Al Gore was a co-recipient today of the Nobel Peace Prize, due to his work to educate the world about the threat of climate change.

God bless ya, buddy.  You took one in the teeth 7 years ago, but ended up having one of the biggest impacts a citizen of this world could have.  It turns out the presidency is overrated, anyway.  And that job attracts assholes like rats to a dumpster. 

Here's to thinking about everybody on planet earth.

We'll be raising a glass to Mr. Gore at the Connolly house this evening.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/13nobel.html?ex=1349928000&en=3fc5aeb5e155f49c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

A couple weeks ago, my brother turned me on to one of the funniest damn videos I have seen in a long time, called "Letter to my Sister".  It's a short film from some of the actors on Saturday Night Live.  It itself is a spoof of some season cliffhanger of the TV show "OC", where they glossed over the gratuitous killing off of a major character by adding an nice soundtrack to the gun battle.

Here is the SNL video:

But, the best part of this video is that a million people have been making their own versions of "Letter to my Sister", by mashing up other movies (or their own videos) with that song (which, by the way, is "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap).  The best one I have seen is a mashup of a scene from the movie "300", but you can surf around yourself and see some great ones.

So, obviously, we had to go and make our own videos to join the party.  And, since the only willing actors we had at our disposal tended to be 3 years old, we had interesting challenges for directing the shot.  For instance, we thought it would probably be a bad idea to include, say, a gun in the plot :-). 

Brian got his done first, where he decided to use a magic wand.

For our video, I decided to use death rays that shoot out of your hands as the agent of death.  I couldn't get Monica to be one of the actors in our movie, but the Weaver-Hoisingtons were visiting us from Bend, Oregon, so their two kids play pivot roles in the plot, and Kecia shows up at the end as the last person to die.

Making those videos was a ton of fun.  Now, if I only had the same amount of motivation for finally packaging up those hours of videos of birthday parties, vacations, and Max's first steps from 2 years ago so our relatives can access them!

The evening's plan started off with high expectations: leave work a bit early with Monica, pick up my son and my niece, and head over to the Zoo for the ZooTunes show of the Pink Martini's.  A little picnic outside with two 3-year olds in front of a live band on a sunny day.  Sounds like a great plan!

In actuality, yesterday night totally sucked beyond belief.  And it was all due to a bowling ball.

Monica picked me up from work at around 4.  I was about 10 minutes late, which wasn't that big of a deal, but it did add a little "we're a bit behind schedule and it's my fault" vibe to our commute, which had me looking to make up for lost time during the rest of the journey to the zoo.

Then, even though we were on the road at 4:15, we got stuck in the total nightmare of the evening rush hour on westbound 520.  Crap!  But hey, if you lose your cool about traffic in Seattle, you'll have an ulcer in no time.  So, we just hung out and caught up on life as we waited it out.  No biggie.

We got home, picked up Max, walked and fed the dog, got picnic supplies, and out the door in 10 minutes!  Excellent, lost time re-acquired.  Next stop: over to my brother's house to pick up our niece Audrey to join us for the picnic.

This is where the evening took an unrecoverable dive for me.

As we pulled into the alley behind Brian's house, a saw a small blue ball sitting in the middle of the alley.  I was driving rather slow, since I was in an alley and about 5 houses away from my destination, but I still felt I was a bit behind schedule.  So, I drifted the car a bit to the side so I would run over the ball in the middle of the car, gently passing over it.  Sure, I could have stopped the car and moved the ball myself.  But hey, I'm in a hurry. 

What I heard next was the most ungodly crunching and scraping that I have ever heard any car make, let alone my car.  I hit the brakes and stopped the car.  I could see my sister-in-law and niece a couple houses down waiting for us outside, and they obviously were wondering why we stopped where we did.  As they walked over to us, and got down on my hands and knees and tried to figure out what was going on.

That damn blue ball was a goddamn bowling ball, and it scraped and crunched everything in it's path on the underside of my mini-cooper.  Then, it lodged itself into a small well on the underside, where it was completely stuck.  On top of that, some weird fluid was leaking out of the bottom of my car.  That's just great.  People that know me all understand one weird thing about me: somehow, I managed to get to the age of 36 without any basic understanding of how cars work.  This is mostly due to me not getting my first car until I moved to Seattle at the age of 23.  I skipped that whole teenage phase of most boy's lives where they get interested in cars and figure out how they work.  If there is anything more severe then running low on gas or needing an oil change (which I pay other people to fix for me), any problems with my car become completely debilitating because I don't know how to fix them.  Great.  So, the liquid leaking of of my car could be coolant or windshield wiper fluid for all I knew.  No clue.

At this point, my focus was dislodging this ball, and the easiest thing to do would have been to jack up the car.  I'm sure I have a jack in my car somewhere.  But, no, of course I didn't do that.  I was in a hurry.  We were late for the show. 

Two neighbors popped over and asked if they could help, so I asked them to help me find some big rocks.  The idea was to put a big flat rock in front of the front tire, and drive the car up onto the rock, and then kick the bowling ball out of the way.  I found a big paving rock in a neighbor's backyard that I pried out of his lawn, put it in place, and drove the car up on top of it.

The result of this: the ball now was lodged into a different spot under the car, but directly under the exhaust pipe.  And, if I drove off the paving stone, the ball would crush and destroy a large section of the exhaust pipe (among other things that looked important under there).  I now had to make sure the car did not come back down, or things would break even worse, but I also needed to get it higher.

So, another paving stone and some other large rock were promptly found.  One was put in front of the existing paving stone, while the other was put in front of one of the rear tires.  The goal is to move four inches forward, and get both tires up (and keep them up).

This worked!  The ball rolled away.  One of the friendly neighbors took it from me and said they would dispose of it.  This was good, because if I had to deal with that ball, I was going to do something very unconstructive like throwing it at something.

Threw this whole ordeal, I had this ticking clock in the back of my head, because we were on a course to massively be late for the show.  So, I was sweating bullets on my hands and knees kicking a stuck bowling ball and hauling big rocks around, but I was also getting all stressed out about the show. There were two three year olds running around, some neighbors trying to help, and some goddamn mystery fluid leaking out of my car.  This all turned into a poisonous cocktail that fouled my mood for the rest of the day.

So, although we dealt with the frustrating traffic on 520 with style and grace just an hour earlier, the next set of mundane hiccups to the show become overwhelming burdens.

Dealing with crosstown congestion on the way to the zoo: infuriating!

Finding a parking spot near the zoo: infuriating!

Trying to find a spot to sit down at a sold-out show that we are arriving late to: infuriating!

I tried to hide my moodiness from my lovely wife and two three year-olds that were excited about playing outside and dancing and jumping to music.  But, after we finally wedged into a spot and sat down, the kids played and wrestled and giggled too loud (apparently, kids can giggle too loud, I did not know this), so some grumpy people behind us politely pointed out that the kids were distracting them from seeing the show.  Christ Almighty.  There were about 300 kids here doing the same thing as our kids were doing.  These grumpy people were lucky I didn't have that bowling ball in my hand at that moment. 

The rest of the evening was a blur.  I tried to get out of my funk, but it didn't really happen.

On the trip home, I was peppered by some good questions from the kids.

"Uncle Mike, why did you drive over that bowling ball?"

"Daddy, driving over bowling balls is dangerous.  You shouldn't do that."

After not being able to answer these questions to their satisfaction, my only retort became "Uncle Mike doesn't want to talk about the bowling ball anymore.  The bowling ball is in Uncle Mike's past.  Uncle Mike is moving on to other things now".

I went home, had one beer, and went to bed.  Day, be gone!

It's 2007, and it's a great time to be alive.  Technological advances make life better every day, by creating new experiences previously unavailable to us, or by removing old pain points that came along with life.

Last week, however, I had a run-in with a piece of technology that seems to be exactly the same as when I was six years old.   That was a long time ago.

The evil sharp serrated edge of the Saran Wrap dispenser.

Why is it that, in 2007, I can slice my thumb open simply by trying to wrap a peanut butter sandwich in plastic wrap?  Have they not been able to create some elegant design where the plastic wrap can be cut, but not expose the user to a slashing risk? 

Please, people! Let's get some smart people thinking about this problem and get it fixed.

There has been quite a deal of chatter in the newspapers, blogs, and talk radio about a potential pardon for Scooter Libby.  Some of this talk is not about "if", but "when".  Are you kidding me?

Scooter Libby might deserve our sympathy.  The guy is going to jail.  That must be pretty hard on anybody, it doesn't matter who you are.  But, sympathy aside, the man deserves no pardon.

Here is a write-up from the Washington Post that gives an overview of the verdict and the current situation Libby finds himself in: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061500200.html?tid=informbox. 

I did a search for anyone on the internet that could possibly argue the case for the Libby pardon, and I found a couple sites and articles that try to state the case.  So, I thought I would spend some time retorting some of their viewpoints.

For starters, the first destination you have to see so as to best understand Libby's support network would have to be http://www.scooterlibby.com/.  This is a site 100% dedicated to getting Libby pardoned.  From what I can tell, it serves primarily as an information clearinghouse for those who are concerned about Libby's plight, with new article links being posted quite regularly.  One big demerit, however, is the big quote from Dick Cheney at the top of the site, explaining how great a guy Libby is.  Now, I don't care who you are, and what part of the political spectrum you subscribe to.  Even if you are a hardcore republican, do you really think that anything Dick Cheney says is honest and believable?  Geez, it would be better to get Nixon to phone in a recommendation from beyond the grave, as opposed to Cheney, the creepiest man in politics.

Anyhow, this site *does* take a crack at arguing Libby's case, which is as follows:

The Nice Guy Argument

ScooterLibby.com, as well as many other sites as blogs, first lead with the "nice guy" argument.  Scotter Libby, it turns out, was the nicest goddamned guy in the whole world. He was a caring and loving father.  He was a friendly and helpful neighbor.  He sacrificed for his country.  Ya da ya da ya da.

This argument is utterly ridiculous.  Following this logic, we should pardon a bank robber, if we found out that he helped raise abused and abandoned pets in his spare time.  You break a crime, you do the time.  I don't care how saintly you are in the spare time you have when you aren't breaking laws.

The "What He Did Wasn't So Bad" Argument 

The next article I read was from Christopher Hitchens for Slate.com.  You can read the article here: http://www.slate.com/id/2168642/.  He has a few arguments he makes against the Libby verdict, but I'll start off with what I'll call the "What He Did Wasn't So Bad" argument.  Hitchens flippantly describes Libby's offense as being simply a set of minor inconsistencies while under oath.

There is a major problem with this argument.  If you go back and read the Washington Post article, you'll see that there was "overwhelming" (the judge's words!) evidence that the reason he gave false statements under oath was to thwart investigators.  That's called obstruction of justice.  So, to say that he only committed "minor inconsistencies" is a bunch of baloney.  He was trying to undermine a federal investigation, in order to protect someone.  Either himself, or someone else in the administration.

Here's a good description of obstruction of justice from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice.

 We could obviously then argue about whether obstruction of justice is a big deal.  But, that would be silly.  You need the punishment for getting caught covering up a crime to be very high, since they are then basically getting away with whatever crime they are covering up.  So, since you can't get them for that crime, you need to assume they did something very bad.  It's like losing your parking ticket at a parking garage.  If you tell them you lost it, tough darts.  You pay the maximum fee, since the attendant can't just trust you, or everyone will start accidentally losing their tickets if they have been there for a long time, since lying about losing your ticket would be cheaper than being honest about how much time you've been there.

The Procedural Error Argument

In Hitchen's article, he references two more arguments that both fall under the "Procedural Error" class of arguments.  Meaning, some technicality in the way the process was carried out that could potentially have some bearing on the outcome.

His first jab at this is some arcane legal issue about whether Fitzpatrick was a legal choice as prosecutor.  Note that this isn't about his competency, but something to do with his stature in the federal hierarchy.  I'm not an expert, but this seems like a distraction at best.  And, Hitchens goes off on some indignant tangent about how the court thumbed their nose at this argument, when they formally replied to it and largely dismissed it (although I do think some sort of investigation is still pending on this). 

His second jab is about the defense not being able to put memory experts on the witness stand.  I can't really refute this one, but the comments section of Hitchen's article on Slate seemed to rip this argument apart.  So, I'll leave this argument to be batted about by people who know more than I on the topic.

The Naked Political "Protect My Peeps" Argument

Nobody beats William Kristol from the Weekly Standard for being nakedly political.  The guy doesn't even attempt to hide it.  Kristol has posted two articles on the Libby Pardon debate; one in March, and one a couple weeks ago.

• 3/19/2007: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/390vrpwk.asp
• 6/18/2007: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/749vayto.asp

His primary argument, which can be read between the lines fairly easily, is the obvious one that Republicans all understand.  They don't want to see Libby photographed in a prisoner uniform, right on the cover of the New York Times.  Having someone so close to the current administration doing time makes the crimes the Bush/Cheney presidency have committed so much more real to the American public.

It goes without saying that this is a poor argument.  Although preventing an embarrassing perp walk to the slammer being shown on CNN is a reason for wanting to see Libby pardon, is certainly isn't a valid argument for why he deserves it.

The "If Sandy Berger Can Do It" Argument

Another argument that Kristol alludes to is the situation with Sandy Berger and the missing records from the National Archives.  If a Democrat can get away with this sort of thing, why can't a Republican? To be honest, I wasn't paying attention to this one when it happened.  You can read about it here, in this Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/07/AR2007060702278.html.

So, this is pretty crazy.  I don't know what in the hell this guy was doing.  If you do some searches for more articles, you'll find some pretty crazy accusations about how and why he smuggled this documents out of the Archives, but to be honest, most of these are on GOP political sites, so I had a bit of a challenge finding objective articles about it.  Let's just assume he was doing something bad. 

But, to be clear, he got charged for a misdemeanor, not a full-blown obstruction of justice charge.  I think it could be argued that the Justice Department should have probably gone the distance and hit him with obstruction of justice if that is what they thought he was doing.  For some reason, they didn't.  And, this was the Bush Administration doing the prosecuting. 

So, it can be either see that Berger didn't commit as severe as a crime, so therefore he got less of a penalty.  Or, it can be seen that he was poorly prosecuted by the Bush Administration's Justice Department.  But, in what world would their poor ability to argue the case with Berger mean they should take it lightly with Libby, when they *did* have a strong case of obstruction of justice?

The "Because You Can" Argument

The last major argument I can deduce from Kristol's articles is simply, the president should pardon Libby because he has the power to.  Kristol spends a bunch of time describing the powers of the presidential pardon, and explaining why this power is an important part of the American system.

I couldn't agree more.  I think the presidential pardon is a great thing.  We don't live in a world of black and white.  You can easily construct hypothetical cases in which pardons make a lot of sense.  Although not a proponent of torture and any breaking of the Geneva convention, an example often cited is that character from the TV show "24" who has to torture someone to save L.A. from being nuked.  You can imagine he could be prosecuted and convicted, and then pardoned for saving millions of lives.  Again, a horrible example, and I apologize for it.  Torture is really dumb.  But, you get the point.

Well, it's also a horrible argument for pardoning Libby.  It's a good justification for why you would ever do a pardon, but it sure isn't a good reason for why he deserves one.

How About, He's Guilty of a Really Bad Coverup?

Which leads me to the one reason he shouldn't be pardoned.  Because he's guilty.  He's guilty of protecting someone from some crime they committed.  Maybe he was protecting himself.  Maybe he was protecting Cheney.  I don't know.  We probably will never know.  But, for every "nice guy" in the administration who is asked to jump in front of a bus to protect someone higher up, they should know that noone is going to swoop in and pardon them and clear things up.  They are going to jail.  So, they should think about who they are truly allegiant to.  Are they allegiant to the current crew of turkeys that run the executive branch of the US government?  Or are they allegiant to the USA, our justice system, and the proper prosecution of crimes?

As a parent of a 3 year old boy, it goes without saying that Thomas the Train is a big part of our lives.  Not only can Max tell you the name of every train in the collection (so can I at this point), he owns at least half of them. 

Which is why every parent that I know is now completely freaking out by the recently announced Thomas the Train recall.

http://recalls.rc2.com/recalls_Wood_0607.html

So, just like everyone else, I got home that night and went through Max's toys and confiscated all the yellow and red trains.  Poor James, he was always proud of his red coat.  Ivo Hugh, on the other hand, wasn't on the list for some reason. But he is red, so you're out, buddy. 

Then, I went back and read the details of what the problem was.  Turns out, some factory in China is still using lead paint!  This is just great.  The DailyKos does a quick write-up on the problem.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/13/22048/3592

For those who don't know anything about Thomas trains, there is one detail you should understand: these are not cheap trains.  If a matchbox car costs about a dollar, each of of the affected trains below probably costs somewhere between 5 and 10 bucks.  So, the fact that the manufacture of these toys involves some factory somewhere that has no quality assurance around the paint they use is a bit insane. 

I'm looking forward to seeing how this fiasco plays out.  I can't imagine how expensive the replacement will be for this company.  But more importantly, how will they survive the PR impacts of their brand now meaning "cheap dangerous manufacturing process that has shipped poison to children for the past 2 years".

I really don't understand why Alberto Gonzales still has a job.  There are two completely obvious reasons to fire him.

• Incompetency.  He is either incompetent in his attempts to be sneaky and fire people for unethical reasons, or he is incompetent in the running of his department, because he literally can't remember anything that has happened ever.  It doesn't really matter which.
• He is opening a huge hole for congressman to run a million investigations into what happened, which will keep opening things up wider and wider.  Firing Gonzales will go a long way to closing this hole and allowing the White House to reclaim the conversation going on in America.

Now, as a rabid opponent of the current administration, it's hard to not watch this train wreck with a bit of a chuckle.  Let Bush and Gonzales circle their wagons and go down in flames together.  Have fun, guys!

Although Alberto's fate appears to be sealed, lots of politicians seem to get away with saying that they don't recollect past experiences, when if they did have a better memory, their explanation of what happened might be incriminating.  It seems like a simple solution to this problem would be to make it illegal for elected or appointed political officials to not be able to remember things.  There is a lot of work that would have to go into the wording, but we could make it a federal mandate to take proper notes, and officials need to have a working ability to remember things in order to keep their job.  Let's do this, people!

The Washington Post has a great article on the hearings that happened yesterday:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902935_2.html

One interesting tidbit that caught my attention:

While the panel's Democrats focused primarily on the alleged rationale for the firings, many of the Republicans concentrated on Gonzales's declared lack of involvement and inability to remember significant details. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a former U.S. attorney, seemed stunned when Gonzales said he could not recall a crucial Nov. 27 meeting at which a final plan for carrying out the firings was discussed.

"I'm concerned about your recollection, really, because it's not that long ago," Sessions said. "It was an important issue. And that's troubling to me, I've got to tell you."

OK.  That's great.  November 27th was only about six months ago.  And, he can't remember a damn thing from that day. 

While I happen to be a manager here at Microsoft, I have no secretary, I manage my own calendar and tasks, and don't have people around me taking notes on my behalf.  I use Microsoft Outlook, and I spend a little bit of time every day managing my up-coming appointments and to-do items.

I thought it would be interesting if I looked at the data I had sitting in Outlook, and see if I could reconstruct what I did on November 27th.  It turns out, not only could I rebuild most of my day, but the sheer fact that I had some artifacts that reminded me certain meetings happened allowed me to remember the details of the meeting fairly well.

Here are the significant things I did on November 27th.

• At around 9am, Mike and I met with Jonathan, a potential partner, in downtown Seattle and talked about a bunch of interesting integration scenarios with Spaces and the product this company was building.  Seeing this in my calendar jogs my memory that I was late for the meeting because I missed the bus, and i had to apologize to everyone for being 10 minutes late. 
• Mike and I commuted back to Redmond together after the meeting with Jonathan, and at around 11am, we met with Neel to go over some tactical operational issues with some of the services we run.  Again, seeing this item in my calendar brings back the memory of the issues we were trying to nail down.
• At noon, I had lunch with Greg.  I can't remember exactly where we had lunch, but it was either at a local Sushi restaurant in downtown Redmond, or an English pub that is two doors down from the Sushi place.  Greg and I go out to lunch together once a month, and we have gone to both places in the past.
• I had a 90 minute break on my calendar in the afternoon, so I can't 100% recall what I did at that time, but it's a pretty good bet that I sat in front of my computer and triaged my email inbox.
• I set aside some time on my calendar to submit a bunch of expense reports at 2:30.  I remember I was running a little late on getting these in, and I was getting nervous that the American Express people were going to start breathing down my neck.  So, I bet I spent about 45 minutes doing this.
• At 3:30pm, I met with Greg (a different Greg!), the dev manager for our team, for 30 minutes to do our routine weekly sync up.  I can't recall what we talked about, but I'm pretty sure we did not discuss firing a bunch of people for unethical reasons. 
• At 4:00pm, Karen and I met for coffee and chatted about the project we were working on at that time.
• Later that night, at around 6:30pm, I met an old friend, Chris, who was visiting the Seattle area on a business trip.  So, Chris and I, along with one of his colleagues, went to the Six Arms and had cheeseburgers and beers.  I'm pretty sure I had a Hammerhead to start with, and then had an IPA.

Alberto: please use Microsoft Outlook.  It helps a lot.

 Two weeks ago, I attended a meeting at my local elementary school, to learn more about what is going on over there.  Max is turning three this month, so we're starting to spend more and more time figuring out the school situation here in Seattle.

 Attending this meeting was particularly interesting to me, since i had heard there was some growing tension between some parents and the administration, that seemed to be boiling down to race issues.  Madrona has historically been a black working-class neighborhood, and is probably most famously known as the home of the Black Panthers headquarters for Seattle during the 60's.  The school mascot of the Madrona school continues to be the Panthers, and there is a famous statue in the neighborhood of a panther and a pig kissing, to commemorate a truce that was forged between the Black Panthers and the Seattle Police Department during the heightened racial tension that existed in the 60's and 70's.

Here's an interesting link on the Seattle Weekly site that retells some stories from those days:  http://www.seattleweekly.com/2006-08-02/news/aaron-dixon-s-radical-past.php.

What I knew going into the meeting was that the school was adjusting to a change in the make-up of the community.  I've been living in Madrona for 10 years now, and have seen it grow more and more middle-class.  The eastside of the neighborhood has always been predominantly white and upper-middle-class; most of these homes have a view of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains to the east.  The westside of the neighborhood, which used to be predominantly black and working-class and middle-class, is shifting to be less black (and more white), and becoming more and more middle-class. 

So, I was assuming this change might have some sort of affect on the school, but I was largely in the dark on what the problems might be.  I knew of quite a few white families that sent their kids to the school, but this was a fairly recent phenomenon, and the school is still about 75% black.  The neighborhood, however, is only about 1/3 black now-a-days.  The Seattle Times published some charts that shows some of the changes that have happened over the past 30 years, which you can see to the right.

My mother was in town for an extended visit at around the same time;  this is great, since she spent 25 years of her life as an elementary and middle school teacher in the Philadelphia area.  While the school she taught at was mostly a white neighborhood, it was fairly diverse economically.  So, she has personally dealt with a lot of the issues that show up in public schools when you have some parents that micro-manage the faculty and think that their child needs to be in the gifted program because of course they are a genius, while on the other side, a ton of kids are showing up without a lunch and their parents have more important concerns then helping with homework (such as working multiple jobs to make ends meet).  So, mom came with us, as did some other neighbors, and we headed to the meeting.

 Boy, what a meeting!

The Seattle Times had a reporter there, and covered the entire three hour discussion.  From the first second of the meeting, it was clear that the room was a powder keg, and the facilitator was walking on egg shells the whole time.  Here's a great write-up of the event on the Seattle Times site, that I think did a superb job in giving a balanced view of the issues at hand.

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=madrona28m&date=20070328&query=madrona

For myself, my family, and my close friends that attended, we all considered ourselves outsiders to the discussion; basically, eavesdropping into other people's conflicts.  We live in the neighborhood, and we have small children, but they aren't of school age yet.  But, although we considered ourselves outsiders, we are all white.  And therefore, it became clear that we were lumped into one side of this debate, even though we took pains to not throw our two cents into a discussion that we as of yet did not truly understand. 

My race and my middle class upbringing gives me a particular point of view on things and biases my ability to make purely objective observations.  But, to the best of my ability, here is how I would boil down both sides of the conflict.  If I am totally wrong here, it's due to me only really absorbing this conflict out of one three-hour meeting.

• The people who don't want change: this group is predominantly black, but has a healthy group of white parents who are happy with the way things are at the school.  This group of people think the new white people want to turn their school into a high-end oasis of scholarly learning and slowly get the black people out of the school. The undercurrent here is that the new white neighbors are racists.  There is a lot of comparison with the school conflict and the gentrification that is going on in the neighborhood. They see what is going on in Madrona as white (and asian) people “stealing” black homes (because taxes are going up) and slowly turning Madrona into a comfortable white middle class area. They fear that giving into demands of white people means black people giving up something. They already are losing the neighborhood (in their view), so they sure as hell aren't losing this school.  It also turns out that the black people at Madrona school have an emotional connection to it’s blackness; they see it as a place to send their kids if they want their kids to grow up and have lots of relationships with other black kids. I guess a lot of the Madrona school kids don’t actually live in Madrona (although most do), and the people who commute from other neighborhoods usually have a parental or grandparental relationship to the neighborhood (i.e., they grew up there in the 60’s).
• The people who want change: this group is predominantly, if not completely, non-black (white and asian).  These people are incredibly indignant that the black people in the discussion think they are racists. They believe that they are the good guys, and are exactly the sort of white folks that black folks should be allies with. The white folks want to send their kids to a neighborhood school, and don’t care if 50% or 75% of the kids are black. They just want it to be a neighborhood school. But, the school is doing very badly in national tests, and has had to do things like cancel recess, scrap Spanish class (remember that the school is K-8, so no foreign language until you get to high school!) and other reductions in services. They do this because all the money is being focused on “at-risk” kids. When a lot of the parents organized together to raise money via a PTA to bring back things like a Spanish class, it became clear that the principal and the staff at the school didn’t want the white parent’s “charity”, and they took pride in the the focus of the school to be for at-risk kids. The white folks thinks this is admirable, but doesn't serve the needs of every student, and that madrona shouldn’t be a magnet for every at-risk kid in the entire school district.

This tension resulted in 7 white kids getting pulled out of the school in September of this school year by their parents. A lot of these parents spoke at the meeting.  After they transferred their kids to other schools (such as Montlake), these parents were then “fired” as volunteers, and were given side comments from staff that “if this school isn’t good enough for your kids, we don’t want your help”. The parents think this is crazy; they figured the school just wasn’t the right school for their kid, but then it’s still the neighborhood school in Madrona, they have talents (such as math tutoring), and still want to give back to the community. But, they were rejected.

This is just an awful situation to see.  As a neighbor, I want to see people talking to each other in a constructive way.  I want to see everyone participating in creating a great community.  As a parent, I want there to be a school within walking distance that will serve his needs, regardless of it's racial composition.  I don't understand why we can't have all of these. 

The University of Washington was pulled in to facilitate the meeting, and did a good job keeping things positive, while at the same time, letting every person who wanted to speak (or vent) be able to do so.  Not everyone in the room was constructive, but democracy is both ugly and beautiful.  You have to take all of it if you want all of it. 

I'm looking for a way to participate in this conversation in the future, but it's not clear to me that us non-parents in the community are, frankly, wanted by the school district and the faculty of the school to be part of the discussion. 

Here's for hoping that smart, respectful, open people on both sides find a middle ground, so neighbors can start understanding each other.  And, in the process, we create a great neighborhood and a great school that we all feel a part of.  That definitely is not the case now. 

• Alerts -- Not only do i want to get pinged on my phone via a text message if someone adds a comment to my Live Space, I want to get pinged when some of my favorite Spaces get updated.  Finally!  And, since we have a great mobile version of Spaces that I can use on my phone, i can waste time on the bus and catch up on everyone's Space when I'm away from my PC.
• Videos -- We now allow embedded videos in blog entries.  Ka-chow!  To celebrate, here is a little clip I took from my cell phone of my son Max rockin' out at Bumbershoot back in September.  Party on!

 It all started at 4:30 today.  Mike and I were chatting and enjoying some coffee at the RedWest cafeteria, when Monica called me.  She had mentioned something earlier in the day about the weather maybe going south, so I assumed she wanted to leave work a little early to beat some traffic.  That was in fact the case, only ten times worse.  While i wasn't paying attention, a slight drizzle of snow turned into a nice flurry, and all of Redmond/Bellevue had already gotten in their car, gridlocking the town.

Great.  This is going to be fun.

I told Monica I would leave work immediately, and walk from RedWest all the way to her building near 40th Street and 150th Avenue (so she wouldn't have to drive through gridlock to get me, she had already been in a standstill for 45 minutes before she even called me).  As I walked down 148th, I got to see first hand that, yes indeed, the whole area was basically shut down.  Cars were everywhere, and not moving.  Several cars had slid against the curb and then abandoned.  And a small few were slipping on the icy roads with wives behind the wheel and husbands behind the car pushing.

I finally caught up with Monica and her little section of hell, where she was only about 10 feet further down 150th Ave from where we talked on the phone.  We huddled in the warm car while we came up with a plan.  This is where we made our first, and most impactful, well-intentioned by straight-up wrong decision.  We decided to ditch our car at a Microsoft parking lot and take the bus home.  We wouldn't have to drive on the gridlocked icy roads in a little Mini-Cooper; let's leave the driving to someone else!  Sounds good on paper.

We walked up to the busstop at 40th Street and the 520 highway, on the onramp to the westbound lanes.  When we got there, we found the 565 bus, which is not the one we want.  But, the bus driver made it very clear that she was the only hope for leaving the area, because no other bus has been able to get up the hill to get to this part of Redmond.  So, although this bus went to downtown Bellevue instead of downtown Seattle, we had to get in, or go back to our car.  This was our second well-intentioned but wrong decision.  Since, by ditching our car, we would have to go to the back of the line of cars that was trying to get out of the vicinity, we would be way worse off than where Monica was sitting for an hour.  In retrospect, this is just me rationalizing the decision we made; we should have gone back to the car.  But, oh well.

As we climbed onto the bus, the only two seats next to each other were the jump seats that are in the middle of those two-car buses (where the joint is in the bus that bends when the bus turns).  We sat there, and realized within 15 seconds that we were very likely going to be characters in those tragic fatal accidents that occur during snowstorms that actually end up being funny a couple days later.  It turns out these doublebuses do very poorly in the snow, and started to jack knife on the highway, with the first car of the bus turning almost 90 degrees (i.e., going sideways), and the second car of the bus still pointing mostly straight and careening towards the concrete barrier by the side of the highway.

Monica and I quickly changed our seats.

After the bus driver finally settled the bus into a nice comfortable "stuck" position on the road, she then turned into a drill sergeant and starting barking orders to the fully occupied bus.  "All the women, please proceed to the back of the bus.  All the men, please step outside and help me push the bus.  I need two guys directing traffic, please.  The rest of you, push on the count of three."  Here are some great pictures i took as I helped pushed a jackknifed city bus down the highway.

After 3 sessions of pushing, getting back on the bus, getting stuck, and then repeating the pushing, the bus driver finally started to admit that this might not work out.  Although it clearly broke some rules, she started letting people get off the bus while parked in the middle of the highway, since we were near a spot where we could hop a fence and get to a walking trail that ran along the road.  We took this opportunity to bail and start walking.

This is when we starting hanging out with Jose.  He was on the bus with us, and we all got off at the same time.  We had no real plan on what to do, but we were thinking that walking west towards Seattle was probably the right thing to do.  So, we started walking. 

A couple miles down the road, we then bumped into three more people that were dealing with a similar situation.  I think they were on a 545 bus (the right bus we would have liked to have gotten in the first place) at an earlier stop than where we were, but it got stuck.  They took a slightly different path, but ended up deep in Bellevue with us, walking west. 

After a group-think on what to do, we figured out that we could get to a bus stop on the 520 highway just past 92nd Ave, were buses would be working, since there is no icy onramps or offramps to deal with.  So, we partied on. 

After an hour and half of walking since we left the bus, we finally got to the bus stop along the highway, but no buses were coming.  At this point, we surprisingly had a lot of patience to wait it out, but boy, I was starting to lose the feeling in my fingers and toes.  For those who don't know the area, there is a huge lake that separates Seattle from the Eastern suburbs, where we all were currently stuck, and there is no footpath across the bridge.  So, we needed a ride; we could not walk, no matter how much stamina we had.

Here is the picture of the crew at this point, hanging at the bus stop.

That is when the random French snowboarder in the white van showed up.  I'm guessing a bit, but I'm pretty sure he was sitting in the crappy traffic, and saw six tired travellers sitting at the bus stop.  So, he pulled up and offered us all a ride across the lake, so he could use the carpool lane.  Oh, and the van didn't have any seats, it was just a big open van with a tarp on the floor.  Of course, we all got in.

Here's a picture of the French guy and his action van.  Thanks, French guy!

Anywho, he dropped four of us off at Montlake (me, Monica, Jose, and some poor bastard that still had to figure out how to get to Ballard), and took the other two home, since they were going his way.

Monica and I said goodbye to Jose and the poor Ballard bastard, hopped on the 48 bus, walked another 15 blocks home from the nearest bus stop, and promptly cracked open some beers.  If my sister-in-law wasn't around all night to babysit my 2 1/2 year old son while Mom and Dad were held hostage in the suburbs, I don't know what we would have done.

In the future, I'd like to have an open discussion with everyone on the the public transportation system deficiences we have here in the Puget Sound are, but I'll save that for a later day, I'm a bit tired right now.

I was just sifting through all the photos stored on my mobile phone, when i ran into a couple pictures I took from the W Hotel bathroom when I was in Manhattan.  That's right, I was going to rant on how this was the most poorly design bathroom I've ever used!  Thanks for the reminder.

I was staying three nights at the W Hotel on Lexington Ave, and like most hotels in Manhattan, the room is fairly small.  The bathroom is tight as well, but i thought the layout of the bathroom was actually kinda cool: the shower was in the corner, with no clear division between where the shower ended and the floor of the bathroom begins.  This was cool, since all the time you were in the bathroom and not taking a shower, it made the room feel larger and open.

Here's a picture of what it looked like:

One of the interesting things i noticed on my first night was, for some reason, there were two bathmats on the ground.  One of them was placed near the beginning of the shower, and the other was rolled into a cylinder and places on top of the other mat.  I didn't pay much attention to that, but i figured out why this was done as soon as I took a shower the next morning.

It turns out that the most obvious problem you could possibly run into with this design actually happens: the water that comes out of the shower doesn't nicely flow into the drain, but actually runs across the entire bathroom floor.  So, the maids now try to head this off by putting an extra bathmat down on the floor, rolling it up into a mini-wall to block the flow of water.  This leaves a sopping wet bath mat you have to step over and deal with for the rest of your stay in the room, until the maid comes and replaces it.  Notice how close the sink is to the shower, so you end up stepping around a mop-like mat when you try to brush your teeth.

Oh, and it gets worse.

Check out this picture of the shower controls:

You'll notice that the big dial that turns on the shower is directly under the showerhead.  There is a small dial above the big dial; this small dial is the diverter: so, pushing the diverter in one direction makes the main shower head work.  Pushing the diverter in the other direction powers the handheld shower head instead.  What can go wrong with this setup?

• When you turn the big dial, your arm and most of your body is naturally underneath the showerhead.  I tried, there is no way to do turn that thing without exposing yourself (take a look back at where the sink is; this is the main obstacle).  And, the water that comes out is freezing cold for the first 10 seconds.  So, the start of your day is guaranteed to be very uncomfortable.
• If you move the diverter to the position where the handheld is used instead, take a look at the direction it's pointing by default.  Not only are you also going to get a full blast of freezing cold water directly in your face, but you also manage to get even more of the surrounding bathroom wet for the rest of the day.
• Here's the kicker: even if you wanted to pick the best of two evils (by either getting blasted by the main showerhead or the handheld), there is no way you'll do it right.  If you push the diverter to the left, the handheld is powered.  Notice that the handheld is actually on the right.  Excellent!  If you push the diverter in the direction you think makes sense, the opposite thing will occur.

The rest of the hotel is great.  Typical problems, like power outlets not being near desks or no ethernet cords for internet access, never occurs at the W.  And they make great martini's.  So, how did they screw up the bathroom so bad?

Like many people across the country, I've been caught up following the drama around the 2006 elections.  I basically tuned out of almost all pop culture (tv, radio, magazines, you name it) and spent most of my time consuming anything that had to do with politics. 

Last night was The Stranger's election party in downtown Seattle at Spitfire.  So, me and some close friends went down to Spitfire and camped out all night to watch the results come in.  It was a great crowd, and I even ran into some old friends I haven't seen for a long time.

I was expecting some surprises in a couple close races, and indeed some surprises did pop up (for instance, I did not expect the Dems to actually take the Rhode Island Senate seat, who knew!).  But, nothing compares to the surprise my brother hit me with when he returned from one of our many trips to the bar:

"Dude, did you hear?  Britney is filing for divorce."

My god, man!

I have been a closetted Us Magazine reader for years now, ever since my sister-in-law lived with us back in the day, who was (and is) a subscriber.  It didn't take long for me to get sucked in.  Within weeks of discovering the fascinating world of gossip magazines, i was trying to steal the latest issue when it came in so I could read it before she disappeared with it.

But, I left that world behind a couple months ago, when the current political cycle started heating up, so i am totally behind on who is getting fat, who is too thin, and who is hooking up with who.  Madonna is adopting?  Did I hear that right?

I love a good train wreck.  The best part of this Spears divorce is that this isn't the end of a train wreck; it's more like another train smashed into an existing train wreck, creating an ever bigger train wreck. There is going to be finger-pointing, money grabbing, and custody battles for months to come. 

Bring it on!

http://www.tmz.com/2006/11/07/britney-spears-files-for-divorce/

Hey, it turns out that our friends Daniel and Annie over at Lead Pencil studios are geniuses.  I guess we should have seen that one coming.  Congrats, Daniel and Annie, for your public genius outing!

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=92791

• The guy who gave me a loaner car at the VW dealership – I dropped off my trusty 1994 Volkswagen Golf at the VW dealership to get it’s 120,000 mile tune-up and check into a possible clutch problem.  And, they gave me a loaner car.  I gave them my driver’s license, and at the time, I hadn’t even figured out it was bogus yet.  They didn’t catch the problem, and handed me this weird Subaru half-sedan half-pickup truck thing.  The thing eats up gas, so they got me back on that one.
• The lady who rented me a car at the San Francisco airport – I was sweating this one, since by now I had figured out my license was stale.  But, I gave her my license, she typed into her computer some random info (probably NOT my expiration date), and then gave me the keys to a nice compact car.  And a map.  Thanks, lady!

I did *not* push it and try to actually board the plane with a bogus license, although it would have been an interesting test of our national government’s ability to defend us from people with expired licenses.  I went to the airport with my passport.  That one is good for 2 years.  I’ll be on top of that one, I swear.

You might ask, how exactly did I figure out my license expired?  I tried to gain entrance to Linda’s Tavern in Capitol Hill,  Seattle.  They run an impressive operation over there at the front door.  I would have been totally screwed out of a couple beers and a BLT that I was banking on having there, but luckily, I walked into Linda’s with my twin brother, who had a *valid* license, and he vouched for me.  Thanks, Bri.

• Weather Man – This movie seemed interesting when I saw the trailer.  I get what the director was trying to convey, but it just never really comes together.  I give it a C.
• 9 to 5 – I was very excited to see this movie available, I don’t think I’ve seen it for 20 years.  It completely withstands the test of time, see it today!  It gets a solid A.
• How Green Was My Valley – This was a 1950’s movie about a coal mining town in Wales.  Just awful.  Are all movies from the 50’s really corny?  The emotional points of the plot are shoved down your face, as if I had an IQ of about 80.  I give it a D.
• Harry and Tonto  – Art Carney played an aging guy who lives in a crumbling Brooklyn neighborhood during the 70’s.  It’s the story of him and his cat (Tonto), as he travels the country experiencing life.  Someone amusing, although predictable movie that I never would have seen, nor known existed, if it hadn’t been available on the flight.  Larry Hagman has a bit part at the end!  This was probably during his hey day on Dallas.  This movie gets a B-.
• The Ringer – this was the lone movie I got to see on the way back.  Since my wife hates Jackass, I was assuming that this was the only opportunity I would ever get to see this movie.  Kudos to Johnny Knoxville for being in a movie with mentally handicapped people and being respectful to everyone.  But, I can’t give it more than a C+.

• Start by imagining you waking up on your first day at 7am.  This assumes that you have a normal work day ahead of you, where you probably have to be up doing something at 9am. 
• Think about what time you have to go to bed to wake up at 7am.  On your first day, it’s actually better to go past your perfect time, and be a bit tired as a result.  Why would you want to do this?  If you go to be earlier, there is a big chance that your body will malfunction, and you will wake up at 2am and not be able to go back to bed.  For me, the perfect time to go to bed is 11am, if I want to be up at 7am.  So, push it to at least midnight, so you totally pass out by the time you hit the sack.
• Now that you have your bedtime goal, you have to figure out how much napping on the plane you can get away with, and still be totally dead tire by the time bedtime shows up.  If you sleep for the entire flight, you’re screwed.  But, if you get one catnap in, but are awake 90% of the time, you’ll be fine.
• Once you figure out how much you have to be awake, you need to figure out a way to stay awake.  You need a laptop with something you can be engaged with (work, a video game, whatever), or a thick book, or movies that you’ll pay attention to.  If you just have some cheap magazines you got at the airport, you’ll get through them in 20 minutes, and then you’ll fall asleep. 
• Drinking alcohol is totally playing dice with your whole plan.  Although it’s tempting to have a couple glasses of wine when you are sitting on your ass for 10 hours watching dumb movies, you can’t forget that you’ll be awake for a very long time, and that glass of wine might give you a splitting headache 8 hours after you drink it.
• Drinking coffee is the same bag.  At least during the second half of the trip. 

• ITunes, apparently, doesn’t support exporting your podcast subscription list as an OPML file, or some other easily transferable list so you can share with other people. 
• If you right click on a subscription, and click on “Description”, the url for the podcast shows up, but in a non-copyable edit field.  There is no way to get the URL out of there!
• Once you start subscribing to upwards of 30 or so podcasts, when it comes time for iTunes to update your feeds, it pins my processor and I can’t do anything else with my computer for about 5 minutes.  Resource hog!
• If I don’t listen to a particular podcast for some period of time, iTunes decides to just stop subscribing to it.  So, every day, I have to walk my whole subscription list and make sure none of my feeds stopped updating.  I know why they do this, but clearly it’s too aggressive.
• There is no good way to discover when new podcasts that might be interesting to me are now available.  The sort of thing Amazon does really well. 
• I think I’m on my sixth iPod.  These things fall apart quickly.  It’s always right before a big trip when they decide to die a quick death.  The last two I got replaced for free through Apple’s warranty, but what a pain.