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Tag Archives: immigration

Oh, Those Annoying False Narratives

One of the more annoying arguments in the immigration debate is that undocumented immigrants coming to this country take jobs away and have a negative effect on the economy.  These recurring arguments make terrific sound bites and usually appeal to the emotional and uninformed voter, especially during hard economic times.  And yet these are the false viewpoints that still guide today’s immigration policy debate.

Over the years there have been numerous studies which debunk these false narratives. Here’s another by the Urban Institute.

In short, this study and others demonstrate that immigrants help to fill gaps in our labor market, immigrants complement rather than replace existing workers, and increase, not lower, wages and productivity.

The Urban Institute’s study again helps to quash the notion that immigrants are “stealing” American jobs.  In fact, as the study points out, many low skilled immigrants and native workers aren’t competing for the same jobs.  If this isn’t enough evidence, a recent study by PEW suggests that immigrants are “much more likely than U.S. foreign workers to be self-employed.” From a Latino perspective, immigrants were nearly twice as likely as U.S. born Latinos to be self-employed.  So in other words, the PEW study suggests that immigrants are in fact job creators (aka entrepreneurs) not job takers!

So don’t fall into believing this overused false narrative.

And while it seems that immigration reform won’t happen anytime soon, when it does, let’s hope it’s developed based on facts – not fiction.

We’re All Immigrants

Graphic via Vox.com

A historical look at immigration through a lens of maps.

Later waves of European immigration killed off most of the first Americans (largely through European diseases, which traveled through the Americas much more quickly than European humans did). That set the stage for European Americans to rebrand the United States, in particular (where indigenous populations were almost completely “replaced”), as a “nation of immigrants.” Even today, America is still home to more total immigrants than any other country in the world. In this map, each country’s size is distorted to reflect the size of its immigrant population.

Importing Entrepreneurship

Graphic via Inc.com

Adam Bluestein places a dollar figure on the need for comprehensive immigration reform –  the most entrepreneurial group in America are not born here:

Despite accounting for only about 13 percent of the population, immigrants now start more than a quarter of new businesses in this country. Fast-growing ones, too–more than 20 percent of the 2014 Inc. 500 CEOs are immigrants. Immigrant-owned businesses pay an estimated $126 billion in wages per year, employing 1 in 10 Americans who work for private companies. In 2010, immigrant-owned businesses generated more than $775 billion in sales. If immigrant America were a stock, you’d be an idiot not to buy it.

Bluestein chronicles the experience of one Latina, Ruby Polanco, a Honduras-born entrepreneur who was brought to America as a child:

With her mother and two brothers, Polanco lived in Los Angeles, in a 300-square-foot apartment with no kitchen. School, she says, was “very hard on kids who didn’t speak English.” And the convoluted process of obtaining green cards–particularly challenging for immigrants from Central America–added to the family’s sense of insecurity. At 17, Polanco was a pregnant high school dropout, married to a man she’d divorce a year later.

Finally getting her green card, Polanco says, “changed my mentality. In my own crazy mind, I decided I wanted to make myself American, to make this country my country. After many years, I had the right to stay here.” Polanco got a job as a cashier at McDonald’s and eventually became a manager. After getting her GED, she attended community college, and later got a bachelor’s degree in business management.

Since founding a school for makeup artists in 2006, Polanco now has four locations in the Los Angeles area, revenue of more than $2 million, and about 45 employees. Polanco has also become a visible entrepreneurial presence in L.A.’s Hispanic community. “You give a Hispanic woman $5 and she’ll turn it into a million,” she says, “but not a lot of people are investing money and time on these young women.” Polanco hopes she can help other Hispanic women overcome an “illegal” mindset. “Even legal people here think very illegal,” she says. “They think they can only do business in their corner.”

Some cities like Boston are already providing “accelerator” programs to help international entrepreneurs establish themselves in the U.S.


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Thursday, October 27, 2011

Citizens' Police Academy Latest

At last night’s session of the citizens’ police academy we learned about police communications, felony car stops and SWAT. In Boulder County a simple code system is used rather than the more complex systems in some parts of the country. For example, Code 0 is danger and code 2 is a traffic stop. Felony car stops involve arresting one or more people in a car who are suspected of committing a felony. Three police cars are placed in a triangle formation to cover the suspect’s car. One at a time people in the car are order out, handcuffed and placed in the back of a patrol car. Members of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) go through extensive initial and ongoing training (approximately 240 hours a year). In dealing with a hostage situation the priorities of life are in this order: 1. Hostage, 2. Witnesses/bystanders, 3. Other officers and support personnel, 4. SWAT members, 5. Suspect.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

What a difference a day can make.

Tuesday was sunny and warm with the autumn colors shining in Boulder. Wednesday a blizzard hit with a foot of snow. Quite a contrast.

Friday, October 21, 2011

We all start encountering interesting blips of memory as we get older. Here was one that happened to me. I was in my home office updating my financial records with mileage traveled for an author event presentation that day but couldn’t remember the mileage, so I went out to the garage to look at the odometer. When I came inside, the phone rang and after taking the call, I returned to my office and began working on a writing project, completely forgetting about the mileage (this is what my wife and I refer to as the intervening thought). Twenty minutes later I saw my expense folder and recalled that I needed to update the mileage. But by then I had forgotten the mileage amount I had seen on the odometer, so I had to go back out to the car a second time to look at it. At least this time I recorded it while I remembered and before another event interrupted me.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Citizens Police Academy - next round

Last night at the citizens’ police academy, we heard from a crime scene investigator. One interesting tidbit—a DNA profile can now be determined from as little as ten cells from a suspect. The second speaker covered animal control. An owner of a dog can be cited if a dog attacks or approaches in a menacing manner even if it doesn’t bite. The third speaker was a school resource officer. She described the importance of knowing the schools and the students. She deals with teenage drama all the time. A minor can be interviewed as a witness or a victim without a parent present, but there needs to be a parent present if a minor is a suspect and rights are read.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Break from Writing

I took a break from writing to go visit our son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons in Iowa. We visited an apple farm, bought goodies, went on a tractor ride and got a picture of the family with pumpkins. Now it’s back to writing in the morning.

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Monday, October 24, 2011

Gorillarinas, Putting the agile skirt on a waterfall Gorilla

Fact: putting a skirt on a Gorilla doesn't make it any more graceful

Ballerina gorilla

Are your agile initiatives Gorillarinas?

If you're working in a large organization and trying to "be agile", it often turns into a strange situation where only a superficial set of changes are made, but folks wonder why their initiative isn't able to deliver the expected benefits. This is remarkably similar to putting a skirt on a Gorilla and then wondering why it isn't suddenly graceful.

I'm not saying you cannot train a Gorilla to dance ballet, I'm an optimist at heart and believe anything is possible. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the effort of taking an IT organization that has built up the overhead gunk and crud of a huge process and turning into a highly responsive and lean software delivery organization is anything less difficult than turning a Gorilla into a ballerina. This effort will be large, there will be casualties, and you will likely need expert help (or therapy).

As a member consulting organization, I get the benefit of meeting up with my compatriots at Redpoint to discuss the challenges, successes, and failures when working within transform hulking and clumsy organizations into something leaner, meaner, and more agile. One theme that recurs in these discussions is that many traditional processes are deliberately dehumanizing. They view people as interchangeable components that can be replaced at a moments notice and have no impact to the overall project. After all, if you've run out of ballerina's, you can surely substitute anybody (or anything) in a tutu to do the dance, right? This is a key failing and just plain wrong, and even in organizations that throw around slogans and mission statements proclaiming how important everyone's individual contribution is, all traditional processes turn developers, QA analysts, and even Bob the dinosaur into "Resources".

Some ways to know if you've got a Gorillarina:

  • Daily standups status report meetings that ALWAY last 1 hour (or longer)
  • A variety of torture devicestask/bug tracking tools... one for the "official" stuff and one for the "agile" stuff...
  • ScrumMaster who's responsible for the work and assigns tasks to team members!
  • Team members who sit around and wait for someone to tell them what to do
  • Time-boxes that are well intended, but just never seem to work
  • Planning starts with announcing a release date, then estimating the effort involved
  • Retrospectives are about collecting lessons learned for our PMO to track!
  • We do Pair Programming (a senior guy reviews all commits), Test-Driven Development (20 page formal test plans review d by QA AND the analyst team, and use Continuous Integration (we do a massive build the week before a release)
  • User stories, requirements stories, development stories, test stories, and all sorts of other “types of stories” allow us to track the work!
  • Our impediments list helps track why we miss our commitments!
Some things you can do to pave the way toward having a more graceful Gorillarina:
  • Recognize that you are not going to instantly get results by doing standups or using notecards or renaming your project manager the "Scrummaster"
  • I know it's been said 1000x, but empower your team(s) to solve problems, if your process is getting in the way, ditch it... or fix it...
  • Recognize that "agile" is not a technology thing, it's a business thing... everybody needs to have skin in the game.
  • Agility is about values reified as techniques and practices, not merely practices!
  • If you're in the Chicago area, drop us a line at
  • Find another organization that has a track record or producing results and let them help you (although our sales department would really like you to use the link above ;) )

One last note and something that was brought up while editing. Agile is not JUST the practices (jeez, there we go again...) it is as much about building shared values and attitudes about what the team is doing. Many organizations think they can send a couple of guys to "scrumaster training" and they'll come back and infect the entire organization. Helping transform teams and entire organizations from one mindset to another is a job that requires practice, experience, and skills that are not acquired in a one (or two) week class. It takes a certain type of person to fulfill this mission and if your goal is REAL transformation, it is in your best interest to seek out folks who have a proven track record. It can be a daunting task for someone who is inexperienced in the field, and if you think you can send a Business Analyst to a training course and then have them run around your organization waving the magic "agile" wand at projects, you'll most often end up with a bunch of "agile best practices" but no real transformation.

Special thanks to Si Alhir and Steve Fastabend for feedback and editorial assistance....

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Promiscuous programming

How many folks out there are promiscuous programmers? You know who you are, every project you work on, you meet a new technology or language and feel compelled to "try it out"... without giving the right amount of consideration to the language that is currently being used. Worse yet, you seem compelled to badmouth a language that has been really good to you ( I love you java;) ) and always compare the imperfections of your programming wife ( java, you're syntax is really bloated) to the sexy cool stuff from one of your programming girlfriends (ruby, I love your monkey patch).

I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, I think it is very important to have breadth in technology and learning new programming languages is a way to become a better programmer. It's more important though, to have an objective perspective about the REAL comparison and not just get infatuated with every new thing that wanders by because you think (or worse yet someone else thinks) it's better. Listen to me folks, the grass is rarely greener on the other side of the fence... It's different, and frankly it MIGHT be greener... but even if it IS greener, that doesn't necessarily make it better.

So where am I going with this? Am I suggesting that being a promiscuous programmer is a bad thing? Not really... and in that respect perhaps the metaphor is a bit bad. But, you have to suspect advice about women from a guy who's only ever been with one woman about women because ... he has a noted lack of experience. What I'm saying is when you're starting out, playing the field and figuring out what you like is important, but it's also important to commit to something and really "know" it. Make sure that changing languages is a conscious decision and you weight the benefits and drawbacks of such a switch lest you spend your entire career as a programming slut flitting between one fancy new thing and another.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Two factor developer personality type scoring

I was recently sitting through a technical discussion and was thinking about how different people were reacting to the information in the presentation. From this I started to think about how a two pairs of related factors seem to influence how people react to new technology. Here's a quick chart showing them as well as examples of prototypical statements a person at each extremes in each quadrant might speak about Source Code Control:

For a bit of definition:

  • The Conservative - Liberal continuum is a measure how inclined you are to try new technologies. An extreme conservative feels no need to use anything new and will never use anything new unless the old thing completely fails to work any more. An extreme liberal would be compelled to change technological approaches before even finishing a prototype because a new shine technology showed up on their radar.
  • The Skeptic - Believer continuum is a measure of how much critical thinking you put into a new technologies capabilities. An extreme skeptic would tend to disregard pundits and anecdotal evidence and require solid proof. An extreme believer will have a religious-like believe in a technology that has no basis in fact.

The reason I put this chart together is to help understand that these things are not binary switches. In addition, some traits are orthogonal (Skeptic and Conservative), but some are in opposition (Skeptic Believer). Moreover, different techniques are necessary to understand how to interact with folks depending on where they fall in both continuums.

Conservatives will generally require a lot of selling or you will need to burn the bridge behind them or they will continue falling back into the "good ol way of doing it". Conservative Believers will be the hardest lot to convince because the sheer amount of time they've been doing something (no matter how stupid it might be) will actually be a reenforcing factor and no amount of factual evidence to the contrary will sway them. On the other hand, a conservative sceptic can often be swayed with evidence and a good business case for doing things "the new way".

Liberals will generally require more oversight as they will tend to embrace and proliferate new technologies. Liberal believers are the most difficult because they will do it just because they read about it on hacker news and it sounded cool. These guys often need to be brought back down to earth lest your systems be riddled with one-off science experiments. Liberal skeptics (I'd put myself largely in this camp) are easiest for me personally to deal with, but I think that's because I'm one of them. For the most part, the closer to each other on the quadrants your team is, the more likely you are to get consensus on what to do (or NOT for some groups.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

My javascript parseInt("08") surprise!

I recently had to debug a problem that was causing a javascript function to return the incorrect value. The code in question was right padding numbers less than 10 with a 0: so 1 became "01", 2 becomes "02" and 10 should be "10".
Number.prototype.to_s = function() {
    if (this < 10) {
        return '0' + this.toString();
    } else {
        return this.toString();
This works fine... in one direction.
I kept running into a problem when I tried to parse this back into an integer.
So I'd do something like
and the result would be 0. What I didn't realize is that the "0" prefix when parsing an string indicates the number is base-8 (octal) and therefore "08" isn't a valid number. I would have, however expected some sort of error message or NaN instead of 0. The problem is that javascript will only return NaN if the first character in the string is not a number... so It happily saw that '0' was a number, but '8' was not (in base 8) so it returned 0.
Aside: I see that this method of specifying base-8 is not supposed to be deprecated

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, and for issue tracking

I've used each of these tools on at least one project now (JIRA for quite a few) and thought I would share my observations about when each one would be most appropriate.

Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is only offered as a cloud based or hosted solution, but has a pretty impressive list of customers. On the upside, they've fully embraced the cloud concept and offer a well documented set of RESTful APIs to integrate with third party systems. You can connect issues to SCM commits using post commit hooks from svn or git (or anything with a little effort)

I find the pivotal tracker User Interface be a bit confusing, but pretty useable out of the box and geared toward agile methods. Another big plus is that they can auto-estimate your actual velocity and burndown which helps you get your arms around your real velocity. In addition, they have some out of the box reporting. is also a hosted solution, but of the three has taken an more interesting approach to bug tracking. They've jumped on the gamification bandwagon and have tried to craft an experience that is actually enjoyable instead your typical cold-war soviet style user interaction that most bug/issue tracking systems seem to espouse. While innovative, they are missing some features and are decidedly still in the Minimun Viable Product stage.

You can integrate with git via post-commit hooks, but third party integration doesn't exist is still in beta and frankly the documentation was somewhat difficult to find (hint -- the link is in the footer). I can appreciate the idea of keeping things simple and this product will certainly work well for a small agile team or an independent who's just keeping track of things for himself. It's hard to say how this would scale to a larger team or very complex project as it is deliberately bare bones and I suspect this could work against you on a largish project or team.

Last, but certainly not least, is Jira from Atlassian. I'd consider this the 800lb gorilla of bug/issue tracking and I've used it for years on multiple projects in a variety of teams and workflows. Frankly, you can do anything you want with this product... They can host it, or you can run it internally with a slew of different databases. It integrates with just about everything, and it has a plugin system that folks have used to build a vast array of plugins to help do just about anything you want.

The default user experience seems is horrendous and to match the impedence between what an agile/small team might need and the default JIRA config you're going to waste a lot of time either fetching plugins or configuring things to work how you want. JIRA's biggest strength is also it's biggest weakness and it would be difficult for me to recommend JIRA for smaller teams or startups as it's enormity imposes to some serious overhead --- either you eat the time trying to figure out the default UI or you eat the overhead of configuring it to be less complicated...

Here are the users I think would be a good fit for the tools:

  • A small team who just doesn't want to lose track of bugs or tasks, and has an interest in keeping an informal and deliberately fun culture -
  • A similarly small team, but one that finds a need for stronger organization and reporting options and/or if you think the idea of bug tracking being fun is somehow off putting - pivotal tracker
  • A large team or large organization who has thousands or hundreds of thousands of issues to track and will end up with a full time person or more to help manage track them. Additionally, if you need to host in-house, JIRA is the way to go

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Should I use mongodb, couchdb, or redis?

In the current nosql fervor, there is an important distinction that seems to get missed repeatedly. There are two (OK three) really important factors that these tools use to distinguish themselves and many people completely miss the point.

The first factor is durability -- does the data actually get saved to a disk somewhere and, if so, how often and how much might I lose if something "goes wrong"? Redis and mongodb users might be somewhat surprised to learn that, by default, they can lose your data should the process crash or shut down. While you can configure them to work around this issue, you're going to slow things down substantially doing so and therefore lose the big advantage they've been designed to provide. In short, redis is a great alternative to something like memcached, but is not really an alternative to something like couchdb.

Which brings me to the second factor, which is searchability (I couldn't think of a better term) -- Key-value stores are typically not designed to be easy to search, but to be able to fetch values by a particular key really quickly. Document stores are designed to enable more dynamic searching, often at the expense of some other attribute like speed, memory, or disk space.

Lastly, there's speed -- couchdb can be fast, but it's not really going to compare at real-time updates to mongo or redis. If real-time is your most important factor, couch is probably not your best solution (actually it certainly isn't your best solution).

So in the crop of current contenders (in no particular order) I'll give you my winners in certain use cases:

  • A fast disposable cache based on discrete keys: Redis... it's fast, it's widely known, it's easy to set up and use and more flexible than memcached (although memcached is also a good choice).
  • A durable and searchable document store that slowly accumulates more data and needs some concept of versioning (maybe like wikipedia or a blog engine): Couchdb
  • A quasi-durable searchable document store with quickly changing values (like a real-time status reporting application... maybe facebook or twitter: Mongodb

As for the other 9,999 choices that currently exist, I'd say don't dig around too much or agonize over your choice unless there is a specific and very important problem your application needs to solve that is difficult or complicated with these solutions. Should you get into that situation (like maybe needing to find directions like google maps) then you'll need to expand your horizons and look into other solutions. My recommendation is to start with one of these three and only go to a different solution when necessary. You could six months researching all of the possibilities and at the end have nothing but outdated research. Pick something and run with it, only then will you understand the problem and be able to make a better/more informed decision for your scenario.

More importantly, you'll probably notice that for many real-world solution, it might make sense to use all three of these (or more). I think part of what causes problems in "fair" comparisons of technology is that folks think they can pick the "single best solution for all problems" and that's just not a realistic perspective.


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Chocolate and Maple Nut Tart

The idea for this tart began with me wanting something just a little bit different from one of my favorite desserts: pecan pie. I’ll spare you the loose set of ideas that led to this final product and just get to the food–rather than a topping of exclusively pecans, through complete indecisiveness sheer brilliance, I used a mix of pecans, hazelnuts, and almonds. Then, in place of the usual corn syrup-based custard, I instead made a maple syrup and chocolate based custard.

Chocolate and Maple Nut Tart

Taste and texture-wise, the pecan pie heritage of this tart is very clear. All the tweaks add to what is still very much a pecan pie flavor foundation, and I loved it. You pick up the flavor of almond and hazelnut with deeper, dark sweet notes of chocolate and maple which I found was a great foil to the touch of cinnamon you get from the graham cracker crust. You still get that gooey custard filling with a nice, crunchy top, and something about this tart feels more “wintery” than a pecan pie (which to me, feels “autumny,” go figure). Plus, making this is just as easy a pecan pie–mix stuff in a bowl, dump it with the nuts in a crust, and bake!

  • 1 Graham cracker crust
  • 3/4 cup maple
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 2 tsp cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 3 Tbsp butter
  • 1/4 cup bittersweet chocolate
  • 1/2 cup almonds
  • 1/2 cup pecans
  • 1/2 cup hazelnuts

Graham cracker crust

Prepare your graham cracker crust and bake it blind.

Whisk the filling components together

In a bowl, whisk the brown sugar and maple syrup together until fairly homogenous. Add the eggs, one at a time, whisking between each addition. Incorporate the cocoa powder, vanilla, and salt. Melt the butter and chocolate (I just use the microwave–30 seconds, stir, repeat with 15 seconds more as needed until melted down), whisking this into the mix.

Add the nuts to the crust and then pour in the filling

If the nuts need to be shelled, have the papery coating removed, or be crushed to a size of your liking, do that now. Add these to your pie crust and then pour the filling you prepared earlier over the pie. Most of the nuts will naturally rise to the surface, but if they don’t, a gentle stir should do the trick. This way, the top surface of the nuts will be glazed with the sweet filling (rather than just sitting dryly on top of it).

Chocolate and Maple Nut Tart

Put the pie in a 425°F oven and promptly cover the exposed crust (loosely!) with some tin foil to prevent it from scorching. After 15 minutes, drop the oven temperature to 350°F for 15-20 minutes more (or until the pie is set. Jiggling the pan shouldn’t jiggle the center of the pie).

Remove from the oven and give it an hour to cool down. I tend to prefer a slice after the pie has cooled down a good bit rather than fresh out of the oven. Enjoy!

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8 Responses to “Chocolate and Maple Nut Tart”

  1. Alexa Says:

    Lovely pie Mike… can’t go wrong with so many wonderful ingredients!

  2. Kevin Says:

    I often enjoy using maple syrup rather than corn syrup in pies like this. I have to try adding chocolate next time!

  3. Sophie Says:

    Waw!! You always seems to amaze me with your lovely recipes!!

    This tarte looks absolutely fabulous, Mike!

    MMMMMMM,….so festive & georgous too!

  4. Jeff Says:

    Dang baker! Hey brother looks awesome and miss you floating around!!! Quit working!!!! Hope everything is going great.

    Awesome job but one suggestion that chocolate and maple needs…..bacon.

  5. Jeannie Says:

    I love to visit your blog just to drool over your pics!

  6. Lynn Says:

    Yes, you are brilliant. This looks mouthwateringly amazing!

  7. The Duo Dishes Says:

    Great way to cut the sugar that’s usually in a pecan pie. Sounds great!

  8. Mark Garso Says:

    What an interesting twist. Now to find time to try it….Mark Garso

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Thursday, August 14, 2014

Moving On (With Mixed Emotions)

I never thought I’d feel anything but pure, unadulterated joy when I no longer had to pay for childcare  - but as I dropped my son off for his last day at A Child’s Garden, those were not tears of joy seeping from my eyes. Turns out, I’m really going to miss that place. As will my son!

Eli has been going to A Child’s Garden since he was five months old. Like most parents, when we made the decision to put our kid in daycare, we felt guilty, thinking, “No one can give our kid the same love and care that we can,” – but they did. So much so that we still felt guilty, only it changed to, “We can never provide as much fun, education, interaction as they can!”

On rare days off, it was a constant struggle to keep up with what he had come to expect from the day. By lunch time, I was the one needing the nap. And we only had the one kid! I still have no idea how they did it, but I was continually amazed at what he came home with, be it artwork, a new skill, vocabulary, even mannerisms. He wasn't just being watched, He was being raised. By people who loved and appreciated him almost as much as we did.

Each new year brought a twinge of trepidation, as every time Eli was transitioned up, we worried that the next room’s teachers could never be as good as the previous ones. But from Miss Jane in the baby room to Miss Kim with the toddlers and Miss ‘Sette in the 3-4-year olds up to Mr. Ben in with the five-year olds, we were always happy and comfortable with who was taking care of our boy. And there were MANY more, but I don't want to start naming them, as I’m afraid to leave someone out. Suffice to say, we loved EVERYONE!

On the days when I picked our son up, I always tried to sneak into the room so I could catch him in action (otherwise, he’d drop what he was doing and rush over to give me a big hug), and I was always impressed with what they were doing. I’d often walk in to find over a dozen 3- and 4-year olds seated around a table, conducting an elaborate science experiment – and NO ONE was ever arguing, or messing with things they weren’t supposed to, or clamoring over who was next. They were always fully engaged and active learners. My wife and I are both veteran elementary school teachers, and it was eye-opening (and a bit embarrassing) to see the staff getting pre-schoolers to cooperate and participate with such interest, while we struggled to get our 6th graders to simply stay in their seats!

And not only did they have fun, they learned! I’ll never forget bringing Eli to visit my mom one summer afternoon when he was around three. A thunderstorm came rolling through, and when Eli jumped at a particularly loud rumble of thunder, my mom tried to calm him by saying, “Don’t worry, that’s just the angels bowling.” Eli looked her dead in the eye and said, “No, it’s not. It’s the sound of a warm and cold front coming together.”  My mom looked at me, as if to say, “Where does he get this stuff?” But I knew right away. It was Miss ‘Sette!

There are so many examples of things my son learned without our assistance. Sure, we helped, but it was at A Child’s Garden where he first started to dress himself, use the potty, clean up after himself (still has not mastered THAT one at home!) read and write, count money, tell time, play fair, share, show compassion, use his manners, draw, color, feed himself, walk a balance beam, celebrate the holidays (even ones I never knew existed), dress up, dress down, cut, glue, pedal, meet fireman and policemen and magicians and Santa, nap, build, climb, jump, dance, sing, and smile, smile, smile. We have an entire wall in our kitchen cover with photographs taken at school (and the other three walls covered in artwork created there) And in every picture, and on every drawing, is a smile.

Here’s proof, in case you don’t believe me:

Five years of smiles and support and sincere concern for my child’s well-being. Five years of Open Houses and family picnics and holiday celebrations. Five years of summer camps and Back to School nights and birthday parties (OMG the birthday parties! I’ll shed no tears if I never step foot in Bounce U again!) Five years of making multi-course lunches and making sure the backpack was packed (and ALWAYS making drop-off and pick-up on time, but only because they open early and close late!) And most importantly, five years of never having to worry about what was going on with my kid between the hours of 8-4, M-F, as I knew he was safe, happy, and engaged.

Five years that felt like five months. And now my son is off to kindergarten. I KNOW he’s prepared. I KNOW he’s ready. I KNOW he’s excited. And I know just who to thank for it. A Child’s Garden.

I just never knew I’D be the one so sad to say goodbye L

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

The Man Behind the Counter

These aren't exact numbers, but for the past twelve summers or so, on my twice weekly bike rides to the beach, I’ve been stopping at a little mom and pop deli to grab a sandwich on the way.  It’s called Armon’s (pictured above), and back when I was writing for the Connecticut Post, I submitted a column on it, but my editor said he never heard of it, and therefore, neither had the readers. I tried explaining to him that I thought that was the point of a newspaper: to inform readers about things they didn’t know about, but he refused to run it (and may be one of the reasons I started this statement with “when I used to write for the Post!”)

But, as much as I hate to admit it, he was sort of right, for on my route, I pedal past people lined up outside the popular Pickle Barrel, go right by the wonderful Gaetano’s (and completely ignore the Subway directly across the street) in favor of Armon’s, where there’s usually not much of a wait. A few minutes later, I’m out the screen door, sandwich in hand, heading for the shore.

Unfortunately, this is not my overdue review of the deli. Nor is it a plea to check them out (but you so should!) Sadly, it’s a tribute to the owner, who I just found out, passed away at the age of 53.

Every time I set foot inside, I was greeted with a hearty, “How are you?” by a man I always assumed was named Armon, who was assisted by his ever-present (and equally pleasant) wife.  And even though we were both New York Giants fans (as evidenced by the numerous plaques and posters on the wall) we never talked about sports. Or current events. We talked about our kids.

I learned all about their son’s hockey skills and school exploits. They got an earful on my dealings with a pre-teen stepdaughter (and later newborn son) and later still that same stepdaughter all grown up and off to college, and that same son coming in with Daddy for lunch.

Twelve years of “How are you’s,” and his insistence that I put down the Diet Snapple in favor of his hand-crafted ice tea, and Maria sneaking homemade cookies in with my sandwich (thus necessitating the Diet Snapple!) Twelve years of school photos of their son, Mathew, on the wall. Twelve years of simple yet sincere, interactions with two people whose names I didn’t even know, yet I felt like I knew them well.

I didn’t make it down there this summer until around July 4th, when I walked in, and for the first time, neither of them was there. The counter was manned by two young “kids” (guessing in their 20’s) who, while nice, seemed confused and out of their element. My first thought was that “Armon” and his wife sold the place, but a closer look at the hot food case showed her unmistakable macaroni and cheese (with shredded ham and full slices of cheese on top) so I assumed they were just on a well deserved vacation.

Summer continued to fly by, and for a variety of reasons, my beach trips were fewer and farther between, so I did not get a chance to stop back in until just last week. I was meeting my family at the beach, and stopped off to get sandwiches for me and Julianna. The same young girl was at the counter, but I was relieved see “Armon’s” wife manning her usual spot behind the deli case. And even though we had not seen each other in close to a year, she immediately set out making my sandwich (ham and cheese on a Portuguese with lettuce and mayo) while asking about my kids. I got her caught up on Eli heading off to kindergarten and Julianna returning home from Uganda, then mentioned how surprised I was when I walked in back in the beginning of the month to find strangers in their spots. I was in the middle of saying how glad I was the she and her husband didn’t sell the place, when her face went all white and she informed me that he had passed away on July 10th.

I was shocked and saddened. I felt horrible, and told her so. Adding that I wanted to come around and give her a hug, but I was all sweaty from my bike ride. She went on to say that he was diagnosed with cancer back in January, and six months later…

I left heavy-hearted. Even though it was a bright sunny day, I pedaled the rest of the way to the beach in a fog. Such a nice man. So energetic and full of life. Someone I had little in common with, and knew very little about, but someone who added a little something to my day. And not just me. He made everyone who walked through his door happy, with his homemade iced tea and Giants memorabilia and “Sure, sure…” in response to every request. People appreciated his work ethic, and refusal to take an extra single, as he always insisted on rounding down the change. And on a more subtle level, I’m sure customers recognized the lovely relationship he had with his wife. I know it can’t be easy working with your spouse (every day, that is! Love you, Honey!) but you could see the love and respect they had for each other. And suddenly he was gone. And I felt terrible.

When I got home, I looked up his obituary, and learned that “Armon” was actually named Asadollah Khorasani,  He moved here from Iran (I sort of thought he was Greek) and was the former owner of Mr. T’s. I have no idea where the name Armon came from, as he was “Ozzie” to his friends. And while I was not fortunate enough to call him friend (or Ozzie, for that matter!) I am honored to have made his acquaintance, and greatly saddened by his passing.


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Monday, September 23, 2013

Bitcoin’s capacity to protect our privacy from the GCHQ and NSA has strong roots in Cypherpunk thinking, argues Richard Boase. Satoshi Nakamoto, its creator, is a figure who owes something to all the founding fathers of Cyberspace. His disappearance is important so this democratic and ethical system can be used by all of us for good.

As a movement, Cypherpunk is more nuanced, more serious and more focused than Cyberpunk. Like all good punk movements, Cypherpunk is radical by design and fanatical in its end goal of disrupting the status-quo. If we couldn’t see Cypherpunk clearly before it was because books like Cryptonomicon were not as accessible as the pulpy and instantly attractive Neuromancer.
Cypherpunk is concerned solely with hidden meaning, secrets and power that can be wielded out of sight from governments and spooks. It is embodied by discrete arrays of public/private key pairs. It is a science that values discretion and privacy above all else, and as such it champions our most closely held secrets and beliefs.
Cyberpunk by contrast was typified by Jaron Lanier’s clunky Virtual Reality: pixelated polygon aesthetics from the 1990s.
Until now, we couldn’t really understand the issues at stake as a culture, because we couldn’t imagine what Google would do us or to our businesses. We didn’t know what ‘big data’ was, or how social networks would assimilate our friends, acquaintances and close family members into one amorphous communicative membrane. Neither could we envision how peer-to-peer networks might threaten Hollywood and Wall Street.
When Neuromancer was originally published in 1982 we couldn’t even get our heads around what a web browser was. Cyberpunk in the 1990s was all techno music and wild hair, squat parties and bad video art. Cypherpunk, by contrast was RSA, PGP and the NSA. Now, it’s BTC, GCHQ, PRISM, SHA-256, TEMPORA and RAGTIME-P. It’s a world full of acronyms and codes, impenetrable to all but the most cynical, distrustful, and political of minds.
In literature, those who are lost to history are occasionally referred to as ‘ciphers’. It’s a peculiar use of the word because it implies that the person is a lost word or code in the logos, not understood in their time. The root of the word is from the Arabic ‘sifr’ meaning zero, empty; so Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin is the historical cipher par excellence.
This meaning of ‘cipher’ therefore does not apply to the historical luminaries. Rather than benefiting from an absolute right to privacy, luminaries belong uncomfortably to the public domain where they suffer an element of transparency. This is a crucial point to understand because the Cypherpunks do not wish fame, exposure or recognition. Their philosophy can be summed up simply by Assange’s essential maxim: ‘Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful’.

 The Cypherpunks
The Cypherpunks began in 1992 when Tim May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, started the Cypherpunks’ mailing list. But Jim BellDavid ChaumJulian AssangeAdam BackWei-Dai and Hal Finney are just a few of the ciphers on the mailing list who are just now becoming luminaries, because they’ve all contributed something so uniquely valuable to us through their efforts to protect our privacy in the new information economy, particularly against the encroaching surveillance state.
Other names, like Tim-Berners LeeJohn Perry Barlow and Nick Szabo also feature in this essay, as ‘Cypherpunks by proxy’ because of their contributions and their philosophy.
Tim May’s seminal 1992 document ‘The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto‘ states:
“Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, …with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.”
In 1993 Eric Hughes wrote his original statement on the mission and goal of the Cypherpunks called ‘ A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto‘, in which he says:
“Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems… Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age… We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy…We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money”.
May also went on to write ’The Cyphernomicon‘ which was later echoed by Neal Stevenson’s historical fiction entitled “Cryptonomicon” in which “[a] narrative is set in the late 1990s with characters […] employing cryptologic, telecom and computer technology to build an underground data haven […].  Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency”.
David Chaum was the most notable early champion of the Cypherpunks’ goal of realising a digital currency in ‘Digicash’. In some ways, Digicash was a spectacular failure, sometimes unfairly attributed to Chaum’s greed; but in the best ways, its failure was instructive because it demonstrated perfectly that a privately issued digital currency could not survive the legal system’s onslaught of regulations (AML and KYC in particular). Exactly the same story has been seen being played out again and again, with e-gold’s failure, whose CEO Douglas Jackson narrowly avoided being sent to jail, and more recently with the Liberty Reserve Dollar and Arthur Budovsky‘s arrest.
The Independence of Bitcoin
The fundamental difference between these private currency operations and Bitcoin is that these units of exchange are issued by private corporations and are backed by something, usually paper or real gold, or silver. As such they suffer from a fatal flaw: that whoever is issuing the unit of exchange has a monopoly control over and can enrich themselves at the expense of the other people using the currency.
Whilst the dollar is backed mostly by political force (the threat of forgery protected by imprisonment or violence), legitimate banks can manipulate the international money markets by devaluing their currency. The rules that apply to banks, also apply to the privately issued currencies like those mentioned above, and they must all be highly regulated. They must do due diligence on their customers and follow rules like: ‘Know Your Customer’ where they must be able to verify the true identity of their clients, and they must keep records of what their customers are buying and selling with their digital tokens.
Recently we’ve been informed about the US government’s use of FISA, the ‘Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’ of 1978 (amended much since 9/11) which effectively enables the US government to make requests for information about a private company’s data. In the UK, it’s RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers 2000) that enables this process. Using FISA or RIPA, our governments can lay claim to the most sensitive of private data, from meta-data about calls and communication to the KYC databases.
Private companies like the ‘Liberty Reserve’, who issue anonymous tokens backed by silver have to keep records of the transactions that their customers are making. If they refuse to comply with the governments requests for detailed information, they can be prosecuted, and of course, their ‘anonymous’ systems are used extensively by criminals of all flavours: from money launderers, child pornographers, to drugs and arms dealers.
It’s actually a great catch for the British and American intelligence agencies to be able to capture that information. Bitcoin differs because it belongs to the public domain. It is issued by relatively public individuals, it costs real energy and resources to create, and of its transparency is facilitated by the use of a publicly distributed peer to peer ledger that everyone can easily access. There is no corporation that keeps records of the names of transactors, and there is no CEO to prosecute so no government entity can exert absolute control over it through regulation or legislation, whether by FISA or RIPA, provided that the user enters the system and uses the bitcoins in an anonymous way.
Understandably, governments don’t like this, and they’re desperately trying to find ways to regulate it. In April 2013 a study from the university of Chicago released a document which concerned how the IMF could potentially address the threat that Bitcoin now poses to the global economy in its capacity to launch speculative attacks on national currencies. The technicality is that they (the IMF) cannot buy Bitcoins because it is a stateless currency, and according to their articles of association they can only hold reserves of state-backed currencies. This is a dilemma for the IMF, and puts them directly at odds with the Cypherpunks’ politics, which is precisely the point.
Perhaps John Perry Barlow’s words, keeping with the spirit of independence akin to the founding fathers of the US, put it best in his now famous ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ when he stated:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather…
Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.”
For those wary of Bitcoin’s pedigree, it may comfort them to know that it emerged directly from a culture of programmers who champion open-source software (also known as free software) like Sir Tim-Berners Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. The ‘shadowy hacker’ label that is sometimes ascribed to Satoshi Nakamoto is fair in some ways because that’s the way he intended it. Satoshi thus embodies all the things that the original Cypherpunks were trying so hard to impress upon us: our fundamental right to privacy. It is Bitcoin’s capacity to protect some aspects of our privacy from GCHQ and the NSA that makes it valuable – to a degree. But it’s more than that. Bitcoin has high utility, and gains some value from its scarcity, but more from its inherently democratic and ethical design.
So whilst Bitcoin may have been conjured from the dark space that bore markets like the Silk Road, Bitcoin is a purist and egalitarian creation by nature of its architecture and implementation. It is not monopoly controlled, it is not a privately backed currency, it is an emergent currency, backed by our increasing understanding of peer to peer networks, and complex mathematics (specifically one-way functions as applied to large prime numbers). It incorporates all the best elements of the crypto-voodoo that the Cypherpunks were so enamoured with, with the crucial proviso that all the cryptography used in its construction belongs firmly in the public domain and is therefore open to peer-review.
This is of critical importance because it prevents agencies like the NSA or GCHQ being able to insert their own private ‘back doors’ into the algorithms, meaning that transactions can be made anonymously and securely, remaining purely within the domain of the transactors; and this is precisely what is at stake with the current revelations about GCHQ’s TEMPORA program, the NSA’s PRISM program, and their less well known but equally terrifying RAGTIME-P program; capable of mapping an entire person’s life (since 2001) by domains, social, financial and communicative into three dimensions, along a historical time-line.
The technologies that the Cypherpunks have developed over the years; technologies such as TOR, Freenet; I2P, and Bitcoin, lie firmly within an open source ideological framework, and have effectively become tools to defend privacy, against invasive and potentially abusive governments, and ‘Open Source’ is fast becoming a religion in its own right. In a sense, it has philosophical ties to peer-reviewed science: it is open to criticism, and it is therefore open to innovation and advancement.
To make things clearer, the cryptographic roots of Bitcoin stem from the legacy of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adelman who pioneered the RSA algorithm (the first commercially available cryptographic algorithm) in 1977, and Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman’s ingenious invention of ‘Public Private Key Cryptography‘ in 1976, a method now used in everything from PGP email (now more commonly used in GnuPG) to the Bitcoin network protocol. Both of these cryptographic innovations were closely watched by NSA who initially classified them as threats to national security and therefore as (reclassified) weapons of mass destruction, but they eventually gave up trying to contain them in the late 1990s and early 2000s when both RSA and the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange were finally and terminally released into the public domain.
It was these two key innovations, and the development of the peer-to-peer network by Shawn Fanning and Shaun Parker with Napster, that allowed Bitcoin to become a reality. They allowed the publicly distributed transaction ledger to be shared amongst a network of honest participants who could all continuously check that the ledger did not include any double spending and had not been tampered with.
There was however, one final, and brilliant solution to the problem of ‘double spending’ which made the whole system viable. Double spending was a problem that had plagued digital cash since its inception: the solution came in the form of Hal Finney’s concept of ‘Reusable Proofs of Work’ based on Adam Back’s invention in 1997 of Hashcash; originally a “proof-of-work system designed to limit email spam and denial of service attacks”, in combination with Dahlia Malkhi and Michael Reiter’s academic work on ‘Byzantine Quorum Systems’.
RPOWs (as they came to be known) really came into their own and did away entirely with the need for a central time stamping server that could be compromised by crooks wanting to re-spend their digital cash over and over again. Satoshi explained how RPOW’s could be used to solve the Byzantine General’s Problem, a problem in general computing that demonstrates through game theory how a group of potential co-operators can come to the best consensus even with the possibility of having defectors in their midst. His explanation for how proof of work can be used to eliminate the need for a trusted third party is here.
Hal Finney responded to Satoshi on his original posting of the Bitcoin whitepaper on the cryptography mailing list at Metzdowd; he was also a keen observer of Wei-Dai’s original post on /b/money which begins:
I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.”
Dai goes on to outline the original idea for Bitcoin which is then fleshed out fully by Nick Szabo in his article ‘Bitgold’, published in 1995 and then republished again on his blog ‘Unenumerated – Bit Gold’ in 2008 where he fully articulates Dai’s idea. It is Szabo’s writings that are crucial to the intellectual development of Bitcoin and digital property rights in general.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto is in effect then, a kind of amalgam of the cypherpunks’ fusion of characters, with some of them, like Dai, Finney, Reiter, Back and Szabo, perhaps more crucial to Bitcoin’s development than others. Satoshi will be an important historical cipher exactly by disappearing.
Rather than being forgotten, Satoshi is considered a neo-saintly archetype for the digital age, conjured as if from a William Gibson novel. Like Neo from the Matrix, he is from a place where “government is … permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary”, a figure who owes something to all the founding fathers of Cyberspace.
As ours is a distinctly post-religious culture, like V from ‘V for Vendetta‘, Satoshi emerges from the darkness of the digital underground to lead the masses in a brave new world against the banks, oligarchs and multinationals; all who benefit from our ignorance about the nature of money, our powerlessness over entrenched state monopolies and our obedience to the collusion of government and big-business.
Let’s say then, that Satoshi Nakamoto is a convenient fiction and that it behooves us as a culture to construct and mythologise him as a figurehead around whom a loose network of global hackers and freedom fighters can rally.  Anonymous, Occupy, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, abhor the surveillance state and say they want to see an end to corruption.
They are whistleblowers who are peaceful revolutionaries by nature, they are intellectuals and pragmatists, who believe in non-violence, and who are true children of the internet age. The government may label them as dissidents, but it’s more appropriate to class them as heroes. They wish to challenge the old order and institute a fairer, more egalitarian society, a world where education is freely distributed and available to all, and where privacy is a right not a privilege.
To this end, and for those who believe in a fairer world: we’re all Satoshi. The key is, how can we apply Bitcoin to ethical markets rather than black markets? How can we implement it ethically to make a fairer and better world? Because the potential to redress the balance of wealth, to incentivise distributed computing problems like “Folding@Home’, to cure Cancer and Lou Gerig’s disease using this technology is huge. It may not be something we can fully appreciate in our lifetime: but the reason I’m so passionate about it is that it may also be a tool by which to confront ‘The Monopoly Empire’ of profit and greed as we’ve known it for centuries, spur development in the poorest countries, and help those who need it most.
Please donate 0.1 BTC for each syndication to 1AU8WhY6RHRYcr7heCNfj5YGHTELFkBQNP

1 comment:

  1. If you're searching for the best Bitcoin exchange service, then you should pick YoBit.


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Children are a heritage from the Lord…
     Blessed is the man
    whose quiver is full of them. Psm 127:3-5

6 Arrows Radio Network was founded by Cale Nelson in the Spring of 2014 as an alternate media company.  Cale had spent nearly a decade working in Non-Commercial Christian Radio, and after a short hiatus he missed the microphone.

Over his break, Cale had become a Podcast Listener. He decided that he too could ‘do that’ and set about getting his ideas together.  Rev. Kenn Blanchard, the Black Man with a Gun, who produces multiple podcast’s was instrumental in inspiring Cale to get back behind the microphone. Kenn also introduced him to Professional Podcast Mentor, Dave Jackson.

Having a radio background helped fast-track the process. With the help of the Dave Jackson and his School of Podcasting the first ever episode of the Fo Time Podcast was launched.  What started as an internet inside joke, quickly became a renowned Amateur Radio Podcast.  Catering to the ‘New Guy’  the Fo Time podcast garnered fans from all over the globe.  Great Guest, Brilliant Co-host and Quick Wit made the Fo Time Podcast one of the favorites for many Ham Radio Operators.

In the Spring of 2016, Fo Time Podcast was re-branded as Ham Radio 360.  Seeking a broader appeal for the Amateur Radio Community, HamRadio360.com was designed to be a Ham Radio news, education and entertainment site.  Through multiple content providers, Ham Radio 360 strives to bring the reader and listeners a daily dose of Amateur Radio Edu-tainment!

Not long after the Re-brand, Cale’s youngest son decided he wanted to become a podcaster too-Milam In the Middle released in September of 2016.  Following the MIM debut Cale set his sights on a new podcasting venture that he’d been long developing.  Modern Christian Men was launched in the Spring of 2017.  Modern Christian Men is a ministry focused podcast and blog.


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Military Veterans Organizations: Veteran's of Foreign Wars on Crystal Ave in Kansas City, MO

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Veteran's of Foreign Wars Post 1829

5904 Crystal Ave
Kansas City, MO 64129
(816) 921-2222

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Make your own free website on

- General Books
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Jane's Gun Recognition Guide

Author: Ian Hogg, Rob Adam
6th edition (April 1996)
Publisher: HarperCollins (paper)
ISBN: 0004709799
Dimensions (in inches): 1.55 x 4.99 x 7.48

Notes: Pictures are in black and white.

Jane's Guns Recognition Guide features all the military rifles, pistols, features all the military rifles, pistols, revolvers, machine-guns and sub-machine guns in action today. From the US Army's newest infantry rifle to former Soviet weapons now in terrorist hands, as well as ex-World War II guns still soldiering on, this essential book enables you to identify them all.

Table of Contents:

  • Total pages : 512 pages

Ed's Analysis:
Well, this book has it all, except for shotguns. If your looking for handguns, this book is for you. 200 out of 500 pages in this book is pistols and revolvers. This book is a statistics book, with a gun on every page. The pages are obviously double sided. With 500 pages, it has over 1000 firearms. I was dissiapointed to find only one photo of the gun, and the photos are in B&W. This book is not for the gun enthusiast who would like to see good color photos and pictures of people in action with them. This is for the research person or for persons in the military, who wishes to gain information on weapons. Still, overall, this book is worth the buy if you just want to know more about guns.

All info and pictures in this site appear courtesy of the following web sites.

Aeroseek's Aviation Banner Exchange
Aeroseek's Aviation Banner Exchange

All questions and inquiries should be made to the webmaster.

Last updated : Sunday, April 30, 2000 1:31 AMMonday, May 01, 2000


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Thursday, August 23, 2007

Cutting the county's phone costs and life lines

Milwaukee County administrators, desperately looking for ways to fund basic services because Scott Walker would rather (have other people) die than raise property taxes, are recommending a huge cut to the county's 211 line.

Reports the JS:

Also on the chopping block is funding for IMPACT, a non-profit group that operates Milwaukee County's 211 call center. The group would lose 90% of its county funding, from $480,000 last year to $46,958 this year.

The 211 centers link callers to community services, including food pantries, emergency shelter, utility assistance, low-cost home rentals, and alcohol- or drug-treatment referrals.

When the 211 service began in 2002, the center took 58,000 calls. This year, it will take an estimated 130,000. Mike Davis, president and CEO of IMPACT, said the proposed budget would cut the number of calls taken by about 55,000.

At first glance, the $3.69 per call cost of operating the line may not seem cost-effective at all. In fact, the county absolutely should look at ways to reduce that cost, either by increasing the volume of calls to the center through an awareness campaign or by actually cutting costs.

But cut the budget? Supervisors ought to put this on the morality weigh scale: operating the 211 line costs the county significantly less per call than the county charges for many generally destitute inmates to call collect from the House of Correction or County Jail.

That amount is $5.50 a call, unless the inmate has a debit card -- then it's $3.30. (The latter is 39 cents less than the cost of the 211 call, but I'm betting most inmates aren't getting the lower rate because they don't have the required debit cards and the average cost of the calls is going to be more than $3.69.)

If county government is unwilling to spend as much to help residents get needed social services as it will charge for an inmate to talk to a loved one on the outside, then something is beyond repair in county government.

Here's a thought: how about looking for ways to reduce both of these costs?

Daniel said...

This is not the first time that Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker and The County Board of Supervisors have demonstrated that, “they would rather have other people die” - than do the jobs they were elected to do. I say that because: when told about the live threating circumstances taking place in the County’s disabilty program (DECA), and asked to expose and/or end the corruption and cover-up taking place (in that program) - Scott Walker and the County Board refused to do so. A longstanding and ongoing situation - that is denying (via “backroom politics”) approximately 4,000 disabled individuals the opportunity to even be considered for a civil service job within county government. A set of circumstances - made worse by the fact that those very same disabled individuals (via their disability) are more vunerable to life threatening medical situations. Thus, making them in even greater need of the health insurance a full-time job with the County could have provided. All this, do to the fact that the current County employees have been able to successfully use “backroom politics” to keep the “DECA” people out of their way – when they (the County employees) decide it is time to change jobs. I know this to be the case - from first hand experience. I almost died because of the “backroom politics” I mentioned.

Anonymous said...

The County spends approx. 60 million in healthcare for retiree healthcare. Retirees pay no premiums. Maybe if they started paying premiums those could offset the funds neccesary to fully fund the 211 line.

Joe Klein said...

One of the big problems at Milwaukee County is the lack of creativity by both Scott Walker appointees and the existing bureaucracy. They tend to look for commercial solutions from a semi-closed circle of vendors and consultants. They don't want to take a risk on some of the technologies like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) that can save Milwaukee County money and thus allow for the preservation of services.

Many VoIP carriers provide flat rate lines with unlimited calling in the US and Canada.

Significant savings can be incurred using VoIP based PBXs especially if implemented using Open Source based systems such as Asterix.

If Federal, State, County, Cites and Villages interconnect over their own fiber networks, the cost of inter agency calling can be reduced to nearly zero.

We need to get our heads out of the sand and stop government reliance on on gold plated IT solutions. A mentality that worships big consultants and big business solutions seems to reign supreme in Wisconsin. We need to foster a spunky, roll-your own, self dependency. Open Source Software (OSS) can provide low cost solutions to many of governments IT problems. To be effective, it takes disciplined software development and a cooperative approach with other other Villages, Cities, Counties, States and Countries involved in OSS development.

Google (A Linux shop) and Yahoo (A FreeBSD Shop) are companies that have made themselves using OSS to craft customer solutions. With the right minds at the helm, OSS solutions can architected to be scalable and reliable.

We need to put money into employee development rather than the pockets of large consultant firms like Accenture. We need to cooperate with other developers using the Internet and work to collectively improve our OSS based software. Taking an open, cooperative yet self reliant approach, we can insure that government can best serve the people and be frugal at the same time.


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Monday, July 6, 2009

Scott and I have been seeing tons of Escalades lately and so the other day while on the road we rang up Lisa and asked her to look up the meaning for us. It was "an act of scaling, especially the walls of a fortification" Both Scott and I have felt a clearing of our schedules, a feeling that we are being prepared for the next thing.
The definition of escalade rang true to that feeling. Yesterday, during an impromptu women's prayer meeting after church at the Olson's, Zeke was sitting on the floor chanting to himself, "Jerico, Jerico, Jerico" and I thought, yep, there is a fortification that was scaled, in an entirely different way.

So we wait, to find out if we will be using the standard ladders to scale the walls of the fortress we are to conquer next, or if instead we will take a less common path and dance around singing until they fall down at God's bidding.

Oh, and we don't actually know what the walls are yet either...but that is okay.

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Thursday, April 13, 2006

Loving Google Calendar

Google Calendar

If you have not yet tried the new Google Calendar, do so now! I am already loving it! I have been looking for a new online calendar solution for a over a year and now I have finally found a winner!

While I usually beat up on Google for many of their latest products, I am greatly enjoying their new online calendar! It works very very well!

Blink It

Anonymous dibau naum h said...

I didn't do any evaluation of GC yet, but do use a great online calendar, called 30boxes (

It has some really cool features, such as natural language interface, & harvesting web data into your calendar (e.g., your blog posts).

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Resolve this: Hypnosis for Weight Loss

It’s a Weighty Issue – Food Choice, Portion Control, and Motivation to Exercise

Connie Brannan, CHt. & Licensed Trainer of NLP® shares her personal and professional insights into success with weight management.  Connie has used the tools of NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming and self hypnosis to transform herself:

From this...
From this…
Happy and healthy with hypnosis.
To this!

Find your healthy with Mindworks Hypnosis
Find your healthy!

It’s a Weighty Issue – Part I: Food Choice

It seems that a large percentage of the population is thinking about their weight and dieting at any given moment, reading about this new diet, that new food plan, purchasing diet products, and/or in the midst of dieting. Our weight truly is a national obsession.

So, why do diets and food plans fail so miserably to help people achieve a healthy weight and stay there? A “diet” is a conscious (thinking) endeavor. It involves analysis, logic, and willpower.  That can’t cut it long term.

There’s more power in the mind beyond thinking.  We are driven by unconscious (outside of awareness) desires.

We THINK we know why we do what we do. And we’d be wrong. Weight management and issues therein are a complex web beyond conscious choices They involve unconscious patterns of behaviors, and embedded beliefs about ourselves and the world that can limit us. These unconscious drivers are just that, unconscious, beyond our awareness. They get embedded in us and like a program installed on a computer they run and run and run.

What is the benefit of hypnotherapy for weight loss? We can actually get in there and address and change these patterns of unconscious behaviors and limiting beliefs. Update the programs running in us. Change how we feel and what we do. These changes lead to long-term sustained weight loss success and weight management.

Weight loss is a weighty issue. Yes, it is. There’s a lot involved. In my office working with clients we address a variety of changes that may be useful. I’m planning a series of essays which I intend to share here and on my blog, dealing with the issues hypnosis helps such as food choice, portion control, emotional eating, motivation to exercise, self image, negative self talk, limiting beliefs, time management and priorities, and more aspects of the weight management puzzle.

The number one change needed on everybody’s list is food choice — is there a predilection toward sugars and sweets? And/or too many carbs such as pasta, pizza, and potatoes? Not enough vegies? Drinking enough water? I’ve heard it all, uncontrollable attraction to unhealthy choices, such as cookies, chocolate, candy, cake, donuts, sugary sodas, French fries, chips, etc. And the gamut of ho-hum all the way to aversion responses to healthy choices.

Willpower alone can’t cut it!  What is willpower? It activates during the “I want it” vs. “No, I’m not going to have it.” struggle. We’re torn between two competing desires. Willpower is the conscious mind taking control and activating a conscious decision. Usually, it’s the “no.” Willpower is weak. Willpower is difficult to maintain long term (yo-yo dieting proves this).

With skilled hypnosis, we erase the need for willpower altogether. Let me say that again. We get rid of any need for willpower. Willpower is forced to the surface when there’s a struggle. What if there were no struggle? What if your brain just said “no” automatically? There’d be no use for willpower and it wouldn’t even come into play. You’d just be doing something different because it feels right.

For example: I have no interest or desire to jump out of an airplane for sport. NONE. In fact, it’s not going to happen. It’s on my “no way” list. Do I obsess about jumping out of an airplane? Of course not. It never enters my mind. Do I struggle to force myself not to jump? Of course not. Do I jump? No. It’s not what I do. What if eating unhealthy became a “no” rather than a struggle? That’s what skilled hypnotherapy achieves. Will power goes back on the shelf. Don’t need it!  We move beyond the willpower struggle.

Here are some of my client results/comments regarding activation of this change:

“Hi Connie, Just had to send along this spread of the party I was at last night. All of the things I find the hardest to resist! Meats, cheeses, bread, crackers, nuts. It was so nothing to me! I didn’t have ONE THING! And the best part was I didn’t WANT one thing!

It’s just so amazing to me. I am sure it’s “another day at the office” for you but, for me…oh my goodness it was so awesome to not obsess over having it or not…wow. Thank you!!!”  – Lori H., Mercer Island, WA

Is her willpower in play? No. The craving for these particular food choices is gone.

“I’ve lost 40# in 4 months… My sweet tooth and chip obsession disappeared overnight.  My self esteem skyrocketed.  It’s been months since I’ve seen you and yet I’m still right on track with my goals.” E. – Seattle. Is her willpower in play? No.

“I don’t crave ice cream at all now!  Or chocolate.  I am in shock!!!”– Saliha B., Issaquah, WA.  Is her willpower in play? No.

I hope you get the picture here. These people are not “dieting” to avoid sweets and “temptations” and they’re not struggling, they’re just automatically choosing different in ways that serve their weight management success. That’s what skilled hypnosis can do. Hypnosis creates the positive changes that move people by addressing and changing the unconscious patterns. No diet can do that.

Hypnosis stops overeating.
Hypnosis stops overeating

It’s a Weighty Issue – Part II:  When to Say When

I love helping people with weight loss. People come into my office and itemize their issues: what they eat, when they eat, why they eat (when they’re not hungry), how fast they eat, and all the accompanying aspects of self image and internal dialog, limiting beliefs, and so on. Many things need tweaking for success.

The topic of the moment is: Portion Control. When to say when. How to become attuned to the right amount of food for your body and energy needs. How to eat less and enjoy it more. Here is part two of my continuing essays on the various aspects of the “Weighty Issue” of weight loss and weight management, and the successes to be had through Neuro Linguistic Hypnotherapy.

Our mind has unconscious strategies for everything we do. How we act, how we think, what we choose, what we perceive as real. We acquire these strategies through learning. They become embedded in us like programs running on a computer, which we then call “habits.” Habits are learned, and they can be unlearned.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP–a conversational hypnosis) studies successful unconscious strategies, and we can grab, install, and live those strategies in ourselves. In studies of naturally slender people, we have successfully gathered naturally slender food strategies. Via NLP and hypnosis, we can install these into people who would benefit from them. This is a necessary piece of the work I do with clients! A client can adopt an unconscious new strategy and find themselves engaging in new behaviors without any mental effort.

We get clients in tune with physical hunger vs. emotional hunger. The mind can notice the difference. Emotional hunger is “fed” in new non-caloric ways. Physical hunger leads to a healthy choice strategy in the mind, meaning you’re more likely to reach for an apple rather than a cookie, a salad rather than a cheeseburger and fries. We implant a speed strategy, how fast to eat. Slowing it down is usually helpful. We implant a beverage of choice strategy: water! And then most importantly, we implant an exit strategy. When to STOP EATING. This is set at the point of satisfaction, when the body’s nutritional and energy needs are met in accordance with achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.

There are, sadly, desperate people out in the world who don’t realize the control they have over their own minds and bodies, and they go to bizarre extremes like surgeries that attempt to PHYSICALLY limit food intake. That’s not necessary! Installing new unconscious strategies with hypnosis creates better success, without the expense or health risks.

When it’s all said and done, the weight loss client finds themselves engaging in:

–Less emotional eating

–Healthier choices

–Smaller portions

–More satisfaction.

It’s all good.

If your unconscious strategies (habits around food) need adjustment, it’s so much easier than you think to make healthy changes.

It’s a Weighty Issue, Part III:  Let’s Get Moving

Motivation to Exercise with Hypnosis
Motivation to Exercise with Hypnosis

Beyond food choice and portion control, motivation to exercise is high up on the list of changes desired for weight management. “Let’s get physical, physical! I wanna get physical …” That song with its driving beat makes me think of movement. Working out.  Active life. Neuro-Linguistic Hypnotherapy is a way to make it happen.

Patterns and habits are learned. And, if they don’t serve us, they can be re-learned differently, in ways that help.

The “magic” of NLP is, simply put: We can attach new feelings to any activity. What would it be like to be full of energy and motivation to exercise? What if exercise became something wonderful and pleasurable and eagerly anticipated? What if your mind simply said: “This is who I am and this is what I do”? Do you suppose it would be easier to increase your physical activity level?

Here’s one unwanted pattern that I often see with clients:  couch potato. Are you one? That’s a person who has developed a habit of sitting around, watching TV or surfing the web, with a body at rest for hours at a stretch. Oftentimes, this is coupled with mindless eating. That’s a sure fire formula for obesity.

With hypnosis and NLP, we can change “I’m too lazy” and couch-potato habits into a new mindset about exercise. A new mindset leads to new behaviors. In our work, we create and install new, useful mindsets for exercise. Here are some examples:

–I love it. It’s fun.

–It’s my routine. It’s just who I am and what I do.

–I have to. (a sense of urgency and necessity)

A combination of any of the above.

New beliefs go with the new mindset:

–I’m an active person. I’m a healthy person. I have energy. I make the time to be physically active, as this is something wonderful for me. This is “me” time. I deserve healthy.

And new behaviors emerge:

I go to the gym. I go for walks. I find the time. I look for opportunities for movement, taking the stairs rather than the elevator, parking a little further from the store front, and so on.

Hypnosis (and in that word I include NLP) is a way to change your thinking and feeling and behaviors and beliefs to become who you want to be. It really is endlessly fascinating work as every person is different and their desires , beliefs and motivations are different. The game and the fun is finding what will work with each individual and installing those changes. This is why I often say hypnosis is an art form as much as it is a science.

Motivation to be active physically is just one piece of this puzzle, within a larger framework of healthy changes.  Everyone on the planet knows how to lose weight. It’s a very simple and well-documented formula. Eat less, make healthy choices, and be more active. What stops you? We find out and we address those things and create new habits. The power of hypnosis and NLP is that they are tools that encourage new healthy behaviors, and help people automate those choices.

Happy and healthy with hypnosis.
Connie Brannan, CHt. & Licensed Trainer of NLP

Warm Regards,

You can also find out more general information of the successes to be had with these mind technologies of hypnotherapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming here:

All material contained herein is Copyright © Connie Brannan, CHt. and may not be reproduced without permission


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Monday, April 7, 2014

Hank the Ranger

While G.I.Joe is my favorite property from my childhood, the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon comes a close second. In fact, if we just talk cartoons, the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon is my all time favorite cartoon.

I'm not sure what that says about me...

Hank was the leader of the gang trapped in the "realm" of Dungeons and Dragons and, let's face it, was kind of the boring leader guy. He's the Cyclops of the group.

It's also kind of interesting that for the oldest member of the group, Hank is the only character who doesn't have a love interest or at least have someone show interest in him during the cartoon's run. Even Eric had a queen almost marry him (although she *was* evil, so maybe that doesn't count.)

Anyway, for Hank, I modified a Heroclix Legolas, removing the quiver and adding Hank's collar thingy. I considered trying to make his awesome hair, but didn't think I could pull it off.

Would He Stay Or Would He Go?

Initially, the kids were all looking for the way home, but I think some might elect to stay in the Realm. Hank is a good fighter and has a strong urge to do good, but in the end, I think his sense of responsibility would make him return home.

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Saturday, May 1, 2010

Celebrate Mother's Day with the Perfect Book

Mother's Day is this Sunday May 9! While dinner and flowers are the tradition, why not make your celebration more special by giving her a book or two. You can make the selection yourself or make a date with your mom to visit her favorite bookstore.

Long after the candy is gone and the flowers are past their prime, your mom will still be enjoying the book you have selected for her special day. Here are my top 20 suggestions for the special woman in your life:

  • The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel by Sarah Addison Allen ISBN: 978-0553807219
  • The God of the Hive: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King ISBN: 978-0553805543
  • House Rules: A Novel by Jodi Picoult ISBN: 978-0743296434
  • The Inn at Angel Island by Thomas Kinkade ISBN: 978-0425234341
  • The Postmistress by Sarah Blake ISBN: 978-0399156199
  • The Telling by Beverly Lewis ISBN: 978-0764205736
  • The Walk: A Novel by Richard Paul Evans ISBN: 978-1439187319
  • Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert ISBN: 978-0670021659
  • Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk by Robyn Okrant ISBN: 978-1599952390
  • Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard ISBN: 978-0316042796
  • Day-votions for Women: Heart to Heart Encouragement by Rebecca Barlow Jordan ISBN: 978-0310322030
  • Dreaming of Dior: Every Dress Tells a Story by Charlotte Smith ISBN: 978-1439187555
  • Giada at Home: Family Recipes from Italy and California by Giada De Laurentiis ISBN: 978-0307451019
  • The Good Mother's Guide by Ladies' Homemaker Monthly ISBN: 978-1604331424
  • The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman by Karen Karbo ISBN: 978-1599215235
  • Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom by Kristin van Ogtrop ISBN: 978-0316068284
  • The Little Big Book for Moms, 10th Anniversary Edition by Lena Tabori ISBN: 978-1599620756
  • Mom Rules: Notes on Motherhood, the World's Best Job by Jill Milligan ISBN: 978-1602399877
  • Mommy Prayers: For *the missing binkie *the late preschool pickup *the birthday party from hell...and other everyday absurdities by Tracy Mayor ISBN: 978-1401323721
  • Paula Deen's Savannah Style by Paula Deen ISBN: 978-1416552246
Don't forget that Mother's Day is not only a day for celebrating mothers and motherhood, but also for celebrating all the special women in your life including step moms, aunts, sisters, cousins, in-laws, and godmothers. Consider buying a special book for each.

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