... and sometimes not.

So that we don't seem like over-amped activist yahoos, it has to be acknowledged that 'chink in the armor' is a common idiom that you do indeed hear all the time in sports, politics, etc. I use it myself from time to time. It's an excellent term to use to describe a weakness in something that otherwise seems impenetrable. The same could be said about the swastika: an interesting graphical design that is used in many cultures throughout the world. However, one would also have to say that that one would be wise to avoid using either if at all possible. It's important to consider the context when either or these occur and respond accordingly.

It's entirely possible for the phrase to pop up without any malice *IF* it came up spontaneously in a discussion. It's mainly a question of how considered the choice was -- much like many offenses, premeditation is important.

For something like this to get published on a major website after any kind of review is revolting. However, the on-air utterance seems a little more ambiguous -- he may have been reading the prompter or he may have been ad-libbing. He didn't say it with any particular emphasis on the word, which suggests to me he really was just using the idiom.

That's sort of the problem in fixating on superficial(*) offenses like terminology, doubly so when you draw the short straw and have a racial slur that's a homonym of a word used in such a common idiom. Whether it reflects deep racial animus or benign ignorance can't honestly be determined without resorting to Freudian-style speculation on what the offender intended.

Offensive terminology should be dealt with severely, but I can't help but feel like such skirmishes don't truly address deeper problems. Headlines are easy to retract, second-tier on-line editors who write weekend headlines at 2:30 am are easy to fire, and sports anchors easy to suspend. It's easy to just avoid a particular word, no matter what you actually think of a particular group of people.

It's the more insidious stuff that I'm concerned about. It's headlines like "American beats Kwan", or the post-Katrina photo captions that describe black families 'looting' food and white families 'finding' food. It's whenever anybody compliments me on my English. These kinds of things reflect presumptions so ingrained that whoever says these kinds of things doesn't even think they're saying something controversial. It's the kind of thing that needs far more attention, but isn't the kind of thing you can describe in 155 characters or less.



* Look it up. Superficial doesn't necessarily mean minor.

I've got to admit I was a lot more affected by Steve Jobs's death last week than I expected. If you asked me a few months ago, I would've figured I'd be bummed out for an afternoon and then obsess about AAPL's stock price for the next few days. The only other public figure that actually saddened me tremendously when he died was author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in August of 2008 at the age of 46, after battling depression for years. Both were figures that died in the prime of their careers, succumbing to afflictions they had struggled with even as they produced some of their greatest work.

While it might be understandable to feel such emotion for an artist or writer, many remarked at the time at how unusual it was to see such emotion for a high-tech CEO. We know intuitively such a glib descrīption doesn't do service or respect to what Mr. Jobs accomplished. But it did make me wonder why I don't expect to feel the same intensity of emotion when such other larger-than-life figures in the tech industry pass on, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or even to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. No doubt many like myself will express their respects for their great achievements and how much better the world is for their work. But I doubt we'll see quite the outpouring we saw last Thursday.

Speaking for myself, I flashed back almost immediately to my first experience on a computer that I actually wanted to use, the Macintosh at my friend's house back in 5th grade. He insisted I head over to his place after school one day to play on his dad's new computer. Up until then, that generally meant me sitting around fiddling with Transformers while my friend fumbled around with a computer for about two hours, be it a C64 or DOS, loading several floppies or tapes, screwing something up, flipping through manuals, starting over, rebooting, and so on before we finally could play, say, Pirates or maybe some text game for maybe half an hour before it was time to go home for dinner and then miss my TV show because my homework wasn't done. It wasn't anything I even remotely had any kind of interest in.

The Mac changed all that. We played lots of games (we spent weeks on "Deja Vu"), of course, but oddly enough it didn't stop there. We would eventually just start messing around with the computer itself, messing with settings, desktop patterns, and then eventually playing around with text in word processing apps, trying to draw in paint programs and so on. I was always the artistic kid (boy has that changed), and spent tons of time in MacPaint and was the only guy brave enough to try the 'Draw' (vector) programs and have any kind of success with them. After we got my own, even my writing improved as I started keeping a Doogie-style journal and gagging at how awful my writing was upon review a few months later.

It was a powerful experience, and no technology quite matched it for some time (though Unix came close in college). I didn't know about the 1984 ad, I didn't know about Steve Jobs, I just know this thing was awesome and made me want to understand things like hard drives and memory and processing speeds. My enthusiasm for the Mac and the knowledge that resulted has been responsible for many positive development in my career, from my first job as a computer lab geek at UC Santa Cruz to my first job at ILM as (and many are surprised at this) a Macintosh Technician.

I only first learned about Steve Jobs in sort of the past tense as I entered college, because he was long gone from Apple by the early 90s. Lacking the vast archives of the internet, it was amazing what a strong impression he was still able to make as people spoke of him reverently while simultaneously keeping him at arm's length because of the rather volatile reputation he had earned in the early years. Even as Apple showed all the signs of a failing company after nearly a decade of mismanagement since his departure, people were wary of bringing him back in 1997.

The rest is history, of course, but it didn't take long for me to see a very direct connection between that amazing piece of technology I first used as a kid in 1985 and the amazing individual who drove its creation and resurrection while envisioning with near clairvoyance the role it would assume today, and possibly for some years to come. We're reminded nearly every day of how much his work has improved the world. I have no doubt that I would not be where I am today without him.

Thanks, Steve.

The 'coons will have to roll 20s.

Hexes. I'm seeing them a lot these days in games and movies as effects for energy shields or invisibility cloaks, enveloping that awesome ship or sexy covert agent in a shimmering protective grid. At the advice of the folks in the garden shop, a protective hexagonal grid of chicken wire will do the same for my nascent lawn, shielding it from the surprising number of skunks and raccoons in my neighborhood. They've been flipping up large sections to dig for grubs and worms. I was skeptical at first, but it's been remarkably effective in one test area. I didn't buy enough to cover everything, but it seems the coons have only been hitting certain spots. We shall see. Hopefully I'll only need this up for a few more weeks to let the grass's roots grow stronger.

A case can be made for a strong offensive option, though:



I'm trying to talk myself out of buying this, but don't expect much success.

EDIT: Go Bear!

(Like a lot of topics, there are surely more scholarly viewpoints on economics, but because everyone's involved in it and affected by it, I think we're all entitled to a reasoned opinion.)

Whenever debates on increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations come up, the conservatives generally go to the very tangible bottom-line arguments about wealth redistribution, with some class warfare accusations thrown in to give their arguments a dash of cultural incredulity. Liberals go heavy on the bleeding heart cultural arguments, trying to appeal to notions of fairness and sympathy for the less fortunate, and act like money isn't an issue.

While the bleeding heart arguments do resonate with me, it'd be insane to support something just because it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. If that was it, I'd give to panhandlers all the time for that quick nice-guy feeling, all the while encouraging and enabling behavīor that nobody thinks is good. (Ever see people give to panhandlers inside a restaurant? Ugh.) The main reason anybody should be advocating higher taxes to support government work projects and social programs is because it'll make us all richer.

Just about anybody who works in a high-income profession relies on broader economic activity. We rely on large numbers of people buying more goods and services so that we benefit either directly if they buy products and services offered by the companies we work for, or indirectly when they buy the goods and services produced by our clients, or even less directly when the quarterly filings come in and the companies in our portfolios show stellar sales and revenue.

Absolutely none of this happens when there aren't customers to buy these goods and services. And when there are no customers, there are no profits. So my company might lose clients or have less sales. So it may need to cut costs and lay a bunch of people off. Or my stocks might tank from poor earnings reports. So I'll have to re-think getting that new computer or 60" plasma. So I become one less shopper at the AAPL store or AMZN. And the cycle repeats.

If lack of tax revenue forces government to cut medicare and social security, suddenly I have to consider setting cash aside should I need to support my elderly mother. If you have kids, you may need to re-think using the public schools, and look to spending on private. Or possibly moving altogether to a better, more expensive part of town with solid schools. And again, even if we're gainfully employed in the middle class, we're a few less customers at the BBY or the F or GM dealership.

Through work programs we can create moderate income jobs for people that need to get a computer to replace their 8-year-old Compaq still running MSFT Windows 2000, buy a digital TV instead of the dumb half-assed $40 adapter box, maybe sign up for a VZ or S cellular plan (a career necessity these days), and of course, buy food and clothing at the WMT or M. All this while fixing roads, bridges, and pipelines so that we don't have to contend with catastrophic infrastructure failures that end up costing everybody even more money. Infrastructure that, by the way, support vital delivery services such as FDX and UPS, that allows them to charge rates low enough so that most of the stuff you buy from AMZN will have the free 3-5 day shipping. Which makes you that much more likely to click 'Buy'.

This goes for the Social Security and Welfare too. The money doesn't just go into a hole. It goes right back into the economy when they become customers (instead of shoplifters, if worst comes to worst) at the SWY or TGT. Maybe even take the kids to MCD every once in a while.With sufficient income, they might even need to open accounts at WFC or BAC. Are there lazy douchebags on welfare? Sure, but so long as I don't have to hang out with them, get mugged or burglarized by them, and not have them become homeless and screw up my downtown area, I'm not too bothered by it. But by all means, seek and prosecute fraud.

Frankly, I'm sick and tired of the bleeding heart stuff. I like captial-L Liberal policies because they make sense for me as somebody who wants to live comfortably and even maybe get obscenely filthy rich. This is the sort of thing we Liberals/Progressives should open with. Feeling like a good human being stuff just helps me sleep at night, which is important, but that's far from the only reason.

This lawn project is definitely one of the more challenging home improvement projects I've taken on. One thing I was thinking about often while working on it was how different this was from building the fence.

It reminded me a lot of the difference between the more creative work I'm doing now an the more technical work I'd been doing for the last several years. The fence was kind of like the more technical tasks. It was easy to get a sense or progress while I was working on it and seeing the end to it. Once a piece was in, I could look it over, maybe test it a little, and be pretty sure that part was done or at least was going to perform properly under the expected conditions.

The lawn felt more like the creative work in that it was hard to progress through all the phases sure that I had truly finished them. It seemed that every time I stopped to level or took a closer look at a particular part, I could find some reason to re-rake or re-till to get more rocks out, or re-grade to get a better slope. What looked good one day looked awful the next. All of this while not being totally sure if I was doing any of it the right way! After a certain point you have to just say it's good enough, but whether or not it wasn't will always sort of nag at you.

Anyway, for posterity, here's the breakdown:

A fair amount of gravel and rocks/concrete was mixed into the soil under the tarp.

Pick-axing up the yard. This went quick, but wow, was it tiring.

Lifting up the tarp revealed that, along with the gravel that made it under the tarps, there were a lot of rocks and concrete chunks mixed into the topsoil. Maybe from a previous project. I didn't know what was under there, so it wasn't a good idea to run the tiller through it with out breaking up the surface first.

After tilling, adding in some fresh topsoil, re-tilling, planing & grading, rolling, more planing, etc...

A bunch of hastily selected sod pieces from the Depot.

It's not a fatal mistake, but I really wish I had a quick look at *all* the sod pieces I picked up. A fair number had yellow/brown spots or were totally yellow, probably from having been out on their lot all day. They seem to be all greening up, but it wasn't very satisfying to look at the finished project and see all these dead patches.

The morning after.

After five days...

About two weeks.

All new sod will look okay the first 4-6 weeks, supposedly. After that, any problems with the soil or setup will start to emerge. I just used my snapshot cam on these shots (didn't want to risk the new SLR), so I see the exposures were different. Eh.


Some notes:

Before/after dusk-masks. Be kind to your lungs. Use a dust mask.

20 or so pieces of sod may stress your suspension.

Most of the gravel, rocks, and concrete dug up.

This actually isn't all of it, the rubble pile is now probably taller by about half a foot. Next step is to find some way to get rid of all the rocks/concrete/gravel. Apparently most garbage services have sites called 'transfer stations' that accept bulk waste from construction (which this qualifies as). Fees vary based on weight. Berkeley's will take up to 330 lbs. for about $30 (per one visit). The trick is getting it all there in one visit, which probably means a rental. Arranging for some special bin or hauling costs about $200, again depending on weight. Some places recycle, some don't, I'm just going to go with what's closest.

My guess at the work is roughly two good 40-hour weeks to do this. If it wasn't for all the gravel and rocks I came across, it might have gone faster. It might also have helped if I opted to just dig up and throw out the entire top six-inches of top-soil instead of trying to rake the rocks out of it. That would have been complicated for other reasons.