99 percent failsafe

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I got a good laugh when Kirsten posted this, and I finally remembered to mention it here.

Laura Bush recently expressed her “shock” over the gay marriage issue. In this Salon article she goes on to talk about sex education, mentioning that abstinence is “100 percent fail-safe.”

This raised Kirsten’s eyebrows, apparently…

And it suddenly occurred to me that this was just a little off…I mean – the Bushes are hardcore christians, right?

That abstinence bit worked REAL well for Mary and Joseph, didn’t it? It’s 100% fail-safe, after all.

iTunes: “Perfect Tan (Bikini Atoll)” by Machines of Loving Grace from the album Concentration (1993, 3:21).

Apple out of debt

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Impressive, really — even with the economy in the shape it’s been lately, Apple has been doing so well that they were just able to pull themselves out of debt, according to this internal Apple memo:

Team,

Today is a historic day of sorts for our company. When I arrived back at Apple in mid-1997, the company was burdened with \$1 billion of debt. Through everyone’s hard work we turned Apple around, paid off the majority of our debt and began to amass a war chest of cash in the bank which has grown to about \$4.8 billion! But there was still \$300 million of remaining debt, which we decided to hold to maturity.

Today we used \$300 million of our cash to pay off this remaining debt.

Apple is now a debt-free company — for the first time in over a decade!

It sure feels good.

Steve

(via /.)

iTunes: “The Moon, Part 1” by Speakeasy from the album Common Ground (1995, 3:33).

Clumsy Brits

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According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, in 2002…

  • 12,300 people slipped and fell on wood floors.
  • 20,000 people injured themselves while riding microscooters.
  • 5,310 people fell while pulling on trousers.
  • And 700 people (assumedly men) injured themselves while zipping their trouser zippers.

\<cringe>Ow.\</cringe>

(via Prairie)

iTunes: “Golden Dawn” by Ministry from the album Land of Rape and Honey (1988, 5:42).

Why the genealogy bug?

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Because it makes history real.

When I was younger, I claimed (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) that I couldn’t get into history because, “you meet all these interesting people — but they’re all dead!”

Thankfully, that attitude has changed as I’ve aged, and I’m constantly finding history more and more interesting. One of the big triggers for that change was the first time I started digging through the box of genealogical records that floats around our family, during one of its trips through our household. At first it was just idle curiosity, but then I started reading…

Random recollections of what’s contained in that box:

One family line can be traced back to Richard Warren, who came to America on the Mayflower.

The line of mom’s maiden name — Ward — can only be traced back a few generations. The popular theory is that a few generations back, the “family founder” was an orphan, and therefore a “ward of the state.” Hence, the family name of Ward.

One of my ancestors ran a stop on the Underground Railroad during the civil war.

During the westward expansion of America, one family lived in a little cabin somewhere out on the woods. One day the mother and father were off somewhere, leaving the children in charge of the oldest child, who was around ten or twelve, I believe. During the time they were gone, he realized that there was a mountain lion (cougar?) stalking the house, and he had to find his father’s gun and kill the predator before it made off with one of the younger children.

During the Revolutionary War, one ancestor fighting for the colonies was captured by the British. During the review of the prisoners on board a British ship, the captain stopped in front of him — it was his brother. They retired to the captains cabin and spent the next few hours in debate, each trying to convince the other to switch sides. Neither succeeded, the captured brother was set free, and neither brother saw the other again.

These are all things that when you read about them in the history books, they often just provoke a “huh…that’s neat” reaction. But when I sat there and read through these stories as they related to myself and my family, they resonated with me in a way they never had before, and suddenly it was all a lot more real to me.

I’m really looking forward to being able to get back into all this again.

Can you tell? :)

iTunes: “Sky Is Broken, The” by Moby from the album Play (1999, 4:18).

More on the genealogy project

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I spent some time last night following up on playing around with software for tracking my family’s history on our website. So far, things are actually looking fairly good — with the one caveat that I only have so much information in my head.

The first piece to the puzzle is GEDitCOM, a Mac OS X application that reads and writes standard GEDCOM files (I had no idea that there was a standard file for genealogy software before I started looking into all this). While it’s not the prettiest application in the world, it does appear to be very powerful, and I’m quite pleasantly surprised by the amount of information that the GEDCOM format supports.

Of course, I’m not sure why I’m surprised — I’m obviously not the first person to look into how to track all this information using a computer. I guess we all just like to think that we’re the first to come up with a good idea… ;)

The second piece is the web package I stumbled across the other day — PhpGedView. A set of PHP scripts, it was very easy to install and get up and running, all I had to do was copy the scripts into a directory on the webserver, tweak the permissions on two files and one directory, and I could log into the interface and start putting things together. Again, it’s not as pretty as it could be, but it does look like nearly (if not entirely) all of the functionality that I was looking for is there.

Once PhpGedView is installed, all you need to do is upload a standard GEDCOM file and PhpGedView parses it and creates the final website. Here’s the one spot where I ran into problems: each time I uploaded the GEDCOM file that GEDitCOM created, PhpGedView wasn’t able to parse it correctly, and I got a bunch of garbage data.

Turns out that the solution is fairly simple, and ties into an age-old issue between Mac and PC file formats. Mac systems use a different character to signify the end of a line than PC (DOS/*NIX) systems do, and when the scripts tried to import the GEDCOM file, they saw it as one really really really long line. I was able to get around this by running the file through BBEdit and switching the line break style, I’m sure there are many utilities to do just that floating around the ‘net for people who don’t have BBEdit.

Once I got that figured out, the import went smoothly, and as a result, the first version of our family tree is up. It’s very bare-bones at the moment (though not as bare-bones as it looks at first — just click around and experiment a bit to move around the tree), but mom promised to send me copies of the family’s “history box”. Once I get that and pop more information in, the tree will look a lot less sparse than it does at the moment.

Even better, though, is that PhpGedView does handle one of the bigger items on my wishlist — user accounts with editing ability. I’ll need to put together a simple “user’s manual/how-to”, but this will allow other people in the family to add and edit information to the database. Once changes are made, I can then download the updated GEDCOM file from PhpGedView to my computer, re-import it into GEDitCOM, and keep all the information synced between my personal workspace and the website. Not bad at all!

Every few years of my life, the genealogy bug has bit me — now that it has again, it’s great that I’ve got the technology at my fingertips to be able to store and present it like this.

Now, mom — about that box… ;)

iTunes: “I Was Walking” by Poems for Laila from the album On a Wednesday (2002, 2:50).

Brain Drain

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There’s an excellent (as in must-read) article in the Washington Monthly looking at how the Bush administrations policies are driving creative talent away from America.

As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001–an astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar, though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers. Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope are short-term security concerns–as federal agencies have restricted visas from certain countries after September 11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United States. For instance, most of the decline in science and technology immigrants in the National Science Board study was due to a drop in applications.

[…]

…I’m convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America’s human capital and interconnectedness to the world–crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government’s attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we’re saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, “You don’t belong here.”

(via Tom Negrino)

Why gay marriage should not be legalized

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[Update:]{.underline}

When I originally found this piece, it was uncredited, and so I posted it as I found it. Thanks to Suchita for pointing me to the original source: the Gator Gay Straight Alliance at the Univeristy of Florida.

  1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.
  2. Heterosexual marriages are valid becasue they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.
  3. Obviously, gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
  4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if Gay marriage is allowed, since Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
  5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.
  6. Gay marriage should be decided by people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
  7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire counrty. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
  8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
  9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
  10. Children can never suceed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
  11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to things like cars or longer lifespans.
  12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “seperate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Seperate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as seperate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

Not the best I’ve ever read, but not terrible, and has its amusing moments. Its heart is in the right place, though.

(via Something Positive)

Duck! The food’s shooting back!

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You will never lose betting on human stupidity.

A man and his wife ducked behind a refrigerator when bullets began exploding in their oven, authorities say.

Capt. Craig Kohlbeck of the Brown County Sheriff’s Department said the husband had put the ammunition and three handguns in the oven before the couple left on a vacation.

He told officers he thought the items would be safe there in case someone broke into the home while they were away.

After returning from their trip Tuesday, the wife turned on the oven to prepare dinner and the bullets ignited, Kohlbeck said.

No one was hurt.

Of course, as amusing as this is, I can see it happening. At one point many years ago, mom decided that she’d store some of her unused Tupperware in the oven. Later on, Dad decided to cook.

After she had to get new Tupperware, mom decided that there were better places to store it.

;)

(via Prairie)

iPhotoToGallery

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Adding photos to my family photo gallery, the old way:

  1. Choose the photos I want to send to the gallery in iPhoto.
  2. Export the photos to a folder on my hard drive.
  3. Copy the photos to a folder on the webserver.
  4. Log into the Gallery software on the website.
  5. Navigate to the album I want to add the photos to.
  6. Choose Add photos….
  7. Enter the URL of the directory I just copied the photos into.
  8. Upload.
  9. Done.

Adding photos to my family photo gallery with iPhotoToGallery:

  1. Choose the photos I want to send to the gallery in iPhoto.
  2. In iPhoto, choose File > Export…, then click on the Gallery tab.
  3. Choose the album I want to upload the photos to (or create a new album).
  4. Click Export.
  5. Done.

Very, very nice.

(via Forwarding Address: OS X)

iTunes: “New Style Baby, A (’91)” by Pink Stanly Ford from the album Technomancer (1996, 6:47).