Not politically correct, technically correct.

There are some issues that I take a stance on that would, at the surface, appear to be me trying to be PC. In reality, I just want to be TC, technically correct.

Issue 1: Indians and Native Americans.
This one has bugged me for a long time. Why do we still call Native Americans Indians? We figured out a long, long time ago that Christopher Columbus landed in America, not in India. So why do we still call the natives here Indians? It makes referring to either the Native Americans or Indians very ambiguous. I also say Native American, and teach my kids to do the same, not because I am scared of offending anyone, but because I want to be clear in my meaning of who I am speaking about.

Issue 2: African Americans.
This is the stupidest term we could have come up with to define people with who descended from African aborigines.
The term itself is rather confusing. It is suppose to imply Americans who came from Africa. But that doesn't really stand up very well. Would a white person who becomes a naturalized citizen, and their children, be African Americans? What about a black person from Europe, Jamaica, or any other country who has moved to this country and become a citizen. They don't see themselves as Africans, so they aren't really African Americans, and neither are their children.
The other problem is that we are distancing blacks from other races. A person who comes from a long line of Europeans, Australians, or any other country, but born in the United States would simply be called Caucasians, or Americans. Are blacks a special bread of Americans that we need to define them differently?
A third issue is the difference between nationality and race. Nationality refers to the country you are born in, and has nothing to do with your ancestry. Race has to do with your ancestry, but not with your country of origin. All people born in Africa are Africans. When an "African American" moves to another country, are their children in that new country African American's? No. They are neither African nor American, either by race or nationality. To say someone is an African American is reference to their nationality, so why do we refer to that as a race? It is a technically incorrect way to refer to people who have black skin.
I suggest we call all people with black skin Negroes, and all people with white skin Caucasians, but really I just don't care, as long as the term is consistent and relevant.

On both of these issues, I don't take a stance because I am worried about offending anyone, I just want to use language that is clear and meaningful.

Wedding Weekend

Last weekend Kim's cousin, Brent got married to his fiance, Brooke. The wedding was in Ft. Meyers.
Kim picked me up from work on Friday a little after 4:30pm and we left straight from there.
As a rule Kim always drives the first half of the trip. The reason for this is that by the second half she is exhausted and will go crazy, literally. So she drives first and then I drive second.
This time the kids where being causing all sorts of trouble, and Arianna just could not be made happy. I was having a hard time dealing with it, so we pulled over and I drove the rest of the trip.
We had to make lots of stops on the way down and arrived about 12:30 at night. We where set to stay at Donna and Mark's house. When we got there we banged on the door, rang the doorbell, on all of the windows, and called their phones with no luck. They where dead asleep. After about thirty minutes of this we decided to find a hotel room. After passing on some seedy looking places, one with cops interrogating someone, we picked a hotel right off the interstate. We didn't really pay attention to the price that night, but the room was $100. This was pretty absurd as it was just an average hotel, nothing special.
Mark and Donna called the next day to find out where we where, and Kim gave them the full story. They where pretty upset with themselves about not waking up. We drove to their house, and their kids where excited about seeing ours. They played a lot.
Ernie came over without Donna. Not having Donna around makes a big difference. She is always very loud and does what she needs to to be the center of attention. The problem is that she doesn't understand normal etiquette and says all sorts of offensive things frequently. She is also always on Ernie's case, so he was more relaxed too.
The wedding was at some brand new high-class golf resort. The ceremony was outside, where it was burning hot form the Southern Florida sun. The breeze kept things somewhat manageable. They must have foreseen this as the ceremony was only about thirty minutes long, and then it was a break for the reception hall.
It started with appetizers of fruits, vegetables, and cheese and crackers. When we sat down, all of the girls where fussing a lot. Kim noted how she was looking forward to the wedding, but was now just looking forward to getting home. She was holding the baby up on the table as she ate crackers, so I slipped in to her stead and held up the baby and shooed her away. She was hesitant but finally I convinced her to go and have fun. She kept coming back to us, but I kept reassuring her that she was free to do whatever she wanted.
After appetizer time we where seated at our assigned tables. At our table was us and Kim's sisters, Ernie, April, and April's boyfriend. With Kim so close to the kids she had to care for them again as they would go between me and her, but by this time they where all on good behavior, but I made sure Kim new she could go mingle as she pleased.
Athena wanted to go out on the dance floor and dance with me, so we did. It basically consisted of my crouching down, watching her as she ran around in a circle. She had a really good time.
It took a while, but they finally served the salads. After an even longer time, they served the main dish, which was a sliced chicken breast stuffed with some sort of cream and spinach thing, I think. It also had some orange sauce on top of it. It was okay, but the food wasn't hot, and I think I could get better chicken at Lindy's.
After the meal they did the traditional stuff where the mother and fathers of the bride and groom do their talk and the last dance, and all that other stuff. Then it was dance time. You don't have to beg the Newman's to get out and dance. They just do it. The music was good to. It was primarily oldies like Twist & Shout, Mustang Sally, etc. Lots of good music to dance to. None of that slow crap. I staid up to the Cha-Cha slide.
Not longer after we sat down for the meal, Aurora said her stomach hurt, and she just kept feeling worse as the night wore on. Athena had was having a great time, but by the end of the Cha-Cha slide she was beat. The DJ did over six minutes of the Cha-Cha Slide. She started it laughing and ended it whining. Arianna was on her last wind as well. So I went home with our kids, Mark, and his kids Marcus and Harrison.
Back at the house Kim, Arianna, Athena and I where set to sleep in Harrison's room, and Harrison, Marcus, and Aurora where set to sleep in Marcus' room. When Aurora laid down she said she felt like she might throw up. Marcus got a a trash can and told Aurora to throw up in there if she couldn't make it to the bathroom, which was just outside the door.
After the kids went to bed I played the Wii. In the middle of the game Aurroa came out to the living room. In stead of throwing up in the trash or the bathroom, she went in Harrison's room and thew up all over some of our stuff and then puked in the hall on the way to the living room.
I set her in the bathroom and then in the bath tub and went back out and cleaned up the throw up. I then washed her in full and set her back in bed. She said she felt better, but I made sure the understood that there was a trash can right next to her bed she needed to use if she coulnd't make it to the bathroom, and that her first priority needed to be throwing up in one of these two places before she tried to find me.
After that she went back to sleep.
The next day I didn't feel well. I didn't throw up or anything, but my body felt week. I laid around the house practically all day. The kids played a lot and where very well behaved. In fact, the whole trip only Aurora went to time out, and that was once for burping at the dinner table. We the kids where really well behaved while we where away.
We left Fort Meyers around 5:30. Because of my sickness, Kim drove the whole way back. The kids slept the whole way too. We only had to stop once, and that was for bathroom and gas.

Miro love

I have set up a program called Miro on my girl's computer and am loving it. The simplest explanation of what Miro does is that it is like podcasting for videos. In stead of downloading updated podcast (i.e. audio casts) it downloads updated video casts, or video feeds. There isn't much ground breaking about that, but the way Miro does it is really cool. It tries to make itself out more like an online video programmer than a simple video feed reader.
When you first start it up it has a search engine to find different feeds based on topic. So for my girls I browsed the education and kids section and found video feeds from all sorts of places. For example, They Might Be Giants releases a new videocast every Friday featuring to kids music videos. National Geographic has videocasts they release periodically.
We do not have cable at our house, and I prefer to keep it that way. So now my kids have only the TV that I have selected for them without any commercials chanting "consume, consume, consume" at them. The latter being why I don't like having cable TV.
Miro is available for Linux, OSX, and Windows at http://www.getmiro.com/ It is also open source software.

Yesterday I participated in the International Ride of Silence. Unfortunately, just the day before, a local kid named Jarryd Brown was killed on his bicycle.
I took my bike up to Krank it Up at 6:30 to fix a leaky tire, and just in general get my rusty bike back in to shape. My patch on the tube didn't take, so Danny let me ride his mountain bike.
The "Silence" part of the ride was taken very seriously. As far as I saw, nobody said a word the whole ride. We just rode and listened to the various cars make racket at us either throw yelling unintelligible words or honking. It's not always immediately clear when people are trying to show their support, or trying to be asses, so I make a habit of giving everyone a friendly smile and wave, even when their intentions are clear.
Our first stop was at the intersection of Magnolia and Apalachee Parkway where Jarryd was killed. He had some friends and family there. They took one of our Ghost Bikes and chained it up at a post.
It was a very emotional scene. Lots of crying. One guy told Jarred's story about falling in love with bicycles recently.
Local news was there, and they interviewed Justin Pogge. Then we left for our next stop.

http://tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080522/NEWS01/805220316&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL

Jarryd Everett Brown, the bicyclist who died in a Tallahassee crash Tuesday night, was part of a tightly knit community that is now mourning his death.

Brown, 22, grew up in the Miccosukee Land Cooperative, a neighborhood where about 100 families live, and he graduated from SAIL High School in 2004.

"When I went to school today, there were a lot of kids that needed hugs and, believe me, I needed them too," Mike Rychlik, an English teacher at SAIL and a neighbor of the Brown family said Wednesday. "He was very popular. The kids at the school really gravitated toward him but, he wasn't the swagger kind of popular guy. He was kind of low key. He was a loyal friend."

About 8:15 p.m. Tuesday, Brown was heading north on the west side of Magnolia Drive, said Tallahassee Police Department spokesman Officer David McCranie.

According to witnesses, Brown crossed Apalachee Parkway even though he had a red light. The driver of a Chevrolet Blazer heading west on Apalachee had a green light when he went through the intersection and struck Brown. The driver, who was not at fault, was William Wiehagen.

"The investigation continues but charges are not pending," McCranie said.

Brown was thrown from his bicycle and died on scene, he said. He was not wearing a helmet.

It was the second bicycle-related fatality in Leon County and Tallahassee this year. Carroll L. Moore, 64, died Feb. 26 from injuries he suffered from a crash a week earlier. A driver waiting to turn left onto Clara Kee Boulevard from U.S. 27 North didn't see Moore, who was riding his bicycle.

Earlier this month, a bicyclist was seriously injured after he was struck by a truck and dragged 100 feet on North Monroe Street.

Bicyclists were injured in 63 crashes last year in Leon County, but none died, according to preliminary data from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

The Miccosukee Co-op community helped Brown's family when his mother was sick with cancer. She died a few years ago, Rychlik said. They formed a healing circle and had potluck dinners at the Browns' home on Monday nights.

"It's really hitting us hard," Rychlik said. "For Scott (Brown's father) to lose a wife and to lose his only child is unbelievably burdensome and hard to fathom."

Georjean Thaell, another neighbor, said it was clear Brown was a loving person.

"When I would see him, I knew that he loved me and I think that a lot of people can say that about him," she said. "He had beautiful, big eyes that were kind of sad after his mother died."

Justin Pogge, a volunteer with Krank It Up, a community bicycle project, said he saw Brown last week.

"The bike he was riding was one he borrowed from a friend, and he was talking about how excited he was getting a bicycle and riding it around town," Pogge recalled.

Pogge was helping organize a ghost bike ride for Wednesday night. The ride is a memorial for local bicyclists who have died in crashes. He and others planned to spray paint an old bicycle white and chain it near where Brown died.

Two years ago we setup a ghost bike for a man who was killed near the Governor Square Mall. The bike has since been taken down so we put another one up.
The final stop was for a bicyclist that was killed near Lake Jackson. Lake Jackson is pretty far away. About half broke off and continued on to Lake Jackson. The rest of us headed back to Krank it Up.
Overall the ride was both emotional and exhilarating. It is coming up on the eve of Andrews death, and I thought about him, Aurora, and the rest of his family a lot. Death is a very difficult thing to deal with.

Some pictures from the ride:
http://tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Site=CD&Date=20080521&Category=PHOTOS03&ArtNo=805210803&Ref=PH&Params=Itemnr=1
http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=22528266&albumId=1892362

Aurora and adding

Aurora just asked me what twenty plus twenty was. Before I could answer her she said, "No, wait, it's forty."
I asked if they had been practicing added two-digit numbers in school. She said, "No, I just remember I could count by twenties." She figure out in her mind how to add twenty and twenty without anyone explaining to her how to add two-digit numbers. Sweet!

Arianna's first birthday party.

Saturday we held Arianna's first birthday party at my parents house out in Sopchoppy. Kim bought some bouncy balls and playpen balls for the party.
Nick was there with his fiance and two kids Ashton and Angel. Aurora immediately took to Ashton and they played together most of the time.
My mom had bought a kiddy pool. We filled it up with water and playpen balls, which made for much fun to be had by the kids.
I was actually pretty excited about getting the balls. I had wanted to get some playpen balls for quite some time, but never had a good enough excuse to make the purchase, and I didn't expect that Kim would be to keen on the idea. So to have Kim bring up the idea and take the initiative to get them was awesome.
Athena did not take any naps all day long, but was still good for the whole day. She got a lot of presents. I got Aurora and Athena SpongeBob Season 4 part 1. We usually get the other kids a present for the others birthday. Just this one half of SpongeBob season four cost almost forty dollars. I wanted to get teach of them one half, but it was way too expensive.
Saturday night we let Ashton stay over at our house. This made all the kids really excited. Ashton slept on the top bunk with Aurora. The next morning I made pancakes, we got all of our stuff ready, and then we headed back out to Sopchoppy.
Nick helped Danny replaced a water pump and then he had to leave back for Pensacola.
After that, all of us except Danny went to Apalachicola. We had dinner there and looked at the scenery. Afterwords Kim and I gathered our stuff and went home.

Vicky and the truck

Zeke and Vicky had their car stolen a couple of weeks ago. So they called me and wanted to know if they could have their Dodge Dakota back. Vicky came down by bus on the eleventh. We had a good day. It was mothers day so we went to Cabos and met Kim's sisters there for brunch. Anne met us there but Stanley was throwing a major fit about not wanting to wear shoes. It was so bad that Anne had to leave.
After brunch we went back home and got the truck ready. We took all of our stuff out. We still had a bunch of Zeke and Vickie's stuff from when they moved to Washington, so we loaded that all up in the truck. Athena and I then washed the truck. It needed it desperately, and I had meant to get around to it anyways.
So then Vicky left and drove the truck home.
A few days later the police recovered their car. It was not far from their house. The paint had been scratched up, the upholstery had cigarette burns, and most of their stuff had been stolen. It also stinks very badly.
We had lost our key to the gray van, so I had to have a locksmith come out and make a key, which cost ~$85.

Hardy update

I had too many problems with Hardy on my laptop. The wireless driver has been compiled in to the new kernel, but doesn't seem to work. I can get it to work by installing Gutsy, grabbing all udpates, and them upgrading to Hardy. This will let me use the Gutsy kernel on Hardy. The only problem is that programs that need kernel modules, such as Virtual Box, only have kernel modules for the Hardy kernel in the repositories, so they won't run.
There where also some various other problems such as the volume and screen brightness buttons on the laptop had a long delay before the changes took affect.
The biggest improvement with Hardy on this laptop is that video acceleration works flawlessly. In Gutsy if I turn on video acceleration I cannot playback videos. So every time I want to playback videos I have to turn off video acceleration and then turn it back on when I am done watching videos. The easiest work around for this is to simply not use video acceleration, which just means no wobbly windows or desktop cubiness.
On the girl's desktop it has been running Hardy since it was Alpha. Thing where shaky in the beginning, but now it runs very well. I am very happy with it's performance on their machine.
At work I use Wubi. It install Ubuntu inside of Windows, as opposed to requiring you to repartition your hard drive or anything else drastic. It then gives you the option on bootup to run either Windows or Ubuntu. If you choose Ubuntu it runs Ubuntu from the data that is stored inside of Windows. It seems to run great, by initial reaction, but at work I do have to work and not play, so I haven't had much of a chance to try it out. I am going to have to find all the Windows apps I run for Windows in a Linux form. We do lots of Oracle and Java stuff and most all of that is built in Linux, especially the Oracle stuff. There is some other software I'm not so sure about. I will have to do some digging during my lunch breaks.
Very soon I will be doing a clean install of Hardy on my desktop. I'll blog about how that goes when it goes.

Last day and first day at jobs.

My last day at Corrections was last Friday. My last call involved helping a tech in the field with a mainframe printing problem. Another tech, Dave, sent a print job on the mainframe. After he submitted it she logged in as her and sent the exact job and it printed. I checked the queue on the mainframe and his job was still sitting there in queue to process. The mystery was why is his still in queue if it was submitted before hers?
It turned out that he had submitted another job that was hammering the database, and his other jobs would not print until his first submitted job, that was hammering the database, finished. I also could not cancel it because we had no way of knowing what it was doing to the database and didn't want to force quite something that would cause the database to become corrupt.
Of course my last call would have to be something out from left-field.
My job at DMS is going great. We are converting COBOL code to IP/SQL that calculates billing for calls. State agencies use a system called Suncom for their voice and their data. The process for billing calls is kind complicated, but is currently handled by Cobol. A previous employee had rewritten it to Perl, but it needs to be in IP/SQL to be consistent with everything else. Rick had converted the Perl to IP/SQL, but with lots of bugs. My job was to work through the bugs. I squashed the last one this morning, and spent the rest of the day taking all the data we compile and throwing it into the database. The database it is going in to will be handled by other code that is currently running in Cobol and will be translated in to IP/SQL as soon as I get this part finished.
I am really digging my job. I am picking most of this stuff up pretty quickly, and I'm really enjoying it. I have even been able to clean up some stuff that wasn't done the way that is "best practice." So it is nice to be a newb, but still have something constructive to add from time-to-time, even if it's only small things right now.
I hate meetings, and we seem to have at least two a day. It sucks to be completely mentally entrenched in to fixing some problem, then to have you yanked from it for an hour, and then trying to figure out where the hell you where before and get back in that groove. It disrupts everything. Once I get my barring, though, I will probably be the one in the meetings talking everyone's ear off, instead of sitting there trying to figure everything out, because that is how I can be when I get in my mind that something needs to be done this way or that way.
Other bonuses to this job is that I don't have to wear button-ups all the time. Polos are sufficient. I can also grow my hair out longer. Oooh, oooh, and I get to put Ubuntu on my machine once I am out of rookie stage.
I am pretty overwhelmed. I am very much a novice programmer right now, and on top of that there is a lot to learn outside of the programming about the organization and how the different systems work, as well as who is who and what is what. I just have to take it in a little at a time.
Overall everything rocks. The real benefit will come this Friday when the check deposits in to my bank account. Woot!

Two kinds of nerds

I've long held an idea about nerds (geeks, whatever...) that one way you can sort between the two is by which classic sci-fi series they cling to, Star Trek or Star Wars. The key difference lies in the story telling. Star Trek is all about the details. They want to know different technical and social details, how does the graviational system work on the Enterprise, what is the cause and effect of the social interactions, how does the teleportation work? Star Wars is all about the story. Who cares why there is gravity in the X-Wings? What matters is that a Jedi can destroy a ship the size of a small planet with one. How does a light saber work? By jabbing it into the chest of your enemy, that's how.

Being on the Star Wars side of the fence, I may be a little biased in my assessment, but the way this difference plays out in real life is priorities. Star Wars nerds are interested in what is important and fun. Star Trek nerds are interested in the things that nobody in their right might would ever find interesting.

I have found that when I meet a fellow nerd I can determine which of the two series they prefer based off of the previous paragraph. There are so some subtle cultural difference that I don't know how to properly articulate, but can be picked up on in time if you pay attention.