Yesterday there
was
a news
story about a man who committed a bank robbery for only one dollar.
In North Carolina, on the morning of June 9th, James Verone walked into a bank
and handed the teller a note that read, “This is a bank robbery. Please only
give me one dollar.” Once given his meagre loot, he said, “I’ll be sitting
right over there in the chair waiting for the police.”
And why would he do this? In the hopes of receiving health care in prison. Mr.
Verone has some serious health problems, no insurance, and is unable to work.
Having exhausted his savings, he decided this was his best option, calmly put
his affairs in order and went for a walk to a bank.
It’s one of those stories that gives me the impulse to smugly sit here around
the other side of the planet, shake my head and think, “Only in America.” But
there are disenfranchised and desperate people in any society.
Last year I was going into the city a few evenings a month for various user
group meetings and the like. I was surprised by often being approached by
homeless or street people asking for any spare change.
In the past, I’d tended to give these people short shrift and keep walking, but
a friend of mine turned me around on this one evening when he was approached by
a man who was asking for some money so he would have a safe place to sleep that
night. He talked with the man for a little bit, gave him the few dollars he had
in his pocket and wished him luck.
I gave what is probably the usual reaction. “Hey, you don’t know why he
really wants that. He’s probably gonna go drink it or shoot up or something.”
His response realigned my thinking. He said that here was somebody in front of
him who was in such desperation that he would approach strangers in the street,
asking for help. Had swallowed their pride and needed to beg. The very absolute
least you can do is take them at face value and give them a few bucks.
Shrugging he concluded, “Never miss an opportunity to practice compassion.”
Mr. Verone’s heist reminded me of another story I heard not so long ago. In the
early 1900’s the Mayor of New York, Fiorello
LaGuardia had a habit of
showing up at a municipal court and presiding as judge. An opportunity that not
many Mayors availed themselves of.
The story goes that this particular night during the Great Depression, and old
woman was being charged for stealing a loaf of bread. She told the mayor that
she did it because her two grandchildren were starving. The shopkeeper refused
to drop the charges, wanting her as an example because it was a “real bad
neighbourhood.”
His hands tied, LaGuardia charged the woman a fine of ten dollars. As he was
pronouncing this judgement though, he took off his hat, threw in ten dollars,
and announced this he was remitting the fine. Not only that, but he fined
everyone in the courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has
to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.
The hat was passed to the bailiff, who used it to collect the fines from
seventy odd people in the courtroom that evening: petty criminals, traffic
offenders, a few lawyers, and one narked shopkeeper. The bewildered grandmother
was handed the collection and sent home to her family.
“Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.”
In honour of today (March 14) being Pi
Day, a musical interpretation of Pi to 31
decimal places by Michael John Blake:
And if you think you can do better, head over to
http://pi.highsign.de/ and make your own composition!
Pi, represented by the Greek letter π, is of course the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to its diameter, and is also the ratio of a circle’s
area to the square of its radius. Ever so versatile, the number π is used in
all kinds of maths. Geometry and trigonometry obviously, but also calculus,
physics, statistical probability and even chaos theory.
Celebrated in song and poem, there was even a movie called
Pi about a number theorist who
tried to understand the entire world through numbers and ended up drilling a
hole in his head (an impulse I’ve often shared during my career working with
computers.)
(Click image for a larger version.)
So do something today in celebration of the wonder of π. For Aussies, a meat
pie for lunch would be fitting. You could order a pizza (sometimes called a
pie), set your desktop wallpaper to the image above, read up about Pi on
wikipedia, try and memorise the
digits of π (the world record is 42,195
digits), or just run around in a circle like we do most days.
One of our cats has a bib-like cloth attached to his collar these days to stop
him catching birds. It is suppose to interfere with his stalking and so far
it's worked.
The other cats in the neighbourhood do point at him and laugh and call him a
kitteh [sic], but he’s reaped his own reward as far as I’m concerned as he
kept bringing birds home and hiding them in the house…
Anyway, just now a nice old man knocked on my door because he saw Kismet with
this thing on his collar and was concerned it was something stuck in his collar
and might be choking him.
I explained what it was and assured the man that if anybody was going to have
the pleasure of throttling that bloody cat it would be me and not some
inanimate piece of cloth.
I’ll never forget the time my brother-in-law was telling me about the movie,
Like Water for Chocolate. In trying to
sound worldly and hip, he enthused, “I love French films!”
If you’ve ever really used Google in anger, you’ve no doubt come across search
hits in a foreign language, and been offered a link to read a translated
version. Google Translate is a wonderful
service, but they recently added even more awesome with the ability to
translate
Latin!
Now we can all sound like pretentious scholars. I’m hoping the next addition
will be either Pig Latin or Tok
Pisin.
If Pavlov used a Labrador I think his experiments are void.
Well the cats are still at it. Last night Michelle was dishing up dinner and
turned her back for a second and one of the cats nipped up onto the bench and
tried to take off with a chicken drumstick.
It turned out to be a bit too heavy and while trying to dodge various objects
being thrown at him he dropped it onto the floor, where of course Toby
instantly vacuumed it up. (Toby is actually very well behaved – we’ve left food
out on the coffee table and he knows not to touch it – but once it hits the
floor it’s his domain.)
For the non-dog owners out there, cooked chicken bones are generally not very
good for dogs. They can splinter and cause problems, so when you see your dog
gobble down a drumstick you react with some urgency.
I immediately stuck my hand down his throat to try and retrieve the drumstick
– which has left me with a very nice imprint of one of his molars on the side
of my finger and taught the children a few new expressions they’re not allowed
to repeat.
Thus, with one hand covered in slimy dog spit, and the other holding on to his
collar, I took the last action left to me and hoicked up on his collar so he
couldn’t swallow. We danced that way for a little bit until he finally dropped
the bone.
At this point all pets were encouraged into the laundry either by the scruff of
their necks or pure inertia and locked away until after dinner.
It was actually quite nice to eat a meal without having furry eyes watching
your every move for a change.
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx
We have a three year old Labrador named Tobius or “Toby” for short. He was
supposedly the runt of the litter, but turned out to be a big black doofus with
an attention span about as wide as the space between his eyeballs.
He is not especially good at playing fetch. He'll be running along after the
ball and something will divert his attention --- one sharp left later he's off
rolling in God knows what and you're the one fetching the ball. About the only
time he's any good at fetch is if we play it in the house, up and down the
hallway.
So of course, Toby swallowed a ball a few weeks ago. It was one of those small
rubber super-balls that I’m continuously telling my daughter not to play with
or the dog will eat it which, sure enough, is what happened. She was bouncing
it up and down the hall, there was a flash of black and a scream of, “No Toby!”
and the ball was breakfast.
The advice from the vet was to wait and see, and to check his poop for the next
few days to see if the ball appears (a task that was delegated to my daughter
for obvious reasons – that and because it was her fault he ate the ball in the
first place). If it didn’t turn up in a few days or he showed signs of distress
then call them back.
Luckily he threw up the ball sometime during the second night as we found it in
the laundry the next morning. None of the animals have been inclined to play
with it for some reason.
Coda
Being the first dog I’ve ever had, he has certainly been a learning experience
for me. The general failure with the whole fetch thing for one. Toby has had
surgery twice on his left eye to laser out a growth, so perhaps his vision
isn’t all it could be and he has trouble tracking the ball. He’s certainly not
always the most visually observant.
At the start of June I had my head shaved for a good cause. Shaggy hair and
beard completely gone, run over twice with a straight razor, the whole nine
yards. After which we went bowling — but I digress. When we got home, with
the excitement of everyone arriving and pats and such he just didn’t notice,
but a while later, after I have been sitting at the computer for 20 minutes or
so then got up and turned around he totally freaked. He jumped up and barked,
“Who the hell are YOU?!” His nose and eyes were telling him two different
things.
Fortunately he calmed down quickly once I gave him a cuddle and distracted him
with a cat to chase.
“A cat by any other name is still a scheming little fur ball that craps
behind the couch.” — Unknown
The two new cats we’ve got are incorrigible. Despite our best efforts to date
they will still go on the kitchen benches whenever they can get away with it.
Every other cat we’ve had we’ve been able to train to stay off the benches, but
not these two.
They will also steal any food that is left unattended for even twenty
seconds. The little buggers have gotten into meat that was left out to defrost
(in the sink with a heavy glass breadboard over the top to keep them away, mind
you) and even steal bread left out on the bench.
They will literally try to steal food off the kids plates while they are eating
their dinners if adults are not around.
Ever since Michelle and I got our first cat the day after we got back from our
honeymoon, we’ve maintained the habit that the animals get shut in the laundry
at bed time and let out again in the morning. They’ve got baskets, water and
other amenities to make it comfy. They soon get use to it and it becomes part
of the routine. These days, with two cats (Kismet and Bazyl) and a hulking
black Labrador (Toby), it’s the only way to get a peaceful nights sleep without
something four legged tearing over you in the middle of the night.
Kismet, however, has gotten into the habit, when it comes that time of night to
put them into the laundry, to sneak under the table and only be lured out by
food --- which grates because if I give in a put some food down I feel like I'm
rewarding him for being a sneaky prick. And he is sneaky too, because he can be
fast asleep in my daughter's room, but will hear me let Toby out the backyard
for his pre-bedtime ablutions. So while doing this I see him slink out of her
room and under the table were I can't get him.
Then last night absolutely tore it. I’d done the trick of looking like I was
getting food out of and panty, and when he runs into the laundry I’m was empty
handed one too many times, and he wasn’t buying it, even when I actually put
food down. I would chase him out from under the dining table, and he would run
up the other end of the house and hide under the couch. I would chase him out
from under there and he would move on to the next bit of cover, ducking and
weaving commando style until he makes it back to the dining table, and around
we’d go again. The very last thing you want late at night before heading to bed
is to be playing a game of tiggy with a damn cat.
Let’s just say that as 12:30 last night the house was neat and by 12:40 half of
the furniture had been upended so the cat couldn’t get under it, the little
bugger had finally been cornered behind my bed, carried by the scruff of the
neck and given a lesson in aerodynamics as he was jettisoned into the laundry.
Since that night, we’ve come to a certain understanding. I invested in a water
pistol, you see, and so now it usually takes no more than two circuits around
the house before he declares defeat and slinks damply into the laundry, while
the other pets try not to giggle too conspicuously.
The cats’ continued and brazen brattishness led me to research these electric
fence type things where they wear a collar that gives them a jolt if they get
too close to the proximity sensor. This would be ideal to set put the sensor in
the kitchen to just keep them out of there, but there are two problems:
It appears to cost in the order of $600 or more to get the equipment for two
cats. This seems hideously overpriced. I guess they’ve gotta make sure the
equipment is safe and wont kill the animal (although that’s not a deal-breaker
at this point), but still overpriced.
None of them come with a remote where I can trigger the jolt on demand. I
know this can be abused, but would be damn useful in encouraging them out from
under furniture and as stress relief. I would call it, “the joy buzzer”.
Ah well. For now, the war of attrition will continue unabated.
I’m happy to say the number of gadgets I own has been growing a bit
unmanageable in the last few years, in particular the number that need USB
either for power, communications or both. The downside is the number of cables
and other debris that gets strewn around my desk. So I made a USB box to tidy
it all up:
Internally it has two powered USB hubs, one of which is connected to the
computer, the other is just for use as a power supply (for the GPS and battery
charger, which don’t need to talk to the computer).
The seven port USB hub, with five in the front and two in the back, is hot
glued into the front of the container for each ad hoc USB access.
Keyboard, mouse and backup drive are all direct into the computer as the
motherboard has plenty of ports.
A couple of days ago, a couple of friends put the following on their status on
Facebook:
People need to understand that children with special needs are not sick. They
are not searching for a cure, just acceptance. This week is for special needs
education. 93% percent of the people will not copy and paste this. Will you
be part of the seven percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for
at least an hour?
Now raising awareness and understanding is a fine thing, and I know and love
the kids my friends were thinking of when they cut and pasted this message.
Today’s topic is not the important subject of children with special needs, the
above just happens to be the latest example of what I do want to talk about,
which is how not to win people to your cause.
I’ll admit I’m fairly cynical of mouse-click
activisim,
avatar
activism
or any no-commitment, no-effort -isms. I think Lyz Lenz summed it up best when
she tweeted, “I am pretty sure no
matter what I put in my Facebook status, I won’t cure cancer, help Haiti or
raise awareness for anything, except my Facebook status.”
But that’s just me (and Lyz). I’d rather you use your own words for something
important to you, but if you want to cut and paste a status message concerning
a cause you have some skin in, then go for it.
The bit that really raises my ire is the, “Will you be part of the seven
percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for at least an hour?” How
many emails, tweets or what-have-you have you seen that try to stick it to you
with the “most people will just ignore this, will you?” line? How many of those
have you sent? It reminds me of the old, “If you forward this email, Bill Gates
will personally send you a new mobile phone” email that did the rounds years
ago, and hundreds of others.
For one thing, 80% of statistics are made up, so “seven percent” is fiction –
but more importantly: I don’t like being manipulated. Guilt trips and
pressure tactics are about the surest way of not getting my cooperation, no
matter what cause you represent or what you’re trying to sell. I grew up going
to both Baptist and Pentecostal churches, so I know how to be a critical
thinker and I know when I’m being manipulated.
You want to really get people to buy in to a cause, then appeal to their
intellect and move them with your passion. Share your stories of how it effects
your life, and give them enough information to understand, to agree (or not),
and to know how to participate (or not). Leave the manipulative tactics to the
politicians. If your cause is true then you don’t need ’em. A guilt trip is a
short journey that ends at about the same place it started. Commitment carries
you much further.
This week is for special needs education awareness. Many people don’t
understand that children with special needs are not sick. That they are not
searching for a cure, just acceptance. I know and love some children that
have special needs and am frustrated by how some people view them. How about
you?
Photo by Milen Dimov, Used with permission
’Twas a year ago today that I started using
Twitter and
Facebook. I kicked it off with a test
message to see if I got my
twitter missives automatically being sent to Facebook properly. Hardly an
auspicious start. I was not an early adopter of social networking tech, and at
first blush, you can’t blame me. Do I really want to read 140 character
messages of what people had for breakfast and their progress on the house work?
Fortunately I found it wasn’t all asinine ephemera.
I quickly found that the people I followed on Twitter and the people I followed on Facebook fell into two camps. On Facebook, there were already a lot of people that I know in analogue (AKA the real world), not just online. Particularly a large component of The Junction community group of which I’m involved. These are mostly non-techies – people from all walks of life.
On Twitter, it seemed I was following people of a more geek persuasion. Interesting people I’d meet at various conferences or tech user groups around Melbourne. In June I setup an account on Identi.ca for no particular reason. What’s Identi.ca? It is basically the same as Twitter, but based on open source software. It ended up being advantageous as there were a couple of people I started following that were only on Identi.ca - so I quickly set things up so my status updates flowed automatically from Identi.ca to Twitter, and from Twitter to Facebook.
So, Facebook was more friends and family, and Twitter and Identi.ca became more colleagues and techies. I sort of view my Twitter and Identi.ca use as my more professional, software developer persona, and Facebook as more of a personal venue. Mind you, I’m well aware that there is no such thing as privacy on Facebook, so in either case I never post anything I’d be particularly embarrassed for a potential employer to read, or worse still my mum.
So what do you do with it? I’ll usually tweet one or two things a day. Most of the time it is something funny I’ve found on the Internet that I want to share. That funny image you came across, or someone else tweeted. Some of the highlights if the past year have been:
Sleep Talkin’ Man which has to be the funniest thing of the year. This guy says absolutely bizarre things in his sleep. His wife uses a voice activated recorder and transcribes them on their blog each morning. Apparently when he’s awake, he’s quite a nice guy. When he’s asleep… not so much. Can be quite offensive at times, but gets a laugh more often than not.
Recently I launched Quote for the Day, backed by a little program that randomly picks a quote from my database and posts it each day. Of course you can follow it via Twitter, Facebook, or RSS. Okay, no more spruiking.
The sheer number of people Tweeting and Facebooking is astounding. Around the time I was doing some online work for a friend of mine, Kim, I came across a service called TwitterSpy that will send you instant messages of tweets based on search terms. So along with my name, my wife’s name and a few other terms, I had stuck his name in, then promptly forgot about it. About a month later an instant message pops up from someone tweeting that they had just hired Kim, whom I know was looking for work. So I ring up Kim to congratulate him on the new job, about thirty seconds after he’d hung up from the phone call with his new boss, accepting the job. Totallypsyched him out.
There’s also the weird or creepy things that happen. Like the time Amazon started following me on Twitter minutes after I visited their web site. Amazon continued the creepy trend with another Twitter account auto-sending me ‘good deals’ on Amazon products based on key words in my tweets. Clever advertising? Not.
There’s a really nice guy called Darren Rowse, who is one of the original professional bloggers. He even has a blog about professional blogging and of course, a related Twitter account. I was somewhat bemused when within a couple of hours of starting to follow ProBlogger, I myself had eight new followers – all of them ‘online entrepreneurs’, ‘wealth creation specialists’ and ‘professional bloggers’. After a day it was about twenty and at that point I stopped following ProBlogger to avoid more spam followers. Somehow I think all these ‘professionals’ don’t quite get it.
So how do you keep your sanity in the social networking world? A few of the things I have learnt:
Don’t friend everyone of the entire planet that you’ve ever met. You’ll end up with a barrage of noise. I’m the type of person who reads every tweet, that’s why I only follow about one hundred people, and most of those are infrequent tweeters. I don’t really understand the ones that follow thousands of people and just “dip in the stream”. I guess I’m all or nothing.
I also use RSS feeds a lot, and often use a twitter user’s RSS feed to follow accounts that are more company types (such as Firefox or Little Bird Electronics), and reserve following in Twitter more for individuals.
And speaking of noise, on Facebook you will see a lot of status messages to do with applications, like “Tracey just received an e-hug from Marsha” or “Go into Farmville and give me something stupid.” When you mouse over these, a “Hide” button will appear. This is your best friend. When you click it, it gives you the option to totally ignore the person, or totally ignore messages from the application, or undo. Ignoring the application is what you want. Be selective in what applications you use because they will have access to a lot of your information if you allow them.
And on a similar vein – you will get invitations from people to join all sorts of causes or what have you. Personally I’m fairly cynical of the efficacy of these click-wrapped activism things. If you want to join them then do so, but don’t feel in any way, shape or form obligated because somebody personally invited you along with everybody else on their friends list. The ignore button is your friend.
Same goes for friend invites from people you hardly know or don’t want to know.
Tend the garden. I actively block users that start following me that look like spammers, or already follow thousands of people and are obviously only following me in hopes that I’ll follow them back to boost their numbers in some weird ego thing. After a year I only have forty-seven followers on twitter, but I consider them quality followers (well, most of them, anyway).
So the social networking thing, is it worth it? After a year I have to grudgingly admit that, yeah, it is. It has certainly been useful as a kind of ’touching base’ with people I don’t see often enough in meat space (AKA the real world). Also, I’m actually a fairly private person, and while reasonably coherent and gregarious online can often be quiet in person. Facebook in particular I think has given me the opportunity to express a little bit more of myself with friends in a medium that can be more conducive. You get to share those delightful little discoveries, funny video or wry observations as they occur – not something that would always happen offline (AKA the real world).
So I wonder what the next twelve months will be like…
One of our cats has a bib-like cloth attached to his collar these days to stop
him catching birds. It is suppose to interfere with his stalking and so far
it's worked.
For the non-dog owners out there, cooked chicken bones are generally not very
good for dogs. They can splinter and cause problems, so when you see your dog
gobble down a drumstick you react with some urgency.
He is not especially good at playing fetch. He'll be running along after the
ball and something will divert his attention --- one sharp left later he's off
rolling in God knows what and you're the one fetching the ball. About the only
time he's any good at fetch is if we play it in the house, up and down the
hallway.
Kismet, however, has gotten into the habit, when it comes that time of night to
put them into the laundry, to sneak under the table and only be lured out by
food --- which grates because if I give in a put some food down I feel like I'm
rewarding him for being a sneaky prick. And he is sneaky too, because he can be
fast asleep in my daughter's room, but will hear me let Toby out the backyard
for his pre-bedtime ablutions. So while doing this I see him slink out of her
room and under the table were I can't get him.
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