Thoughts on our American Gun Culture

As with so many others, I've been thinking about the Newtown shootings quite a bit. Usually I ignore these tragedies...after all, we have so many shootings in America. But having so many elementary schoolers shot, for an unknown motive, when I have a seven year old son that I've not seen in person for a few weeks due to my job in the city while he's back home in the middle of DeerHuntin', PA...that disturbed me.

I am in a tough spot. Many of my coworkers were horrified by what happened. There was some comfort in that, some measure of not feeling quite so alone here in the big city while my family is over a hundred miles away.

But there are some coworkers who are, to put it mildly, gun enthusiasts. There's a chilling effect to know that you really shouldn't express much of an opinion on the matter lest you bubble some animosity to the surface; to be fair, they may be feeling under attack now, since there is some rather vocal anti-gun sentiment against those who feel a need to collect a small arsenal in their basements.

It's best to just not say much at all. And I for the most part kept my comments in check. I'd say a few snark things here and there using Twitter and that was about the extent of it. But there always has to be someone who decides to damage my calm.

Apparently Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican representative from Texas (color me surprised) said that "Having been a judge and reviewed photographs of these horrific scenes and knowing that children have these defensive wounds, gun shots through their arms and hands as they try to protect themselves, and, hearing the heroic stories of the principal, lunging, trying to protect, Chris, I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids."

 Seriously?

Apparently they are serious. This is the same type of bullshit we heard when James Holmes shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. "If only the audience full of law abiding citizens were armed! They could have taken the shooter out before he killed those people!"

These same advocates ignored the followup where it was found that if someone did happen to have the wits about them enough to draw a weapon, AND realize who the person was causing the panic among the chaos, the odds are they would have ended up shooting people fleeing the theater instead of actually shooting the killer. Oh, and he was wearing bullet resistant protection...better make the first shots count.

 That truly made me twitch. Literally, I had a twitch from the muscles on the side of my face. Did these people ever actually work in a public school? Have they had experience dealing with people who don't fantasize about killing everyone around them the way they themselves apparently do?

Are they aware they aren't actually in one of these action movies?

Was this guy aware that the teachers he wanted to arm are the same teachers that his party platform are accusing of being overpaid, overcompensated, and largely incompetent? Now he wants to arm them?

This was when I tried to better understand why people feel a need for such weaponry. I'm not a stranger to guns. I enjoyed target shooting. I grew up in a town that had days off school for hunting. Guns, church, and beer are pretty much the top three things that keep my home town's economy fueled before the gas fracking companies moved in, and all that did was add "fleecing those damn gas workers" to the list of income for businessmen and slumlords.  I was in a town that made guns a hobby nearly as important as NASCAR.

But I still couldn't understand the fervent need for people to own large guns.

So what reasons are being put forth to support the pro-gun groups?


"I have a right to defend myself." I can understand that, being in a scary city. You never know when someone scary, like basically anyone who isn't you, might steal your wallet or threaten to rape you in an alley or look at you in a strange manner. It's comforting to feel the weight of that pistol holstered to your side.

The thing I wondered was that if robberies and assaults generally took place within reach of a baseball bat's distance from you, why are you using a weapon that is ideally able to whap a target a few blocks away? That means that if you were to miss your target, or the bullet goes through the target, you risk hitting an innocent bystander.

Why are you using a gun for self defense when you could use a taser or mace, or perhaps invest in  martial arts training?

I suppose there are some that would say that the criminal could have a gun. In that case, you're already at a disadvantage, if he's already got a weapon drawn and aimed at you.

"Drunk drivers kill people! Should we ban cars?" That was a great reply because it was blatantly stupid. No auto dealer sells you a car with the expectation that you're going to run someone over. If I pull out a pocket knife, people generally don't assume I'm going to start slashing them with it. Pull out a gun, and you're going to get a panic from people around you.

Why?

Because guns are used for one thing. Putting holes in things. Targets. Animals. People.

These massacres aren't accidents. These guns are doing precisely what they're made to do; kill things. You're not misusing the gun. It's not like someone took a break from using their Glock as a cooking implement and decided in a moment of angry passion to turn someone's brain into a decorative wall pattern.

This is a "false equivalency" fallacy.

 "I use a gun because I need protection from the government." Or some other relation to the second amendment, back when guns took three minutes to reload and were laughably inaccurate over a distance of more than fifty feet.

Here's my question. You have your guns, or your basement arsenal, and you are going to protect yourself from the government when they come knockin'. Has there ever been a successful outcome of this game for the people with the home arsenal? Waco? Ruby Ridge?

It seems to me that the government, with tanks, fighters, well trained militia, body armor, drones, bombs capable of blowing up bunkers hundreds of feet underground...

...probably isn't all that afraid of what you have. I remember a case in California where a guy in body armor did substantial damage (notice he's not around anymore?) before he could be stopped and another case where a guy welded steel plates to a bulldozer to create his own tank before going on a rampage (notice he's not around anymore?) so I concede that you can do a lot of damage before someone takes you out.

But someone will still take you out.

"I use a gun to protect my family." I question this because this insinuates you feel your family is in danger, yet all most of these people do is have a few guns in the house. That's not always the case, though. Do you also bar the windows? Have a panic room? Is the door frame steel, to prevent someone from kicking it in? Do you have security cameras? Fencing around the perimeter?

Or just the guns?

Having the weapon also supposes that accidents cannot happen. True enthusiasts relish telling you how careful they are; gun locks, gun lockers, teaching kids to use guns "responsibly." Yet every year there are stories of kids shot because they were playing with daddy's gun. Or the gun slipped and went off "accidentally." Or a kid was shot because he was sneaking in late at night and Daddy thought it was an intruder.

So many people who honestly wanted to protect their families end up killing them instead.

And when the stories do come out, it's always someone else's fault. Always. My Dad was shot in the leg by a ricochet from a rock; should have been more careful with his backstop! The person that killed all those kids in Newtown? He was mentally ill! It's irresponsible to let him have access to those weapons, of course bad things happen!

 Which brings up the latest spin on the elementary school massacre. "Mental illness is the REAL problem. We need to address that!"

This hearkens back to the core message of the Republican party. Responsibility for one's own actions. See, guns don't kill people. People kill people. Crazy people getting guns, they kill people. We normal, sane, law-abiding citizens pose no threat, because we're sane, responsible people! We need to focus on treating the mentally ill!

This is also the same party that opposes healthcare coverage that isn't for-profit, putting healthcare out of reach for most of the Americans that need it. Ironic, isn't it? Maybe it's cognitive dissonance.

I'll point out that there's no definitive test to show when or if someone will snap. Most guns used in crimes are obtained legally, after all. I'm not exactly sure how they plan on "treating the mentally ill" or rounding them up before they get guns if there's no way to know if someone is truly mentally stable before they go on a shooting spree.

And what about the law-abiding perfectly sane people with weapons that have a kid who is unstable? Does the idea that "just because someone went nuts and killed a bunch of people doesn't mean I should have to give up my gun" extend to the people who have kids or family members who are potentially unstable? Are they going to start screening all members of a home before allowing you to have a gun?

What's the solution? Banning guns? "If you ban guns, people will just find other ways to kill each other!" Will there still be murders? Most likely. But hearing this argument gives me a couple of questions; first, in countries with stricter laws limiting access to guns, why do we not hear of the stream of bombings, poisonings, and other supervillain-esque schemes to murder masses of people? Come to think of it, our murder rate is something like three or four times higher than France.

Take a look at the list of homicides by country from Wikipedia. It doesn't take a genius to see, even at a glance, that we're doing something really wrong compared to similarly developed countries.

That's really strange to me to hear gun advocates vehemently denying that something is wrong with the way we approach gun regulation in our country. Looking at the numbers, how can you not think there's a better way?

Second, the goal isn't necessarily to eliminate homicide, but rather to reduce homicides. Raise the bar, so to speak, on how easy it is to kill each other. When most gun crimes are committed using legally obtained weapons, shouldn't we examine just how easy it is to obtain guns? Maybe if it were a little more difficult to pick up a gun and squeeze the trigger on impulse, maybe there would be fewer deaths.

"The real answer is to have everyone carry concealed weapons!" This one is another one that makes me wonder how far into the non-reality bubble these people are. Everyone? Armed? Are they aware that the majority of people out there probably aren't as anxious to shoot other people as they are? I really wonder if these advocates are just chomping at the bit for an excuse to blow someone else away, and rely on the laws allowing easy access to weapons as a form of validation that this is normal.

The logic goes along the lines of, "If everyone is armed, then gunmen won't shoot anyone, because they know that they'll be killed right away." Because of course lunatics think about surviving their rampage and are normally rational people, and it also ignores the fact that even experienced shooters miss. That was driven home by a recent shooting in NYC wherein the police...trained police...shot 3 and injured a total of 9 civilians in an attempt to hit a lone gunman near the Empire State Building. When trained policemen end up wounding more people than the shooters, I question the wisdom of just arming civilians who are a little too anxious to carry death in a hand-sized package.

It sounds to me as if they live in some kind of action movie fantasy, where everyone is suddenly turned into a SEAL team member by virtue of just having a Glock strapped to his or her side.

But this approach is the opposite of they "They want to ban all guns!" mentality, where the retort is that people will find creative ways to kill each other anyway.

The implication is that if you level the playing field, criminals will be criminals anyway, and will continue to find ways to kill people. Evidently these people who live in an action movie set to continually loop in their heads never paid attention to Batman.

There's a scene in the movie Batman Begins where Commissioner Gordon expresses some concern regarding the impact of masked vigilantes running around the city (quote culled from IMDB):

Batman:Well Sergeant
Jim Gordon:Its Lieutenant now, you really started something, bent cops running scared, hope on the streets
Batman:But?
Jim Gordon:We still haven't picked up Crane or half the inmates he released from the asylum
Batman:We will, we can bring Gotham back
Jim Gordon:What about escalation?
Batman:Escalation?
Jim Gordon:We start carrying semi automatics, they buy automatics, we start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds, and *you're* wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops. take this guy: armed robbery, double homicide. Got a taste for the theatrical, like you. Leaves a calling card. 

See, if everyone, or a significant portion of the public, were carrying guns, wouldn't that mean the same scenario as pro-gun advocates spelled out with banning guns, that nutjobs would just start using more "creative" ways to kill people? If they're not willing to just kill people with guns and ending their own lives out of fear of being shot by the gun-loving public, you'll just end up with bombings and poisonings and other supervillain-y type behavior, using their own brand of logic.

The real question is, why do you need these weapons? Isn't there a reasonable compromise that can be made?

I'm a fan of target shooting. Others in my family are big on hunting. And living in rural PA, there are times we see things like bear roaming in the back yard. Plus I really do hate deer...anything to keep their population down and minimize my car insurance is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

But has PETA been going around arming deer so that hunters require AR-15's to take out deer? (Which might actually be awesome as a reality series, by the way...)

Can't we limit access to guns in a sensible fashion? You're not going to hold off a mob if civilization collapses. The government that can kill with remote-control drones is by no measure afraid of you and your collection of rifles. And you're not John McClane or James Bond.

It's time to become more practical. There are far more deaths through accidents, suicides and homicides than are prevented by citizens brandishing guns, and perhaps it's time to scale back the tools of lethality to a more manageable level. Looking at the numbers and statistics compared to other countries, it's sheer delusion to not think there's a better way.

"But this is America. Not some Socialist/Communist country. AMERICA!" You're right. Other first-world countries have fewer of their citizens killing each other with guns. It would be nice if citizens of the Greatest Country on the Planet had lower odds of being shot than those living in France.

EDIT - Found some interesting graphs created by Mark Reid (@mdreid) on Twitter. Go ahead and have a look...an illustration of my previous assertion that even glancing at this information tells me that something is seriously wrong with the way the US handles guns.

Basic Presentation Notes

Whenever I watch a video of a TED talk or listen to a podcast, I can't help but think about presentation style. Some part of my brain can't simply listen to the topic; I hear how they're presenting it, and pick apart the style.

Consequently if the speaker commits some way-too-common errors in style I find it too distracting to actually hear the message the speaker intends to convey. Obviously if you're trying to communicate a message to an audience anything you do to distract the audience will lessen your effectiveness as a speaker.

I was again reminded of this while listening to a presentation at a recent Skepticon conference by Jessica Ahlquist. If you don't know her name, she was embroiled in a controversy over a prayer displayed in her school culminating in lawsuits and threats against her.

I believe she's 17 years old in this presentation, and it reminded me of when I was working with a school district and thinking that while she made some of the basic annoying mistakes (fillers!) overall she was a fantastic presenter compared to most people her age. And by most, I mean 99% of people in her age group.

The presenter mistakes she did make still triggered my mental list of "Why is this so hard?!" presentation gaffes. The list, in no particular order (and not entirely pertaining to Ms. Ahlquist's presentation) are:

1. Not eliminating fillers from your vocabulary. You know them. Usually they come out as "Um..." and "Uh..." They're a habit you can do without. Following a close second after the monosyllabic fillers are the fill phrases that make me want to reach out and smack you across the face. With an aluminum bat. Phrases like, "You know?," and, "Like, whatever." Speakers onstage not speaking about people with brain damage or imitating youth should never utter such things.
2. Not ditching the gum. Part of this is my own quirk in brain chemistry; I can't stand gum chewers. That may go back to hearing people talk about how fat people can't control themselves and always have to stuff their faces, but this would be coming from a person chomping gum all slack-jawed. I don't need to see and hear the intricate squishing of saliva while you masticate your corporate sponsored tooth- and breath-cleansing propaganda. While onstage, drink water if you need something in your mouth. Otherwise I spend WAY too much time hoping for you to choke much in the way NASCAR fans hope for a crash.
3. Standing as if rigor mortis is setting in. Standing stiff behind a podium is boring. Animated speakers help engage the audience. I'm not saying you need to run around like a pop star on meth, but it would be nice to know that we're watching a live show. Otherwise you could have just sent an audio recording. Make eye contact with the audience. Gesture a little (not to the point where you resemble a windmill at a mini-putt course, though.)
4. Using your PowerPoint as the presentation. If your entire presentation communicates your point just as effectively by printing out your PowerPoint slides and handing them out, there's no reason for you to give a presentation on a stage or with a microphone. People will fall asleep just as readily from the handouts as they will in your presentation, too. So don't do it. PowerPoint is supposed to complement your presentation, not be the presentation.
5. Failing to rehearse your show. You should know what you're going to talk about and the arc of your topic. You can tell the people that don't rehearse; they are the ones that are basically reading the giant screen behind them with their PowerPoint, using it as a set of cue cards. Or worse, basically regurgitating the information from the PowerPoint to you, like some reverse subtitle system. Ideally, you should be able to start your PowerPoint presentation on a timer and hit the beats while the presentation is basically running on autopilot behind you.
6. Starting off a presentation by saying you're not good at these sort of things. That sets a rather poor tone for the rest of your presentation. If you're not good at giving presentations, believe me, the audience will know it.

Obviously these points focus on stage presentations in front of an audience and wouldn't pertain to audio-only presentations such as podcasts. What do you think? Are there other presentation pain points you run across that distract you or drive you nuts?

Self Doubt in the New Workplace

I remember hearing a story once about how circus elephants are (or were) trained.

A young man is walking around the circus when he sees a large elephant tied to a pole using a thin rope. The man walks up to the trainer and asks, "How can you keep that elephant tied to this stick using just this thing rope? Can't it pull itself free?"

The trainer said, "Well, I'm sure it could if it tried. But it won't. When he was a baby we kept him chained to a large stake. He would struggled for awhile, but the chain was thick enough and the stake strong enough that he couldn't get loose. After awhile, he just stops trying. Now the sensation of resistance around his leg is enough to make him think he can't move beyond the reach of the rope."

This story illustrates the idea of learned helplessness.  Basically you become trained to the notion that something is pointless, so why bother trying to change it?

I bring this up because sometimes these learned responses can be insidiously difficult to change. Even when we become conscious of the effects.

My previous job had aspects that I eventually realized were toxic. Maybe these elements are ingrained in the field, maybe there is some kind of institutional momentum perpetuating the elements, maybe it's the culture of the organization or maybe it's any of a dozen other reasons all mixed together, but in the end it doesn't matter except to realize that these elements formed a toxic environment, not just in which to work but an environment where the toxic nature became part of who we are as employees. It was this realization that partially led me to take the risk of moving to the city, by myself, leaving my family behind so that I could try working for a company that held the promise of being different.

I've been working with the new employer for approximately five months. I've had one review session with fairly positive things to say. I recently got a message from our manager in the office saying that he was scheduling a "1 on 1" session with each person on the team, just to review things like what we enjoy with the company and what things could be changed and see that we're all on the same page. I could see in the schedule that my block was only half an hour.

On the surface, this doesn't look like anything to really worry about.

But I realized that when I first read this message, I became anxious. The first thoughts going through my head were worries that this was a meeting where I was going to get a warning of some sort, or possibly told that I was going to be fired.

Was I going to be criticized for some perceived deficiency? Had I offended someone? What would I do, with a lease on the apartment and bills to pay, if he were going to ask me for my keys and badge?

Granted, all these worries were fleeting thoughts. I have no real reason to think that the message hid anything more sinister than what was printed at face value in the text. He had talked to one team member already, and the rest of us on the sysadmin team were scheduled for a session as well. If there were problems I really have no reason to think I wouldn't be told about perceived shortcomings and given a chance to remedy them.

But I still had those thoughts.

Thinking back, the previous job, which I had for over a decade, didn't really have a system of feedback or evaluation. When the boss wants to talk to you, it wasn't a congratulations. It was for a dressing down. Sometimes you knew why before going in, if something big had just happened. More often than not, though, you would be simply given a brief, "Can I see you in my office?" type message with no indication of what the reason was, giving no opportunity to brace yourself or defend yourself.

Consequently, you came to loathe those times when a higher-up wanted to see you.

I became trained to use the CYA principle: "Cover Your Ass." Document things. Don't use the phone, because then you'd never have a way to prove that you or the other person said what you thought was said. Avoid anything that could mean you would fail, or even be associated with the failure, because when things go wrong you may be in line to have blame assigned to you. Victories and credit went to whoever could claim the ring first. Blame was claimed by whoever didn't get out of the way in time.

There were times where it felt like the previous job...in the public education sector...is in part a culture of blame, not one of responsibility. It was a culture that trained you to think that you aren't good enough to do more, and ingrained a fear of failing because there was a stigma attached.


I realize that this is one of my biggest faults in my new job environment. I feel perpetually stupid; missing things that I should have caught, or not knowing something that I feel I should know by now. I have a question and my first thought is to ask someone for the answer (and subsequently interrupting what they're working on) when my first impulse should be to work harder at ferreting an answer for myself, but I fear the responsibility of screwing up. Because then I would get the blame, and with it the stigma of failure, and failure is the kind of thing that isn't tolerated.

The thing is that failure is tolerated here. We had a recent series of unfortunate events wherein one of the seasoned admins made a mistake related to FSMO roles on Active Directory servers; it was a mistake that had...well, has...potential to create a number of problems. When going through a list of some servers that were offline, I commented on the one being down and another admin said, "That server can't be brought up. Ever. If we did, it would cause all sorts of problems with Active Directory."

Thinking back over events, I remembered the sheepish embarrassment from the admin that committed the error. But it was rarely ever brought up. The mistake was made, he acknowledged it, and the important thing to the team was to move ahead and keep things working through the crisis. I think he beat himself up more than anyone on the team did.


This is a different place. Part of me wants to believe that. Playing by these different rules...where failure could be an option...it feels like a trick. At the last minute the promise will be jerked away and what looked like cake is really nothing but paper towels covered in frosting (and am I the only one old enough to remember this reference?)

This is a different place.

Things are different now.

Keep telling myself that and maybe I'll eventually believe it.

It's November, Time For Christmas!

The holiday season is upon us. To me it is best epitomized through RetailMeNot's holiday mascot, the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus.

The Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus is the good saint of the OctoNovemCember holiday. You know, the holiday that used to be Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, before crazed shoppers and retail outlets started mashing them all together to create a massive purchaspalooza celebration of consumergasms?

Yeah, that holiday.

I feel as if I'm in the minority. It's possible that I simply don't remember the past through anything other than a kid's naive eyes, but I don't remember having Christmas decorations up in stores before the Halloween candy was removed from shelves. I don't remember the Christmas music drowning out the Thanksgiving decorations either. And it seems every year the holidays still months away are getting shelf space earlier and earlier.

Thanksgiving doesn't even get much attention anymore, save for the football ads. In its place are flyers for Black Friday sales.

Of course many retailers realize that people who just want cheap gifts for Christmas may be getting tired of the occasional trampling and shoulder to shoulder crowds. There are people who take some kind of masochistic pleasure in the ritual of gorging on the Thanksgiving turkey and camping out for hours that night to be among the first to get into Wal-Mart and Target the next day, but plenty of others are just as happy getting their shopping done online with "Cyber Monday" deals.

But if everyone did their shopping on "Cyber Monday," where's the retail advantage in that? As Cyber Monday became more popular among the online savvy, retailers decided to move their deals so online savings can be had earlier, and lasting longer, as well. Like the pet boutique "Funny Fur", which decided to offer their savings from Thanksgiving day through Monday. Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the early online sales potential.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise, though. It fits the pattern. At first, holidays were celebrated on the actual holiday. Holiday cheer was reserved for the week before, a gradual buildup to the big day. Halloween was preceded by choosing costumes, maybe a holiday party at school, and anticipation of various candies and chocolate goodies. Thanksgiving had some sports events, true, but was also accompanied by feelgood (if not mostly fictional) stories of Pilgrims and friendly natives commiserating over a meal from a fortunate harvest. And Christmas? Christmas ruled the holiday season, with hopes of snow days from school fueling dreams of not just ham dinner with family but the big paper-shredding morning as boxes were sifted from the bedazzling blinking strands of lights adorning the Christmas tree. This had to be followed by watching A Christmas Story at least three times over the course of the day, no matter how much my family complained.

This wasn't good enough for retailers, though.

Sales were made by shoving the holiday purchasing message earlier. Halloween costumes go on sale as soon as the weather turns in these parts. Now it's not unusual to see Christmas trees for sale before Halloween night, except for grocery stores where Thanksgiving meals and ensuing football parties still drive their profits.

Not that it's really easy to notice, since various towns have decided to have designated "trick or treat" nights that are rarely actually on Halloween. In my home town adjacent townships have their own schedules, so it's possible, if you wanted, to trick or treat three or four times by crossing borders, and nothing is actually scheduled on Halloween itself for fear of kids pulling "pranks." At least, I suppose that's the reason for the wonky scheduling. Maybe it's a conspiracy to make it seem not so weird for candy to be on clearance sale as snowmen and blinking Santas are placed on the walls of Target on the night before Halloween.

The Christmas Spirit isn't so much absorbed over December as it is injected into your brain all of November and courses through your system like an earworm through December. Honestly, by the time Christmas rolls around, I'm relieved at the promise that the stores will stop playing the same damn tunes over and over.

It's not that I hate the holidays. Just today, November 19th, I sent this picture to the Twitterverse, saying it was a pretty sight:

It is a pretty tree, in my opinion. I do love blue!

I pretend it's not a Christmas tree, though.

Because it's November 19th.


So I agree with the tongue in cheek ads from RetailMeNot. We should have an OctoNovemCember. Complete with the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus. Because then all this retail mingling with religious legends would make sense. A three month consumer orgasm of food, gluttony and family dinners all rolled into one. We sit around and pretend that the holidays are about family and good spirit while racking up debt so our children have toys to scatter around the house and candy to rot in the sofa cushions.

OctoNovemCember. It's a holiday I might learn to enjoy. It's so much less disingenuous than what we have now.

Romney's Whale Fail: ORCA

I was recently introduced to the story that the Romney campaign had a massive IT failure during the election.

I try not to follow the mudslinging and such. I don't have a cable subscription. I don't actively see the latest gaffes and goofs along the way. As such, I hadn't been aware of the Romney campaign bragging in media outlets of his state of the art voter tracking system that was set to put him leagues above anything the Obama campaign had in place.

I ran into the story after the fact so it's hard for me to know that I would have predicted the scale of fail this project ended up becoming. Fortunately we have enough angry and schadenfreude-filled individuals that details are available for those who are curious. 

The gist was that ORCA was meant for volunteers on the ground at election places to track who is out voting and report back to Romney Central so they can coordinate targeted robo-calls to Republicans urging them to go out and vote while collecting the most up-to-date information on the progress of the election.

The Technology Fail

In the video, the communications director for the campaign, Gail Gitcho, gives the following details:

• 800 volunteers will be working in the Garden (their headquarters?) collecting information.
• They will have volunteers in the swing states, where votes "really do matter for the outcome of this election."
• The purpose of ORCA is really to target low-turnout in the target precincts for calling registered Republicans
• Narwhal is what Obama's campaign calls their similar tracking system, and Orcas are the predator to the narwhal, so that's the origin of the clever name.

That's really not much in the way of details, but I suppose it makes for a nice soundbite in an interview. I'll not comment on the fact that this highlighted yet another reason I am ambivalent about voting on our electoral college system (they're targeting only those precincts that "really do matter," eh? Thanks...) nor will I point out the irony that the campaign has characterized Obama supporters as entitled, lazy, unmotivated leeches and apparently ORCA was meant to motivate the Republicans who haven't gotten off their arses to vote for the real leader in the presidential race.

No need to point those out.

But what else can we find about the details of ORCA?

The Huffington Post had an article about plans for the massive poll-monitoring system:

•  It will rely on 34,000 volunteers in swing states to send back data
• Volunteers will be using smartphones to send information
• It will be a web application
• Volunteers log in, see names and ages of eligible voters, and report who has voted.
• Incorrect information, fraud, etc. can be reported from the application.
• There is some kind of social media tie-in so volunteers can send instant messages of what they're seeing in their polling places.
• A link to what is claimed to be the training manual for the software shows what could be a rather strange screwup in the FAQ section, saying: "The answer to Question 13 -- "Am I allowed to speak on my cell phone inside the polling place?" -- states, "Yes you may be allowed to use the smart phone inside the polling place. Please follow your poll manager's instructions." That answer appears to have been swapped with the answer to Question 11 -- "Am I allowed to use the smart phone app inside the polling place?" -- which currently reads, "No, you are only allowed to speak on your phone outside the voting area."

I'm hesitant to believe that is the actual training manual for volunteers; it is a 3 page document that literally appears to be something whipped up with PowerPoint. At best, it's a quick-reference guide for people with short attention spans; it's short on details. There must be more somewhere.

What other information can we find? An ArsTechnica piece claims the program was created over the course of 7 months.

Seven. Months.

The campaign apparently hired Microsoft and a consultant firm to create the application. Like other sources, it said that the application would be used by 37,000 volunteers sending data back to 800 volunteers at the headquarters, and there was a backup voice system that allowed people to phone in results if they couldn't access the web system.

It also says there were 11 database servers, one web server and one application server.

It's important to understand that when you hear these numbers, what isn't brought up is the architecture of the application(s) involved. We don't know how the application was structured; an inefficient architecture could double or triple the number of servers and/or bandwidth required to achieve what a "properly" architected solution would require. Even so, if those numbers are accurate, I find it troubling.

Why?

I work for a company that deals with some big numbers in terms of access and also happens to rely on Microsoft databases in the back end. Here's some numbers based on public information:

• 95 million page views a month
• 800 HTTP requests a second
• 180 DNS requests a second
• 55 Megabits per second

What was this running on?

• 10 web servers
• 2 database servers
• 2 HAProxy servers
• 2 Redis servers

What we see here is that the heavy work comes at the front end...the user interface...rather than the database side. There are a number of web servers handling the heavy lifting along with proxy servers to accommodate user interaction. The article gives technical specs for the systems used at the time, which were (and continue to be) beefy servers.

In other words, the big traffic concern is on the web server side, not the database side.

The article is quoting ORCA using 11 database servers and only on application and one web server?

Again, I don't know what the application is written in and what framework was used. But the numbers quoted give me some pause; at least enough to stop and say that is something that requires some in-depth real-world testing.

 Followed by the Training and Testing Fails

Next in the articles we see claims that the human side of the system had failed. The SD Times claimed in an article that ORCA wasn't released until 6AM on Election Day.

A massive, brand new system, set to work with over 40,000 people, was released the day it was meant to "go live" for use? Are you insane?

This, of course, led to other quirks that I'd come to expect when releasing a new project. None of the quirks are things you'd want to find on the day you're expected to make your best showing. Things like users not being able to log in because of incorrect username/password/PIN combinations, and the volunteers not being able to bring up the site because he or she used "http" instead of "https" in the URL name (which could have been a relatively easy fix if they had tested this beforehand.)

Apparently it wasn't until 6PM on Election day that they admitted the passwords and PINs issued for people in North Carolina and Colorado were wrong.

At one point ComCast shut them down because they thought it was a denial of service attack. In the ArsTechnica piece it was said: "They told us Comcast thought it was a denial of service attack and shut it down," Dittuobu recounted. "(Centinello) was giddy about it," he added—presumably because he thought that so much traffic was sign of heavy system use.

He was happy about the traffic being blocked? I'm really hoping this is a miscommunication. I can't imagine someone building a system dependent on receiving information for analysis being blocked by mistake and having it interpreted as a good thing during a key time in the election. "We're so popular they're cutting us off! Isn't that great?!"

No, it's not.

The Ars piece also stated that training packets arrived on Election Day Eve as late as 10PM consisting of 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls (so I don't know if that would mean the 3 page "manual" wasn't really the manual, since it didn't say how big the voter rolls were.) But really, they expected tech-illiterate volunteers to print all this out the night before?

Wouldn't a campaign spending millions on advertising not be able to afford to print these packets ahead of time and deliver them to volunteer centers for distribution?

What do I take away from this?

• Inadequate training for users
• Inadequate testing of the application using real-world usage models
• Inadequate communication of problems as they were occurring

Overall the program had a systematic failure at multiple levels. It wasn't just application design, or hardware, or training, or implementation and execution.

What I also found surprising, although in hindsight I probably shouldn't, was the hubris behind the application rollout. The campaign was bragging about this program leading up to the election. They ignored problems as they were occurring. And they didn't appear to hold any accountability behind the project.

Oh, the accountability...

Who Was to Blame?

I'm of course not privy to what happened behind closed doors, but the public story released in the aftermath should tell you something about leadership.

Bad things happen. Projects go south. Things go wrong.

Leaders are people who may not have directly had a hand in the problem, but they are the ones for whom the buck stops. Consequently they are responsible for acknowledging when something goes wrong, learning from the mistakes, and planning how to move ahead.

Things may get ugly in the "war room." Heads may roll. New holes are reamed. Maybe there's some screaming or moments of unprofessional language. But at some point the public response is formed and the game face is put on. Then the public sees the leader at work.

Mitt Romney was campaigning to become President of the United States. He repeatedly criticized Barack Obama's leadership of the country. Surely, he'd take responsibility for this failure and take his lumps.

Well, no. Not from what I found.

Redstate.com reported that it was all the consultant's fault. From the article:

They say that the truth is the consultants essentially used the Romney campaign as a money making scheme, forcing employees to spin false data as truth in order to paint a rosy picture of a successful campaign as a form of job security.

I have to admit there's a bit of humor to reading the quote, “the Obama training manuals made ORCA look like drunken monkey slapped together a powerpoint” however.

Instead of acknowledging the mistakes, the campaign apparently decided that it was all the consultant's fault, and then everything will sink away from memory because the election is over.

Funny how that works.

The failures here are played out more frequently than is generally paid attention to. It's almost a running gag; hire consultants, slap together an application with impossible deadlines, then blame the consultants when everything collapses. And of course, the people who hired the consultants in the first place take no responsibility for not actually performing oversight on the project.

In the end this once again demonstrated what kind of leader we almost elected. One filled with hubris, egos, and a culture of blame, and from the articles I've read on the project, I had the distinct impression that the campaign lived in some kind of bubble reality that denies the existence of issues that seem obvious to people outside that bubble.

The unfortunate part is that the events that unfolded here will no doubt be forgotten until they play out yet again in four years, and this will become little more than a footnote to quote when the next major technology failure occurs in a political campaign. Yay!

My First Snowstorm in New York

Today marks the first time I had the honor of shuffling through a snowfall in New York.

This was especially honorific since we weren't supposed to get snow. This is a "nor' easter" that was supposed to move farther inland and dump snow on my home town while leaving us with a lot of wind and rain.

But of course the weathermen were wrong in their predictions. The storm wiggled too far to the right on their maps, probably because of Barack Obama winning the election on the left, and voila', we get a damn snowstorm.

Not just any snowstorm. It's a heavy, heavy, wet snow. The kind wherein the flakes don't alight upon your shoulders and hair but instead smack into you with the grace of a jellyfish launched from a catapult (and a smack reminiscent of a jellyfish launched from a catapult as well.)

I can now say that I sloshed through the messy slushy roads and sidewalks to get back to my apartment tonight in my first New York winter storm. And the horribly gusty winds that we had wind warnings for?

Yeah, not quite as bad as I thought it would be.

The storm has taught me a few things.

1. When it rains heavily, the subway station will have rain as well. In the station. Underground. It rains. Maybe it's just my station, I don't know, but there were literal drops of rain thumping into puddles where you are supposed to walk. Someone even put up yellow caution tape near one drippy spot. Here's an idea...fix it. Not as easy as leaving big puddles, but c'mon...this is New York City, not the damn Batcave. Can't you get rid of the drippies?
2. New Yorkers, or at least some of them, become a little more stupid in snow. GET OUT OF MY WAY. It's snow. Not gold, not lava. No need to stop and hang around at the corner when I'm trying to cross before the distracted driver chattering away on her damn cellphone runs me over.
3. When it's an extremely heavy, wet snow, that stuff will accumulate on buildings and lamps and wires, which in New York City there happens to be a lot of, and fall on you if you're within ten feet of these objects. And they do so at an amazingly high frequency.
4. Some New Yorkers have this special idea about umbrellas being biodegradable. I was amazed at the number I found discarded in the subway and along my walking route to the apartment. I don't know if there's a subgroup of people who think these things are special or if they themselves are "special," but those umbrellas you toss aside? They don't just melt away with the elements. Which is good, since umbrellas aren't supposed to melt in the rain. No, someone has to clean up after you. Maybe you're a moron or maybe you're a job creator, but either way, you're a douchecanoe. At least throw your crap away in one of the numerous trash receptacles the city has provided along sidewalks.

I'm still adjusting to life here, but I really hope this "nor' easter" isn't a preview of what's to come.

"Gambling is Against My Religion"

Someone told me something recently that had me thinking for awhile afterwards.

I was paying a bill off, and found I was about two dollars short. It wasn't a problem; it was the kind of bill I could come back and pay off later. But when he gave me the bill amount, I opened my wallet and emptied all the cash I had on me, and half-jokingly said, "I'm afraid I'll have to come back with the last couple dollars, unless you'd take this (scratch off) lotto ticket."

"Oh, no. Gambling's against my religion."

The reason that stuck with me was that it struck me as being kind of ridiculous to say that gambling is against your religion. Why, exactly, is it against Christian belief to gamble?

In doing some basic research, I can find no reference in the Bible to gambling as a sin. Apparently it's something that has been layered upon as another interpretation certain sects had added over time. Some argue that gambling is just bad when it is done to excess; other responsibilities go unmet to feed an addiction to gambling. In that regard the idea of gambling being "evil" isn't particular to any Christian group.

Another argument is that it's taking advantage of thy neighbor, thus against one of the tenets of Christ in that gambling exploits someone else in order to profit.

While I suppose these are interesting ideas in themselves, my own question came from the idea that gambling is little more than math and statistics used to play a game. Usually that game involves displaying that you're bad at math and statistics, but it's still taking a chance of losing something while hoping for the odds to be in your favor of gaining something. Or if they're not in your favor, that you'll beat the odds and gain something.

Gambling is nothing but playing statistics.

I take a gamble getting out of bed in the morning. Going to the subway. Or going just about anywhere. I'm gambling that I won't fall. Or get pushed into a train's path. Or robbed, shot, or hit by a car. I come back to my apartment with the odds being that this time there won't be a fire. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and just getting up and going about my routine day is a gamble that the day will continue to be routine.

So how is it rational to say that gambling is against your religion?

My second thought is that Christianity itself is a gamble. Christianity is taken on faith; there is no evidence to support the "truths" put forth in the Bible. From the ark to the mass exodus from Egypt, there is no actual evidence to support that the Bible accounts have occurred.

Yet Christians base their life choices on the word of the Bible (and a heavy dose of interpretation by their priests/ministers.)

So in a way, that's a gamble. The Christian is betting that there is a God and that God is the God described in their sect's interpretation of the Bible.

Third...that ticket was scraped. There was no gambling; I knew for a fact it won four bucks.

I should probably clarify that this isn't meant to reflect upon the person that made the statement, but rather the idea behind it. It's something I don't understand. If someone can explain it in rational terms, I'd be all ears...

Sandy is a Pain

What I thought I knew I apparently didn't.

I was walking into the colocation center to switch some backup tapes in preparation for the possibility we wouldn't be able to easily get into the building, physically, with the storm coming, when I got a message from my wife that she was getting nervous about the storm and the likelihood of me getting home when we anticipated later that week and asking me to contact my team at work to see if I could leave early and get back home with them.

The last storm, Irene, had apparently missed NYC but had really devastated our area. Roads gone. Homes gone. Levees are still not properly repaired, and that was a year ago that everything blew away...

I guess it's understandable that there is increased tension back in the homestead.

This was obviously not part of The Plan. The team, however, is awesome. They gave the nod to head home, and I arranged for her to come pick me up as the city was ordering Zone A people to evacuate and public transit to shut down that night.

That gave me enough time to overpack things I wouldn't have ordinarily taken on the bus, coordinate a few last minute items to get done at work, and "shut down" the apartment for the storm. We got back home in PA several hours later, just in time to crash into the bed to get some sleep.

This morning brought news that the storm is heading more northward than predicted originally, but no one knows the full effect or final track yet. Homeside, we still have options involving going to my parents house where they have a generator if necessary, and our home is high enough that there's no way we would need to worry about flooding as long as the house is intact. We'll spend part of today getting some last minute items.

Then it's a waiting game to see what the storm does, and after that it's damage control and evaluating our options.

The hardest part  at this point is the uncertainty...

Storm Preparedness in New York City

Unless you're hiding under a rock...which by some accounts you probably should be if you're along the northern US coast...you probably know about the "Frankenstorm" making its way through the Atlantic and predicted to hit somewhere near Delaware/New Jersey early this week.

The effects of the storm are still speculative at this point, but I do know that potential chaos is being repeated in reports on television for both my home in PA and my current location in the city. My family had to cope with one major unfortunate storm that left us without power for several days; we learned from this incident, and because of this I have some consolation that they should be okay. They have high ground for the house itself; my parents during the last major flooding didn't have damage, and there were multiple routes for my family to get to their house where they can find a generator for electricity. They have a car for charging the cellphone for communications. There should be batteries. Multiple coolers. I reminded my wife to get ice prepared ahead of time in case food has to be stored and the power goes out at the house. My father's truck is capable of hauling items. And the temperatures aren't freezing, so pipes in the house should be fine. They should also have enough supplies of food that doesn't require cold storage to be okay.

So while they may have bad weather, my wife should now have enough experience and support to make it through okay.

This is my first time weathering a major storm in New York City. It's occurred to me that there are qualities that make the island of Manhattan less than idea for weathering storms. For one, it's an island. Islands generally don't do well when water rises, such as the case with surges that accompany large storms from the Atlantic. We have things called "floods." It's bad enough when it happens inland, such as the valleys of my home town area, but to actually be in a location near what is known as "sea level" I would think amplifies the prospective danger.

Speaking of sea level, we had this storm not too long ago called "Katrina" that demonstrated why cities located below sea level AND next to an extremely large body of water are not an optimal combination. Manhattan itself is above sea level, but we have a lot of critical services that are underground, like things called "subways" and "tunnels," both of which have incredibly high amounts of people and vehicle traffic. If water levels rise, there is apparently a definite danger of these areas flooding. Tunnel closures will inhibit traffic moving to and from the island, leaving just the bridges, which may temporarily be shut down if there are high sustained winds.

But at least bridge closures would be temporary (barring damage).

Floods are also one of those things that once you realize you're screwed, it's often too late to do anything about it. It's not like the zombie apocalypse where you can hole up somewhere and eventually decide when to venture out; with flooding, you hole up, and once you realize that the water is going to get to you may already be trapped.

I have some things going for me. New York City has flood evacuation zones, labeled A, B, or C. I'm in none of them. I'm kind of anxious to see how this works, since apparently there IS a flood zone across the street from me. Front row seats to the mayhem, if you listen to the news.

I'm also not on the lower floors of my apartment building, so low-level flooding, if it were to occur, shouldn't reach me. The worst of the potential damage from the storm surge looks like it will hit the southern part of the island; ironically, that's the financial district, where every workday hundreds of millions of dollars pass. You'd think they'd have more protections in place to prevent all of that from getting wet, or at least have a plan that doesn't involve "run away quickly."

The storm track being predicted puts the city at the edge of the effects of the storm, hopefully minimizing the expected damage.

After flooding, the second worry I have is electrical outage. I keep in touch with family using the Internet or, if that fails, the cell network. But if there's an extended outage my UPS will fail, as will my phone's battery, eventually. I also have a few foods that I'd like to keep frozen. Additionally I would need some supply of water, for drinking and flushing the toilet.

First, I have trouble thinking the city would be without power for really long lengths of time. A day. Maybe two. There are two and a half million people on this island, and too much of the infrastructure relies on the power grid before chaos breaks out. So I figure I might need to have two days worth of backup supplies if possible.

I picked up four gallons of distilled water in jugs, and to help keep things cold I started filling Ziploc baggies with water and putting them in the freezer. I'm hoping that they should turn into ice balls by the time the storm comes in, although there was apparently one baggie that didn't feel like cooperating because I checked the freezer and there was a thin layer of water covering the bottom. Whoops. (It seemed like a good idea at the time...)

Although I should probably note for future reference that water in baggies, since it wasn't particularly cold water, partially thawed the chicken patties I was trying to keep cold in the first place. I'm hoping that was the problem and not a problem with the freezer to contend with...just have to keep monitoring it, I suppose.

I don't have a tub. My apartment is too small. There goes filling that for a spare supply of water.

For power I have a UPS connected to my monitor and laptop. In the event of an outage I figured I can turn off the monitor and speakers and try running as long as possible off the laptop and cable modem, after dimming the display to increase runtime. The phone is fully charged; I can keep it charged longer by dimming its display, closing extra applications, and hooking it up to the laptop. I also brought my newer work laptop home with me in case I would need to use it for remote work but also it could be used to charge the phone if (or when) my own laptop died.

I have enough canned food and foods that don't require refrigeration to last the week.

A coworker also suggested getting some cash. "If the credit card processors go down, you'll need cash to get water or supplies. Nothing overboard, but you'd want some in your pocket just in case. People here don't usually keep a lot of things on hand since they can get stuff delivered or go out whenever they want."

Getting cash for emergencies and getting water were the two big goals for the day. And I managed to do that.

Overall I should be okay. I might be inconvenienced. I may not enjoy this. But I should survive. Without a doubt the worst part is the potential to lose touch with my wife and son back home. As I said, I'm confident they should be okay, and they have options and support through my extended family in the area. The most horrific flooding in our area in recent times personally affected us through an extended power outage, and if this storm isn't quite as strong as that one, they should be okay.

Me, right now I think I'm going to cope. I went to the supermarket for water, and while it was quite crowded, there was still gallon jugs of water available, and plenty of drinking water (so far.) I don't know if this is a reflection of New Yorkers not freaking out as much as the news reports want them to, or if there's a lot more supermarkets still being raided, or people waiting until the last minute to get their panic supplies. Again...will have to wait and see.

All I know is I'll be focusing on trying to keep in touch with my family for updates. There's time to panic later.

So Microsoft Opened this Store and Released the Surface...

I've not tried Microsoft's new Surface. I've not gone to their new store in person. What I've done is read articles and postings from others, and I've done some testing with Windows 8 and its new interface. Quite frankly after supporting Windows for many years for an audience of users with varying levels of technology skill, it doesn't take much to form some strong impressions.

As someone trying to view this from the view of an end user, Windows 8 is...ugh.

I've had people on the kool-aid say that whenever something is new, people will complain. It's inevitable.

To a degree that's true. For the average user trying to use an office suite for basic tasks, there is very little difference in functionality between products like Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, for example. You can create a basic document in either one with similar functionality.

However, I worked in a place that tried to save some budget dollars by switching users to LibreOffice, and you'd have thought they were being asked to volunteer slicing off a limb with a chainsaw, judging from the grumbling and complaints we received. In the end, we relented and installed the latest version of Office.

Which they still complained about because the ribbon interface looked different. Fortunately they didn't complain as much (perhaps because it was, after all, MS Office, which they were complaining that they wanted back? I didn't pursue this curiosity as at that point.)

Change is disconcerting, especially when it's for users who don't care about your product, they just want to get the core task done. It's not a matter of using Office or LibreOffice, he or she wants to write a memo.


So when you make changes, they should be positive changes. Perhaps most important, they should be discoverable changes. Windows 8's new interface failed in some fairly fundamental functions in this regard. It's good to make changes that increase your productivity; when features for basic functionality are improved, people will generally like the changes. In our previous example of LibreOffice and MS Office, people didn't so much complain at first, they were simply wary. The complaints would roll in as they couldn't find things they were used to using; the discoverability of a feature was lacking. How do I create three columns of text? How do I create pagination so that it doesn't number the first page? What do you mean I have to remember to "save as" if I send this to someone else or else they can't read it? WHY DOESN'T THIS WORK LIKE IT DID BEFORE?!

When confronted with Windows 8, I had some tiles staring back at me. Okay, I can click them to run those things. Even though I wasn't sure why I needed to know, by default, the weather. Or certain news stories from those particular news outlets. The new Windows was offending my personal sense of style in this regard; I don't like cluttering my desktop with things I'm not using. Acknowledge, and move on; I will have to get used to it.

But...how do I shut it off? There's no start button! (Or Windows button, or whatever they wanted to call it at this point.)

No menus. Nothing that told me how to do anything. It was like the computer just expected to always be on, always running, perhaps go to sleep when it decided to (which was another hidden setting, as I was never asked about power consumption or power saving behavior.)

Oh...I'm supposed to move to a corner to get a task menu. Or "swipe" with my mouse.

It was almost like this was some kind of some kind of tablet, or touchscreen-oriented interface.

I heard from one Microsoft employee that this was an intuitive interface; if you want a particular program, you just start typing the name and Windows will search for it. "You use Spotlight on OS X, don't you?"

Actually, I do. There are some programs I will type into the search box to find. It's become habit. I also have often-used programs kept in the dock for easy launching. However, I came to use the spotlight function because it was a little magnifying glass symbol in the corner. You click it, and a search box drops down. If I don't know what I'm looking for, I can open a Finder window and there's an "Applications" folder through which I can peruse contents. I learned how to do these things in part because I was used to similar paradigms of desktop computer use; the search box, application folders, etc. The interface evolved, and I could feel my way around the interface to figure out how to achieve basic tasks.

Windows 8 just dropped me in the middle of a damn city without any kind of map. Swiping with a mouse? Really? With Microsoft's long history of bending over backwards for compatibility, you'd think they'd have more sense than to create an interface that is basically aimed point blank at the touchscreen market. Reading an article on how to use Windows 8's new interface, approached from the perspective of the average desktop computer user, is an exercise in "What the hell were they thinking?"

To be told that the intuitive thing to do is type the name of the program or document I want, after Windows has been evolving for years to abstract the user from the keyboard as much as possible, was a fairly ridiculous assertion. Yet that's exactly the kool-aid they are drinking now.

None of it makes real sense. Apple was approached with the question of touch screen systems, and Steve Jobs dismissed it, saying, "It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. it doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible." And he's right! How long could you use an interface requiring you to point at the screen before your arm becomes tired?

Instead, Apple adopted the multitouch touchpad as a stand-in for the touchscreen, confining touchscreens to horizontal handheld devices like the iPhone and iPad.

And Apple was very careful in their approach to this. They created what started as a somewhat kludgy new operating system, OS X. The framework of something good was there, but it took many refinements and updates before it was really usable and elegant. It was well matched to the desktop and notebook market.

When Apple came out with the iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad, they created an operating system matched just to those devices. The interface felt kind of like a relation to OS X in some ways, but it was targeted for use on a device with limited screen estate and meant to be navigated with your fingers, not a mouse and keyboard. Separate, but complimentary. You can see that Apple developers are taking steps to integrate the operating system cousins with the introduction of features like Launchpad.

Distinct, but related.

Microsoft, with Windows 8, decided to say, "Screw it...we'll create one interface to rule them all!" Windows 8 is definitely a tablet interface and it shows; apologists are already seeking ways to re-enable previous interface features to make Windows 8 more like Windows 7.

"All you have to do is install this application and you get your menus back!," they say.

When you're looking for applications to mimic that previous behaviors, and it's coming from people who are traditionally early adopters of technology, I call that a bad sign.

Let's pretend Microsoft is leading a charge on tablet computing. They now released their latest sensation, the Surface. The buzz was tremendous! I couldn't ignore it if I wanted to. Now tech adopters are getting their hands on the Surface and...well, I can't say it's definitely bad, but there are some that are scratching their heads.

It seems to have some of the sluggishness of a 1.0 release. Quirks, if you will. And I'll dismiss them as being the same pain points that you would expect when a competitor is having to play catch-up. The device will speed up. It will get refined.

But again with the fundamentals in interface...I found one user that is fairly well versed in using technology, especially Microsoft technology, who had trouble configuring his email on the Surface because it dumped him at a blank screen with no visual cues of what to do. He went to Twitter to ask for some guidance!

When it's a basic function that leaves your users scratching their heads, you didn't do your homework. Subtle features can have an excused learning curve. Your users should not be left derpin' around trying to figure out how to use a mail client if they are the kind of user that doesn't cringe when prompted whether they are using an IMAP or POP account in the average mail client configuration wizard.

Worse than that, Microsoft Surface is debuting with Windows RT...a lookalike to Windows 8, but it's not Windows 8. It's not compatible.

Huh?

So it looks like the new Windows, acts in some ways like the new Windows, but it's not entirely compatible with the new Windows...but don't worry, because another version of the Surface is coming out and it will run Windows 8!

If the average consumer wasn't confused before...

I was willing to write off a lot of this as just growing pains. It's hardly rare for Microsoft to get beaten to the punch with a new technology and have to play catch-up by copying a competitor and eventually, over the course of several releases, "get it" and steamroll the competitors. But I wondered to what extent they would go to copy the competitor, in this case, the Apple and their iPad.


Apple is a special thorn for Microsoft. After all, they basically defined the personal digital music player market in the "post walk-man" era. Microsoft tried to copy them by creating the Zune, and finally they cried uncle and killed that product line. Now Microsoft wanted to create their iPad killer. How far would they go to market it?

I saw people buzzing on Twitter about a new Microsoft store in Times Square. All full of people trying to get the surface! Take THAT, Apple hipsters!

I found a blog posting that discussed going to a Microsoft Store pushing the Surface. The author was obviously not impressed, and he included pictures of the store that illustrated how much Microsoft was trying to clone the Apple store design.

Really?

Is this how far Microsoft has sunk? Their formula for success was to nearly CLONE their competitor? And worse, they created a lesser quality clone?

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. I saw a picture of the Surface's box and it looked vaguely familiar...

Maybe I'm imagining things. After all, there's no picture of the Surface on the surface of the Surface box.

EDIT: This blog post by Brent Ozar I think eloquently summed up my issues with the Surface and Windows RT release. He may be looking forward to the release of the Intel-based Surface with full-blown Windows 8, but the description of it makes it sound like a stripped down notebook computer or touchscreen netbook without the keyboard. That doesn't sound like a great tablet experience to me except for particular use cases...I wonder if there will be a lightning connector that will allow him to project presentations along with using his presentation clicker on an iPad Mini? But then again that would only work if he doesn't have to use PowerPoint...

"The City is Beautiful"

I am a person of habit. I need routine; it offers comfort and a sense of stability.

Rarely does my routine get broken; as long as it only happens once in awhile, though, I'm pretty happy with it. Today was one of those days. It's Friday. A coworker is leaving us for another company, and a number of people decided to linger after hours to bid him a fond farewell.

I happened to be among that number; I'm not overly social, but I wanted to wish him luck and watch (or maybe participate in) some of the socializing that spontaneously broke out. Before I knew it, the clock read eight o'clock as I was shuffling out of the office.

I say this to give some context of what happened next. I was reminded of what my young son said the last time he visited the city. The sun had fallen, yet the streets were still well lit by giant animated signs and the glow of offices and store windows as well as the flow of ever-present traffic. The air was awash in the sound of engines passing and footsteps hurriedly clicking by me and the echos of phone conversations from passersby.

It was much like a night when my son was last in the city visiting, when he said to me, "Dad, the city is beautiful."

Being at an age when his opinions tended to be on the fickle side, I said, "I thought you said the city was dirty and yucky."

He replied, "No, it's beautiful."

"But it's so loud and busy and crowded!," I said.

He just looked around at the buildings and twinkling lights, ignoring my reply as my wife started snickering at me. "Here he's loving this place, and you're trying to convince him otherwise," she said.

It is times like this, when I'm headed back to my apartment alone at night when I'm leaving the office later than I intended when I'm reminded of this conversation. I think of my son's sense of wonder, and I see the city through the eyes of a child instead of the filters of cynicism and old age I've slowly become accustomed to.  It's times like this where, for a moment, I revert back to that state of wonder and bewilderment that only a child can possess and I wonder how I managed to get here.

Despite my son's age he managed to remind me of lessons I've forgotten.

Thank you, Little Dude. Daddy loves you.

How Do You Leave Your Family?

I think I followed a rather odd course to get where I am today.

Some people disapprove of my decision to come here; I question almost every day the justification for coming to the city. They say that I'm not an absent father and not such a great husband because...well, I am physically absent from my family.

Perhaps this requires some clarification.

This job was like a dream come true. I am working with a company whose mission is to make the Internet a better place. One of the founders is a well known speaker and author on the business of software. They have incredibly talented and intelligent people working here, which just makes me question their decision to hire me a little more.

I was hired primarily to handle in-office tasks, a low-level system administrator, while trying to expand my system administration skills by observing and being mentored by my coworkers. What this meant, however, was that I was required to be in New York City. Physically.

I have a mortgage. A son in school. My wife has a job that she hadn't vested her retirement account yet.

Basically taking the job meant I would be in New York and my family would be back in the rural home town. This wasn't a decision that I took lightly. My job at the time was taking a toll; I worked in education, and as a career it wasn't looking too sunny on the horizon for a myriad of reasons. Morale was flagging across the board, budgets were being slashed, and what was once a job with security may very well not have much security in a few years. We also had bills to pay with more on the way, given that we have a daughter in college and the economy has tanked so her job prospects are probably not the brightest. My salary, far under what the commercial sector gives system administrators, was just enough to keep afloat. But at least I had a decent healthcare plan and, at the time, hopes of a decent retirement fund.

I was willing to keep that job. I was resenting it, but I still came home to my smiling young son and my weary wife every night and we occasionally managed to go out to dinner on the weekend. It wasn't easy sometimes, especially when bills were tight or we had another stressful incident at work. But it was a job, and I had a paycheck, and I had my family.

The offer to go to the other company was alluring, and the timing...well, this was something I'd be asked once, and if I didn't take it, it was gone. I knew I'd not be offered this again. And the then-current job was having an administrative transition that also closed a door; a person that helped others with retirement and knew how to navigate the paperwork jungle offered to be my guide, but would be no longer doing it once the management transition was done. It would be the final year that person would do that kind of work.

I was at a crossroads and didn't know which decision was "right."

I happen to have a very selfless wife. And brave. She said, "This job is killing you. You have to take it."

She would have to basically take care of the home in addition to taking my son to school each day. Come Winter, this is not a small chore. I was worried. I still am worried, as we are just starting to get into the Winter season. And my son is young and at times a handful; we've often wondered how we got  relatively lucky with him in that he's generally a good boy and not ill-behaved. But like any young child, he can do things to get on your nerves. And now she'd be basically raising him alone.

Well, not entirely true; my parents are still in the area, and they adore my little guy, often asking if he'd like to spend the night and always willing to help out with babysitting or running errands. Dad was willing to help out diagnosing unusual issues around the house when necessary.

She insisted I take the job. "We'll make it work."

So I did. With much trepidation. I can't count the number of times I ran numbers to figure out whether I'd have enough money to live on in the city while paying the mortgage; best case, I had a surplus, and worst case, I would have just enough to scrape by.

Other obstacles included finding a place to live (ever try apartment hunting when you're over a hundred miles away from the place you're trying to move to? It sucks. Really. Especially when you don't have a lot of extra money to outsource the hunt for you) and actually having the money to move; ironically it was, for us, tremendously expensive to make the move in the first place.

But as my wife said: we made it work.

I talk to her every day. Wonders of modern technology. I ask how my son's doing, and we set up his computer so I could Skype in to chat whenever he's in his room (which, thanks to an addiction to Minecraft and YouTube videos, he often is.) I ask how he's doing in school, which he usually gives the dismissive hand-waving answer he gave when I was there in person. But I hear his voice and see him occasionally smile.

And of course I Skype to my wife every night, and we have chats periodically. Things we normally take for granted I now try to ask, usually getting the same answers you'd expect to get in a routine day. Little events of the day become anchors for the interesting.

We also plan visits; it's expensive to visit the city. A round trip bus ticket for an adult pushes close to the $100 mark; add in the children's ticket and it's north of the mark. If she drives into the city and parks the car, taking it nowhere for the time she's here, that's about $40 per night plus the cost of a Metro card for her and the little guy to get around plus whatever food expenditures and a weekend visit can easily hit $200.

The long term is hazy. We have plans to be reunited in a more permanent fashion in coming years, but we will need to see how the economy changes as well as employment prospects.

Until then, we make do with Skype conversations and in-person visits once or twice a month. The visits are hard; we try to make the most of our time together (well, my wife and I do. My son likes to take advantage of a faster Internet connection to play Minecraft) and when the departure time rolls around I'm not embarrassed to say there's a tear or two shed in the process. There are times my wife and son departed from the Port Authority and I opt to walk an hour to the apartment rather than navigate the subways just because it gives me a bit of recovery time in which to collect myself.

So how do you leave your family? I'm not sure I entirely did. In some ways I put more effort into communicating with my wife now than I did when we were in physical proximity. I think of them every day.

My wife did give me something to remind me of her. She bought a pendant of a heart that splits in two, one marked with a symbol for "male" and the other marked with the symbol for "female." She has one; I have the other. And I've worn it every day. That pendant hasn't left my neck for one moment since I came to the city.

For better or worse, we're making it work.

Some Tips for Visiting New York City

My parents have mentioned coming to the city sometime. I've been thinking of things they should probably know before arriving.

Now, I'm not one to really give in-depth primers on how to live in the city. I've only been here a few months, and it's not really even my "home," as far as I'm concerned, if for no other reason than my family is not here to share in the fun trials and tribulations that accompany living in the concrete jungle. I've not even left the confines of Manhattan with the exception of a trip to IKEA and another to Coney Island and one company sponsored trip to New Jersey, which I don't count because it's Jersey.

I do think I can give some advice for people coming to the Big Apple from a rural area as to what to expect here, or at least to make the visit more pleasant.

Keep an eye on the sidewalk. If there's liquid, and you don't see a guy with a hose spraying the sidewalk nearby (yes, there's a lot of them in front of stores) assume it isn't something you want to track into your apartment. Avoid it.

There's a lot of neat things to see in the city that you don't see in rural towns. And there's landmarks and movie icons and statues and all sorts of shinies and vendors vending weird stuff. But for the love of $DEITY, don't stop in the middle of the damned sidewalk to stare at them. Step to the side. Let the crush of rushing New Yorkers walk by.

See the guy with the big camera staring at nothing in particular in the distance? That's a tourist. They're also called "targets." Great for people hawking all sorts of weird crap and pickpockets to make a profit. Not looking and acting like a tourist will lower the chances you'll be pegged as an easy target.

Get to know the subway system. It's your friend. And get to know it before going into the subway. Just as staring at landmarks with an expensive camera dangling from your neck can label you an easy mark, standing in the middle of the platform (STEP TO THE SIDE...just not the side with the yellow line on the edge) staring with a perplexed look on your face at a map of the subway system will be noticed by certain people.

Be cognizant of your wallet. Keep a hand on it. Be aware of the pressure of it against your body if it's in your pocket. Keep your purse strapped across your body. Be aware of people being a little too close to you when they don't have to be, or brushing up against you when passing, or being stopped by a stranger for a conversation. You don't need to take paranoid measures to protect yourself, but a little awareness goes a long way to preventing you becoming a statistic.

Things are expensive here. You can find deals and steals (sometimes literally) if you look around, but overall, you're going to find prices higher than average. Be ready for it. You can't do anything about it. Bitching won't help. Sometimes you have to lower your standards, and it's not a necessarily bad thing.

Cabs are a treat. Not the norm. I know you expect cabs to be heavily used, since you see them all the time on TV. Truth is the subway system sucks for filming and cabs are EXPENSIVE; you pay for the convenience of not having to walk farther and travel to your destination immediately, hindered by traffic rather than a crush of people on the platform. Unless your rent is in the upper four figures per month, you probably won't use cabs all the time, although I'm sure there are people who use a large percent of their income to not ride public transportation and live in dumpy apartments.

Don't stare at people. There's a common warning to not look people in the eye in New York City; DON'T MAKE EYE CONTACT! I've heard this a lot regarding the subway. The truth is you can make eye contact for brief periods of time, just don't maintain it. Like predators in the prairies, this is interpreted to be some kind of invitation for discussion at best and a challenge at worst. If they see it as an invitation, you may be regaled with reasons why our President is an alien lizard or the government is covering up CIA agents drugging the populace, or if they see it as a challenge you may end up wondering if you're about to be stabbed. If you commit this faux pas, the best thing to hope for is they'll think you're just creepy and ignore you.

Speaking of which, get a good pair of headphones or earbuds. These things are excellent tools for ignoring people in a socially acceptable manner here. In small towns you're considered "rude" for tuning people out with headphones. Here, it's the best way to walk past people trying to shove newspapers into your hands as you pass by, or pretending you didn't see the homeless person sprawled on the subway platform, or the person loudly begging for change or food as they traverse the moving subway train (pro tip: if the doors between subway cars open and someone, anyone, emerges from the door, look away immediately. It's going to be very uncomfortable if you encourage them in any way. Nothing good has ever come from the intra-car doorway.)

Don't just stop. I mentioned sidewalks earlier. This also applies in other situations, like escalator rides and stairways. If you are going to stop to look at something, or check your phone, or whatever catches your attention, step to the side.

Conversely, you'll get further if you learn appropriate rudeness. I usually try to step to the side when passing someone. But after a few months in New York, I've come to realize that sometimes, in some situations, there's a kind of social animal contest that emerges, a contest for dominance. People will purposely bump you when crossing the street. They'll shove in stores where space is already a premium. They know full well they're doing it, too. While I'm not advocating sending female joggers sprawling across the asphalt, there is a certain amount of respect to be gained by asserting that this space is my space, and I'm not backing down, you punkass self-centered hipster jerk. The occasional grazing of shoulders to drive the point home that you're not going to be bullied into moving out of someone else's way when there's plenty of space for the other person to maneuver brings some additional respect. Or it pisses them off and they stab you. Either way you have some pride left intact.

(To be clear, I'm not talking about intentionally ramming people. That would be stupid and make you an ass. I'm saying that if you're clearly walking in one direction, and someone else is intentionally trying to scare you into side stepping, there's something to be said for just staying your course. You get a sense of this after interacting with strangers for awhile.)

Oh, and try looking into something else to do in the city that doesn't involve Times Square. There are things there I like, to be sure; Chevy's is an indulgence, for example, and my son enjoys the toy store. I also enjoy once in awhile seeing the costumed performers trying to fleece me for cash in exchange for photos. Overall, Times Square is still a huge tourist trap. Huge. As in, crushing amounts of people with rolling suitcases filling the sidewalks, staring at the lights, oblivious to people who are actually trying to get somewhere. I get it, there's lots to see, there's lights, there's the big shiny New Year's ball, it's really neat but please for the love of $DEITY if one more damned suitcase rolls over my foot I'm going to shove it up your Metro pass. This place is rife with street vendors and while the constant police presence has helped with the issue, I'm not entirely convinced it's not a target-rich environment for pickpockets. How can it not be? These people are wandering around staring at the top of skyscrapers and blinky billboards.

Those are the big tips off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other things I've picked up...oh, the surprises of just trying to live here alone could fill a couple blog entries, I'm sure. But for now these simple tips can greatly improve your expectations of visiting the city when you're from a small rural town...

Using Gmail as a Mailto: Client

I had an interesting request come in; "When I click on a link to mail someone, Outlook pops up. Can it go to Gmail instead?"

My very first thought was to wonder if it's possible, given that normally when you click on a mailto: link Windows will launch your default mail application. Gmail is a website...not an application.

My second thought was, "Of course it can open another web page."

And it really is quite simple. Here's how to do it using Chrome as the web browser.

Open Regedit.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\mailto\shell\open\command\ and be sure you look for "mailto", not ".mailto". That period makes a difference when you can't find it in the list alphabetically.

Change the (default) entry to:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1

If you want the message composition page to open in a new tab, or use:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –app=“https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1”

...if you want the message composition page to open in a new window

Notice that the path to the Chrome executable may have to be changed depending on where it's installed. Chrome can be installed in a user's profile or in the system for everyone to use. Test it out on a webpage with a mailto: link, and it should work right away, no reboot or re-login necessary (which is great because if you typo it, you can edit the alteration immediately right from Regedit before closing it out.)