Certain external catalysts have encouraged me to change how I'm keeping things civil here. So I installed a couple of new plugins, and have a new procedure that everyone might as well know about, since it'll eventually become obvious anyway.

I installed the Membership plugin that Mike Lietz started for me. This plugin allows me to mark certain posts with tokens that grant and prohibit access for specific users. It also provides unique feed links for each of those users so that they can use their regular feed readers to obtain access to the same posts they see when they're logged in. Of course, those users do need to be logged in to affect this. Otherwise, they'll see the posts that have been on the site all along -- and nothing new.

I then wrote a new plugin, Login Redirect Group, which redirects users in certain membership groups back to the home page instead of taking them into the administration pages. It also provides the nice new login form that you see in the sidebar column.

What does all of this mean? Well, it allows me to continue writing whatever I want, and target it to the readers that should be allowed to read it. It also means that some people won't have access to everything. It also means that the home page is back.

One of the best things about this is that this functionality - being able to target content to specific groups - is provided within Habari's core. The extra plugins just provide the interface to it. This is different from other blog tools, like WordPress, that need to have post-based permissions grafted on entirely. The Habari API allows plugins to produce the permission system they need, but enforce it in the core. This pleases me greatly.

Anyway, it specifically serves my purpose in writing here. And you might know those purposes if you had a login. For which, you can ask by emailing me.

2012 means no more blogging for me. At least for a while. Enjoy the archive and this photo:

I read an account yesterday of a woman who was arrested (let's just call it that right now, to simplify things) for reading the US Constitution while being scanned at an airport security checkpoint. I think the point of the article, given its source, was meant to elicit a reaction of outrage. But I can't help but think how outright foolish everyone involved is.

For example, what possible outcome could the woman expect from her actions? Did she expect that the crowd would suddenly decide not to be subject to scanning? Did she expect to casually walk through security unmolested after having made this stir? Did she truly expect that the only consequence would be that she'd have informed her fellow air travelers that their rights were (possibly) being violated?

But it's not all one-sided. As I said, you are all idiots. The TSA then decides to make a big deal about it, rather than letting it pass. To me, this is what belies a deeper story. Was the woman yelling? Because certainly it would be easier to simply let her pass through the detectors, mark her ticket as "no-fly", and let her be on her way, than to cause a scene, (questionably) detain her, and then let her fly anyway.

SOPA

Switching tacks for a moment, I think the current SOPA legislation being considered is questionable at best, and an outright breakage of the internet at worst. But look at the wording of the legislation (103.b.5.A.iii) before you jump on the bandwagon:

A statement under penalty of perjury that the owner or operator, or registrant, has a good faith belief that it does not meet the criteria of an Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property as set forth under this section.

If you read through the whole thing, you realize that there is a specific process that is involved to shut down a site or payment to a site that is supposedly infringing. The copyright owner sends an official notice (103.b.4.A) to the site or payment provider, which includes many useful things, like the name of the infringed material, how to contact the copyright holder, who holds the copyright, where the material is located, etc. This official notice is made under penalty of perjury -- if you accuse someone of hosting or providing payment to infringing material, you can be taken to court for these false accusations (which is not possible under current law, and a useful deterrent for rampant casual accusations).

The recipient of the notice then gets five days to respond, and has the option to say, in good faith, that they do not believe that the material is infringing, and continue about their business. Seriously. They can just say "no". But they do so under penalty of perjury, so there are more severe consequences if they protect an obvious infringement of copyright in bad faith.

I admit, the bill is very, very imperfect. There are technical aspects of it that don't make any sense. But the claims that it's going to irreparably damage the internet are questionable, and it does have some effect on ending obvious copyright infringement. I'm talking about foreign sites that obviously offer things for download that don't belong to them. Notice that the bill (if you actually read it) deals almost exclusively with foreign sites that host infringing material, and only targets US payment processors and advertising syndicates that cater to them.

Moreover, people that take preemptive measures to deal with copyright infringement are immune from prosecution for those infringements! It's right in the bill!

But the outright insanity that pervades the internet about SOPA is the rhetoric that agencies like the EFF use to scare you into opposing this legislation. I am of the personal belief that the government should just get out of the internet; regulation of this tool would cause more problems than the problems that the tool causes. Yet the EFF would have you believe that the world economy would crash and armageddon would commence due of the passing of this bill. I simply don't see that happening.

Do I believe SOPA should be opposed? Yes, but not for many of the reasons explained online. The online petitions, "signed" by thousands to oppose the legislation, are as ineffective a method for change as reading the constitution aloud while standing in an airport backscatter scanner.

Occupy

I admit to not knowing a lot about the Occupy Wall Street movement. I was in Australia when it all started, and not really connected to the news at the time. But looking over the material that is available online, I will say two things: 1) I agree that I think it's unfair that the richest 1% of the people are in control of everything, although I'm not surprised. 2) Standing around in "public" places protesting doesn't actually get you anything.

Whether the protests are effective, I don't know. What the people there stand for or hope to accomplish, I don't know. What I do know is that I see a ton of people standing around in places where nobody seems to want them. And I hear in my head the fictional voice of fathers everywhere, "Get a job, hippie!" Maybe the problem is that they can't get a job? I can't imagine that with so many people standing around, they couldn't come up with something together. The whole thing seems a little "off" to me.

I kind of understand what they're saying. Like I said, I think this is something I can agree with from a certain perspective, but just like oration from the backscatter scanner, and online petitions, this doesn't seem to be the best means of attack at... whatever the target of frustration happens to be.

Where Next?

I read " Dear Internet, It's no longer ok to not know how congress works", and I agree with many of the points there. This primarily deals with SOPA, but I think it extends to things like the TSA and OWS. The problem is the government. Generation We has a good point: Everything is screwed up, and the youth who will be saddled with it is finally able to make a decision about what they want to do about it.

Sadly, their options are also crap. The options tend toward Republican or Democrat, and neither of those - at least in my mind - embody the choices that this youth vote would want to make. Even our votes as non-youth voters over the past years have amounted to one of:

1. "I dislike what the current guy is doing, so I'll vote for the guy from the other party."
2. "I dislike what the current guy is doing, but I vote Democrat/Republican, so I'll vote for him again anyway."
3. "I like what the current guy is doing, so I'll vote for him again."

Part of the problem is the republican process; that we elect people to represent our interests in government. It would be impossible to elect someone who could reflect our desires in voting, unless they truly voted using their own electorate's opinions. That would be impossible because while many people have opinions, they don't offer them. (I know, hard to believe, right? Well, you saw that only 54% of people voted in the 2008 presidential election, haven't you?)

At the risk of putting my own idiotic solution forward (at least it's not causing a scene at the airport), it seems to me like we need a strong third party that represents the people, rather than campaigning on their own issues. A candidate for this party would simply say "I will educate my electorate on the issues, poll them, publish the results, and vote as the electorate indicates I should."

Thinking about this, it seems still impossible that you could educate your electorate while maintaining an impartial stance. Surely, the information you provided for education would be biased based on who provided the information. At least the electorate could make an informed decision. Although, if we're already doing these insane things to get causes noticed, there's no guarantee that handing the keys to the idiots would gain us a better country.

So that's my monthly delve into politics. Leave a comment to illustrate how stupid I am, and keep me from getting involved for another month.

Random thoughts I've had over the past 5 minutes that weren't enough to fill a whole blog post on their own, but were too much to shove into a tweet:

I wish I didn't have to sleep. Things happen overnight that would be useful to be present for. My coworkers being awake and international Habari support, for two. Also, I'd be able to get all of those things done that I don't have an extra couple hours every day for. It would be useful not to sleep. Being sick has put me into the routine of sleeping more, which is good for sanity, but bad for productivity.

I have a new recruiter policy. If you call and offer an opportunity that doesn't meet the criteria that I've outlined clearly in my published resume, I simply tell you not to ever call me again. This is brought on by today's recruiter call from Sandeep in "Columbus OH" (according to the caller ID - yeah, right), confirming that I am in Chester Springs, and wondering if a daily commute to Erie would be acceptable to me. I informed Sandeep that Pennsylvania is roughly 300 miles across, and that Chester Springs is in the far Southeast corner, while Erie is in the far Northeast corner, and that yes, I was actually serious about not relocating, and no, teleportation technology that would allow me to perform that 375-mile daily commute had not yet been invented. When he said, "If I have any other opportunities I will let you know," I replied, "No, I don't accept calls from recruiters that don't know their own business." Hopefully, that ends that.

I've long been looking for a way to keep focused on tasks and moreover come up with a comprehensive time-management system that works for me. I discovered the Pomodoro Technique, which uses one of those tomato timers to get you to focus on an individual task for 25 minutes between 5 minute breaks. Seems like it could be effective and would like to try it, but one of the more effective bits of the technique is how it suggests to record interruptions. I think this part would do very well for me, allowing me to continue work, and evaluate later whether I really need to check Twitter again or get back to that person I should have emailed days ago. But I want a digital tool to do it, and the ones I've found (including this otherwise really good one, Pomodairo) are lacking in certain ways that seem obviously essential to me, particularly in their ability to collect and then organize interruptions. I might just go back to paper.

It's come up at least twice this week that I used to write desktop software, and should be able to produce small apps that I would like to use (like the Pomodoro app from above). I think it might be entertaining to get back into some minimal desktop development, maybe with some of the newer .net stuff that uses Expression for design.

Between 8am and 8:30am on most weekdays, I'm responsible for preparing the kids for school and seeing them safely onto the bus. In that last sentence, "safely" might have been an overlooked, throw-away word, but it's the most important one in relevance to this story.

You see, the kids at the bus stop jostle and jockey for front position in line at the bus. And while this type of horsing around is natural for the ages of the kids we have at the stop, it has lately become quite excessive. Over the past few months, efforts to get in front of the line have caused the virtual front of the line to keep moving farther and farther forward.

Yesterday, the line had moved at least ten feet out onto the main thoroughfare upon which the bus drives, and was not the first time the driver had a concerned look on his face when trying to operate his vehicle without accidentally crushing one of the kids in line. This is compounded somewhat by parents from across the way parking their cars on the far side of the street while waiting with their kids at the stop, causing the bus to come closer to where the kids are lined up than it might otherwise swerve away to do.

This all comes only six months after one of our school district buses accidentally killed a first grader, someone that some of the kids on our street even knew from class. I'm darn sure nobody wants a repeat of that.

Some parents at the stop have idly talked about spray-painting a line on the road to indicate the front of the bus line. This should hopefully have a positive effect on the kids, showing them the safe zone to stand in so that the bus doesn't barrel them over. But nobody's done anything about it, and after yesterday's taunting of the bus, even the bus driver had a word with each of the kids about staying back off the road. But this morning, they were back at it again. It's just a matter of time until someone gets really hurt.

I'm a proponent of a community taking ownership of things that matter to them, and not waiting for something bad to happen before The Establishment steps in to take care of business for them. That's why I fully support the efforts of whichever neighbor painted the new "BUS" line out by the bus stop this afternoon.

Let's just say there was some contention about how the Homeowner's Association would take it. Not that there has been a backlash from the association yet, but painting the road, even for the safety of the kids, seems like something they might object to, regardless of how tastefully it was done.

I've already heard stories from Abby about certain kids kicking the new line when they got off the bus today, trying to remove it. I'm taking this as a good sign, since it means they recognize the line as something meaningful to their behavior. Hopefully we'll see a positive effect at the bus tomorrow morning.