Archive for June, 2006


On the Radar: Digg Dug Edition

Filed Under: Friends, Geek, Money, On the Radar
Jun.30, 2006

* ??Chris Welch??: “Misconception: Renting is for Suckers”:http://www.investorgeeks.com/articles/2006/05/23/renting-is-for-suckers (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/25/renting-is-for-suckers/). Many of my friends are reaching that point in their lives where they’re considering buying a home. However it’s unfortunate that so many choose to buy over rent, especially in this expensive market, because many well-intentioned people are buying homes that are actually damaging their finances.
* ??Fresh Pursuits?? “Canvas”:http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/. Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for Wordpress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.
* ??Michael Barrish??: “Hell Freezes Over”:http://lumino.us/weblog/hell_freezes_over. Revamped and redesigned, it uses haikus in place of business copy (I couldn’t bear to write business copy) and features a new weblog about making websites (you’re soaking in it). Wondering what “Michael”:http://oblivio.com is up to, I find his new, angsty, neurotic web design company website. Brilliant work.
* I’ve really begun to dig “digg”:http://digg.com lately. As usual, I’m behind the curve (“digg just launched version 3 of their site”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/22/digg-30-to-launch-monday-exclusive-screenshots-and-stats/), but I think I’m just one of those people that has to see something working well before I can grok it. For the uninitiated, digg is a news site that has its content submitted by users. I had initially dismissed it as another “mob rule by the masses” type app (you know, enhancing the “echo chamber”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/23/echo effect of blogs), but it regularly produces some interesting results. Check it out, and “add me as a friend”:.http://www.digg.com/users/kwalker411.
* ??Granite Consulting??: “Late Binding in Microsoft Access”:http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/latebinding.htm. In essence: if you’re exporting to Microsoft Excel from Access programmatically, just use late binding.
* ??Joshua Porter??: “The MySpace problem”:http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-myspace-problem. Joshua gives some thought to what aspect of “design” MySpace really excels at. Hint: it’s not the graphical type. Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is. Let’s assume (forgetting visuals for a moment) that MySpace is well-designed instead of condemning it as a visual failure. Let’s ask the obvious questions: why is it so popular? What makes it so successful? The answers to these questions might make us rethink our basic assumptions, but will make our future designs stronger as a result.
* ??Jason Calacanis??: “The new publishing model”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/06/28/the-new-publishing-model-or-on-rafat-om-federated-media-ad/ (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/28/new-publishing-model/). Here is the new model: 1. Start a blog with adsense and make spare change. 2. Scale a blog to 250k to 1M pages a month and become big enough for Federated Media, AdBrite, and Blogads to care about you (i.e. sell you’re inventory)–now you’re making a living. 3. Scale over 1M pages a month and become big enough that you can afford your own sales group and fire Federated Media for taking 40% of your money because your cost of sales will be 15-20% as a stand alone business.
* YouTube: “Pirates of The Caribbean Ride”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQ5eWBlApY (“via Mike”:http://overloadednoggin.com/2006/06/28/captain-jack-meets-captain-jack/). Johnny Depp meets an animatronic version of himself as Captain Jack on Disney’s new Pirates ride. Very cool.
* ??Lifehacker??: “Windows Vista Beta: A tour in screenshots”:http://lifehacker.com/software/windows-vista-beta/windows-vista-beta-a-tour-in-screenshots-183883.php. Wow, not bad, Microsoft. I mean, after some five years of development, you’d hope that Vista wouldn’t be incredibly atrocious. There’s quite a bit of OS X influence in the finder here (nudge–hey Apple: time to get past “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal in “the finder”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/finder/, by the way), and I’m glad they’re getting away from the “Fisher Price”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#User_interface_and_performance school of design.
* ??Angela Wu??: “So much rage”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/29/so-much-rage/. I’ll agree to this mission if I can be assured that your rage level (which was off the charts that unforgettable night which still haunts me) will stay at a reasonable level. It’s true: I’m hosting Anglela’s website because she strong-armed me into it. Fear the rage.
* ??Jen Poley??: “1966 Plymouth Fury II”:http://sojourn-of-grace.net/2006/06/30/1966-plymouth-fury-ii/. What can I say? Jode and Nathan wanted a car to work on….we found this in Lincoln, and bought it. We hope to restore it, but if you can believe it, for now we are just really enjoying driving it around town. I can just imagine how much Jode is enjoying this.

Dig-Dug

Update: if you loaded this page in the last hour or so and saw a bunch of garbage — yeah, that was me. I was trying to set up the “FlickrRSS”:eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/ cache so this site would load a little faster. I think I got it working; the the site is loading a lot faster!

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Owen Meets Dina

Filed Under: Friends, On the Radar
Jun.29, 2006

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Weeked Update: Inconvenient Pirate Sick Day

Filed Under: On the Radar, Personal
Jun.28, 2006

Friday: Panera in the ‘burbs, and “An Inconvenient Truth”:http://climatecrisis.net/ at Montclair Theaters. We wondered why Al Gore seemed like such a condescending jerk in the presidential election in 2000, but such an intelligent, passionate politician in this movie. We also wondered if Apple paid out for the “product placement”:http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2006/05/inconvenienttruth/ that made the movie feel, at times, like a long “Think Different”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different commercial. (Probably not, Al Gore is already “on the payroll”:http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/gore.html at Apple.) The movie was very thought-provoking — you should see it.

We drove back home on Bloomfield Avenue through Newark and thought we may have heard a gunshot while waiting at a stoplight. We won’t take that route ever again.

Saturday: Sarah worked while I went to Riviera to pirate wifi and people-watch. Moved the blog over to a DreamHost “one-click install”:http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/One_Click_Installs setup. This makes upgrading WordPress one-click when new versions come out. I also got rid of a lot of old, crufty files left over from the Movable Type days, which was “over a year ago”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/02/12/migrated-to-wordpress/ now. Spent the afternoon working on a household budget application that I’ve been trying to write. It’s like a spreadsheet, but lets you save different budget versions so you can do what-if scenarios. I should have written this a long time ago.

Sunday: The Village Church. Brunch in the “Tasting Room at Philip Marie”:http://philipmarie.com/page/vyhp/Private_Rooms.html. John Pa and I discussed some bachelor party plans with “Tom”:http://canaanbound.blogspot.com, which he seemed resistant to. Came home and watched Ray — also good.

Monday: “Sick day” from work, so I slept in while Dina worked some of that therapy dog magic (generally hogging the couch on which I was sleeping). Dinner later that night and Krispy Kreme at our “favorite exit off of Route 81″:http://www.google.com/maps?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=krispy+kreme&near=Clarks+Summit,+PA+18411&radius=0.0&cid=41487795,-75705713,17176720887031646617&li=lmd&ie=UTF8&ll=41.498678,-75.691166&spn=0.058885,0.117073&om=1 in Pennsylvania with the Posegate clan. More Evan photos soon.

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On the Radar: Slow Week Edition

Filed Under: Friends, Geek, On the Radar, Politics
Jun.23, 2006

Uninteresting week? Or has Ken been busy? You decide.

* ??Slate??: “The Misunderestimated Man”:http://www.slate.com/id/2100064/fr/podcast/. Fascinating piece about Bush’s “aggressive anti-intellectualism,” viewed through the lens of his relationship with his dad.
* Don’t drink and blog. Some revelers from Portugal day a couple of weeks ago found the Newark blog and “voiced some opinions about the party”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/06/09/portugal-day-celebration/#comments. I’m glad they found the site, but it looks like they were maybe a wee bit tipsy…
* ??Jen Poley??: “Route 34, three liars, road kill, and the truth”:http://jenny.sojourn-of-grace.net/?p=84. Oh, those Poleys…
* ??Jason Fried??: “Getting in too-much touch (interruption is not collaboration)”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/getting_in_toomuch_touch_interruption_is_not_collaboration.php. Being productive isn’t something that just happens. You don’t just sit down and be productive. Real productivity takes time. It’s a process. You make your way into it. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes or a half hour or an hour or more to really get in that zone. And when you’re in that zone you are actually getting real work done.
* ??Mark Liberman??: “PHPEnkoder for Wordpress”:http://www.weaselhat.com/phpenkoder/. Ooh, this could help us fight spam for emails posted on the “Village Church site”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com.
* Oh, and check out “these photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/owenpesnell/ of Owen Pesnell from “last weekend”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/06/19/weekend-update-revenge-of-the-babysat/.

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Weekend Update: Revenge of the Babysat

Filed Under: Family, Friends, Personal
Jun.19, 2006

Spent Saturday cleaning up the apartment for our guest, whom Sarah brought home with her from Manhattan in a carseat. Owen Pesnell stayed with us overnight Saturday so Darin & Krissy could celebrate their anniversary. Owen did really well with us, and we even returned him mostly-undamaged. A short jaunt down to the Independence Park gave us lots of photo opps as Owen slid, climbed, rocked, and ran himself out of baby-steam.

Unfortunately, with all his frivolity, he (and we) didn’t notice his collision course with an oncoming miniature bicyclist. After bouncing his noggin off of the sidewalk, we thought for sure we were in for a full-fledged freak out. Instead, he shrugged us off and proceeded to the nearest climbing wall. When I told Krissy, she nodded sagely and replied, “Yup, that’s our son.”

Dina was very excited to greet our new guest, who was less-than-enthused to be covered in dog saliva. Most of our effort that night was in helping Dina resist the urge to inspect the squeeling, taunting, food-flinging toddler. Pictures forth-coming.

Sunday at the Village Church, where Darin _rocked_ the “Deuteronomy 8 passage”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/06/the-meaning-of-the-desert/ he and I had discussed only a few days earlier. It was cool to hear some of our conversations surface in his message. Great job, Pez.

That afternoon we treated Charlie to all the _paella_ and _sangria_ he could consume, and 3 months of Netflix for Father’s Day.

After Charlie and Irene had gone, Dina, Sarah and I collapsed on the bed and napped.

Then I installed “this”:http://roundcube.net/ to replace our “crappy webmail”:http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/RoundCube.

Monday came too soon.

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On the Radar: It’s not you, it’s me

Filed Under: Friends, Geek, On the Radar
Jun.16, 2006

* ??Alissa Clark??: “New York Blessings”:http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7212. On love letters for cities.
* “WeatherIcon”:http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/weathericon/. I wanted to use a widget for weather on “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info, but I realized that my theme, “K2″:http://getk2.com, disappointingly, still doesn’t support plugins.
* ??John Gruber??: “Macworld Expo 2006 in Review”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/mwsf_2006. John mentions in passing that you can mount a WebDAV drive in Mac OS X. Seeing that I have 26 GB (!) available on my web-hosting account (“Dreamhost rocks, people”), I thought I might try to investigate that as a backup strategy.
* Play anything on any operating system with “VLC Player”:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. This thing is awesome. Schmoo and I were set to watch a movie on the Thinkpad-from-work (the lappy is in the shop right now), and I realized that my computer didn’t have software to play it. A quick Google search for “open source watch DVD” led me to this player, which I have also installed on the Mac. A quick download, slapped the DVD back in the drive, and it just worked. Brilliant.
* ??Hugh MacLeod??: “A man’s heart”:http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002913.html. So true.
* ??Jeffrey Zeldman??: “Silent phone, secret phone”:http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/12/silent-phone-secret-phone/. Best snarky Verizon complaint, ever. As far as I can tell, the problem involves phone lines, so you can see why it would take one of America’s largest phone companies five days to tackle a brain teaser like that.
* ??Matt Mullenweg??: “Beeping”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/13/beeping/ Your assignment today is to take a walk around your blog, application, website, whatever you work with on a daily basis, and allow yourself to be supremely annoyed with the beeping smoke detector in the corner.
* ??Wired Magazine??: “Judging Apple Sweatshop Charge”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71138-0.html?tw=wn_index_3. Steve Jobs’ Think Different campaign celebrated labor leaders like Gandhi, who used strikes as a form of civil protest, and Ceasar Chavez, who organized poor, migrant farm workers. But a British newspaper at the weekend published a rather shocking report about the factories in China that make his company’s iPods.
* “Quinn Tetris for the Mac”:http://www.simonhaertel.de/quinn/home (“via John”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/june#mon-12-quinn). Free, open source, and oh-so-pretty version of Tetris for the Mac.
* ??Angela Wu??: “How I got here: blogger break-up”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/15/how-i-got-here/ All those times you had “outages,” you never explained yourself, and I started to feel insecure. I know you didn’t mean it to be like that, and I still think you’re a good bloghost. You’ll be great for someone after me, I just know it. Maybe I’ve just outgrown you. Maybe it’s me, not you… Reset your bookmarks to hereisangela.com.
* Breitbart: “Microsoft’s Gates to Leave Daily Role”:http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/15/D8I8SD100.html (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/gates_plans_his_exit_from_microsoft_whats_next.php) Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft. WOW.
* ??John Gruber??: counterpoint, “And Oranges”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/and_oranges. ??Mark Pilgrim??: counter-counterpoint, “Juggling oranges”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/16/juggling-oranges. The tennis ball has been bouncing between two of my favorite bloggers over this matter of open formats. Pilgrim’s argument — proprietary and DRM formats will, one day, trap _everything you’ve ever enjoyed about your computer_ (music, video, photos, email, documents, etc.) if you let them — has been compelling and got me playing with Linux again. Gruber’s responses to this have been frustrating — he still won’t address the point of lock-in head-on. I wonder if Mark’s ultimate statement about DRM hasn’t already been best stated in his 2001 blog entry, “My crush on Spyro, what Flash animations remind me of, and what the past will look like someday”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/07/29/my_crush_on_spyro_what_flash_animations_remind_me_of_and_what_the_past_will_look_like_someday.

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First Car

Filed Under: Friends, Our Story, Personal
Jun.14, 2006

My first car was a 1982 “Buick Skyhawk”:http://www.carsearch.com/772491.htm. I bought it in the summer of 1996. Compared to what I had been previously been driving — a car that my family affectionately referred to as “the Pink Lung” — it was beautiful. Two-door, bench seat, automatic 4-on-the-floor trans, in dark blue. It was independence, it was reputation, it was driving myself to school through my senior year.

In 1996, I knew nothing about owning or buying a car. I have no idea how many miles were on it. It was previously owned by a friend of my Mom’s, and I just sort of looked at it and agreed to buy it for $300. In retrospect, it was a pretty low-risk deal: with my job stocking shelves at the local A&P, the car would have cost me about two week’s worth of work after taxes.

That week, I drove everywhere. To my friend Jon’s house. To my friend Lindsay’s house. And, not least of all, to work to pay the thing off. It was August, and school was due to start up again soon. It was also the week my friend “Ryan”:http://flipsidejones.net/ was visiting the States from his home in London. I told him about the car and we hatched a plan to celebrate the end of the summer and my new ride. We would “drive down”:http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=Long+Valley,+NJ&daddr=537+Monmouth+Rd,+Jackson,+NJ&ll=40.472024,-74.597168&spn=1.055121,1.873169&om=1 to “Great Adventure”:http://www.sixflags.com/parks/greatadventure/ all by ourselves, blow a lot of money, hang out all night, and get back late. He was due to catch a flight early the next morning, but he would just catch up on his sleep on the flight. No big deal.

And somehow, at some point — and I’m not really sure how — we got the idea to invite someone else, too. Her name was Erin. She was quiet, a member of the 4H club, and she liked horses. She was also the first girl I ever dated. I don’t think I was carrying a torch, but I wasn’t unhappy when she said yes.

So we went. We climbed into the Skyhawk and meandered down the New Jersey Turnpike. I had never done so much highway driving. We got to the park, we had a great time. The best time, really — Ryan and I were euphoric with the autonomy of a new car, and Erin played deadpan to our giddiness. We stayed at the park until it closed.

Back in the parking lot, we climbed into the Skyhawk and started it up. We drove a few hundred feet. I noticed the pickup wasn’t as good as it had been. Then it stalled.

We drove around some more until I found a security guard and asked for help. He sent over the park mechanic who, after listening to the engine for 10 seconds, delivered the bad news: I’d “thrown a rod”:http://www.epinions.com/auto-review-3388-1887077-3895269F-prod4. Here we were, three seventeen-year-olds, 70 miles from home, at midnight, and our only means of transportation was completely shot. The mechanic gave us two options. We could leave the car and find another way home. Or, we could hope for the best, take the car, and destroy the engine in the process of driving back. We started driving.

That night, the car burned through two tanks of gas — most of it escaping as white vapor through the exhaust pipe — as we drove a top speed of 40 MPH on the Turnpike, hazards flashing. When I’d run out of money at the second rest stop and had to borrow $10 from Erin to cover the second tank, I knew that any chance of rekindling interest was just gone. I called my 20-something friend Jay for help and car advice with what little change I had left, and he suggested that car would never make it up the hills on the Turnpike. Take Route 1 instead, he said, so we did.

Route 1 is all poorly-timed stoplights through sketchy urban neighborhoods (terrifying for teenage suburbanites). Each time we came to a stop, the car would die. The only way to get it moving again was to restart the car with my foot on the gas, rev the engine in park, and slam the gearshift into drive, chirping the tires and progressively destroying the transmission. I flinched every time. After a few miles, and I started slowly coasting through red lights to avoid having to stop. A sign for a familiar local road loomed into view, and I took it: we drove the remainder of the trip up the winding, farm-lined Route 206.

That was 2 AM. Ryan and Erin were asleep as I coaxed the Skyhawk up and down the hills of the country road, alternately praying and cheering it on under my breath. By 3:30 AM, we’d reached the foot of “Schooley’s Mountain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooley’s_Mountain, a couple of miles from home. I parked the car in the lot of a local pub and called my mom, who, bless her heart, came to pick us up and drop off my friends.

The next day, a mechanic met us at the pub. The car sat like a hollowed-out shell: the engine and transmission were both completely destroyed, and it wouldn’t even start. He offered to take it off our hands for free.

That senior year, I took the bus to school. I never went out with Erin. And for my senior formal dance, I picked up my date in the Pink Lung.

“But, she didn’t seem to mind”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/160499005/.

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Weekend Update: Cars, Portugal Day

Filed Under: Family, Media, On the Radar, Personal
Jun.12, 2006

Friday was “Cars”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5473455, “Cars”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5471976, “Cars”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5459668, “Cars”:http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10004076-cars/, “Cars”:http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/cars/. And, Sarah and I were pleased to discover, it’s as good as they say it is. Ka-chow!

Saturday, Sarah and I celebrated our fourth anniversary (woot!) at “Maize”:http://www.rthotel.com/maize.html at the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark. We had actually attempted to go to Maize when we weren’t living in the city, two years ago. We got as far as getting dressed up, jumping in the car, and getting on the highway, but then Sarah looked at me and said, “I’m pretty tired.” And I said, “Me, too. Let’s go to Pizza Hut.”

This time around, it was much better (and closer) than Pizza Hut. The food, ambiance and service was excellent. Our waiter — who asked for free veterinary advice, but was witty and prompt — was impressed that we “still had things to talk about” after 4 years of marriage. Here’s to more great conversation for the next 50 years.

Sunday, was, inescapably, “Portugal Day”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/06/09/portugal-day-celebration/ in the Ironbound. The Portugal Day celebration actually extends through the week and culminates in a two-day festival two blocks from our apartment. It’s both an extravaganza of Portuguese & Brazilian culture, and an object lesson in poor life choices.

Half-a-million people funnel into our mostly-quiet neighborhood for barbeque, sangria, and Brazilian pop music. It’s not all family friendly, though, as it’s not uncommon to find someone who’s had more than his fair share of piña coladas passed out on the sidewalk. Last year, Sarah and I passed a man who was sleeping like a baby on the curb in the hot sun — we grimaced to think of what HIS hangover was going to feel like.

With Sarah’s brother in town and Ferry Street having been taken over by revelers, we didn’t even try to go to church in the city (though I’m looking forward to the “podcast”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/). Instead, we walked up to see the endless crowds and searched for a “Pelé”:http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/pele01.html onesie for “little E”:http://flickr.com/photos/posegate/157653688/in/pool-evanposegate/. Once you’ve seen one festival, though, “you’ve seen them all”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/portugalday/. After Russ left, Sarah and I crashed at home so I could work on a presentation for Monday.

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On the Radar: Linux, Chicago, Space Quest

Filed Under: Culture, Faith, Friends, Geek, On the Radar
Jun.09, 2006

* ??Overheard in New York??: “That Really Gets My Goat”:http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/005665.html (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/06/common-knowledge.html). That has got to be one of the funniest Overheard moments I’ve ever read.
* Google Maps “Send to Phone”:http://local.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=32461 and the “Firefox Extension”:http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/sendtophone/index.html. Send information (“even from maps”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/acmelab/120622272) to your phone directly from Google. This is freaking awesome.
* ??Mark Pilgrim??’s “recent declaration”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks to switch to Linux has got me looking at playing with Linux again. I decided to skip the “Powerbook installation from hell”:http://joh.deworks.net/powerbook/ and just create a partition on my Thinkpad from work. Impressions coming soon, but, overall, “linux gives us the power we need to crush those who oppose us”:http://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54.
* ??Dean Allen??: “Things That Happened”:http://www.cardigan.com/2001/03-18/. Dean Allen’s old Cardigan Industries blog, dead since 2001, still has a lot great entries, many of which are too dirty to highlight here. ;-)
* ??Killing the Buddha??: “Jesus and I Broke Up”:http://www.killingthebuddha.com/confession/jesusandi.htm. I’m frighteningly single. At least once a week I hit the religion section of the local bookstore, pick up the first title that catches my eye and take it home. Rumi one night. Buddha the next. I know it sounds cheap, but each time I hope it’s love. It never is.
* Wikipedia: “Space Quest”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest. My favorite video game growing up! Rumors are circulating that Sierra will be releasing a new compliation of these games come December, which is good because their 15^th^ anniversary game is now going for over $100 on eBay (it retailed at $40 a few years ago).
* ??Corissa Poley??: “Identity issues…continued”:http://cori.sojourn-of-grace.net/?p=90. Cori doesn’t exist — coulda fooled me.
* ??NPR??: “Life After Foster Care: A Tale of Two Boys”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5443614http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5443614. These two kids — both 13 years old in 1994, both separated from their families, troubled and already acting up — told me with astonishing innocence and optimism about their lives in the group home and what their lives were like before they got there. I wondered what happened to them after that and what they made of their years in foster care.
* ??Eric Blair??: “Google Calendar and PHPiCalendar”:http://www.raoli.com/archives/2006/04/000561.php. The Village Church “calendar”:http://villagechurchnyc.com drama continues. My “brilliant idea”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/05/22/rethinking-the-tvc-calendar/ to use Google calendar has been working. I set up a cron job to pull in a file from Gcal, got the template to look right, uploaded the files, created a Gmail account, and created the events. All that, only to find that Gcal exports all events as “Private” even though they’re tagged as public. Here’s the part where I create a wonky “regular expression”:http://www.regular-expressions.info/ solution!
* ??Luckymonk??: “About the Luckymonk”:http://luckymonk.com/pages/contact. Best description of Chicago, ever. The second best was when I asked “Graeme”:http://www.myspace.com/graemehinde why he left Chicago to move to New York. He said, “You know, after three years of dating a girl, that you’ve either got to marry her or break up? Well, I wasn’t ready to marry Chicago.”
* ??Angela Wu??: ” A religious exemption for same sex marriage”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/06/religious-exemption-for-same-sex.html. Sarah and I have wondered at the whole “legislating morality” issue before, and there seem to be two prevailing conservative schools of thought. Sam recently “touched on”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/series/mark/2006/06/the-end-of-the-world-is-near/ this in passing: let the civic leaders stave off the inevitable decline of society. Angela’s approach — let the country do what it wants but let the church preserve its identity (and, perhaps, clean up the mess) — is much more laissez faire. Which creates a more just society, and is that the point?

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Culture Clash

Filed Under: Dog Training
Jun.06, 2006

This Saturday, I will be attending a seminar given by one of the leading dog trainers in the USA, Jean Donaldson. Very exciting. Jean is also the founder of the “San Francisco SPCA Dog Training Academy”:http://www.sfspca.org/academy/, which is an incredible training center that is world renowned for its programs and humane training theories. Recently, when I realized that animal behavior and training is a passion that I really want to pursue, I went to “Dogwise.com”:http://dogwise.com and happily blew a portion of my paycheck to start my dog training library. It took me just a few weeks to eat those books up cover to cover.

One of the books was “The Culture Clash”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=ourstory-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=1888047054%2526tag=ourstory-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/1888047054%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82, by Jean Donaldson. Every few pages, I found myself nodding my head in agreement, or enthusiatically interrupting my poor husband to read him some blurb about dog behavior. It was one of the most down to earth and approachable training books I have read. I really enjoyed how Jean unabashedly dispelled our cultural doggie myths while still maintaining a true love for the real dogs that we share our lives with. For example:

We are obviously fascinated by the idea that dogs might, just might, be really, really smart. When will we see there is so much that’s truly fascinating about about dogs, it makes intelligene a red herring? The discriminative ability of dogs in operant and classical conditioning, the awe inspiring power of their noses, their formidable ability to deal with a complex social environment, and their feelings and bonding are all mind-bogglingly vast topics, yet we keep harping on intelligence. It makes as much sense as evaluating humans on our ability to sniff for bombs or echo-locate. …

As soon as you bestow intelligence and morality, you bestow the respoinsibility that goes along with them. In other words, if the dog knows it’s wrong to destroy the furniture yet deliberatley and maliciously does it, remembers the wrong he did and feels guilt, it feels like he merits a punishment, doesn’t it? That’s just what dogs have been getting — a lot of punishment …

The myth gives problems to dogs they cannot solve and then punishes them for failing.

I see people falling prey to pre-concieved anthropomorphisms daily at my work as a vet-tech. I guess that’s one of the reasons this book resonated with me so much.

And now I can get it autographed. :)

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