the cult leader seemed hellbent on creating a stand with police.

After I arrived home, I turned on the TV to reporters talking about a shootout. There on TV I saw my fiance's coworkers in quick clips. One of them crying as he walked alongside a vehicle with a body on it. I knew that must have been Rob. I also saw her boss on the roof of the building getting shot from rounds fired up through the roof. The clips made great television and were repeated regularly. I stopped watching.

Meanwhile, my fiance and another agent waited outside of a building where Cindy was working. She had already heard there were some deaths at the raid in Waco. When she came out of the building and saw them, she said she already knew.

My fiance spent some time with Cindy and went to Rob's home town of Jackson, Mississippi as funeral arrangements were made. I drove there to meet them. The day before the funeral was spent in a bar with ATF agents and a collection of cops from other agencies and local municipalities, all with a connection to Rob. They were a tight group.

Terry, a coworker of Rob as well as a close friend, was at the raid. Terry told me what happened that morning. I had not watched TV since the day of the raid and I wasn't familiar with the series of events. I would find out later that the media wasn't either.

Terry said around five in the morning, agents boarded two cattle trailers. The trailers were to disguise the agents since it wasn't unusual to see them around Waco. Terry said as they got closer to the compound they heard "pinging". Then Terry said he noticed beams of light appear where bullets opened small holes in the trailer. Terry thought this raid was going to be one in which they served a warrant but without resistance. Once agents started noticing the bullet holes, fear set in. Terry told me he felt panicky but he was also former military and well-trained. I knew by then even when someone like Terry says they panicked, that was secondary to training and skill.

ATF agents wore body armor and bullet-proof helmets. Terry injured his neck and back by diving behind a concrete structure. He would later require surgery to correct, but never have a full recovery. According to Terry, Rob took cover behind a structure (I can't remember specifically what the structure was). Rob was shooting over the structure and squatting back down. At one point Rob was struck by a bullet in the helmet, knocking him back. When Rob got back up to fire, he was still in the shooter's sights and killed.

In the following weeks, I would hear firsthand stories from people who were there, including my fiance's boss who was hospitalized with several gunshot wounds. The chain of events following the raid were chilling and out-of-sync with the media. I will touch on a few things I know to be true.

• David Koresh was a crazy cult leader. Why some right-wingers want to make him into a martyr is beyond my comprehension. He had thirteen children by having sex with other children.
• David Koresh was stockpiling weapons illegally. I don't care if you agree with a law or not, if you break a law expect consequences. Our system is set up so that any law can be challenged in many different ways. However, firing on police who have sworn to protect the public is not one of those ways. They were looking for trouble and got their wish. In fact, I was told by one of the agents involved that David Koresh said if they don't have their own Armageddon at the compound, they would have to take it into town.
• ATF leadership initially blamed undercover agent, Robert Rodriguez, for not notifying them that the element of surprise was gone. Rodriguez was later exonerated of the  accusation, but not before he locked himself in his home and struggled with serious depression. Someone told my fiance that he was already messed up from being undercover in the cult. Bible drills, the constant preaching, and the mentality of Koresh's followers took its toll on Rodriguez. ATF leadership using him as a scapegoat was enough to send him over the edge. I don't know Rodriguez, but I always felt bad for him.
• David Koresh ordered his own people to set fire to the compound. The FBI has recordings of that order and the subsequent attempts to put the fire out after the FBI backed off. This happened on April 19 when the FBI drove an APC into one wall of the compound.
• Prior to the fire at the compound, Koresh let all of the children out of the compound except the ones he fathered. Again, why he is any kind of martyr defies explanation.
• Right-wingers who complain about Islamic terrorism should recognize David Koresh for what he was. We have prosecuted potential terrorists for way less that what Koresh was getting by with. Religious terrorism is a real issue. People's faith can be used to manipulate them into unspeakable acts. Koresh was doing that to some people who might have otherwise led normal lives. Koresh was a terrorist, plain and simple. You can spin it anyway you want, but the fact is he broke the law and fired on law enforcement during a search warrant. In the end, Koresh is the villain of this story and he took the coward's way out by killing himself and murdering his own children.

One lesson I learned from this whole thing was the disparity between what is reported and the reality. TV news only provides a window into an event. I was 23 when this all happened and I lost a lot of idealism as a result. The misreporting and fabrications that followed the tragedy only made all of it worse on victims' and families on both sides of the standoff.

The most honest reporting of the Waco tragedy was on National Geographic's "The Final Report". By watching that documentary, you will truly understand what happened and how the leadership who made bad decisions didn't have long-term consequences. I watched Rob's widow go through hell because of all of this and I can tell you none of the leadership suffered like she did.

April 19 is an infamous date when it comes to domestic terrorism. Today, I've read mentions on conservative websites about the anniversary of the fire, for example Michelle Malkin's blog article. The articles are all framed around intrusive government practices. Would conservatives be so quick to yell "gun rights" if David Koresh was Islamic? Terrorism is terrorism. I want protection from Christian cults as much I want protection from Islamic militants. I detest them all. David Koresh was responsible for the series of events leading to the deaths of his own people. ATF may have made tactical mistakes and ATF leadership may have unforgivably screwed up. However, it was Koresh and his people who broke the law and fired on law enforcement. To spin it any other way is disservice to my friend, Rob, and the other victims of Koresh's insanity.

People surprise me a lot, and not by jumping out from around corners. If I've learned anything from my time in tech, it's never get involved in a holy war. Sure, when I was green and there was a full-on Mac versus PC debate on a mailing list, I'd stick my n00b neck in there like a bear cub looking for honey. When I read ZDNet news regularly, there wasn't a Mac or PC article that didn't have the other side trying to bring the holy war to the article comments. That's also where I noticed an invading third party, the Linux people, make periodic drive-by comments. After a while it occurred to me these arguments were never playing out. Windows people went back to virus cleaning. Mac people went back to making sweet, sweet love to their computers. Linux people went back to eating food from their moms' fridges.

The only thing that has changed between then and now is both Microsoft and Apple brought the holy war to their respective ad campaigns. I guess they finally gave the people what they really wanted.

The technological holy war is not new. What is it about technology that makes people so emotional?  It's not like there's a Sicilian and death on the line. This emotion tied to technology, especially computers, is disturbing. It's like being a moderate near a political rally. It's interesting to watch the two sides but you don't want to be there when the batons come out. I refer back now to one of my favorite HCI books, The Second Self, by Sherry Turkle:

Young children see almost everything in the world as alive in one way or another. This "animism" pervades the child's thinking until the development of concepts that help draw the line between the alive and the not-alive. Childhood animism has two faces: it makes the world friendly and understandable, but it can make it frightening as well. . . . We are drawn to what frightens us, we play with what disturbs us, in part to try to reassert our control over it. (p. 33-34)

Turkle observed children interacting with a Merlin and a Speak & Spell. She noticed, as the title of the book suggests, children behave differently when interacting with technology. It was more emotional. Most of us grew up with small electronics and computers; I had my first computer 31 years ago. Because I've had so many, I'm a little detached from computers, aside from my pure unadulterated anger at shit not working.

Emotionally siding with the companies making technology seems like a logical leap. The companies are the creators, near deities to some. In my political analogy, they are the parties behind the vapid candidates representing them. Once we make something such a part of ourselves and our personal identity, certainly the creators take on god-like states.

Yesterday I read "Sorry, Adobe, You Screwed Yourself", an article with enough traction to be a meme. Look at the raw emotion in this quote:

Adobe had multiple chances to prove their worth to Apple and they failed miserably. They ignored the OS X version of Flash. They ignored Photoshop – witness the rise of Acorn, Pixelmator etc.

Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.

I suggest pulling back the shiny outer layer and remembering we are talking about a couple of modern American businesses.  They are more dysfunctional than your distant relatives and their products are only "good enough" to make it to market. It's not like Apple has never had quality issues and it's not like Adobe hasn't tried to shut out competition. Any expectation of loyal behavior from any modern company is misguided at best. Companies are slaves to their shareholders. Decisions are rarely made beyond getting through the quarter until the next earnings announcements. I'm certainly no close friend of Adobe, but I think the Apple people protest way too much. It seems we're living Turkle's idea of animism but applied to the companies who make our beloved tech. It's time to back away from Apple and Adobe and get some fresh air; it's just another in a long line of holy wars.

Other tech holy wars of note:

• The Church versus Copernicus
• The Church versus Galileo
• Screw it, The Church versus pretty much everyone at some point
• Edison versus Tesla (Must Read!)
• CP/M versus DOS
• OS/2 Warp versus Usability
• Windows versus Mac
• Linux versus all lesser operating systems
• Framemaker versus Microsoft Word
• Doc-To-Help versus Robohelp
• The Beatles versus Apple
• The Department of Justice versus Microsoft (and nobody cares now)

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Cecily Police Sketches My Dream

This dream was too bizarre not to share.

Dressed in a suit (something I don't even own right now), I visited a Southern Baptist church specifically to watch Doug E Fresh perform. Who wouldn't? The church was packed with white people in suits. I could only sit in the back. Doug E Fresh came out in a gold suit and opened with "The Show", of course. I whipped out my Palm Pre to post photos to Twitter. After "The Show", he stepped back and a collection of all white religious singers started performing. They were of the horrible rod-up-the-ass type: men in suits and toupees next to women in bad 80s dresses and poofy Southern hair and extreme makeup.

Yeah, it gets weirder.

I moved closer hoping to get a photo of Doug E Fresh, frustrated at hearing "Just As I Am" over and over. I end up on a pew next to a blond woman who was too sleepy to sit up straight and kept leaning on me. I pushed her off my shoulder and she would mumble in her sleep something about how boring the music was. While I agreed, she annoyed me and I still couldn't get a good shot of Doug E Fresh.

Then a recurring theme in my dream began: I needed to find a bathroom. I got up and walked to the left of the stage where the bathrooms were. Naturally, the bathroom was completely full of men and boys and I couldn't get in. Inconsiderate jerks. So I walked back to the auditorium. A lady waved at me and motioned for me to sit next to her. She was about my age but really rough looking, in that trailer park, third world way. I didn't know her but she talked to me like we met at the last bad concert and then I remembered her. Then I remembered she had a husband who beat her and she  complained about him. Naturally he showed up. He was thick and mean and confronted me for talking to his wife. Fortunately I was able to produce the late nineteenth century six-shooter I just had appraised for $17,000. Yeah, by this time I was even saying "WTF?"

Eventually I became disgusted that Doug E Fresh was apparently not performing again as well as the sudden appearance of toilets embedded in the pews. I walked out of the church. In the muddy gravel parking lot, two Japanese boys had assembled a small rocket. Bill O'Reilly came out of the church and shooed them away. Then he got into the rocket, which was only big enough for him. He accidentally triggered the launch sequence and became washed with panic. Some other Fox reporter, one of the generic plastic ladies, came out and reached behind him to turn off the switch he couldn't see.

By the time this happened, I decided to jettison myself from the dream, hoping to god this was not a peek into a parallel universe where another me actually lives this reality.

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The UK Government wants to introduce a law to allow anyone to use your photographs commercially, or in ways you might not like, without asking you first.

In reading more about the UK Digital Economy Bill, I realize something bigger than any individual has been put into motion: the world-wide culture of content harvesting.

Without exaggeration, Google's business model dictates it must own all the world's content. Right now everybody is okay with that because we all use Google's Web, image, news, blog, map, book, and scholar search services. Every day we are telling Google they are doing what we want.

So why should it surprise anyone when companies use the Internet in the same way individuals do (see image above)? Companies are made of people. Governments are run by people. When it became a cultural norm to pirate books, movies, music, and photographs, why wouldn't company employees do what they do at home?

Enter Clause 43 of the UK Digital Economy Bill. The language legitimizes unauthorized use of intellectual property by lumping all work on the Internet into a "collective". The philosophy seems to be this: creators who put any content on the Internet divorce themselves of control of that content. Side note: I'm seeing more questioning of the hive mentality (recommended reading You are Not a Gaget by Jaron Lanier).

My internal question machine kicks into gear:

• Does accidental publishing of content put it into the collective to be used?
• Can content be retracted?
• Is there any direct recourse for individuals who retract published work?
• Can a web-based service's failure to hide private content provide any recourse for individuals whose works became part of the collective?
• Will I see my daughter's face on a can of soup one day?
• What are the international ramifications? Specifically, does that mean if I know a photographer in the UK, for example, can I use his work without telling him?
• Can people in the UK use my stuff without my permission?
• Who decides what is and isn't in the collective?
• Most importantly: what does this mean for people who make a living as artists and writers? Will the "licensing body" feed their children and pay their rent?

I could come up with questions along those lines all day. Many content creators could.

I agree with the opponents of this legislation. But this is a basic problem with society in general. When things are left up to a government to decide, they will screw it up. Just because technology poses hard questions to answer, we shouldn't leave it up to government bodies to decide. Culturally the world is saying they want everything for free. A large part of the solution is to work on public campaigns, education, and real solutions as to how to handle intellectual property.  The war between people and companies will get nastier, especially when governments feel compelled to get involved and have such a history of siding where the money is.

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Yes, it has been like this since the first time I posted it.

When not doing my real job, I pursue the Great Purge of 2008. I appear to be behind schedule so it's like most big IT projects. In my defense, proper purging is predicated by planning, precision, premeditated patterns, and pre-medicated posturing, especially when it applies to paper. So here's a little story:

Once upon a time, there was this woman who started a construction business with her husband in the late 1940s. Even today the little construction-company-that-could is still in business. She kept meticulous records. Every receipt, invoice, check stub, statement, IOU, and tissue she filed away. As time passed, boxes multiplied like bunnies. One day, the volume of paperwork was so incomprehensibly insurmountable, her family intervened and non-hilarity ensued. By "one day" I mean last year. By "woman" I mean my grandmother. I can only shake my fist at the sky and yell "why do you mock me bloodline?!" for I too have been stockpiling my own paperwork. The end.

Here I sit scrawling a shockingly long article about my own horde of paper. A couple of notes before I begin: first, not a single company has sponsored this so all opinions are my own. Second, the criteria I use for what is acceptable for my life may not work for everybody, so before you shred those Confederate land deeds you found in your attic, make sure you know what you're doing. I'm just trying to share helpful advice.

Starting At the End

As the title suggests, I formed a plan around future-proofing. Future-proofing is ensuring any product from a process is easily accessible in the future. For example, books printed on high-quality paper will last longer than books printed on toilet paper. Feel free to experiment. Admittedly, this is an over-simplified definition but I'm doing home and home-office documents not files from Area 51.

Naturally when we talk about paperless, we mean going digital as in paper to computer. If you assumed something else, please let me know how you are reading this blog; I'm intrigued.

Before I jump-start my purge, I have needs. And I have requirements too:

• I need to comply with tax retention laws.
• I want to store documents in such a way that I can open them in the future without going through hell.
• I want to be able to search my documents.
• I will need redundancy to protect all my hard work.

Simple, right? Here is how I addressed each of these requirements.

Retention Laws

You can do a Google search and find tons of opinions on retention. My advice is just call your accountant to ensure you comply with both federal and state. Most experts say you need seven years of personal tax information and ten years of business tax information, but ask definitely ask your accountant. Just because it's on a random website doesn't mean it applies to your situation, or for that matter, true. Got it?

Document Formats

I know I'm going to scan documents to be saved digitally. I learned my lesson about document formats while working in IT many years ago. Remember Wang word processors? Exactly. For a while there was a niche specialty of doing Wang-to-anything-but-Wang file conversions. In addition, I personally have a bunch of documents originally formatted in Wordstar that no longer can be read with the original formatting.

This is the first gotcha when it comes to a paperless conversion: Not all scanning software saves documents into a future-proof file format or even into a file. It's true. A lot of the documentation management software that ships with document scanners or is sold independently saves files into a proprietary database. This is obviously not future-proof and it's pretty annoying to be permanently chained to proprietary software.

Enter PDF/A. Go to the PDF/A website and read about how it's an archiving standard. Your best bet in storing your files in something you can access them from in the future will be the PDF/A format. Because it's a recognized ISO standard and large companies and governments are actually using PDF/A, your chances in the future of accessing and/or converting them is much greater than if you go with bad software.

Searching Documents

PDF/A files are stored in plain text. That means they are searchable by definition. However, when you scan documents, they are saved as an image. So your document management software should ideally allow you to store metadata about each file as you scan. For example, you would type key words like "bank statement" and "prison record" to be stored within the files. In addition, good document management software will also do a quick OCR scan of your document and save OCR copy within the PDF file.

Redundant Storage

My final requirement is to have enough file storage. Because I know I'm going to scan a bazillion documents and then save them, I need a lot of hard drive space and an equal amount of backup space. This takes planning because I'm not made of money. Things would be better if some publisher would just accept my open book proposal, but wishes aren't ponies or something like that.

The Plan

So here is my plan for getting this all done:

1. Obtain a document scanner: to be addressed in part 2 of this series.
2. Buy beer: this helps lubricate the robotics that will be actually feeding paper into the scanner.
3. Obtain document management software: to be addressed in part 3 of this series.
4. Obtain file storage and backup: to be addressed in part 4 of this series.
5. Actually do it: to be addressed in part 5 of this series.

Who knows, I might get all of this done.

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Fair warning: the following is a rant. No, I'm not flying a plane into a building. At worst I may kill this mosquito buzzing around my desk or break a pencil or two. However, there is a churning in my gut that feels different than most afternoons after lunch. I've been ignoring politics as of late and I think I need a release. I'll tackle health care and demonstrate to you why normal people like you and I don't belong anywhere near Washington DC. See these demonstrators to the right in that photo from a health care rally? There's a day they'll never get back.

Who Made What Arguments?

First, I know the President said every argument about health care reform has been made. Really? Really? I'm not sure either side has formed anything more coherent than "death panels" and "unregulated this or that". It appears that the only way to debate in DC is to run to the cluster of cameras on the Capitol steps and spew a bunch of soundbites.  The level of debate is so infantile it could be sponsored by Pampers.

There is a business discipline called Process Improvement. Process Improvement experts look at existing systems and figure out where to cut costs and improve productivity. Seems to me if you were to apply Process Improvement principles to health care, your first stop would be the source of most problems, congress.

While I'm at it, I have to ask: why have businesses been dragged into health care reform? That's another tumor you can lob off health care's ass. Why does the quality of your health care depend on your HR department cutting a good deal with Blue Cross? Insurance companies virtually dress like NASCAR drivers with logos everywhere. Your employer is more of a sponsor for your health insurance company than a customer.

Wouldn't be more fair to have free market health insurance with FDIC-like protection where you are in groups based on your local hospitals?

Image via Wikipedia

Today's Lesson in Self-Indulgence

The only law on the floor of either side of the Capitol right now should be to make it illegal for any lawyer to be a lawmaker. I can't think of any other profession that has somebody looking out for them like the legal profession. How would you like it if the people who ran the country kept coming up with new ways for you to be infinitely employed? For every law written, a new legal niche opens and one more ambulance chaser has his rabbit hole.

Nothing about proposed health care is about making things simpler and more affordable for people directly affected: patients, doctors, and insurance companies. In reality this is an exercise in complicating everything so more consultants can over-bill. It's like our tax code. Hey, you remember Sarbanes Oxley? You know how that was supposed to prevent future financial meltdowns? Yeah, health care will be like that: nothing solved but everybody involved will have to work harder to get what they have today.

How About Prerequisites?

If you could actually get any professional politician in touch with their constituents, you would solve all sorts of quantum physics problems, including time travel and tunneling to Bizarro World. I propose before any of the  morons in Washington even breath "health care reform" from their intern-licking mouths, they go on sabbatical. During said sabbatical, they must complete the following:

• Work for three years in the corporate world, during which time they don't get a raise, have benefits cut, get laid off several times, pay for COBRA, collect unemployment until it runs out, and get rehired. After getting rehired, they have to spend a year paying a $12,000 deductible before the next open enrollment so they can pick a better insurance plan.

• 

  Image via Wikipedia

  Run a small business with fewer than say, 50 employees. And it should be in an industry where the majority of employees are minimum wage but accidents are likely, something employing truck drivers or dock workers. They should also have to do this in states where they pay quarterly taxes, just to make it interesting. Then have them try and figure out how to get all employees to sign up for coverage so the few that want it can have it and those that don't can complain constantly about their withholdings. In addition, every quarter, the insurance company gets to jack up rates or drop the company altogether because one of the employees has cancer.

• Also they need spouses to have have at least one major accident, something like falling out of a tree while pruning it or getting hit by a neighbor's car while checking the mail. Here's the stipulation: they must have an HMO during these incidents and forget to call their primary doctors before dialing 911. They  must also try to hold on to a full-time job while the spouse is incapacitated. They have to remain in this situation until all medical bills are taken care of.
• Finally, they must have aging parents on fixed incomes who need medicine for serious conditions like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or MS. They cannot afford to pay somebody else to care for them, so they have to figure out long-term care while physically bathing and changing their parents' adult diapers.

Maybe, just maybe, by going through these things, they might be qualified to work on health care reform.

You're not really expecting anything significant from this current legislation I hope. If so, then I hate to break it to you, Dwayne Johnson is not the real tooth fairy.

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