text:
Bazillion bytes

Status update: a distributed filesystem 2015-07-07

A lot of time has passed, and a lot of code has been written. Bazil is still in heavy development, but it has reached a good milestone to blog about: it can synchronize changes from one peer to another.

Warning: at this stage in development, we will put no effort into compatibility of file formats or protocols. Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.

What follows is a walkthrough of scenario where we have two computers sharing files – find me at GopherCon for a live demo, or follow the steps and run it yourself.

First, make sure you have a working Go (>=1.4) installation. You are expected to have basic familiarity with Go, at this point in development.

Unfortunately, to work around a missing gRPC feature, we need a custom branch of it for now. Let’s check that out:

$ go get
$ cd $GOPATH/src/
$ git remote add bazil
$ git fetch bazil
$ git checkout -b auth bazil/auth

And then install Bazil itself:

$ go get

For the rest, we’ll assume you have two computers, virtual machines or containers that will talk to each other.

You can also run the steps on one host, by calling passing the bazil -data-dir=PATH option as appropriate to keep two separate state directories.

We’ll call our two environments black and white, and differentiate them with that hostname in the prompt.

white$ bazil create
black$ bazil create

Public keys

To introduce the peers to each other, we need to pass their public keys to each other. As the current code doesn’t actually keep track of any nicknames or aliases for peers, we’ll need to refer to these public keys a lot. Let’s set shell variables to remember them.

To see the public key of a node, run

white$ bazil debug pubkey

Typically, debug commands access the database directly, and will only work if the server is not running.

Now set the variable $BLACK on the host white with the value being the public key of black, and vice versa. If you’re running the two on the same host, the following will work; if not, copy-pasting with the mouse is needed.

white$ BLACK="$(bazil -data-dir=path/to/datadir/of/black debug pubkey)"
black$ WHITE="$(bazil -data-dir=path/to/datadir/of/white debug pubkey)"

As is probably obvious from the debug in the command name, this is not the final UX for this.

Running the server

Bazil has a (per-user) server component that the command-line utilities communicate with. Let’s start the server on white.

white$ bazil server run &
bazil: Listening on [::]:34211
black$ bazil server run &
bazil: Listening on [::]:nnnnn

Making friends

We believe in the value of encryption. Bazil uses convergent encryption with sharing keys where the people who know the relevant sharing key can have access to the data.

The default installation sets up one sharing key, but let’s make a new one for our shared files; it’s just 32 bytes of random data. We’ll name our new sharing key friends.

white$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=sekrit bs=32 count=1
white$ bazil sharing add friends <sekrit

Let’s create a volume using the new sharing key, and mount it.

white$ bazil volume create -sharing=friends myfiles
white$ mkdir mnt
white$ bazil volume mount myfiles mnt

We now have an encrypted, deduplicating, snapshottable, local file system. Let’s share it with black, using the public key stored in $BLACK from earlier.

We introduce a new peer, identified by the public key stored in $BLACK. We tell white to allow black to access its local content-addressed storage, and the myfiles volume we just created.

white$ bazil peer add $BLACK
white$ bazil peer storage allow $BLACK local
white$ bazil peer volume allow $BLACK myfiles

Let’s tell black to use the new volume. First, we introduce the white as a new peer for black, and giving the network location where the server on white is listening on. The server prefers the port 34211 (bazil, do you see it?), but will use any free port. We saw the port output earlier.

black$ bazil peer add $WHITE
black$ bazil peer location set $WHITE

Later, we’ll introduce more rendezvous mechanisms, including multicast DNS and an internet-wide lookup based on the public key, and mechanisms for working behind NATs.

black needs to know the sharing key from earlier. Copy the sekrit file from white to black through whatever means are appropriate, and then run

black$ bazil sharing add friends <sekrit
black$ bazil volume connect -sharing=friends $WHITE myfiles
black$ bazil volume storage add -sharing=friends myfiles peerkey:$WHITE
black$ mkdir mnt
black$ bazil volume mount myfiles mnt

We now have the save volume mounted on two machines.

A distributed filesystem

Let’s make changes on white and observe them on black.

white$ echo hello, world >mnt/greeting
black$ bazil volume sync myfiles $WHITE
black$ ls mnt
black$ cat mnt/greeting
white$ echo hello, again >mnt/greeting
black$ bazil volume sync myfiles $WHITE
black$ cat mnt/greeting

Hey! It works!

The sync implementation doesn’t currently handle deletions or subdirectories.

There is currently no user interface to resolve conflicts, or to finish sync merges that were postponed because a file was still open.

At this stage in development, we will put no effort into compatibility of file formats or protocols.

After the obvious missing functionality mentioned is done, there’s plenty of work to be done on making the user experience of managing peers better. The steps above are very manual and discrete right now, as that is what’s easiest to debug.

Once the common usage scenarios have been explored, more convenient mechanisms can be added on top of these low-level steps, e.g. bootstrapping a peer connection over ssh, and interacting with friends over im with humans copy-pasting short messages.

To learn more about the why of Bazil, read the introductory blog post.

To understand the architecture of Bazil better, browse the documentation .

Bazil is still at an early stage in development, but the future looks really exciting. We’d love to have you participating.

posted on 2015-07-07, tagged as bazil

Introducing Bazil 2014-04-24

GopherCon is here, and it is time to reveal what Bazil is all about.

Bazil, also known as, is a file system that lets your data reside where it is most convenient for it to reside.

Bazil is still under heavy development, but welcomes developers and curious power users. Here’s a little teaser of what’s coming.

Imagine you have

  • A laptop with a a 256GB SSD
  • A desktop with a 3TB hard disk
  • A cloud server or storage service
    (virtual machine with expandable disks, S3, etc)
  • or just a cheap computer in a closet with two slow 4TB disks
  • or external USB disk you plug in once a week for backups

On the desktop, you naturally want to be able to use the whole 3TB disk. And you’re not always using the desktop, even when you’re home – the sofa is just so comfortable. You’d like to work with your files even when you’re on the laptop.

First try: Let’s sync to the Cloud*

So you install the currently fashionable large-corporate-backed cloud-sync solution.

A file sync based solution will try to copy all of your files from the desktop to the laptop – yet the laptop’s smaller SSD just can’t hold that much! You’re forced to play games with picking-and-choosing what folders get synchronized, and just don’t have the convenience of grabbing that 8-year-old wedding photo on a whim.

  • Desktop use is just ok: you need to keep adjusting what folders are synced and what not
  • Laptop use is miserable
  • Cloud storage of 3TB gets expensive: Dropbox or AWS will charge you $1000/year for the storage alone. That’s about 30TB of hard drives.
    And most providers don’t inspire confidence on the privacy of your files.
  • or The large corporations are not interested in supporting your server in a closet.
  • or These are the wrong corporations to make money off of you buying hard drives, so they have no interest in supporting that either. Why don’t you rent more online space, you’re easier to monetize that way.

To modernize an aphorism, you can’t put ten terabytes of files on a 500 GB SSD. Syncing between very disproportionate systems is fundamentally a problematic design, and is best for a small hand-picked set of files, not as an actual storage solution.

Don’t take this the wrong way; you really should have some sort of remote backups for important data, in case the building burns down. S3 RRS/Glacier, Google Cloud Storage DRA seem very promising for backup cold storage; we’ll come back to that later.

Second try: Use a network file system

Rocking it old school? We’re down with that.

A network file system like CIFS or NFS, or something like sshfs, would let you use the files from the desktop on the laptop – but your wifi will never be as fast as the laptop’s local SSD, in either bandwidth or latency, so now all your file accesses are crawling, and you end up hunting for an ethernet cable whenever you need to transfer something bigger.

To speed things up, you end up copying often used files to the SSD. Now you have several copies of the same files, and no idea what was modified when, or whether you’re looking at the last copy, or whether it’s safe to delete to free up space on the cramped laptop.

A network file system will also require for you to stay within wifi range. For travel, you’re once again reduced to up manually copying files around, and once again lose track of where’s the latest copy of what file.

  • Desktop use is kinda sorta tolerable: you’re never sure whether the file you are looking at is the latest copy

  • Laptop use is miserable: you’re confused about which copies of your files are the right ones, the network file system is an umbilical tying you to your home network, and everything goes over the slow wifi all the time

  • Cloud storage is still expensive, but now you can use it as backup only and bypass the synchronization service providers: switching between clouds is easier, and cold storage and reduced availability is cheaper.

    However, this leaves you installing & configuring cloud backup software in addition to your network file system woes; not the simplest ordeal, and don’t expect any kind of file history browsing / recovery integration for you network file system clients.

  • or You can choose to back up to your own disks – with the same caveats as above

  • or All of the bad parts of the computer in the closet, with the extra of needing to fiddle with the disks and remember things.

What Bazil does

Bazil separates knowledge of a file from the contents of the file, letting the laptop know about all of the files, without having to store the contents of the file.

With Bazil, the laptop SSD contents act as

  • a cache: file contents accessed recently can be stored temporarily, in case they are needed again
  • a buffer: new content is saved fast on the SSD, and transferred to the desktop / cloud / server in a closet in the background
  • a stash: the user can pin files for use when offline or just using a slower Internet connection

And because Bazil keeps track of the changes, it can also keep track of changes and synchronize them between the different peers; no more confusion about what copy is the latest.

You try to read a file where the contents are not locally stored, the data will be fetched from desktop or cloud/closet server, whichever happens to be the fastest way. All the data is accessible even if it won’t fit on the SSD.

You can pin files for travel, so you’re no longer tied to your home network, or even any network connectivity.

Bazil is the archival solution, with the snapshot feature. Every Bazil peer can browse the earlier snapshots, making restoring files easy no matter what computer you’re on. You don’t have to manage both a network file system and a backup solution.

Bazil is the redundancy solution, with copies of file contents stored on multiple computers. The CAS stores immutable, write-once objects, so you can even mitigate software bugs by taking an extra copy of the history with just rsync, file system snapshots, or any other file copy tool. A snapshot is just an object, and refers to other objects; the objects contain everything needed to regain access to your files.

All Bazil file storage can be encrypted to guarantee your privacy, whether in the cloud, on your own computers, or on external hard drives. Encryption is on by default.

  • Desktop use is good: changes are synced at the first opportunity
  • Laptop use is good: all the data is accessible, often used files are cached, changes are synchronized, files can be made available offline
  • and You can mix-and-match cloud storage providers and servers in closet as you please
  • and you can use external disks for extra space, with Bazil keeping track of what data is what on disk, even when they are unplugged, or even use them to avoid slow Internet transfers

Current status

Bazil is still under heavy development, and a lot of the functionality hinted at above is still not quite there. We welcome developers and curious power users.

See the documentation for more, and feel free to ask questions on the mailing list or Twitter @BazilFS.

The original gopher image was made by Renee French.

posted on 2014-04-24, tagged as bazil project announce

FUSE talk slides available 2013-06-10

Tv is talking about the Bazil FUSE library at the local Gopher meetup tonight. Check out the slides.

posted on 2013-06-10, tagged as fuse talk

Hello, World! 2013-04-01

Hi. This blog post establishes the project. This is not an April Fool’s joke.

There are more ambituous things floating in the background, but many people have expressed interest in this, so here’s an early release: a Go FUSE filesystem programming library.

This is based on Russ Cox’s fuse library, as hosted at

Here’s how to get going:

go get

The github repository is at

posted on 2013-04-01, tagged as fuse announce

Bazil is a distributed file system designed for single-person disconnected operation. It lets you share your files across all your computers, with or without cloud services.

FUSE is a programming library for writing file systems in userspace, in Go.


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Pearl Filled Macaron Ring in Lavender

In Stock

No reward points for this product.

I don't think I'd like my macarons to be filled with gems, but on this ring, I rather they would! This handmade macaron ring is filled with genuine pearls that really make the boldest statement. It also comes with a pearl cage charm that just really enhances the overall look.

30 products in category:

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isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-13
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description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
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conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


WARC-Truncated: length

text:
Have journos (and filmmakers) passed up the Beatles of all scoops?

Background to this post: Identification of participant in Atareb Hospital footage

A recent exchange with a British journalist and filmmaker who, in the wake of Ofcom’s ruling against RT, took to Twitter to laud Ian Pannell and Darren Conway’s 29 August 2013 Aleppo “playground napalm bomb” report went in part like this:

Journalist: RT accused of staging this heartbreaking report. Today, Ofcom ruled against the programme that did so.

RS: Have you examined evidence for claims [alleging fabrication in Pannell’s report], incl. identification of alleged victim?

RS: There are also widely varying accounts of when the alleged attack occurred

Journalist: I’m sorry but I don’t really want to entertain your conspiracy theories about this excellent but heartbreaking journalism.

RS: I have this woman’s name & approx location in the NL [Netherlands] – as a journalist, does this info interest u?

Journalist: Not particularly. It can’t be proven that it’s the same women.

Journalist: or to rephrase that, how do we know it’s the same women? (and I’ve seen your blog)

RS: we don’t, but coincidence of odd contact on FB, then finding woman who looks very alike. U could get to the bottom of it

I’d attached three photos to my Tweet about the Dutch woman. Here are the first two:

In June 2014, entirely out of the blue, this woman had messaged me on Facebook, seemingly anxious at being identified in a post I’d made on a (now defunct) Syria discussion group page in which I had included a frame from the bizarre “tableau” scene in Pannell and Conway’s BBC News report.

The woman’s Facebook message to me of 14 June 2014 (her name and Facebook profile image are deleted). The Dutch translates as “Hi Robert, I see that I am in this photo, but I do not want others to see this photo. Would you want to delete the photo please? Thank You!”

Although the woman’s Facebook account didn’t display any identifying images, a Google search of her distinctive tripartite name [1] immediately turned up the first photo above, and the second some days later, both associated with her Facebook account. [2] Subsequent searches located both images, posted in the same name, on other sites, including Wishdates.

As detailed here, the woman was at that time 51 years old and resident in the Amstelveen suburb of Amsterdam. Her home town was given as Qamishli, Syria and, amid a welter of horoscope and Candy Crush Saga posts, her timeline revealed she had travelled between the Netherlands and Syria in 2012 [3]. There was a gap in her posts between 9 August and 10 September 2013 (the Aleppo incendiary attack is alleged to have taken place on 26 August 2013).

However, as the woman didn’t appear in the frame to which she apparently objected, and as I didn’t recognise her from any of the footage I’d so far seen of the alleged events of that day (in which I was by this time thoroughly steeped) – and moreover, as she didn’t reply to my requests, both in English and (auto-translated) Dutch for clarification, I had little choice but to dismiss her as a crank, a view shared by the head of the Syrian investigation team which was then researching the “napalm bomb” case on the ground:

A woman of 50 wanting to date a man from 18 to 50…. May be it is a trick to be found interesting? If she does not say where she is claiming to appear we have to forget this story. (Email, 15 June 2014)

But then a few weeks later I spotted a referral to my blog from a web page [4] which linked to a pro-opposition blog [5] where a number of You Tube videos of the “Napalm Playground Massacre”, several of which were new to me, were aggregated.

The second video on the blog was a fairly lengthy report by the Aleppo News Network published on 28 August 2013, two days after the alleged attack. It included interior shots of the school where most of the alleged victims in Pannell and Conway’s reports had supposedly been students [6] plus interviews with a teenage alleged witness to the attack [7] and a medic who had supposedly attended the casualties [8].

The last few minutes of this video consists of footage of the alleged events, firstly supposedly of the scene at the residential apartment block claimed to be the first target of the attack [9], followed by footage from Atareb Hospital where the alleged victims had been taken for treatment and where they had been filmed by BBC cameraman Darren Conway. In this final section, amid a myriad of familiar faces from the BBC’s footage [10], a woman briefly appears who I hadn’t seen in any other videos from the day:

giphy (11)

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The resemblance to the woman who had contacted me on Facebook was striking. Taking into account the otherwise inexplicable concern which the latter had expressed at being recognised in imagery from the alleged events of 26 August 2013, along with her Syrian roots, recent history of travel to Damascus and absence from Facebook in the weeks surrounding the alleged attack, the case for making the connection seemed sound. It was an image of this woman, her face smeared with white burns cream [11], that made up the third picture in my Tweet to my journalist and filmmaker correspondent above.

So, how had a resident of an Amsterdam suburb apparently come to be – or to portray – a victim of an incendiary attack, either on a residential apartment block or a school populated by teenagers, in rural Aleppo?

Had she been burned by napalm, as the white cream applied to her face would seem to indicate? Did she know the identities and fates of any of the other alleged victims who had been treated alongside her? Could she account for their bizarre behaviour? And why had she been so anxious to conceal her part in these events – events upon the veracity of which, without any hyperbole, hangs the BBC’s global reputation as a news broadcaster?

Thrilling questions, one might imagine, especially for any UK-based journalist (and/or filmmaker)! And all that’s required to begin investigating are the identifying details I’m able to provide followed by a short hop over the channel. In the face of what could be the biggest media scoop in history – the collusion of BBC personnel in the fabrication of an atrocity – surely any display of journalistic apathy would seem to incur a severe risk of induction into a highly elite cadre of eternal self-flagellants, to date still headed by the unknown Decca executive who turned down the Beatles.

But it has been, to the best of my knowledge, just such a torpor that the publication of the above evidence on my blog has been met with. I’ve flagged (some may say flogged) the matter, along with other concerns about Pannell and Conway’s material, with any number of corporate and independent journalists and bloggers, in detail by email and more succinctly via Twitter. With a few exceptions, the response has been silence.

The greatest inertia however has undoubtedly been demonstrated by the BBC. In the course of two separate strands of formal complaints correspondence, the BBC Trust has been directly provided with this information on three separate occasions between September and December 2014, each time accompanied by or referencing my offer to divulge the woman’s name in order that a proper investigation of her apparent involvement in the “napalm bomb” affair may be conducted. [12]

For my own part, in July 2014 I made contact with a Netherlands-based investigator who agreed to do some digging. A month or so later, the investigator responded:

One of the reasons that it took me so long to contact you again is the fact that I´m having contradicting information about [woman’s first name]. My sources assure me that it is not the same person. The [woman’s first name] living in NL ( not in Amsterdam) is the third daughter of an Armenian pro-Assad Family. [13]

I came in touch with somebody who knows her personally. He said that the person in the video is not [woman’s first name]. He was quite sure that it was someone else. I did ask him to look for any particular interesting things he might find out about her friends and contacts. Still waiting for news from hem. (Email, 5 August 2014)

Perhaps the personal contact of the woman who failed to recognise her in the You Tube video was mistaken, or covering for her: as a member of a “pro-Assad” family, she could have much to lose in being discovered to have participated in pro-opposition propaganda. As far as I’m aware, she has yet to be directly interviewed.

Or perhaps this is all a chimera – the woman’s Facebook message is inconsequential, a meaningless glint in the vortex of social media, and there’s no connection whatsoever between its author and the Flamazine-caked woman in the You Tube film.

But if there are any journalists – or filmmakers – who wish to pursue the possibility that the BBC’s Aleppo “playground napalm bomb” reports of August and September 2013 represent the worst betrayal of trust in broadcasting history, the path to my door is pretty overgrown, but not impassible.

Update: May 2016 – Further images of the woman who contacted me are currently viewable on the Facebook account of one of her relatives. Two are reproduced below. The first is dated 10 January 2015 and tagged “in Netherlands”. The second is dated 22 October 2014 but appears to have been taken some years earlier. I have cropped the woman’s relative out of both images.

new1 new2

Compare these two newly discovered images with the woman from the You Tube video:

[1] Which I’m advised may denote mixed Armenian and Kurdish heritage. Kurds are a predominant ethnic group and Armenians a minority in the woman’s home town of Qamishli.

[2] Possibly these images remained in Google’s cache after having been deleted from the woman’s Facebook account.

[3] A post dated 12 February 2012 gives her location as being “near Damascus”; she returns to the Netherlands prior to or on 5 June 2012, the date of her next post.

[4] On the site A Closer Look on Syria – an estimable resource, as I have since discovered.

[5] Further questions arising from videos on this blog are noted here.

[6] Apparently demonstrating that the premises had – at some point, at least – been in use as an educational centre.

[7] At 9 minutes 23 seconds, wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan “Nato Cash”. The head of the Syrian investigation team writes of this section:

In his interview this young boy is saying that he is a fighter. He was on his post. He heard the jet and later was informed that his proper sister was burnt and taken to Turkey. He did not see her until today. Etc…

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[8] At just after 12 minutes. From 12:58 to 13.00 and, more markedly, from 17:22 to 17:29 (see sequence below) the medic’s light-hearted demeanour seems highly incongruous for someone who has allegedly spent the previous day tending to severely burned and dying children and teenagers.

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This man appears at various points in the BBC’s footage, for example at the gates of Atareb Hospital at the left of this image:

An Arabic speaker has further observed of the medic’s interview:

The so called MD with his neat and clean overhaul said that they were listening through a walky talky to the pilot conversation with the command center (ask any army veteran to tell you how impossible this was).

[9] As noted in section 13 of the BBC Complaints response (authored by Ian Pannell) of 18 February 2014:

There were two attacks. There is eyewitness footage from the first that we have seen: it was a residential apartment block. The second attack was on the school.

A longer sequence allegedly showing the aftermath of the strike on the “residential apartment block” in Urm al-Kubra is on You Tube here.

[10] As itemised in this footnote. Notable old acquaintances include:

  • (20:38) The woman in the distinctive black dress who, masked in Flamazine and accompanied by her “father” (they both appears around the same age), alternates between lamentation and angry denunciation at the gates of Atareb Hospital in Pannell and Conway’s reports and who here similarly seems to affect an oddly mournful demeanour, resembling an icon of martyrdom, as she is apparently treated for napalm burns.

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  • (21:30Ahmed Darwish, the boy whose uncontrollable shaking – resulting from “cold water therapy” (p14) – contrasts with the icy discipline he demonstrates in waiting for his cue before turning to address the BBC camera. Happily, Ian Pannell informs us in ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ that Ahmed “did survive”, albeit the Violations Documentation Center in Syria lists “Ahmad Darwish” as having perished in the Aleppo “Warplane shelling” of 26 August 2013.

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  • (21:48) The supposed “school teacher” who, while initially bridling at the approach of the cameraman, nevertheless goes on to speak “of heroism”, the peculiar Mona Lisa smirk playing across his features as he briskly recounts the day’s events perhaps a side effect of trauma or opiates. Note that this individual (identifiable by the pattern of black marks on his t-shirt) appears in shot with Ian Pannell in the BBC’s reports.

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Whatever suspicions may be aroused by the oddity of these scenes, an English captioned version of the same sequence assures us that this “is not a masquerade” and that the alleged victims “are not performing actors” upon a “theater stage”.

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[11] According to Dr Saleyha Ahsan on p14 of this Human Rights Watch report.

[12] The BBC’s responses to these three submissions were as follows:

  • The Adviser noted that she was not normally able to consider new evidence or new allegations subsequent to her decision, such as the “identification” of a new participant”, the alleged blocking by the BBC of YouTube content, and allegations concerning content which had not previously been included in the complaint and which post-dated Stages 1 and 2 of the complaint. The Adviser did not agree with the complainant that he had demonstrated why exceptionally on this occasion, this new material required to be considered. By way of guidance the Adviser noted however that even had the new material been admissible she did not consider any of the new points raised would have had a bearing on her decision. (BBC Senior Editorial Complaints Adviser’s decision, 26 September 2014)
  • The Committee noted that the complainant had raised a number of additional matters that could not have been fully assessed without substantial further investigation. It had in mind in particular the suggestions that an unnamed former Commander from the Free Syrian Army had denied the incident took place, that a Dutch woman had “participated” in the “scenes” as an actress; and that metadata from the Panorama team’s footage should be analysed to resolve discrepancies in the reported time of the bombing. The Committee also noted that the Commander from the Free Syrian Army was claimed to have invited BBC journalists to Turkey, where he would be willing to provide “safe transit to Urm Al-Kubra where the BBC [could] conduct an investigation and speak to witnesses assembled by the Syrian team”. In light of the Committee’s view that there was compelling evidence that the incident happened broadly as depicted in Panorama and the associated Ten O’clock News reports, the Committee decided that it would not be appropriate, proportionate or cost effective to conduct an investigation into these additional matters. (Final decision of BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee, published 20 January 2015)
  • The complainant then submitted ten new allegations which had not been raised in her appeal, nor at Stages 1 and 2….

…The new points raised by the complainant did not persuade Trustees to change their initial conclusion that Panorama and associated BBC content had depicted events broadly as they occurred. (Rejection of final appeal to BBC Trust re: Panorama ‘Saving Syria’s Children’, published 26 February 2015)

In the last of these responses the evidence relating to the Dutch woman is merely lumped in among the complainant’s “ten new allegations” (detailed here), to be summarily dismissed en masse.

[13] The reference to two women of the same name relates to the odd fact that in 2014 a web search had turned up what appeared to be another individual with exactly the same name as the woman who had contacted me through Facebook. This “new” individual’s date of birth, address and telephone number were all available online: she was eight years younger than the woman who had messaged me and resident in Thorbeckeplein in central Amsterdam, rather than the suburb of Amstelveen, the home of “my” Dutch woman.

I thus take the investigator’s comments in this paragraph to mean that the Thorbeckeplein woman is “not the same person” as the Amstelveen woman and that it is the latter who is “the third daughter of an Armenian pro-Assad Family”,

The coincidence of two individuals possessing the same highly unusual name, resident in different parts of Amsterdam and with different dates of birth (year, month and date) is a perplexing facet of this matter.

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text:
Beerbecue Daycare: Day 1 – Festina Pêche and Gerber peaches

Day 1 of Beerbecue Daycare is under our belt. Nobody was injured, maimed, or lost. I consider this a victory. The Haybag aspires to higher standards, like adequate napping, timely feedings, and regularly changed diapers. Overachiever.

I would say the first part of the day was pretty uneventful. After dropping 1.0 off at preschool, 2.0 pulled an hour-and-a-half nap. For most babies this would not be unusual. But this baby hates naps with the intensity of a thousand white-hot suns. I like naps. The Haybag doesn’t. I’m not pointing fingers or anything. I’m just making an observation.

After taking her in to the Haybag’s office to parade her around (where 2.0 randomly picked who to smile at, who to give the stink eye, and who to scream at), I made it to my first beer around 1pm: Dogfish Head Festina Pêche at the Curious Grape. I figured since I was throwing Gerber peaches at the monster, why not?

Festina Pêche is a Berliner Style Weissbier, which is a sour wheat beer. This one has been brewed with peach concentrate, though. The other two peach beers I’ve had this year (Terrapin Maggie Mae’s Farmhouse (GA) (dry and lightly peachy) and RJ Rocker’s Son of a Peach (SC) (sweet and angrily peachy)) have been missing something. Probably most people would argue that if peach beer needed anything it would be to not have peaches in it, but fruit beers have grown on me a little bit…as long as they’re done right. And I love peaches.

Interestingly, it appears Delaware (Dogfish Head’s situs) has stepped in and been all like, listen up South Carolina and Georgia, this is how you shake your peaches. After all, if Delaware is known for anything, it’s a slew of corporate headquarters and peach groves.

The smell is perfectly peachy, accompanied by wheat and an impending tartness. The taste is the same, with peaches leading the charge, complemented nicely by the wheat, and mercifully backed up by a bracing tartness. This tartness is what the others were missing. It’s never sweet. In fact, it tastes a little champagney at times. The peach is never overpowering. And the acidity is refreshing. And 2.0 agrees, peaches are where it’s at:

The Haybag: You make Beerbecue Daycare sound pretty interesting, but I can’t help but think it’s a little more like this:

10 thoughts on “Beerbecue Daycare: Day 1 – Festina Pêche and Gerber peaches

  1. Totally with you on the fruited up beer! I have a bit of an obsession with them these days. Festina Peche is quite the tart refresher. Interestingly enough, I had a sample of the Terrapin Peachy Saison a couple weeks ago on the same day that I had a Festina Peche (courtesy of a mini mid-week pub crawl with The Alemonger). I liked it at the time and picked up a bottle for an upcoming review. Curious to see how it holds up in bottle form.

    Looks like Beerbecue Daycare is going swimmingly! Keep up the good “work”.

  2. Sounds like my kind of daycare. I would say lose the day job and open up an in home care center where babies are trained in the arts of opening bottles, fetching beers, and the correct glassware to compliment your selection, but if you’re anything like me other people’s kids are the worst.
    I’ve really been into the B-Dubs lately. A semi local brewery has a couple good offerings this year: German Sparkle Party and Swill which is really a radler. So if you get a chance to check out 10 Barrel, those are some solid summer sippers.

  3. I had an Ithica Apricot Wheat over the weekend that was pretty good. I’m with you on the anti-fruit beer front, but apricot beers always seem to work for me. I need to hunt down Festina Peche and come up with a quality nickname like Haybag for my girlfriend. Thanks for the inspiration.

  4. If you are enjoying Berliner Weisses (as I am right now…as I wait for mine to become drink-able)…try Bell’s Oarsman. I picked up a six last night and it is TASTY.

    • I do like me some Bell’s Oarsman. Melissa likes to make fun of the way I pronounce “oar” (O-wer), too. So, even though she doesn’t like Berliner Weisse, it’s fun for the whole family.

  5. Pingback: Sour Beers: Refreshing for Summer | Brew Boyz Blog

  6. Pingback: What My Friends Think – The Dog(fish Head) Days of Summer | The Dogs of Beer

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“Berlin Calling” Q&A Australia

“Berlin Calling” made its Australian premiere over the summer to a full house at The Australian Center for the Moving Image (ACMI). The film’s cast member/cowriter Kastle Waserman and director Nigel Dick made the trip to attend a Q&A following the screening. We received these great photos from photographer/producer Jack Crombie.

During the session, Kastle was asked questions about the emotional journey of making the film while Nigel explained the technical challenges of being a one-man film crew.

Stay tuned for news of future screening announcements.

Photos by Jack Crombie, jackcrombie.net


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Totally rad: an interview with Jenna Freedman, activist librarian

Pinned above Jenna Freedman’s desk is bright red sticker stamped with the words “Library Punk.” It’s a pretty apt description of Freedman, who is the zine librarian at Barnard College’s Lehman Library and seems to have zero qualms when it comes to shattering expectations and shaking up the status quo. She has blue and purple hair, for the most part refuses to read books by men, and spends her free time petitioning the Library of Congress to make its subject headings more accessible to the average user. Freedman, 47, is also the co-founder of Radical Reference, an association of activist library workers who refer to themselves as “radical librarians.”

Jenna Freedman, in front of Barnard's zine collection.

Jenna Freedman, in front of Barnard’s zine collection.

 BK: Your father was a librarian. As a kid, did you dream of following in his footsteps?

JF: No, I resisted. I worked in theater for a long time after undergrad, and at one point, I was like, “This is so stupid.” In theater, everything was urgent and nothing mattered. I felt like in librarianship, everything mattered, but nothing was urgent.

BK: What makes a radical librarian different from a regular librarian?

JF: It’s just who we’re serving, and maybe our own personal politics. Radical Reference recently conducted a workshop called “Know Your Dossier: FBI Files and FOIA Requests” in Brooklyn. There wasn’t anything inherently radical about it. The population we were serving were radicals, who have a certain expectation of privacy, and need to process why you would or should request your file in a different way than Joe Schmoe … or José Schmosé. Through the years, we’ve really become champions of two things: privacy and openness. Privacy for our patrons, but openness of information.

BK: Is that why Radical Reference’s first project involved handing out information to activists and journalists at the 2004 Republican National Convention?

JF: Yeah. We had what we called “Ready Reference Kits.” In the kit, we had a schedule of events, where all the delegates were staying, the jail phone number, information about the Patriot Act, and all sorts of stuff like that.

BK: Let’s say somebody wrote to you and said, “I’m an anti-gay marriage activist and I need help finding sources to support my position.” Would you help them?

JF: Generally, librarians really like to help, and we really like people to know that we know things. So it’s very hard for us not to respond to an information request. We would probably answer that in a way that involves some critical thinking. To answer a question like that, the sources might be some weird, not reality-based, Fox-newish kind of resources that I wouldn’t find particularly credible myself. It was important to all of us to deal with sources that were credible.

BK: You’re the zine librarian here at Barnard. What do you like about zines, and why do you think it’s important to preserve them in a library setting?

JF: Zines are the ultimate embodiment of the personal as political. I have learned so much about race, and gender, transgender, all sorts of things, through reading zines. I think it’s important to include zines in the library because for one, it’s people controlling their own content and style. In most libraries, you aren’t going to find the voices that are represented in our zine collection in anything but case studies, which is a completely different way of presenting a person. It’s also people with radical points of view. Zines come out of an anarcho-punk sensibility.

BK: Your Tumblr blog, The Lower East Side Librarian, contains plenty of zine and activist content, but you also post a lot of stuff about cats.

JF: Yeah, I know, I friggin’ love cats so much, and I love my cats so much. It’s just … There’s a certain kind of crazy cat lady that I’m happy to be, but people have started giving me cat socks, and cat mugs, and cat shirts, and I sort of feel like that’s not OK.

BK: Do you think cats are kind of similar to librarians, in that they’re smart, quiet, and really good at giving the stink eye?

JF: Ooooh, I like that. Although I think librarians are a lot more other-centric than cats. We’re probably much more like dogs, because we’ll chase after you with another book if we think you need it.

BK: You make your own zines, one of which is called Lower East Side Librarian and Friends Menstruating: Librarians and Archivists Keep the Information Flowing. Is the zine purely tongue and cheek, or does it explore a connection between women and librarianship?

JF: Oh, there’s no connection between librarianship and women. It was not an intellectual exercise. I just really like to talk about my period.

BK: Why is that?

JF: I don’t know! Don’t you find your cycle interesting?

BK: Yes?

JF: I totally do.

BK: A group of former students recently filmed a feminist pornography in Columbia’s Butler Library. Should sex in libraries always be restricted to the pages of books, or can exceptions be made for activist projects?

JF: Well, I just really hope they cleaned up after themselves.  I think it’s really labor-hostile if they left all those eggs and stuff on the ground.

Is a New York start-up bringing back the literary salon?

A recently launched start-up called Book the Writer is connecting notable authors with reading groups in Manhattan and Brooklyn, promising book clubbers a literary experience that is “truly special and utterly memorable.” The cost of Book the Writer’s services is pretty memorable too. Julie Bosman of the New York Times reports that a small Upper West Side book club recently shelled out $750 to entice Alexandra Styron (as in, the daughter of William Styron) to their group, where she spoke about her memoir, Reading My Father. More than sixty authors – including Pulitzer Prize winners Michael Cunningham and Sheri Fink – have agreed to participate in the venture. For each book club appearance, writers score $400 (the rest of the $750 goes to the venture), and an opportunity to promote their latest work among the city’s bibliophiles.

Now, there isn’t anything wrong with authors cashing in on publicity appearances. As Bosman mentions in her Times piece, publishing houses often make writers Skype into book clubs without compensating them for their time, which doesn’t seem particularly reasonable or fair. But there’s something slightly off-putting about Book the Writer, perhaps because it promotes a rather blatantly elitist version of the modern-day reading group. Should the venture take off, it may very well prove to be the start of an interesting, retrograde shift in the evolution of the book club.

Today’s book lovers have hundreds of reading groups at their fingertips, maybe even thousands, now that book clubs are starting to shift to online forums. While a lot of these clubs focus on relatively highbrow stuff — literary classics, award-winning novels, political biographies, what have you — there are just as many groups devoted to literature that will never see a Pulitzer Prize. Or any prize, for that matter. In Manhattan alone,  readers can get together and chat about chick lit, “smutty books” (chick lit, plus bondage), YA novels, and horror fiction. There are oodles of fantasy and sci-fi reading groups too, for those who are in the know about the goings-on of Middle-earth and Winterfell. Which is to say that book clubs have become wonderfully democratic institutions, catering to a wide range of interests and open to anyone with the ability to read and the inclination to discuss their favourite  genre.

But that wasn’t always the case. In the 1700s, before literacy began to permeate class boundaries, the literary “salon” was the exclusive purview of the social upper crust (and usually dominated by women). Discussion in these salons tended to concentrate on broad literary concepts rather than a single book, and notable intellectuals were invited to preside over the conversation in order to bolster the prestige of the gathering. Smaller reading groups that focused on specific works of literature began to crop up in the 19th century, and membership was often restricted to women of leisure who had inherited a spot in the group. The ancestor of the modern book club was, in other words, quite the marker of wealth and status.

Fast forward 200 years, and Book the Writer seems to be encouraging a return to the aristocratic reading group of the Victorian era; the venture offers wealthy New Yorkers the opportunity to host literary gatherings that are graced by the presence of well-known authors, whose company is acquired for a price that most readers can’t afford. And New York is the perfect place for this trend to take off; as Bosman puts it, the city “has a glut of … devoted readers, many of them with unusually deep pockets.” As for the rest of us … well, we can be grateful for our author-free book clubs, which at the very least are conducive to spirited reader discussion. After all, you can’t trash a book’s plot trajectory if its author is sitting within earshot, snacking on the same platter of cheese and crackers. And if you happen to have particularly strong feelings about Fifty Shades of Grey or A Game of Thrones, here are links to some of the groups that I refer to in this post:

Chick Lit Book Club:

Smutty Book Club:

NYC Fantasy and Sci-Fi Book Club:

Forever Young Adult book club:

Arkham Horror Book Club:

Happy Clubbing!


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Admission to the Pathway 2 Program

2017 Lactation Program Application

Applications for the 2017 Lactation Cohort must be postmarked no later than December 15, 2016

Our admissions process provides you ample opportunity to consider whether this professional and educational pathway is the best fit for you, and provides us multiple ways to get to know you better. The process includes a written application and a personal interview.

Details about our admissions process, including specific prerequisite requirements, are listed in our Student Handbook and Catalog and in the current Lactation Consultation Program Application Packet, which is posted to the website on June 1st each year.

We strongly encourage you to read all admissions material carefully, but please get in touch with our Lactation Program Coordinator, Sarah Longwell, with any questions.

If you would like to visit our campus, you can find more information on the Visit Birthingway page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Lactation Admissions

What vaccines do I need to have to attend your college?

There is no requirement for receiving any vaccines. Students enrolling in the Midwifery and Lactation Consultation programs will need to submit proof of immunization to measles. Proof of immunization could include the dates of vaccination, certification of contracting measles, or the results of a titre test indicating immunity.

Students may also certify a nonmedical or medical exemption in lieu of proof of immunization.

Students enrolled in the Childbirth Educator, Labor Doula, and Postpartum Doula programs, as well as community students not enrolled in any program, are not required to submit any immunization information.

Please read our latest Student Handbook and Catalog for the most current Vaccine Policy.

How can I strengthen my application to your programs?

In general:

  • Answer all the essay questions as clearly as possible. Use details to fully illustrate your experiences, but keep the essays on topic and relevant to a college application.
  • Proofread and edit your essays for content as well as writing quality (grammar, punctuation, spelling, and conventions).
  • Ask your references to send personalized letters that speak to the skills you have which will lend to your success not just in this program, but also in this profession.

There are many opportunities to demonstrate your desire to pursue Lactation Consultation and your commitment to a Birthingway education:

  • Read as many parenting, doula, and breastfeeding books and journals as you can.
  • Attend parenting, doula, and breastfeeding conferences.
  • Join local parenting, doula, and breastfeeding groups.
  • Take classes or workshops on breastfeeding-related topics.
  • Care for families as a postpartum doula.
  • Care for families as a breastfeeding educator.
  • Shadow an IBCLC.
  • Take an IBCLC out to dinner to learn about her experiences in the field.
  • Spend time in the Birthingway community – meet with our Lactation Program Coordinator, sit in on a class, take a course, or browse our library.

And then tell us about all these things you’ve done to learn about, decide on, and prepare for this path!

What happens after I submit my application?

You will be contacted after your application has been received by Birthingway; if anything is missing at this point, you will be asked to provide the missing documentation. We will also arrange an interview time at this point.

When will I find out if I’ve been admitted?

We select our matriculating class in early January and notify all applicants as quickly as possible soon thereafter.

If I get in, when will I start?
If I am seeking a degree, when do I need to take the general education courses?

General education courses must be transferred in from another eligible institution but can be taken at any time.

  • You can complete some or all gen ed requirements prior to enrolling in the program.
  • You can complete some or all gen ed requirements while you are completing the other credit requirements for the program (Summer terms are a good time to do this).
  • You can complete some or all gen ed requirements while you are still enrolled in the program but after you have completed the other credit requirements for the program.
  • You can graduate with the certificate, complete any remaining gen ed requirements after graduation, and “upgrade” your certificate to the degree*.
    • *Must be completed within the specified timeframe for an “upgrade” to occur.
    • Check the program-specific requirements. Additional program courses may be required to complete an “upgrade”. Contact your Program Coordinator for questions about how this would work.
  • You could choose any combination of these options so long as you have completed all of the gen ed requirements prior to being awarded the degree.


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On Our Radar: Today's Feminist News Roundup

Half-way through the week and here's what we've been reading up on for the day:

That wraps up today's news roundup, but there's more where that came from! Be sure to check back tomorrow for more news to read up on.  Did we miss something?  Let us know in the comments.

by Emilly Prado
View profile »

Emilly Prado is a writer, photographer, library assistant, and button maker. When not crafting sassy critiques for various publications, she juggles several jobs, daydreams about her next trip, and uses the internet far too much. You can see her work at www.emillyprado.com.

Get must-read feminist news & analysis in your inbox, Monday through Friday: Sign up for On Our Radar!

2 Comments Have Been Posted

Thank you, bitch, for highlighting the petition to CNN about their horrible coverage of Steubenville. It's been so unsettling how many people have valorized the rapists and chastised the victim. I've written an article on victim blaming and the concept of "asking for it" that has been reflected in so many reactions to the verdict. My piece is here: wp.me/p3iIj5-2 There have been some pretty impassioned feminist responses to the verdict. I'd love to see a roundup on bitch.

Also Sign Ultraviolet's Petetion

They are demanding an apology from CNN for their AWFUL coverage of the trial and verdict. I used to respect Candy Crowley with high regard. No more.

Petition is on the front page of the site.

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Petter Reinholdtsen recently blogged about ZFS availability in Debian. Many people have worked hard on getting ZFS support available in Debian and we would like to thank everyone involved in getting to this point and explain what ZFS in Debian means.

The landing of ZFS in the Debian archive was blocked for years due to licensing problems. Finally, the inclusion of ZFS was announced slightly more than a year ago, on April 2015 by the DPL at the time, Lucas Nussbaum who wrote "We received legal advice from Software Freedom Law Center about the inclusion of libdvdcss and ZFS in Debian, which should unblock the situation in both cases and enable us to ship them in Debian soon.". In January this year, the following DPL, Neil McGovern blogged with a lot of more details about the legal situation behind this and summarized it as "TLDR: It’s going in contrib, as a source only dkms module."

ZFS is not available exactly in Debian, since Debian is only what's included in the "main" section archive. What people really meant here is that ZFS code is now in included in "contrib" and it's available for users using DKMS.

Many people also mixed this with Ubuntu now including ZFS. However, Debian and Ubuntu are not doing the same, Ubuntu is shipping directly pre-built kernel modules, something that is considered to be a GPL violation. As the Software Freedom Conservancy wrote "while licensed under an acceptable license for Debian's Free Software Guidelines, also has a default use that can cause licensing problems for downstream Debian users".

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Sample Dewar take one

| | Comments (2)

Being the brave souls that we are we thought we would attempt to make a sample dewar without a lid. Our main concern is ice. We are concerned with the build up of ice around the rim of the dewar, but more important is the prevention of ice accumulating in the liquid nitrogen in the dewar. In order to prevent ice around the rim we have completely covered the top of the dewar with flexable silicon heaters as seen in the following picture.

This design works quite well. We have 240 Watts of heaters being powered by a 48VDC power supply and controlled with a small Minco controller. The prevention of ice building up in the liquid nitrogen is a much more complicated matter. Our present thinking is that a laminar flow of air across the surface of the nitrogen may be enough to draw off any accumulating ice crystals in the air above the nitrogen before they have time to reach “snowflake” size and fall into the liquid nitrogen…. pics and results to follow.

Well I’ve finally fixed the commenting system….. I think. The system clock was off by an hour or so. This was causing the TypeKey authentication script to fail. Hopefully is all now well.

Let the comment SPAM begin!

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One Box, Two Systems, New Arrival!

Author Coco Xiao 24.2.2017. | 17:40

The Chuwi HiBox Mini PC is a sophisticated two-in-one Android and Windows Mini PC that lets you take the most out of two operating systems. With its Dual-OS, this Chuwi HiBox allows you to enjoy a wide variety of entertainment features offered by Android while simultaneously coming packed with all the trusted Windows 10 office programs – making it perfect for work and entertainment alike. Click the image below to find out more and share with your friends if you like!

Chinavasion Weekly Newsletter

Author Coco Xiao 24.2.2017. | 17:40
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Meet Rayno Mapoe, a fleet-footed, young talent studying Political Science and International Relations at the University of Cape Town. Rayno first got into rugby after watching his older brother and cousin Lionel Mapoe play, and he hasn’t looked back since.

“I’ve been playing rugby for as long as I can remember,” Mapoe said. “It must be more than twelve years already.”

He started showing promise at a young age, already playing for his school’s A-team as early as Grade One. “I don’t remember scoring my first try, but I do remember playing in Grade One,” said Mapoe.

More than a decade on and Mapoe is perfecting his craft as part of the FNB UCT team. “It’s my first year studying and playing rugby here, so I’m pretty excited. There are guys who have been in the team since last year, and they’ve been very welcoming and helpful towards us new players.”

Rugby has also benefited his life in areas off the pitch. “Playing rugby has helped me a lot,” he said. “Firstly, it’s taught me great discipline over the years and how to balance sport and academics. It’s also great working in a team environment, as it has taught me how to work well with other people.”

When asked about his aspirations are for the future and whether or not he intended to follow in cousin, Lionel Mapoe’s footsteps, his answer was simple. “Of course. I’m hoping to complete my studies and then play professionally, that’s the dream. The FNB Varsity Cup is an ideal platform to pursue both your academic and rugby dreams so I’m looking forward to the future.”

“If all goes well, I still have many years of rugby ahead of me, but I realise that eventually that chapter will end which is why I make a point of not neglecting my studies.”


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liz writes stuff down

What’s in, what’s out, how it tells your story, and failing to parallel Hamilton’s subversive structure

Content warning: rape, anti-abortion rhetoric

On June 26, I left Richard Rodgers Theatre with an embarrassingly big grin - after all, I had just experienced Hamilton. Like many others, I'd listened to the soundtrack many times before even acquiring tickets to the musical, and I'd heard praises for the costumes, the acting, the staging from my friends who had already seen it. It lived up to the hype.

That giant smile wasn't primarily about performance, but about the racial subversion that underscores the story. Lin-Manuel Miranda painstakingly researched Alexander Hamilton's life to create a transformative work (read: fanfic) that bent race to elevate those who were left out of the formation of my country despite the reality that the oppression of people of color was integral to its creation.

Of course, not everyone got that, but none missed it as poorly for me as Alex Nichols complaining that Miranda's choices "ducked the question of slavery". So when Todd VanDerWerff replied that "it's not a work that tries to excuse Alexander Hamilton’s failure[1] to do anything substantive about slavery" but a "rumination to make a better story", I smiled because someone directly responded to Nichols's criticisms with Hamilton's transformative nature.[2] VanDerWerff speaks to how Hamilton's "story about stories" presented a platform to stories too often robbed of that platform and describes how Miranda picked what to include and what to exclude didn't remove slavery from the narrative - "the story that seemed like the most important one" didn't have to be the most important one - but ultimately I think he missed the point in a way that left me feeling sour.

VanDerWerff draws parallels between the circumstances of his birth - namely his mother possibly being raped by his father and her choosing not to get an abortion - and his father's story to Miranda's approach to Hamilton, but where Miranda's choices change the common narrative of our society, VanDerWerff's continue it.

Miranda chooses not to linger on the Founding Fathers' tacit acceptance of slavery, but that decision wasn't one that meant Hamilton sanctioned slavery. Unlike with Miranda's swift exclusion of slavery, VanDerWerff lingers on never getting his father's side of the story, how he chooses to "never, ever call his father a rapist". Miranda approaches the inexcusable exclusion of people of color from having a say in the conception of the United States subversively, but VanDerWerff continues the status quo by repeating the need for the (usually male) rapist to condemn himself instead of pausing to deeply reflect on the woman victim's story. I do not begin to think it would be easy to think that someone related to you so closely could be guilty of the terrible act of rape, but he could have dropped the subject just as easily as Miranda did the details of slavery in Hamilton instead of repeatedly circling back to the night in question. VanDerWerff could have written the untold story of his father instead of continuing an often told story that damages women.

Inspired by the series of accidents surrounding Alexander Hamilton's involvement in the American Revolution, VanDerWerff discusses the happenstance of his mother's choice not to get an abortion. I agree with his insight that "We are, all of us, accidents, in a sense" like Hamilton. But Miranda's Hamilton subversively focuses on accidents surrounding an immigrant in a time where immigrants are systematically denied the respect they deserve[3], while VanDerWerff plays up the dominant narrative that not getting an abortion ushers joy into a mother's life[4] - the same narrative prioritizes the possibility of a dependent fetus becoming a child that is incorrectly used to pressure a woman out of considering the needs of her own life and body, the story used to pressure women out of getting abortions. It's the same story that incites violence against the women who exercise their right to one despite that undue pressure.

The beauty of Hamilton lies in using catchy beats and phrases to help us think critically about the world we live in, to think about how it could be better by including people of color, respecting immigrants, and praising the works of marginalized groups. Hamilton works specifically because it focuses on important things missing from the narrative we're overwhelmingly taught - instead of picking pieces from the narrative in a way that highlights already common, and damaging, beliefs like VanDerWerff's article.

[1] and the failure of the other Founding Fathers, too.
[2] I also jumped for joy because someone found beautiful, cohesive words that embody my feelings on how Eliza deserved the final number.
[3] Hamilton certainly was when John Adams called him "creole bastard" despite all the Founding Fathers being recent immigrants to America.
[4] and I don't doubt for a second that his existence in his mother's life and the world at large are treasures

Many thanks to Jacky Chang and Geoffrey Thomas for reviewing my drafts.

Liz rides the subway on May 31, 2016: “innocent until proven guilty” gives cover to abusers

Liz rides the subway is a series containing thoughts I have on the subway, mostly as an experiment to get me to write more. The ride home after yet another day hearing someone famous has been abusing a woman in his life:

Content warning: abuse, rape

Johnny Depp has allegedly been abusing Amber Heard, and a judge granted Amber Heard's restraining order against him on Friday in light of her claims of repeated physical and verbal abuse. Of course, an army (of mostly men) has been saying (very loudly) that we don't know that he abused her and that we have to give him the benefit of the doubt since obviously he's innocent until proven guilty.

"Innocent until proven guilty" is an insidious phrase people toss around to give cover to abusers all the time. We dodge the possibility that a celebrity harmed a woman by blaming it on the legal system. But as Kate Harding writes in response to the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi of sexual violence, "innocent until proven guilty" has a very specific legal meaning that has nothing to do with this:

I shouldn't need to say this, but I will: Taking reports of sexual violence seriously doesn't mean denying anyone due process or chasing the accused down with pitchforks. I'm not talking about punishing people at all right now; I'm talking about forming educated opinions, by weighing up what evidence we've been allowed to see and deciding what we think of it all. We do this every day when we take in the news, except when the news is about rape, in which case we act like "innocent until proven guilty" means no one - preferably not even investigators and prosecutors - may legally suspect that the guy might actually have done it.

Let me tell you a wonderful secret about the U.S. and Canada: If you're not on a jury, you are allowed to hold any opinion you like of an accused criminal's guilt or innocence, regardless of whether he's been prosecuted and/or what the prosecution can prove! You are not required to wait until some vague future date when "all the evidence" has come in, nor to withhold judgment until a jury has decided the matter, nor even to accept that a jury verdict is necessarily correct! So far, there are no actual thought police - isn't that terrific news?

That is terrific news!

Now, if we could also use our newly acquired abilities to evaluate the evidence of abusers and rapists within our own social circles - the evidence that is right in front of us - we could make life a whole lot better for the survivors we know, too.

Liz rides the subway on May 23, 2016: street harassment

Liz rides the subway is a series containing thoughts I have on the subway, mostly as an experiment to get me to write more. Today was the first time I was street harassed on my commute since moving in November... memories relived on the following train ride:

I was walking through the last aisles of the grocery store to find the last item on my list, almond butter. Since I rarely buy anything but produce and dairy at Brooklyn Fare, I forgot exactly which aisle the almond butter was in and ended up going down the wrong one.

I turned the corner to the next one when a man called out to me, "Damn, looking good today, honey." I ignored the "compliment" and kept walking.

But he didn't leave me alone. He turned around to follow me and asked, "Why are you being so rude to me? I just wanted to talk to you, need to get your number."

"I'm not interested." I upped my pace, stared at the floor in front of me as I moved, and decided to forget about the almond butter - I was no more than thirty feet from the tail of the checkout line where other people would be around.

He followed, raised his voice, "You're such a prude bitch." as I was just near the end of the line. People stared. At first it looked like it was at both him and me, but in a few seconds, everyone was looking at me. No one said a word - were they waiting for me to? I stood mortified at the end of the line, hoping it would move faster than putting all my groceries back would, forgetting that dropping my basket and just leaving could be an option, hoping everyone would forget what just happened, hoping to disappear. My head hung down, and the man went the other way, presumably back to whatever grocery shopping he was doing.

I exited the 2 train through the doors closest to the eastern exit at Hoyt St, walked out the turnstile before anyone else, and started up the stairs to Elm and the south side of Fulton. There are two stories of stairs - the lower story is twice as wide as the top, so during rush hour, it's a massive bottleneck.

I wasn't looking too far in front of me, just far enough to know I wouldn't run into someone. When I was two steps from the middle, right where bottlenecks would happen, a man blocked my path - one hand on the rail to my left in the middle of these stairs, the other on the rail to my right on the wall.

I clicked my headphones to pause the music I was listening to, "Yes Anastasia" by Tori Amos. "Excuse me," I spoke sternly.

He didn't move. "Hey baby," he said. He might have said more. I wouldn't know because I clicked my headphones to restart my music while hurrying down the stairs. I swiped back into the station and walked quickly down the platform to get to the other exit.

I'm just outside my building on my way to the F train. The light is in my favor, there aren't any cars still in the intersection, so I begin to cross Livingston St. About half a block down, a white SUV rolls down the road.

I'm about 150 feet directly in front of the car, and it starts honking. Somehow my instinct is to turn left at it instead of scurrying the rest of the way across the light.

"The fuck are you doing? I have the light!"

The car's pretty close now. I can see the driver. It's definitely slowing down.

"Mmm, lookin' good, lady! Can I take you out sometime?" He knew I had the right of way all along, just he thought scaring the crap out of a pedestrian headed across the street was a risk worth taking for a date.

"No, asshole." Realizing I didn't have brain enough to bite my tongue, I finally get that jolt to run the rest of the way across the intersection.


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What Exactly Is Montessori and Why Is It so Popular? We Ask Big City Montessori School

Montessori has become one of the most popular preschool philosophies and its presence today in the U.S. dwarfs that of some other philosophies such as Reggio Emilia (the American Montessori Society, one of the two main organizations has 1,200 member schools, compared to just approximately 50 schools listed on the North American Reggio Alliance’s website – though both philosophies are highly represented in cities such as San Francisco).

Yet, it can be hard for parents to grasp what the philosophy is really about among all the buzzwords of “play-based,” “child-directed” or “work-periods.”  We sat down with Amanda Ricetti, director of Big City Montessori School (BCMS) to really understand what the curriculum is about, and how it is practiced at BCMS.  We also discuss how to tell if a Montessori school is authentic, and how might parents tell if Montessori is right for their child.  Read on to learn more about this important philosophy.
Montessori preschools encourage children to explore and play with objects to learn about different subjects.
Montessori preschools encourage children to explore and play with objects to learn about different subjects.

NL: How did you become involved in Montessori education?

Amanda: Big City Montessori School (BCMS) is a family-owned business. My mother originally started the school in 1972 as Westlake Montessori School where she was a Montessori teacher herself.  The school moved to its current location in 1980 and we changed our name to Big City Montessori School.

I officially trained and started to work at BCMS around 18-years-old and that is when I discovered how much I enjoyed working with young children.  35 years later, I am still enjoying working with young children as the owner/director of the school.

NL: What was the Montessori training like?

Amanda: The Montessori training, compared to the state-mandated early education training (ECE) for preschool teachers, not only has a clear philosophy, but also has an established curriculum.  When you become a certified Montessori teacher, you are prepared to direct a class; to engage children in learning in all three areas of the I.Qs: social, emotional, and cognitive; and to guide and support the children’s parents during these very informative years of child development.

NL: What is Montessori curriculum like?

Amanda: A hallmark of the Montessori program is how the Montessori classroom is set up to reflect five major areas for the child to travel while in the class: Practical Life, Sensorial, Math, Language, and Cultural Studies.  Learning is child directed and the teacher guides the child to try new things over their three years of preschool.  Students, who we think of as “little travelers” can pick, use and explore a material for as long as he or she likes until he or she is ready for a new one.

There are no grades, and no expectations; the emphasis is on the child developing socially, emotionally, cognitively, and most critically, building life skills and good habits.

The first place our young travelers visit is the Practical Life area, where he or she can find trays, buttons, zipper frames, and more.  They learn practical skills such as pouring water from a pitcher into a cup.

In the Sensorial Section, our young traveler can discover all kinds of manipulatives designed to serve the senses.  Dr. Montessori believed that the training of the senses was of utmost importance, and that the development of the five senses should precede all other educational experiences.  Through concrete exercises at this critical stage of development, children become aware of their own individuality and environment.

Montessori is the only preschool today with a Cultural Section built into the curriculum.  Here, our young traveler learns about geography, botany, zoology, art, etc. in order to create an aware and global thinker.

Finally, our travelers will visit the Math and Language Section of the class.  This section contains lots of interesting manipulatives, such as sandpaper letters, number rods, etc. allowing them to learn from a teacher and independently at their own pace.

NL: In this child-directed approach, how do you ensure that children get a well rounded experience and are not doing the same thing over and over?

There are other children in the classroom and only one of each material, pushing them to try new things.  However, if a child is drawn to something in particular, their turn with that material will eventually come and they can work with it for as long as they want until they have fully explored and mastered it.

NL: How has the curriculum evolved since Maria Montessori developed it?

Amanda: Interestingly, in 105 years, the curriculum has not changed much at all. It is well thought out and universally adaptable.  For example, in China, children might have tea sets in the classroom as a Practical Life exercise and sandpaper Hanzi (Chinese characters) cards, etc.  Nevertheless, overall, the curriculum and the philosophy is the same worldwide and is guided by Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), which was founded by Maria Montessori in 1929 and is still run by her descendants.

Another hallmark of Montessori education is that teachers are trained and certified by AMI or American Montessori Society (AMS), the other major Montessori organization.

NL: What’s the significance of a mixed-age group?

Amanda: Because children start preschool anywhere between 2.5 and 3.5-years-old, children have 2-3 years to explore all of the materials in the classroom.  Older children can be role models and younger children are encouraged to explore by constantly seeing older kids use different things.  By age 5 to 6, when the child is the oldest in the classroom, he or she has moved from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind.  They become teachers for the younger children, thus reinforcing what they have learned and fine-tune their life skills

During the work periods in the classroom, younger children will do an activity alone for 10 to 15 minutes compared to older children, who will often find a project to work with another child, such as building a structure that can take 30 or more minutes.  Children work independently, but may sit together at tables, share materials, talk – it’s a social environment.  However, children learn that when someone is busy, to give them space.

NL: How does the Montessori curriculum incorporate technology?

Amanda: Montessori is not against technology, but believe there is a place for it.  At Big City, we want children to learn about the real world before the fantasy world.  Maria Montessori probably wouldn’t have wanted kids under 6 watching shows about princesses or Batman and Robin, because it takes away from the foundation of learning about the real and natural world: flowers, how the sun comes up, why we have wind, etc.

Young children’s brains do not know how to filter yet between fantasy and reality and some content, such as even some Disney movies, can causes nightmares and model bad behavior.  It’s critical for children to understand their world before getting into the imaginary world.

That said, we do have computers and iPads equipped with art, math, geography, and puzzle software programs.  We aren’t using these devices otherwise, and believe children are going to be exposed to technology at home and in their later life, anyways.  At school, we want children to use their whole brain, build something, use all of their senses, and socialize and interact with other children.

NL: What skills do Montessori children possess at the end of preschool?

Amanda: Montessori is a 3-year journey and at the end, children are ready to go into the wider world.  They can solve problems; know about the time, weather and calendar; and understand a bit about the global world.  They feel powerful, are respectful to the environment and to others, and have the skills to deal with issues in both their academic and personal life.

As your child walks this learning path with their teacher during their personal three-year journey, all the information and experiences he or she has had will be absorbed and transformed into solid lifelong skills.  I have listed some below.

To be able to:

  • Focus on a task with joy
  • Sympathize with others
  • Take initiative and have independence
  • Concentrate
  • Enjoy simple things
  • Love nature
  • Conduct life with proper manners
  • Create ever-lasting friendships
  • Love work and order
  • Spontaneously concentrate
  • Self- discipline
  • Contribute to society to better the world and future

Dr. Maria Montessori believed that these are the truly “normal” characteristics of childhood, which emerge when children’s developmental needs are met and have time to develop, and so do we at BCMS.

NL: Are Montessori schools accredited by AMI or AMS?

Amanda: There are no rules about which schools can call themselves Montessori schools.  However, There are three things that parents can look for in an authentic Montessori program:

  • Teachers that are certified by AMI or AMS
  • Mixed-aged classrooms
  • Environment set up with the five main areas and associated manipulatives

NL: How can parents know if Montessori is right for their child?

Amanda: Generally, if you have a child that is gentle by nature, investigates things, is interested in the world, plays by themselves, does puzzles, etc., then Montessori can be a good fit.

The children who don’t do well in Montessori typically are those that are over the spectrum in energy, have trouble communicating, and tend to move around a lot.  Out of 10 children that I interview, 2 may not do well.  I see that more today than in the past.  But it’s hard for the parent to know, because they only have the perspective of the one child, so it’s best to visit a school and talk to the director.  Until parents are at a Montessori school and see children working independently and view the children’s work on the walls, it’s hard for them to tell whether it’s a good fit.

I advise parents to visit and compare multiple preschool programs before they choose one for their child.  They can see and feel for themselves which ones will suit their child.  Not every program is for every child and this is why there are a variety of philosophies and programs.

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Geraldo Rivera expelled from Iraq

Posted by Dan on Mar 31, 2003 @ 11:50 AM

DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE?: U.S. military to expel FOX NEWS CHANNEL's Geraldo Rivera from Iraq after violating rule, rival CNN claimed Monday morning; giving away crucial details of future military operations during live broadcast... Rivera drew a map in the sand indicating the position where the unit which he was embedded with was located, where they were going... Members of the 101st Airborne Division will escort Rivera to the border with Kuwait, said CNN, quoting a Pentagon official... Developing...

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Archive for the ‘online access’ tag

SOPA and PIPA: Just Say No   no comments

Posted at Jan 16, 2012 @ 6:41pm News

If you check out basically any technology-related website this week (and many non tech-related sites as well) you will find information relating to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property, Protect IP Act (PIPA).  This proposed legislation (which has, for now, been avoided) would not only halt online piracy, it would take away a whole lot of online freedom too.

Sure, I believe that protecting intellectual property is important. Many artists, entertainers and the companies that employ them don’t want consumers getting their products for free. This is understandable. We all need to make a living. But we can’t protect intellectual property on the Internet by universally censoring content. Before I go any further, let’s explore what PIPA and SOPA really are.

PIPA was first introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Orrin Hatch, and Chuck Grassley. PIPA would give the government and U.S. corporations the right to seek legal action with any website they determine has allowed copyright infringement. This extremely loosely-defined legislation could potentially:

– Force Internet providers to block websites on their networks.
– Force advertisers on “infringing” websites to pull their ads.
– Seek legal action by suing blogs, search engines, directories or any other site on the internet.

Goodbye, User-Generated Content

PIPA would create a perilous online climate for any website. It would encourage harsh restrictions on user content, effectively censoring any type of user-generated participation. This means user-generated writing, videos, audio files… ANYTHING. The fact is, user-generated content is a huge part of what makes the Internet so rich. If PIPA passes, we will lose our free forum. This will have wide-reaching implications for social behaviors and social control.

SOPA would work in conjunction with PIPA. It would allow:

– The U.S. Attorney General to seek court orders to force search engines, DNS providers, advertisers and more to sever contact with any “offending” websites or content.
– Private corporations to create their own hit lists of websites they feel are breaking their copyright policies, for ANY REASON. Read: legal mafia. The companies would be able to contact a website’s provider directly to sever service within five days.

Sayonara, Innovation

Not only would these bills severely restrict user-generated content, they would stifle innovation. Developers aren’t going to experiment with new ways of distributing content if they are constantly under threat of take-down. Think about the big sites we all use today: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, DropBox… none of these would have made it a week under PIPA and SOPA.

Ridiculous Consequences

Imagine this scenario: a child makes a video of herself singing a popular song and posts it to the Internet. That child could be responsible for the blackout of YouTube. That child and her family could face legal action. They could face fines in the millions! Is this the kind of Internet we want?

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How do I use ReportViewer 2010 in Visual Studio 2008 project?

Recently some customers asked me how to use reportviewer 2010 in their visual studio 2008 project. ReportViewer 2010 fully supports both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. The problem is that in Visual Studio 2008, you cannot directly use it in design time. This is a helpful hint, so I decided to dig it out. Really it works very well but need your efforts on extracting the DLLs from GAC and manually coding to create the reportviewer control. Here are my steps to show you how to make it work.

1. Download the ReportViewer 2010 Redistributable package from

2. Install it on your computer, then the Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForm.dll will be registered in GAC, however you could not directly reference this assembly from GAC in Visual Studio 2008. Referencing the assembly file is needed however the dll is not installed in other place. So the next step is how to extract the assembly file from the GAC.

3. John’s blog showed some ways to extract assemblies from GAC. I used Windows Command Prompt to extract the Microsoft.ReportViewer.Winform.dll and Microsoft.ReportViewer. Common.dll out to my project’s bin folder. You can first use the “cd” command to redirect the folder to ” C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms”, then use the “dir” command to check which folder is for ReportViewer 10.0 and run “cd” again to redirect to that folder, then run copy command like “copy Microsoft.ReportViewer.Winform.dll D:\Projects\MyTestReport\Bin\Microsoft.ReportViewer.Winform.dll” to copy the file to your project’s bin folder. As well you can copy the Microsoft.ReportViewer. Common.dll file.

4. Then in Visual Studio 2008, right click the Reference folder, click “Add Reference…”, switch to the Browse tab and add the references to these two assemblies. You can also add the ReportViewer control to the ToolBox via Choose Items by selecting the assembly Microsoft.ReportViewer.Winform.dll in the bin folder, but you will find that the control does not have real UI appearance. It just shows as a component but it is good since you can set properties via the property window.

5. Refer to those auto-generated code for the ReportViewer 2008 control in your project, manually add the code for your Reportviewer 2010 control to your Windows Form application accordingly.

6. For example, you have a form named Form1, modify the InitializeComponent function in Form1.Designer.cs as follows.

        #region Windows Form Designer generated code

        /// <summary>
        /// Required method for Designer support – do not modify
        /// the contents of this method with the code editor.
        /// </summary>
        private void InitializeComponent()
            this.components = new System.ComponentModel.Container();

            this.reportViewer1 = new Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportViewer();
            adventureWorksDW2008DataSet = new AdventureWorksDW2008DataSet();
            V_GETSALESTableAdapter = new WFMix.AdventureWorksDW2008DataSetTableAdapters.v_getSalesTableAdapter();

            // reportViewer1
            this.reportViewer1.LocalReport.ReportEmbeddedResource = “WFMix.Report1.rdlc”;
            //this.reportViewer1.LocalReport.ReportPath = “Report1.rdlc”;
            this.reportViewer1.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(13, 13);
            this.reportViewer1.Name = “reportViewer1”;
            this.reportViewer1.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(532, 352);
            this.reportViewer1.TabIndex = 0;

            Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportDataSource rds = new Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportDataSource();
            rds.Name = “AdventureWorksDW2008DataSet_v_getSales”;
            rds.Value = adventureWorksDW2008DataSet.v_getSales;

            // Form1
            this.AutoScaleDimensions = new System.Drawing.SizeF(6F, 13F);
            this.AutoScaleMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleMode.Font;
            this.ClientSize = new System.Drawing.Size(708, 417);
            this.Name = “Form1”;
            this.Text = “Form1”;
            this.Load += new System.EventHandler(this.Form1_Load);

        private Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportViewer reportViewer1;
        private AdventureWorksDW2008DataSet adventureWorksDW2008DataSet = null;
        private AdventureWorksDW2008DataSetTableAdapters.v_getSalesTableAdapter V_GETSALESTableAdapter = null;

7. In the Form_Load event, you can fill the data to refresh your report just like ReportViewer 2008.

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

Comments (8)

  1. Raj says:

    Thanks for the article. but In my case, I have report and other controls in same winform. how can i refresh the report?. any help would be appreciated. thanks

  2. wW1711 says:

    Once I "dir" at …Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms I'm not seeing a location to further "cd" into…

    The columns I see (in PS) are "Mode", "LastWriteTime", "Length" , and "Name".

    No folder…

    Any ideas?

  3. wW1711 says:

    Oh, and the "Name" field doesn't appear to be a folder… It looks like the Public Key Token…

  4. Jorge Olimpia says:

    Thank you for the article Charles. I got your tips and use them in a ASP.NET project, adapting what was necessary to work. For those who want to try it, after install Report Viewer 10 Redistributable package, copy Microsoft.Report.Common.dll and Microsoft.Report.WebForms.dll to other folder and reference both files in your project. After that, in the web.config file change the references from to Report Viewer's version. Also, change the version number in the web form where you add the component.

  5. Mark73 says:

    Is there a way that i can use the RSRemoteRpcClient in vs2010 communicating with sql 2008 r2?

    Now i can only use this on the 9.0 reference..but not on the 10.0.

    is there a way to work arround this?

    Best regards,

  6. solange says:

    Hola, yo trabajo en 2008 con visual, hice todos los pasos de Jorge Olimpia, pero no encuentro como acceder a desinger.vb para modificar el codigo, hay alguna manera de poder ver y modificar el desinger.vb  para webforms ?

  7. solange says:

    Hola, yo trabajo en 2008 con visual, hice todos los pasos de Jorge Olimpia, pero no encuentro como acceder a desinger.vb para modificar el codigo, hay alguna manera de poder ver y modificar el desinger.vb  para webforms ?

  8. Jason says:

    I know this post is a year old, but thank you so much!!!!!

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Building a Game: The Model, View, Controllers approach

The goal of these series of blogs is to create a simple Silverlight Game that you can build on.  This will be done by doing the following:

  1. Create a game based on MVC (Model, View, Controller) principle

  2. Test the game with the MVC Unit tester (let’s give it a spin)
  3. Work with documentation and architecture

Again, because we want to keep things simple, we’ll take advantage of the minimum number of features of the ASP.NET MVC framework and Silverlight needed to build the game. In order to create our application, we need to complete each of the following steps:

  1. Work up the design of our game, I will do this at my other blog:
  2. Create the ASP.NET MVC Web Application Project

  3. Create the ASP.NET MVC game model

  4. Create the ASP.NET MVC game controller

  5. Create the ASP.NET MVC game views

The following items will be discussed as required on some other blogs:

  1. Use of XNA with Silverlight on the
  2. Create a functional program to do some simple physics using F#, I will discuss this on my blog:, although I have to finish up a discussion on orbital mechanics, which is hopelessly messed up right now.
  3. Implement the system architecture and test plan, I will discuss this on my blog:, here again, I will have to finish up my analysis of the Mars Climate Orbiter crash that resulted from a units mix between software modules.

If you want to get up to speed on MVC, you need to have at least Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1, ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight 3 loaded on your machine.

To make sure you have a good idea of how to work with MVC work through the tutorial at:

I wasn’t able to get the Create part to work correctly, if you do, let me know.

Getting game working with clear understandable steps for the ABSOLUTE beginner is the goal for about 10 blog entries.  It is exploratory for me, so stay with me, and we’ll get through this successfully.

Well, my wife wants me to watch the Australia movie with her, and it lasts for 3 HOURS!  I like Nicole Kidman, but the camera always seems to pay to much attention to her and her movies suffer.

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