I hope you had a great Mother's Day
To all the moms out there, especially to Richelle and all those out there that are mine (and yes I mean that plural) - Happy Mother's Day!
Sunday, May 11, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"When we're poor... our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation"
Boston.com: The sting of poverty: The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.
NYTimes: Paul Krugman: Poverty is Poison:To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child's brain.
Philly.com: The new mandate: First, find them a home: Deborah Harmon, 43 and mentally ill, was released from jail for panhandling, and again faced living on the streets or in a shelter. Runell McKnight, 25, had no place to go with her two young children after she broke up with the man she was living with. Today, both women have apartments of their own, with each a beneficiary of programs that aggressively promote the notion that, above all, the homeless need homes.
The Gospel of Consumption: "Nothing," he claimed, "breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure."
Elizabeth Warren interview at UC Berkley: It is partly about politics. If you don't email your congresswoman or your congressman and your senator, then you are part of the problem today. You've got to tell them that this is an issue that matters to you, that this really, truly matters.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Leg/Back Pain Update
I had a follow up at the University of Pennsylvania last Friday to discuss my progress.
My lower back pain symptoms has been unchanged, I still get a very hot pain while sitting, either happening immediately in unergonomic settings, or after an hour or so in ergonomic-correct settings.
My leg pain (only my left leg) begins after walking 3 or more blocks and progresses to a level 2 after five blocks, requiring me to stop walking and take a break for it to settle down. If I don't the pain rapidly grows into something that incapacitates me.
The leg pain starts in me left hip, left knee, left shin almost simultaneously (I think the hip just slightly before the rest). Along with that is a growing tingle in my left big toe and a pressure on the top of my left ankle. Sometimes the tingle remains in the toe whether sitting, standing or walking. Most times all of these will subside when sitting down or leaning against a wall.
Unfortunately, the level 2 pain is a step back from the level 1 pain I felt earlier in the week (which was a level 5-8 pain before the first shot in this series), when I sounded so optimistic. I'm doing everything 'right' as far as I know. Eating well. Exercising. Watching posture and my body mechanics.
The doctor was encouraged by my progress. The leg pain/tingling used to come on earlier and far more strong. So he's scheduled me for two more Selective Nerve Root Block injections.
I don't mind the back pain. Don't care that much about it at all. Getting up every hour to relieve it is good for for me. But the leg pain continues to be a drag on so much.
Gotta keep on trucking. Things could be far worst.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
On being "well adjusted"
David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech at Kenyon University:
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Deep thought for today.
Make sure to read the whole thing, via Dave Rogers
Monday, May 5, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Java Application Servers Without J2EE
infoq: SpringSource Launches New Application Server without Java EE
SpringSource Team Blog: Introducing the SpringSource Application Platform
SpringSource: http://www.springsource.com/web/guest/products/suite/applicationplatform">SpringSource Application Platform
Not directly related at all, but has everything to do with it:
The Daily Profeth: Google App Engine & eclipse (PyDev) - a nice getting started guide.
Monday, May 5, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I've been tagged!
This is weird. I am almost never at a loss for words, but this time I've been for over a week now.
Antonella Pavese tagged me to share my favorite historical figure and five random/weird things about him or her.
That's a hard one! While I've read few biographies, I do consider myself a bit of a history buff.
Anyways, as soon as I figure out my favorite, I'm in. Coming soon...
Monday, May 5, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Great NYTimes article reveals a little about their Web production process
.It was both educational and fun to read the NYTimes interview with Khoi Vinh, their Design Director.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
New Balance 992s - Not good for lower back pain
Many folks who suffer from lower back pain are told - "buy New Balance sneakers".
The mistake comes in where folks follow the hype and buy what is a terrific running sneaker - New Balance's 992s.
I can understand why. I've seen Steve Jobs wearing them for goodness sakes.
And yeah, I actually bought a pair.
But here's the thing, that particular sneaker does not help back pain sufferers. In fact, I believe can trigger low back pain when they are mis-worn. Which is wearing them for a purpose other than running. 992s are running sneakers with additional cushioning in the heal for the hammering they take during jogging or running. This additional cushioning elevates your heal, adding pressure to your legs and encouraging your back into a posture that isn't helpful while walking.
And if you are suffering low back pain, like me, you're not running all that much.
After following some advice found in this message forum I went out and bought some Clarks and Pumas. There is a notable difference when standing or walking. Richelle's mom has sung the praises of Clarks for her knee pain for a while.
So it was great to read in New York Magazine that this approach made sense.
Related: Boing Boing thread on the previously mentioned article and subject.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
High Self Esteem not the same as Good Self Esteem
These three articles explain a lot about folks who refuse to hear any feedback/advice/criticism given in good will.
It's true it turns out - they are, most likely, dealing with a self esteem issue. But not the kind you think. In fact, they just may be looking down on you.
ScienceDaily: High Self-esteem Is Not Always What It's Cracked Up To Be:
...Increasingly, psychologists are looking at such behavior and saying out loud what may go against the grain of how many people act: high self-esteem is not the same thing as healthy self-esteem. And new research by a psychology professor from the University of Georgia is adding another twist: those with "secure" high self-esteem are less likely to be verbally defensive than those who have "fragile" high self-esteem."There are many kinds of high self-esteem, and in this study we found that for those in which it is fragile and shallow it's no better than having low self-esteem," said Michael Kernis of University of Georgia. "People with fragile high self-esteem compensate for their self-doubts by engaging in exaggerated tendencies to defend, protect and enhance their feelings of self-worth."
ScienceDaily: Studies Find Narcissists Most Aggressive When Criticized:
...researchers assert that people with high self-esteem are a heterogeneous group that may be more different than alike since high self-esteem can be an accurate appreciation of one's good traits, or it may be a highly doubtful sense of personal superiority that is not reality-based. While some individuals with high self-esteem are largely unaffected by feedback, others may require frequent confirmation and validation of their favorable self-image by others. Thus the psychologists assert that differences in the validity of individuals' self-esteem undermines its usefulness as a predictor of aggression.The authors suggest that aggression by narcissists is an interpersonally meaningful and specific response to an ego threat. "Narcissists mainly want to punish or defeat someone who has threatened their highly favorable views of themselves," the authors note. "People who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it."
New York Magazine: How Not to Talk to Your Kids:
Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?...For a few decades, it's been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.
So a question forms for me as a parent - how do you foster good (healthy) self esteem instead of high self esteem? Of course I think I am already good (actually great) on this score so far. Same with Richelle. But as Emma gets older, it will become a real challenge in the face of our materialistic, baby-psyco-over-protecting society.
I know a few adults who will not accept feedback, advice and criticism, no matter what, who came from the most balanced of families. So this maybe out of our realm of influence. But we gotta try.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Transitions
It's a sad day as Shelley Powers closes down her home on the web to concentrate on other projects. Her blog was host to some of the best online conversations I've ever participated in. The people who connected there were smart, passionate, and rarity of rarities in a single online community - diverse. You could get in a heated argument about any number of aspects about online media and respect would still be kept by those conversing. For me, the only place that came close to that experience were Salon's Table Talk in its early days (before it went behind the pay wall).
I'm looking forward to what comes next Shelley, but I will miss Burningbird.
And congrats to Anil Dash who is celebrating five years at SixApart. The company has made tremendous changes these past six or so months, basically it's been reborn, without loosing a step. And there is a lot to admire there.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Had the 2nd of 2 epidurals last night
So far so good. The last steroid injection, taken back April 2nd, was a tremendous success. Whereas the three I received last year had benefits that were tenuous and short lasting these seem to be helping me progress towards a place that is kinda back where I was before the injury happened. Monday and Tuesday I had taken walks of up to five blocks with leg pain that was barely noticeable. My lunch breaks were not wracked with leg pain. It was a joy. While my back pain doesn't seem to be subsiding, it's my leg pain that concerns me, what has been limiting my outdoors activities so much this past year and a half. The back pain is manageable with good body mechanics, getting up and about every hour, exercise, good diet, good ergonomics at work and at home (it is at home that I need to correct things - at work my workstation is simple, but gets the job done).
I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but I am looking forward to strapping my guitar back on and inviting my friends over to hang out. Not only that, but to socialize in the flesh again. Most important - just taking long walks with Emma and Richelle, going to the zoo, going down the shore, maybe even a few family trips that I have been avoiding because of pain and not wanting to be a drag.
Thursday, April 17, 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Got my Mac Book Pro at work
Many of us at work are migrating to OS-X. It's logical since our deployment environment is a Unix variant, Solaris, and most of us on Windows run Cygwin to create a developer environment that resembles a Unix-like environment.
Now I'm not a stranger to OS-X. I've been convincing my family to switch for the past four years and now they mostly run iBooks and Mac Books, decreasing the time I used to spend helping fix problems. Fact of the matter is, if you are using a PC mostly to send email, surf the web, manage photos and video, it is a great all round choice.
The irony is that within minutes of getting my laptop I froze it! Turns out it isn't all that smart to run Parallels, out of the box, the way I did, and run, oh, 8 or so programs simultaneously outside of it!
Anyways, in less than an hour I had my favorite web browser, Firefox, my organizer, Wikidpad (which required me to run it from the Python source - but it worked!), my encryption software TrueCrypt, my IDE of choice Eclipse, my favorite OS-X free text editor, TextWrangler, all up and running. With Maven, SVN, Java and Python pre-installed made it easy to checkout my current work and get a build going. I won't be needing Parallels all that much since so much of the work I do can be done in OS-X, but it will be convenient to be able to test websites in different browsers, on two of the three primary desktop OSes, with little effort.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
I Upgraded to Movable Type 4.1 Open Source
I'm happy I finally got around to upgrading my personal blog to the latest and greatest Movable Type. It's clear that open sourcing the software has been good for SixApart and that MT can again be considered a viable alternative to other blogging platforms like WordPress.
People at work like to ask me what blogging platform 'is the best'. Honestly, after working with so many over the years, I have trouble identifying that. Feature for feature, you can make one do what the other does.
Someday I'll put together a matrix that highlights the real differentiators as far as I am concerned, but I do have a shortlist I can share if I was doing a project as a consultant: Drupal, Movable Type, WordPress, and rolling something new with Django.
MT has a new beta release coming out with a few features I am looking forward to.
Monday, April 7, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Interesting Programming Reads
Blog at trepca.si: Java, Python and defaults - Sure is true enough.
Code To Joy: Open-Source group announces jJavaM - It was an April fools, but a good one for the sarcasm.
Python-by-example - Will come in handy.
Better Programming With Java EE: A Conversation With Java Champion Adam Bien - Dispels some myths.
An Army of Solipsists: Blog Archive: Using Spring MVC Controllers in Grails - Might come in handy if I ever get around to experimenting with Grails.
Anil Dash: Atom Wins: The Unified Cloud Database API: "I want every program that thinks of itself today as a "blogging client" to reimagine their market as being a front-end to a database in the cloud. I want all the apps built on smart database abstractions to think about this new unified cloud API as an option they must support. And most of all, I want geeks to make something cool with this that we couldn't do before."
Hosting Java Web Applications: Why Is It Still So Hard? | Javalobby
John Wilson: Groovy and XML | Groovy Zone
Saturday, April 5, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Simple Web services are so much fun
Track your Domino's pizza delivery with a python script.
Or try this nice one liner in your favorite Unix shell: curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F|B)' | cut -d \- -f 2 for a Futurama quote from Slashdot.
Thursday, March 27, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Around My Web Of Co-Workers and Ex-Co-Workers
Rajiv Pant, my former manager at Knight Ridder, shares some thoughts about the Future of Content Management for News Media for Web sites.
The apartment of Jesse, a co-worker at CIM, was robbed. He posted pictures of the culprit and thru social media like Digg got some justice: McFearsome: Blog Archive - WOW, You're a MORON!
Anandhan Subbiah, my manager at CIM, has a post up about the horror of Seal culling.
Jon Moore discusses REST as Unix programming for the Web.
And Arpit, CIM Flash extraordinaire, celebrates his 100th post.
And congrats to Gabo on becoming UX Lead for Joost.
From the Philly Future side of things, Howard Hall's poetry is a daily must read for me.
Albert Yee is going to have his photography highlighted this Friday.
And Scott is putting up a podcast about moving in with Marisa.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Sing A Song
The night before Mom's funeral, we were driving around Fox Chase, making arrangements, and Emma, from her car seat, sung.
"Sing, sing a sonnnnng"
One of the many songs Richelle and me sing to her, that it would be this one that she would sing first, the night before Mom's laying to rest, meant everything to me, and was so unexpected (we had thought it would be "Row your boat" - for reasons I'll share sometime).
A great version by Dan Hardin
The Karen Carpenter version that is Richelle's favorite and was a hit in the 70s
Sing
Sing a song
Sing out loud
Sing out strong
Sing of good things, not bad
Sing of happy, not sad
Sing
Sing a song
Make it simple
To last your whole life long
Don't worry that it's not good enough
For anyone else to hear
Sing
Sing a song
La la la la la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
Sing
Sing a song
Sing out loud
Sing out strong
Sing of good things, not bad
Sing of happy, not sad
Sing
Sing a song
Make it simple
To last your whole life long
Don't worry that it's not good enough
For anyone else to hear
Sing
Sing a song
And a great Tripod page Sing.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
"crippled by their own process"
Coding Horor: "Is Eeyore Designing Your Software?":
Here's my honest question: does open source software need all that process to be successful? Isn't the radical lack of process baggage in open source software development not a weakness, but in fact an evolutionary advantage? What open source software lacks in formal process it makes up ten times over in ubiquity and community. In other words, if the Elbonians feel so strongly about localization, they can take that effort on themselves. Meanwhile, the developers have more time to implement features that delight the largest base of customers, instead of plowing through mountains of process for every miniscule five line code change.Are large commercial software companies crippled by their own process?
I'd say that in large corporations, I've seen many internal projects beat down by the same.
The new portal architecture at CIM doesn't suffer from this, but the old one certainly did. We've come a long way.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Easy target: knocking the press for the housing crisis
Dan Gillmor is right to knock the press in its coverage of the housing bubble. It didn't do its job. But I thought we were in the age of the crowd having more information than the experts? In the age of news that bubbles up from the conversation where knowledge of something as disastrous as a oncoming financial collapse of the country would umm... be somewhat noticeable.
Beat up on the press all you want Dan. They are an easy punching bag in an age where over 60% of the public have lost confidence in them.
While I am sure we can find voices in the blogosphere that were warning us to impending troubles, as we probably can in the press, it didn't get surfaced to wide enough audience.
The media failed certainly. And so did We the Media fail.
And it is something that must be confronted.
I am a big trumpeter of social media and how it can empower each of us to connect in ways that were impossible just a short while ago. I'm planning to share some great examples here in later posts. But as you say Dan, there's plenty of blame to go around in this mess.
As Dave Rogers recently pointed out many tend to look to technological solutions to problems when what they are really dealing with is something different. We prescribe solutions way before we even understand the problem.
And hard enough, sometimes understanding the problem involves a hard look in our own mirrors.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Shelley Powers: "If you do it right, you get Techcrunch. If you do it wrong, there's the ditch"
What Shelley Powers describes in the below linked piece is the current economy that encourages folks like Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears to do whatever it takes to get publicity.
David Shenk's "Data Smog" put it like this "All high-stim roads lead to Times Square".
That's the Web. It is nothing if not high-stim.
Folks like Michael Arrington not only have embraced where that leads, but know how to make a profit from it.
Kevin Kelly, in a piece that cuts away at the hype, describes one possible business model for artists in in "1,000 True Fans". But he never describes how you are going to find those fans. In an attention based economy, will it force artists to involve the kind of marketing that, in the words of Dave Rogers tries to "exploit love"?
Bb's RealTech: Shelley Powers: Stop Creating and Get a Real Job:
According to people like Michael Arrington all recorded music should be given away for free, and artists make their only income from concerts. If they can't make their living from concerts, or busking for tossed dimes in the subway, than they should consider music to be their hobby, and get a job digging ditches.Of course, if we apply the Arrington model to the music industry, we should be able to download all the songs we want-as long as we're willing to sit through an ad at the beginning and in the middle of every song. Isn't that how Techcrunch makes money? Ads in the sidebar, taking time to download, hanging up the page. Ads at the bottom of the posts we have to scroll past to get to comments? And in between, loud, cacophonous noise?
It angers me how little value people in this online environment hold the act of creativity. Oh we point to Nine Inch Nails and Cory Doctorow as examples of people who give their work away for free but still make a living. Yet NIN levies an existing fame, selling platinum packages at several hundred a pop to make up for all the freebies, and Doctorow has BoingBoing as a nice cushion for the lean years. They bring "fame" to the mix, and according to the new online business models, you have to play the game, leverage the system if you really want to make a living from your work. We don't value the work, we value the fame, yet fame doesn't necessarily come from any act of true creativity.
All you have to do to generate fame nowadays is be controversial enough, say enough that's outrageous, connect up with the right people in the beginning and then kick them aside when you're on top to be successful. You don't have to have artistic talent, create for the ages, or even create at all-just play the game. If you do it right, you get Techcrunch. If you do it wrong, there's the ditch.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Design Patterns Aren't (That) Evil
I agree with much of Jeff Atwood's writing when it comes to programming and development. I'd say on any given subject 90% to damn near 100% (congrats to him on his new adventure). But I think his post on design patterns, unfortunately, falls into a line of argument that I disagree with strongly - that *identifying* design patterns leads to complexity. Complexity because some engineers leverage them right from the get go without thinking about simplicity first. He even flags Head First Design Patterns as a potential complexity creator.
I understand the concern. Every once and a while you get into an argument with someone who is telling you your code stinks because it doesn't employ pattern "so-and-so" and every once and a while you come across some needlessly complicated code because the developer thought pattern "xyz" was the appropriate solution and implemented it without thinking a few minutes more about the problem and putting together something far simpler.
Replace the word "pattern" in the above sentence with "technology" or "API" or "archetecture".
Give it a try. It leads to the same place. And I'd say the problem doesn't start with patterns (or technologies, or APIs, or whatever). It starts with the developer.
Does that developer start from a KISS viewpoint, or one enamored by buzzwords?
So Jake Says: Music and Design Patterns:
Chord progressions are design patterns. They give a common framework musicians can use to communicate. However, the implementation is left to the musician. You can play classically or bluesy. You can shred the progression. You can take the most "outside" ideas of modern atonal theory and apply them to the song. There are elegant implementations, there are common implementations, there are "outside" implementations, and there are bad implementations.Chord changes aren't represented in the core notation/language of the music, but you can use musical notation to spell out changes. You can also use shorthand languages to design the music. The sentence "12-bar in Bb, 2-5-1 turnaround, on my lead" gives away none of the implementation details (voicings/melodies, etc.,) yet the song is written in a breath.
Design patterns act the exact same way for programmers. They are, at heart, a common framework by which programmers can discuss a design. They can spend less time focusing on minutiae and more time discussing design and code.
Even if you are using Python or Perl and you don't have to explicitly define an Iterator to loop through arbitrary collections, you could easily point to a "for x in y" statement and say "iterate through y" to describe part of an algorithm. You will be correct, and a coder from any paradigm won't have to give it two thoughts.
Design patterns always exist, but are sometimes invisible.
Monday, March 24, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Happy Easter
Emma is waking up at her grandparents right now and Richelle and me are just getting out of bed, making calls, and getting ready for the day. It's a tradition we started last year, that I'm looking forward to as the years come.
Easter is a weird holiday, in that, as the article from Slate states below, has resisted commercialization and has retained much of its religious meaning. Having grown up in a house without organized worship of any kind, I don't have many memories of Easter eggs or baskets. In fact, my fondest memory of Easter is one of recent years - that of my mom, calling me the night before from the nursing home, reminding me to bring her a chocolate egg.
That egg was important to her. To her, a Catholic who had doubts about the faith's practices, Easter had to do with family and new beginnings.
I think the tradition we are setting up with Emma, with Richelle's parents, is very much in keeping with that.
The events in Christ's life, death and resurrection, point you in that direction, thinking about renewal, and what it means for your faith - for your life.
Every year I kick myself at not getting back in the habit of going to church. A habit I had only a short while as an adult that ended when Hunter, my nephew, died immediately after my confession on Saturday, September 15th 2001. A few days after 9/11.
For so many, they find solace in religion during times like that. I wish I could be like that. My instinctual reaction was the opposite.
As I get older, I am starting to realize that doubt, reason and faith are not necessarily at odds. That it is we human beings that demand straight lines and simple rules to dictate our universe and paradoxes upset our world so mightily that it can be hard to face the day when any light is shone on them.
tonypierce + happy easter:
today is one of the most holy days for Christians around the world.
today is the day that the Christian messiah, Jesus, came down from Heaven
and walked around and said, see, told ya I'm God.
everyone pretty much freaked out.funny thing about Christians, they basically run the world
yet when it comes to their holiest days they act ashamed.
instead of wearing t-shirts that say Jesus
or putting a nice picture of Jesus on their door
or a nice poster of Jesus in their window
and say, Right On, Jesus,
they buy candy and paint eggs and hide them
and wear hats and have brunch
just like they've never even heard of Jesus
and dont marvel at what he did for them.they act like dirty heathens, basically.
...the good book says that it's not
the things that go in our mouths
that we should worry about
it's the things that come out
of our mouths
that matter....get yourself in situations
where you get to say some badass shit
Slate: Happy Crossmas!:
Despite the awesome theological implications (Christians believe that the infant lying in the manger is the son of God), the Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum. How pleasant it is in mid-December to open a Christmas card with a pretty picture of Mary and Joseph gazing beatifically at their son, with the shepherds and the angels beaming in delight. The Christmas story, with its friendly resonances of marriage, family, babies, animals, angels, and—thanks to the wise men—gifts, is eminently marketable to popular culture. It's a Thomas Kinkade painting come to life.On the other hand, a card bearing the image of a near-naked man being stripped, beaten, tortured, and nailed through his hands and feet onto a wooden crucifix is a markedly less pleasant piece of mail.
The Easter story is relentlessly disconcerting and, in a way, is the antithesis of the Christmas story. No matter how much you try to water down its particulars, Easter retains some of the shock it had for those who first participated in the events during the first century. The man who spent the final three years of his life preaching a message of love and forgiveness (and, along the way, healing the sick and raising the dead) is betrayed by one of his closest friends, turned over to the representatives of a brutal occupying power, and is tortured, mocked, and executed in the manner that Rome reserved for the worst of its criminals.
We may even sense resonances with some painful political issues still before us. Jesus of Nazareth was not only physically brutalized but also casually humiliated during his torture, echoing the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In 21st-century Iraq, some American soldiers posed prisoners with women's underwear on their heads as a way of scorning their manhood. In first-century Palestine, some Roman soldiers pressed down a crown of thorns onto Jesus' head and clothed him in a purple robe to scorn the kingship his followers claimed for him. After this, Jesus suffered the most degrading of all Roman deaths: crucifixion. Jesus remains the world's most famous victim of capital punishment.
To his followers, therefore, his execution was not only tragic and terrifying but shameful. It is difficult not to wonder what the Apostles would have thought of a crucifix as a fashion accessory. Imagine wearing an image of a hooded Abu Ghraib victim around your neck as holiday bling.
slacktivist: Practice resurrection
Sunday, March 23, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Hope you had a great St. Patrick's Day
Even though you wouldn't know it by my name - I'm Irish. It's something I was was dimly aware of as a teenager, and something I've come to embrace as I've gotten older and realized my last name isn't that of my biological father.
So what is St. Patrick's Day? According to my friend Ron and a link he posted, something mighty bad. According to David Plotz at Slate, something to take pause of and be thankful for.
Me? The lack of cultural upbringing I had leads me to think of something far more recent - the North Ireland peace process and the hope it brings for the world. Differences that seem intractable and unbridgeable can be met. And not always does it need to lead to blood.
And yeah, I'll have a drink to that.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Using Our Powers For Good
I recently re-read Rebecca Blood's 2003 BlogTalk presentation: "waging peace: using our powers for good". It is worth revisiting by anyone who is a blog evangelist or critic. Taking a look at the daily lack of cross linkage on memeorandum.com, unfortunately, it seems almost prophetic.
...People agree most readily with the things they already believe, and everyone has only 24 hours in a day. Because of these two factors, weblogs are too often enclosed in echo-chambers of their own making.In the book 'Data Smog', David Shenk says: 'Birds of a feather flock virtually together' and this is certainly true of weblogs. He goes on to say: 'The problem... is that people are tuning in and becoming informed--but they're tuning into niche media and they're acquiring specialized knowledge. As our information supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease. Technically, we possess an unprecedented amount of information; however, what is commonly known has dwindled to a smaller and smaller percentage every year. This should be a sobering realization for a democratic nation, a society that must share information in order to remain a union.'
Let me add that it's not just specialized knowledge that we are accessing. It's news and opinion about current events. The Web has given us the ability to retrieve news accounts from around the world. It used to be that most people got their news from just a few sources. This limited access meant that most of us were evaluating events from a common pool of information about the world, or at least a pool that was common to the people around us. But Web users can choose to get their news from wherever they like. And factual accounts of the same events quite often differ substantially in their wording, emphasis, and in the conclusions they draw. We now have the ability to choose from among news accounts until we find one that we feel gets it right.
Now, I don't advocate returning to the pre-Web world of local newspapers. But there are consequences to the wide access we have gained.
Democracy depends on groups of people coming to terms with one another, and devising solutions that will address the needs of most, if not all, of its citizens. Even a system like mine, in the United States, where majority rules, cannot afford to completely ignore the needs of anyone not in the winning party. Democracies simply cannot function unless citizens and policy-makers can talk to one another and achieve some sort of common ground in addressing the issues of the day.
However, when people can choose their news and information from an unlimited variety of sources, they usually will choose sources that confirm their pre-existing biases. According to theFolklorist.com, confirmation bias is 'a tendency on the part of human beings to seek support or confirmation for their beliefs.' It makes sense, if you think about it. The only basis we have in evaluating any source of information is the set of information--including opinions--that we have already decided is true. Very few people will be inclined to choose primary sources of information that consistently put forth ideas that just seem wrong.
This isn't deliberate malice. It's a simple matter of choosing, from the available sources, those that seem most accurate, and those that seem most accurate will always be those that most closely reflect one's own view of the world. So while the Web, in theory, makes it possible to explore many more points of view than ever before, in practice, few people actually do this to the extent that they can.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Share It When You Can Find It: Investigative Journalism
88 percent of newspaper coverage is 'churnalism': rewritten wire copy and PR. Only 12 is derived from reporters initiative or is fact checked.
That's the state of newspaper journalism in Britain according to what Nick Davies has written in his book "Flat Earth News". You can read more about "Flat Earth News" in a recent London Review of Books article (via dangerousmeta).
No wonder the majority of Americans no longer trust the media and folks like Jeff Jarvis are making an issue of it.
We have a clue we are being spun. And I bet that niche media's pursuit of 'authenticity' - the practice of wrapping news in greater and greater extremes of opinion to seem 'genuine' - folks probably feel at an instinctive level the exploitation.
In this environment, it has become more and more difficult to find investigative journalism you might care about or might need to know about.
There are many initiatives that have sprung up over the past few years that attempt to address how investigative journalism can be pursued, developed, created and funded.
Scott Rosenberg shares his doubts about one of the latest, "ProPublica", a non-profit driven by some big names in traditional journalism.
Think about a story the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published: "Philadelphia faces shortage of housing for mentally ill". It was front page of the Local section. Some editor thought that I, as a reader, would find that story interesting or pertinent.
In a world driven purely by linkage, PageRank, traffic counts, and other topic based story algorithm filtering systems - would I see that story? Would that story even be written? Who is its audience?
Think about it. And what it means for your knowledge of others that sit outside your topical or social spheres.
Now I'm not saying that algorithm driven - or crowd driven - news filtering is bad. Far from it.
Nor am I saying that a world where only 'experts' provide access to the news stories is good. Again far from it.
But the folks who *do* say one or the other are selling something. And it is at our expense.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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