Entries in Life

And it looks like I’m training my kids right..

My mother sent me a copy of a column printed in USA Today yesterday: “In 1920, U.S. saw the carnage of class warfare” Given the title (Ooh! Class Warfare!) the comparison of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to early 20th century violence isn’t surprising. The columnist tries to shock us by comparing OWS to the forgotten bombing of Morgan Stanley on September 17, 1920:

At noon the previous day, a horse-drawn wagon carrying hundreds of pounds of explosives and deadly shrapnel exploded in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan at 23 Wall St., the heart of America’s financial district. The final death toll was 38, with more than 400 injured.

Great, now people who think there is a problem with extreme wealth inequality are just about to bomb us! The editorial goes on to say:

The suspects were surprisingly similar to the spectrum of leftist protestors who are occupying Wall Street right now. They ranged from radical progressives to socialists to communists to anarchists, from homegrown Bolsheviks to Italian Galleanists to Communist Party USA.

I haven’t seen any Galleanists, Bolsheviks or violent anarchists, but then, I haven’t been following it very closely.
Still, that list of ideologies reminded me of Chris Hedges “Death of the Liberal Class” (Interview with Chris Hedges). Chris Hedges book starts around the turn of the century and moves through the violence of the 20s, the Great Depression and beyond.
An interesting counter-point to this columnist is Robert Reich’s take. As he points out there is something happening today with the OWS:

Even more startling is the change in public opinion. Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.
A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.

Even more interesting is the comparison that many people (even Republican politicians) see between OWS and the Tea Party movement.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner said:

I understand people’s frustrations. The economy is not producing jobs like they want and there’s lot of erosion of confidence in our government and frankly, under the First Amendment, people have the right to speak out.

There is something going on the people on the right throw tea parties and people on the left start occupying everything. Something is deeply wrong and change is coming. Hopefully there won’t be any crazies with bombs.

“Of all the things you considered your dad, a person was never one of them.” So much more relevant now that I am a dad.

I have let a few things build up that I want to write about (and I’m trying to make sure the bugosphere doesn’t overwhelm me entirely), so here is a potpourri of what is going on.

Good Friends

This past weekend, someone from New Orleans that I’ve been working with for the past eight or nine years was in New York City and said he wanted to get together. It provided a nice excuse to go up to NYC. We had a great dinner and had fun catching up. Even though I’m not a businessman, I have a few friends like this one who own and run their own business and I love their perspective.

While I was in NYC, I made good on a threat I’ve made before to this open source power couple that I know, Leonard and Sumana. I met Leonard seven years ago when we were both working on the Clark campaign. I didn’t realize then how truly bright he was, but if you google “Leonard Richardson”, you’ll see that he has written quite a bit. And he maintains a fairly humble attitude and has a wonderful sense of humor. You can see this in his O’Reilly Bio: Leonard Richardson has been programming since he was eight. Recently the quality of his code has improved somewhat.

When I said I wanted to meet him, he asked what I wanted to do. I suggested Museum of the Moving Image since it was near where he lived and, as it happens, was hosting the traveling Jim Henson exhibit. I vividly remembered Leonard playing the Manamana video for his fellow Clark staffers, so I thought this might be right up his alley. I was right.

I didn’t know Sumana before the WMF but she was brought on as our Volunteer Development Coordinator this year (in the TL;DR group, which I am a part of and I can only find a brief mention of in this “Platform Engineering” blog post) and, lo, open source runs in small circles. Sumana and Leonard are married!

Hurricanes

Of course, Hurricane Irene was on our minds. As someone who has lived through several hurricane seasons in New Orleans (but not, I admit, Hurricane Katrina), I was a little more amused than I should have been that NYC was evacuating parts of the city because of predicted 50 knot winds (though, I admit that I thought shutting down the subway was a good move — I will condescend at least that much).

Even if the storm that hit NYC didn’t meet my stringent standards for impending doom, it was still good to hear that Sumana and Leonard survived.

School

Oh, and as if that isn’t enough trauma in my life: tomorrow is the first day of school for my children. Given that and dvfmama’s work outside the house, it’ll be my first day for quite some time by myself.

I don’t know if I can handle the solitude.

The nolug mailing list has been taken over by the perpetual whine again: “New Orleans Sucks.” Even though I still love the city and sometimes dream of living there again, when it comes to crime or politics there are many ways that it does, indeed, suck. But the thing that got me to move away — before Katrina came and made the problems worse — was opportunity. I had to post my experience with New Orleans and opportunity.

TL;DR: Even freetards need people skills.

I am telling you why I love and miss New Orleans. It has nothing to do with tech or politics. I don’t live in NOLA because of opportunity, remember?

I should clarify. I did post about politics. And even while living there, I was bothered by politics. But politics didn’t make me move.

Even rampant crime — my wife and I were robbed at gunpoint once — didn’t make us move.

It was opportunity. At the time, I was working as the “anti-spam” guy for McDermott. When they replaced my Solaris MTA with a Barracuda appliance and terminated the contract, I really wanted to continue working as a fairly-well-paid person working with Unix.

Most of the readily available jobs that met my criteria in NOLA at that time required an Oracle certification. I did think about getting one — the cost-benefit ratio for an Oracle Certification is pretty good and demand was there — but I am too much of what Fake Steve Jobs calls a “freetard” to get one. The GPL really does mean something to me.

We sold our house in Carrolton, and, for a few weeks, I worked as a Perl subcontractor for a guy in San Francisco on a mod_perl project he had.

After that, I went to work on a presidential campaign in Little Rock.

Even though the campaign was a flop and the pay was abysmal, it was one of the best decisions of my career: I made a number of friends from around the country and worked closely with them over the course of a few months. Those relationships led to more opportunties than I would otherwise have, living here in rural Pennsylvania.

So, yes, NOLA sucks as far as opportunities. Any place outside of a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco probably sucks a similar amount, at least for Tech jobs.

Which brings me to my point: It isn’t WHERE you are or even WHAT you know so much as WHO you know and HOW connected you are. You can have great tech skills and still be stuck with a job in a New York City bodega if you don’t know how to leverage them.

Yes, a person in the right place with the right set of technical skills can do amazing things. But if he doesn’t have any way to build and maintain some relationships that will help him when his current situation is finished, he’ll be stuck.

This robin showed up a couple days ago at our front door and has been keeping a sharp lookout for us and its eggs.

Sometimes

Reading Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay to the kids after dinner.

For the first time in quite a while, we’re early for Pascha!

Lily and I took advantage of the first day of really warm weather to plant some strawberries.