Entries in Life

Yesterday, I wrote about parenting in a way that caused offense to a number of my friends — including my wife. For this, I ask your forgiveness. Partly, I wrote to get a reaction — with a title like “Radioactive Content”, this should not be a surprise. I’ve revised it since to be less reactionary, but I spent a lot of time last night and this morning thinking about it. A good part of that time, I spent obsessing about what I should go say to defend myself, trying to come up with something devastating that I could say to make it obvious I was right and everyone else had better toe the line. This is something I struggle with constantly: trying to bend the world to my will, to convince others that I am right, that I deserve to be listened to. Of course, you all know better. I’m a narcissistic blow-hard. So I sat down this morning and read over Do not Resent, Do not React, Keep Inner Stillness by Metropolitan Jonah. In it, His Beatitude reviews everything I’ve learned from a number of Orthodox writers, but it was a review I needed this morning — a reminder not to provoke others, not to “enflame the passions”. It was a reminder to keep from causing resentment as well as holding onto my own resentment. It was a reminder that I am, as we pray before communion, first among sinners. I ask your forgiveness.

It is very difficult to write about a moral position without offending someone. is probably right: I should just keep my mouth shut, or, in the case of this blog, not purposefully post incendiary statements. I’ll try to do that more in the future. For now, though, and I have been having a very heated discussion about what I wrote. While she agrees with my practical reasons for two parents, she disagrees with the way I expressed it. She and others said I came across as “smug”. This leaves me confused. I don’t think I’m better than others. I admit I’ve had a blessed, and, in many ways, privileged life. I don’t think this makes me better than anyone else. I don’t think this makes anyone else less “worthy” than me. But still, that seems to be the sentiment I convey to many people. It could well be that I’ve been so isolated in my experience that I can’t convey to others the practical reasons for two parents, so I’ve challenged to do it without offending people. Her background is completely different than mine. She may have a better chance of writing about this subject without offending others. I still think it is nigh-on impossible to write that children need two parents without offending people, but if she manages to do it, I’ll gladly admit it. (Update: She did it.)

I’m going to take this from “hot-button” to radioactive. Children deserve a resident father. Women do not deserve to have children simply because they want them. … There’s a difference between what adults want and what children need, and children’s needs trump adults’ wants.

(from Are Fathers Optional?)

In case you hadn’t caught the clue, I’m what most people would call a social conservative in almost the strictest sense of the word. When we make decisions that affect other people, we should consider their needs. When we’re thinking about bringing life into the world, we need to be especially sober. Twelve years ago, Dolly was created and cloning became something that people began to think about as a possibility. Articles were written about the possibility of men and women having themselves cloned so there would be mini-me‘s running around — blatant testaments to their parent’s vanity. Imagine! I could raise my genetic offspring without having to put up with a woman! seemed to be the gist of some of them. But I do not recall the obvious narcissism being discussed. Suppose it is possible in a few years to have a child who shares all my genetic characteristics without the bother of first developing a lasting relationship with someone else — or, for that matter, having much of any interaction with anyone else at all. The narcissism seems so obvious. Perhaps it is because we celebrate narcissism in our culture that this doesn’t bother us. Even many “christian” leaders seem to have discarded the idea that pride is the root of all sin and promoted their face and personality more than they’ve demonstrated humility. I suppose it shouldn’t be any surprise that, here in America, men and women feel the right to pursue their desire to have children, without intending to have any sort of relationship with the child’s other parent. This is, after all, the land of individuality and self expression. Why not buy a child to raise as my own if I can? I don’t think it would be profitable to start legislating my morality — how far would an anti-pride/anti-narcissism ordinance get, and would I be the first one charged? When I read the statistics of how many people are being voluntarily raised by a single parent, whether that parent has 14 children or one, I feel like I am, as Father Stephen writes, standing on the edge of cultural disaster. We’ve been here before and we’ll move on. Life will continue despite a world that seems to be falling apart around us constantly, whether the immanent danger is climate change, abortion, or economic collapse. (Update: The quote that started this post used to include a bit about “stigmatizing women” who choose to have children without fathers. People ended up responding to that, thinking I was directing my ire to women in particular, instead of anything else I said, so, even though I liked the responses, I took it out. I want to make it clear that anyone, man or women, who sets out to have children by themselves, intentionally depriving them from the start of their other parent, is wrong.) Added: No one “deserves” to have children. No one has the right to have children. Parents have an obligation to provide the best household they can for their children. Going into parenting intending to short-change your children by eliminating one parent is not in their best interest and is an avoidable decision.

Amber, a non-technical mother, tries Ubuntu. This sounds like Alexis‘s use of Ubuntu. I’m a geek (like her husband) and my wife wants to learn how to use Linux. The amazing and amusing thing (to me) is that she when I installed Ubuntu on our kids laptops, Alexis was the one who began talking to them about the philosophy of Free Software and the obligations of the GPL. I wish Amber the best and hope that she can join the ranks of other “normal” people I know who use Ubuntu: my mother, my friend, Jim Bonewald, my cousin, Jeremy Stein (and the rest of his family), and of course, Alexis and my kids. Linux users may not yet be measurable, but we’re growing. And a lot of credit goes to Canonical and Ubuntu.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend money right now. In fact, for the past few of years, I’ve been relatively thrifty (compared with my previous, debt-building, ways). For a while, I imagined I was unique, that I was somehow getting ahead. But a couple of years ago, at the beginning of 2007, I started reading articles that said that people were starting to save more. A significant amount of people had begun to feel uneasy, it seems, about all the debt they were accruing and starting to save more. Of course, two years and a couple of stimulus bills later, people are feeling even more skeptical of debt. I don’t know about you, but debt is one of the scariest bits of the possibility of losing my job. How am I gonna handle this mortgage!?! I can hear my inner-breadwinner screaming. And with layoffs and unemployment growing at substantial rates, I’m sure many people are looking for ways to set aside something “just in case”. Certainly they aren’t likely to be building even more debt. Further, I’m in line with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, more than our politicians, when he says:

… over the last period of time, the balance has really shifted. Instead of innovation and productivity driving growth, it’s really been unsustainable levels, particularly of private debt, that have been a key driver of economic growth. (emphasis mine)

He continues: “In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset.” A fundamental reset. Nudges to “free up cash” will mean I have more cash to put in the bank, to help stave off what seems like an inevitable doomsday scenario, not that I’m going to spend more just to get a newer, larger TV. So politicians don’t want to give us money, because we won’t spend it. Instead, they give it to banks and dying car companies. Strangely enough, it seems to me that, of the two, the car company is the best way to get money into the economy — especially if no one is buying cars — since the car company will have to spend, spend, spend just to stay afloat. The banks, it seems, can’t help but reward themselves with tax-payer-funded bonuses in obscene amounts. But what do I know? I’m just a freetard. I don’t have a degree in economics. And I certainly want to increase the liquid assets I hold right now and fill in the the debt hole I’ve managed to dig for myself. I can’t imagine others feel much differently. And giving bailouts of billions to banks will just aggravate that feeling, no matter how much they need or deserve it. Update: I love this bit from winterspeak: The US household has gone from an unsustainable level of negative saving to a sustainable level of positive saving, as we all knew it eventually would, and this is only triggering the Apocalypse because academic economists have no idea how money works.

After googling “Delicate Vietnamese Flower”, I realized I hadn’t talked enough about it. It started as an a cute, ironic, and endearing term for my wife during the Clark Campaign — anyone that meets her knows that she is anything but a shrinking violet. Later, when we were looking for a domain for her blog, we tried variations on DVF and found dvfmama.com. And that, is how the Delicate Vietnamese Flower became known as .

My son was annoyed that his school-provided laptop includes NetNanny configured in such a way to keep him out of game sites like PopTropica. Now, I understand the desire to censor our children’s forays onto the Internet. There is a ton of stuff out there that is a lot easier to get to than when I was a kid. And, often, as adults our first instinct is to protect them from where we know their curiosity will lead them. But blocking game sites? Now you’ve gone too far! Since I like to pretend I’m somewhat subversive, I was completely ready to let him install Ubuntu on the laptop. It plays into one of my goals for 2009: teaching my kids to program. I mean, sure, you can do it under Windows, but I’m just so much more comfortable with Linux. There was one snafu: I neglected to backup and defragment the disk before starting, so we lost some files. But, once his sisters saw the wobbly windows they just had to have it installed on their laptops, too. So now every laptop in the house runs Ubuntu. My daughter summed it up nicely: “I just feel so grown up now that I’m using Ubuntu like Mom and Dad!” As if to make sure I wouldn’t become too proud, she did add that she became acutely aware that I wasn’t quite the Super Geek she imagined me to be when I managed to lose her weather charting homework. Win some, lose some, I guess. But I count this as mostly a win.

In addition to helping bring IntraHealth’s web stats up-to-date, I’ve been working on my own. I’ve been playing around with Webalizer and awstats. While I prefer awstats, I really hate referrer spam. Awstats allows you to specify a blacklist and suggests using MT-Backlist for a list of blacklisted, referrer-spamming domains. The problem? MT-Blacklist is abandoned and the author suggests using TypePad’s Antispam service as a replacement. This is all well and good if you’re just worried about comment spam, but it does me no good when I’m trying to keep referrer spam out of my parsed logs. I looked around for someone maintaining a more up-to-date list, but couldn’t find it. Maybe that just means I’m the only person interested in such a list. Maybe the old list works for most people who want to use it. But I found several referrers that it doesn’t block and added them. If you’re interested in a more up-to-date list, you can pull from my github repository. If you have domains to add, you can ask me to pull from your repository. It may be that I am the only person interested in this, but if not, github will give us a way to collaborate on a list.

Almost two years ago, when I started working at IntraHealth, dcm told me about IntraHealth Open. Being a neck-bearded freetard, the idea really appealed to me: Use open source in the education of students in developing countries across Africa to build a workforce that could support the IT infrastructure of the continent without using Western consultants. The use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is essential to the goal. Using software that is freely licensed for perpetuity avoids the "First Hit is Free" model many software companies use to get developing countries hooked on their software. Building the use and understanding of FOSS into the curricula gives the students the skills they need to use software on the job. And deploying freely-licensed software like Ubuntu, OpenOffice, iHRIS Suite and OpenMRS into these developing countries will create a local demand for workers who can use, understand, and maintain the very software they’ve learned about in school. I’m very excited about the new IntraHealth OPEN initiative. You can even take part. Senagalese musician Youssou N’Dour is working with other musicians to help raise funds for the OPEN initiative by making his music and remixes of it available for free download under a Creative Commons license. So go download some music and consider making a donation to IntraHealth OPEN. UPDATE: Listen to dcm talk about Open in the Launchpad podcast.