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SEWP BOWL?  Really?  And who said the government doesn’t have a sense of humor.

(from http://www.sewp.nasa.gov)

This was almost the last picture I ever took of my son.  

The nightmare happened to us today.  We’re at SeaWorld’s “Aquatica” waterpark…  enjoying some time out of the heat… 

They have a water-climber-thingie there.  It’s a MONSTER.  Six or eight slides, four levels, two big drenching buckets, and a lot of places that big fat parents can’t get to without a pry-bar and a gallon of crisco…

Well today it happened.  My 5 year old, (who I am convinced is the result of my monther’s curse “Some day you’ll grow up and have kids who act JUST LIKE YOU DID.”) got lost in this thing.  Look at the picture above and tell me – how easy is it to lose a kid in this mess?

Once we realized he’d gone missing we started the search.  Alerting the lifeguards, etc.  (Note to SeaWorld staff – the correct response to “My child is missing” is *NOT* “Well we’ll let you know if we run across him.”  #justsaying)

I ran around the perimiter of this monster and this is what I learned:

* There were no fewer than 5 entrances and exits.

* There were MAYBE 3 lifeguards at ground level watching some 150 kids.  A handful at higher levels paying attention to nothing but the slides.

Then as my paranoid mind took these facts to their logical conclusion I realized a few other things.

*NONE* of the parks we’ve been to in the last week, including the self-proclaimed “Happiest Place on Earth” have any meaningful way of preventing a child from getting lost, plan of action for acting on a loss or alerting parent’s of said loss.  More importantly, none of them, NOT A ONE, has any process / proceedure for dealing with someone taking a child out of the park with malicious intent.

NOT. A. ONE.

Even Chuck-E-Cheese, that famous purveyor of bad pizza and loud annoying furry animals, has a process in place all-but guaranteeing that the people who bring the kids in are the ones who take them home.

So why then do these parks, with all of the MONEY and technology, not have the same?  Hell they even fingerprint the kids on the way in as a means of keeping people from sharing a single ticket…doesn’t it make sense that this could be used to make sure the people the kids are leaving with are their rightful parents?

I always thought a simple RFID bracelet on parents and kids that were paired together would do it.  If a kid tried to leave alone or with parents not his own, alarm.  If a kid without a bracelet tried to leave, alarm.  If anyone tried to leave without their bracelet, alarm.   Easy, right?  I could probably write the software in 30 lines of code or less, and I’m not a programmer.  Great Wolf Lodge resorts (www.greatwolflodge.com) even has a wrist-band that can tie a kid to the room # they’re staying in, so if  kid gets lost all they have to do is scan the wrist-band to figure out where they belong.

Answer me that Disney, Universal Studios, and ESPECIALLY SeaWorld.  Why is it that protecting your revenue is more important than protecting the safety of the people within your gates?

Needless to say the next time my youngest son get’s set loose in a water park of any kind, he’s either going to be in college or he’ll be wearing a Lindsey Lohan style ankle-bracelet.

If you’re interested, you might check out http://www.brickhousesecurity.com as they make a handy-dandy and WATERPROOF child locator with a “wander alert” should your tagged child leave your preset safety-zone, and with a monitor that if you need to find your kid will literally point you in the right direction.  (No compensation was paid for this review, but I’ll take a free one if they want to offer…)

Oh – and as an FYI – he had wandered out of the area, up about 10 flights of stairs to the top of a waterslide called something with the word “Terror” in it that he apparently was under the impression that his under 48 inch-ed-ness was going to be allowed to go down without an adult handy.

And as further proof that he is my son, he gave the security guard holy hell trying to get him down from the top of that slide…only agreeing to finally when the security guard promised that he could say good-night to the WHOLE PARK on his radio when they got to the bottom.

Which he did….(after his mom and I were finished hugging on him and scolding him that he should never ever do that again.)`

My son’s “Good-Night SeaWorld!” was heard by all tonight….thankfully.

It’s a running joke in our household that when taking a picture of my youngest, you’re more likely than not to catch him not touching the ground in any way, shape or form.

Happy Birthday Iain – who turned 5 last week.

Dear Dr. Paul:

You dislike federal spending. 

Your state receives $1.51 for every $1 in federal income taxes paid. 

By your own argument, you are for smaller government.  I would like to know which federal programs you will move to opt out of as the Jr. Senator from Kentucky.  Highway dollars? Welfare?  Will you force your hospitals to stop seeing Medicare patients?  How will you rectify this imbalance?

It’s obvious to me that if you want to reduce federal spending, the correct first course of action would be to STOP REQUESTING THE MONEY.

For the 2008-2010 budget years there were 233requests for “earmark” spending, totalling over 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS.

Which of those projects will you cancel?  Which military bases will you lobby to close down to help cut spending?   What will you do to enforce the fiscal discipline you expect of the rest of us in your own state?

Let me put this into perspective.  You are an opthamologist.  Estimates are your practice derives at least 50% of it’s income from Medicare.  How do you justify railing against socialized medicine when half of your income is derived from it?  Are you ready to take a 50% pay-cut?

My final questions to you are these:

Will you stop asking for money for your own state knowing that that represents an expansion of the federal government?

Will you support Social Security / Medicare? 

If the vote were to come before you to abolish either or both, how would you vote?

We’re watching.

So from what all three of my readers knows, i’ve had a bit of a workplace issue.

I walked in this morning and quit my job.

It wasn’t really planned, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t a smart thing to do per-se, the whole “Hey idiot, you don’t have another job lined up yet” bit of the argument didn’t show up until later.

But I did it.  I walked into the boss’ office and told him that I’ll tell <contracting company> to start sending him resumes for my replacement immediately.

So we talked for a bit, and it didn’t take long for me to start venting.  he asked me if I really wanted to leave, I told him no, but I didn’t see any other choice seeing as <newteamlead> wouldn’t let me do my fucking job, instead relegating me to crap work that my intern could do on a day-to-day basis.

He asked me to hold off making any phone calls, and that he would fix it.

And then I stepped through the looking glass into wonderland…  Suddenly the idiot who has spent the last 6 months being the bane of my existence, suddenly is my best friend, and I’m being asked my opinion on technical matters, 7 figure purchase orders, and the like.  (the stuff I’m actually paid to do)

So who knows – maybe this problem is fixed…for now.

I’m not holding my breath though.

Everyone knows, it’s been a rough few days, but sometimes we learn.

Mahatma Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Last week my son got into an altercation with a girl at school.  He tripped and accidentally brushed up against her.  Apparently she wanted to call this an “assault.”

My son is 14, 6′ tall, and 175# – all LANK.  To say he’s kind of out of control when he’s doing things as simple as walking is the understatement of the year… I watch him trip over his feet no less than twice a day, and believe me, the denim bill in this household is HORRIFIC.

So he “gropes” her (her words) and she starts flaming him on facebook (thank god in private since they’re not FB frends)

We get a copy of EVERY email that goes into my son’s email account, and an actual txt message/page if it contains “certain terms”.  Handy parenting tool offered by my hosting provider.

So we start seeing these emails coming through.  When she started threatening to have her “guy friends” (who uses that term anymore) kick his ass we finally asked him about it.  (The whole time he was posting back that it was an accident and that he was sorry, etc)

It occurred to me, after a weekend of well-published but best forgotten emails/tweets/blogposts that it’s a *LOT* easier to say things onlline that you’d NEVER say to a person to their face.

Cyber-Bullying, Cyber-Stalking, etc. is becoming a real problem in this day and age.  I suspect it’s because it’s so easy to hide behind ones and zeros and forget that there are other people out there.

I think it’s also because we’ve learned, through our penchant for trauma and this stupid 24 hour news-cycle we all run in, we’ve learned not to trust people are take them at their word.

Thanks to people like “Balloon Boy” Heeney and others, our first instinct is to look at people with suspicion, replacing the emotion we used to experience.

Caring and compassion.

Whether it be a guy on the street corner claiming to be down on his luck, trying to feed his family (Is he really using it to buy beer/drugs) or soliciting donations for someone who has lost a family member suddenly, our first instinct is now to look for “the angle”  What are they trying to get out of it.

You know what?  Here’s how I look at it.  If you’ve got the $1 or $5 or whatever to spare, give it.  It’s *ALWAYS* better to err on the side of compassion for your fellow human being.  Even if it DOES turn out to be a hoax, *YOU* did the right thing by someone, and karmically that means something.  (Doing a good deed in the face of suspicion has to be worth something extra too.)

When Balloon Boy went up I took one look at the baloon floating through the sky, the shape, etc, and said to myself “There is no way there is a kid in that balloon.”

But that’s the key – i said it to myself.  When it did in fact turn out to be a hoax, I was justified in saying “I knew it” and all was good.

But when someone asks for a donation for a cause, I will *ALWAYS* err on the side of compassion.  After all, if it comes down to it and I or my family are in need, I’m hoping people will do the same.

Going forward, I’m going to try to be more…positive.  In this blog, on Twitter, and in life in general.  I’ve decided to stick around but I will *NOT* be here nearly as often any longer, I do have actual responsibilities, and this can’t be one of them any more.

Being the change…

Jesse

Full disclosure.  I’ve not seen an iPad yet.  But I’ve used my son’s iPod Touch on occasion, given what I’ve read and heard second-hand from people who have, the iPad, in it’s current incarnation is nothing but an iPod that won’t fit in your pocket.

That being said -  In the world of personal computing, Apple still has a small percentage in terms of market share.  10%.  And I’m not talking about just the computers, that’s INCLUDING the iPhone. **Source NetMARKETSHARE (http://www.tuaw.com/)

Add that to Apples absolutely STUPID refusal to support Flash on ANY of their devices (rendering sites like Hulu.com completely unusable) and it’s the Betamax all over again.

I love the Apple OS, I think that if there was a version of Snow Leopard that would run on readily available hardware I’d probably jump at it -  (I’m an Ubuntu user on my laptop, Windows on my Desktop) – however I don’t see that happening, because Apple uses it’s software to guarantee hardware sales.  (My only other problem with it is I have a few applications that still require the use of a serial cable, apples still have no serial port)

Which brings us to the biggest problem with the iPad, the iPhone, and Apple in general is the vendor lock-in that goes with any of these products.  Most people don’t like lock-in, it’s the same complaint I heard recently about the Kindle.  The biggest complaint about the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, etc I’ve heard is the fact that you can almost not get a single application through anyone but Apple.  Yes other vendors can submit applications for the i<device> but it remains to be approved by apple and apple doesn’t approve new apps lightly.

And then, once you’ve bought your app, you’re hooked, because you can’t transport those applications to another platform.

Which is exactly where Apple wants you to be.  Beholden to them.

The main benefit to the HP Slate, and the Dell versions that are undoubtedly soon-to-be-announced, is this.

If I decide I don’t like my HP, I can take my applications to the next platform.  I’ve already paid for them, why shouldn’t I?

Portability and availability are the things that HP and others will offer that Apple can’t, or won’t.

Just my .02 cents

Dear Mr. Cuccinelli

When asked how much money this lawsuit is costing the taxpayers you responded $350.

When asked if you’d retained outside council you said no, that everyone working on it were employees of the attorney general’s office.

Apparently you have issues with basic math and should have worked for Enron before you entered into politics.

Let me ask the question again, for the record:  “What is the hourly rate of the STATE (taxpayer paid) EMPLOYEES you’ve got working on your idiotic ideological crusade, and how many hours have they devoted to it.”

I’ll take a round number please.

Please don’t waste *MY* money on this stupid lawsuit.  HCR will help people.  That alone should be reason enough to leave it alone.

Also – please don’t purport to represent the citizens of the state of Virginia.  First off you idiot, Virginia is a commonwealth not a state, you’d know that if you had the IQ god gave a turnip.

Secondly, you don’t represent me, you don’t represent more than HALF of the districts in your “State”.

You represent Governor McDonald, the Insurance Industry, and the Republican Party, they are your true masters.

Ok – I just had an interaction with a “technical” support rep from Symantec that is quite simply driving me insane.

I want to thank “Shajeewin” for renewing my objection to outsourcing jobs overseas.  Yes people, it’s cheaper.  But then again you do get what you pay for.  This “person” (and I use the term loosely) had an interaction with me that doesn’t pass the Turing test.  Note to companies – if you’re going to outsource your support to a third-world country, pick one that can fucking speak *AND UNDERSTAND* the English language first.  *THEN* see if you can find one who is technically competent.

Then fuck-off for outsourcing jobs when we have 10+ million unemployed in our own country.

Background:  I am trying to set up a customer who wants to push a Disaster Recovery image of ONE computer system across the internet to my datacenter, to be used in case their building becomes a smoking hole in the ground.

Initial push of data is about 30 gig, daily updates in the megabytes range.  The hard part is this customer isn’t the type to spend a lot of money on Bandwidth, so went with Verizon DSL, with it’s whopping 128K upstream speed.  (Verizon – you suck too.  #justsaying)

My solution for this was to do the inital backup to a USB drive, hand-carry it to my system and upload it, and then push the incremental updates over the wire.  Simple, right?  (Trust me, it is)

So I look at Norton/Symantec Ghost.  First option, I’ve always liked Norton – though in retrospect I’m changing my mind about that QUICKLY.

Here is the chat that ensued (with my after-the-fact comments thrown in)

Read more

…and try to ignore the smell of your state taking a big crap on your head and everything you stood for.

I lived in Massachusetts – There was a reason I left.  There was a reason I left a *GOOD* company to work for a *SHIT* company.  It was the state of Massachusetts.  Spending one more month there would have involved me shooting from a roof-top somewhere.

My wife says that Massachusetts would be a nice place if it weren’t for the people.  Tonight just cemented that for me.  Massholes manage to continue to be fucking idiots.

Did you happen to forget why you kept electing Ted Kennedy?  Why you now choose to deny the rest of the country healthcare reform that you already have?

Just go away.  Nobody really likes you anyway.