Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.
   -Dale Carnegie

In the battle of one man against the world, bet on the world.
   -Franz Kafka

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
   -Winston Churchill

…nothing is ever really easy, is it?

Sometimes, there is nothing else to say.

So,

Fuck…

Photographs freeze a moment in time, and old pictures from the pre-digital era by their very nature add a weight of age to the image, even if the subject is something like a landscape, not attached to a particular time period. The yellowing of the paper, the fuzziness from the grain or the poor lens, the time-induced fading of the color or the reduced contrast of old black-and-white imbue a gravitas that is lacking in the crystal-clarity of images taken with a digital camera and displayed on a computer screen.

I wonder if in a quarter-century the pixel-files captured today will have the same impact of memory that old photos have now, sometimes wistful and sad, or recalling joy often repeated since that frozen moment. The razor’s edge clarity may be too harsh for gentle reminiscence to survive.

I hope everyone is able to appreciate the day with their family, even if they are not what is called “real’ family, and even if they are not physically present.

Family is not always related, even by marraige, and being there isn’t always in person.

I’ve put up a test blog to try out different layouts at this URL:

http://www.randomfate.net/WP/

Feel free to look in and comment on the appearance. I’ll ask for specific feedback once I get close to what I want to try.

Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
   -David Broder

The outcome of the election last week underscores exactly how poorly George W. Bush understands his role as President. His political opponents mocked him, and rightly so, for proclaiming that he was “the Decider” (and the capitalization could be heard in his statement) and it was up to him to “decide what was right for ‘Merica.” There is one catch in that, however, which is our Constitution proclaims the People are soveriegn and the government exists to serve those people.

Unlike other nations which have a single person as head of state and different individual as head of government such as in the United Kingdom where Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state and Prime Minister Tony Blair is the head of her government, in the United States the People are the head of state, hence the opening words, “We the People…” The President is the head of government. Many assume, wrongly, that the President is both head of state and head of government, but the President merely represents the People on occasions where a head of state is required. The original government of the United States, outlined in the Articles of Confederation, showed how the founders did not want a true head of state, but they recognized the need for a central representative and therefore called the Constitutional Convention that resulted in our current form of government.

George W. Bush apparently forgot he is merely representing the true origin of power in the United States, the People, and instead has chosen to behave like a CEO operating a company in a top-down management style. We can only hope that he learned the error of his ways on Wednesday morning when the scope of the “thumpin” administered by the real “deciders” was apparent.

When I lived and worked in France, I shared a cubicle with several people, including someone who was a contractor to one of the corporate partners in the Alliance that prompted my expatriate assignment. This person was an almost painfully young Frenchman with whom I, as a soon to be 40 year-old-man at the time, had precious little in common with due to the chasm created by both age and culture. In the past few weeks, I frequently wonder what has become of him in his quest to gain more credentials through the (to me, anyway) Byzantine French system of college degrees. I do not know the answer to my questions because in my life I seem to have difficulties creating many permanent ties, and I know it is simply a facet of who I am, sadly enough.

It is nearly a year since I left France, and while I have tried in some small way to keep in communication with those friends I left behind, it has been very difficult. The immediate tasks presented by the death of my father, my engagement and subsequent marriage to a single mom who had two children who were incipient teenagers (the kids are great, but they are getting to the age where things are “complicated’), the building of a new house for my new family, and keeping down my day job to pay the bills in the midst of all the associated chaos and required overseeing of the new construction gave me more than sufficient reason to neglect the maintenance needed to keep fragile new friendships alive.

This December my company is flying me to San Francisco to attend the premier conference for my industry, and some of those with whom I worked in France will be there, either as presenters or as session chairs (believe me, if you don’t know what a “session chair” is, you do NOT want to know, because it will peg your geek meter beyond 11). I am definitely looking forward to seeing those folks again, especially those with whom I shared hobbies like photography, because I have allowed those contacts to lapse to my regret. For me, it seems that I have only a limited bandwidth to keep long-distance relationships going, even those that I would prefer to remain active.

It comes down to a matter of trade-offs, because we all have limitations. There are only so many hours in a day, so much energy in a person, so much time we can spend concentrating and thinking, and although we all have different levels of talents, regardless of those factors it comes down to trade-offs, what are we wiling to devote our limited supply of energy towards. Since my new life has required much more energy than I in my foolish optimism had hoped, I have not been able to break my previous tendency to lose touch with those out of sight, and therefore out of mind, and I have lost touch with those who I would have liked to have kept in my personal communication loop.

It is very sobering coming up against a limitation such as this, especially for one who once seemed to have infinite energy to argue any cause. Such is the fate of us all who are privileged to live long enough to recognize it.

We’ve moved everything into the new house (or into the garage, as there were so many boxes we wouldn’t be able to move if they were all inside the house itself), and now we have the task of unpacking. The disorder is very stressful for my wife, so the focus for the next two weeks will be in getting things out of boxes and stored as quickly as possible while still making sure the homework and kids’ activities are all covered.

So, don’t expect much in the way of deep thought here for a bit. I am still thinking about things, but I simply don’t have time to compose anything coherent.

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
   -Albert Einstein

Fools rush in where fools have been before.
   -Unknown

…Donald Rumsfeld resigns as Secretary of Defense.

This administration will go down in history as the “too little, too late” crew, doing too little initially and recognizing the need for change far, far too late.

Life is a long lesson in humility.
   -James M. Barrie

The two most abundant things in the universe are Hydrogren and stupidity.
   -Harlan Ellison

My experience voting today was not one to encourage confidence in our system; instead it highlighted the folly of the American attitude of seeking a technological solution to every problem.

When I arrived at the elementary school where my precinct votes, I saw a line at least 50 yards long stretching out the door. When the line finally moved enough for me to see the table where ID was being presented I was able to determine that half of the electronic voting machines were not working. A big hint was a massively overweight guy with a pocket protector stretching his already deformed polo shirt, multitool in hand, leaning over a machine with its guts exposed for all to see. The feeling that a vote could be cast securely using that type of device was fading fast.

The identification verification process, while efficient, had the smell of 1984 (the novel) about it. A bar-code on the back of my driver’s license was scanned into a laptop, which displayed my name and printed out a sticker with said name and a barcode on it. I was then to go to another line, this one only 20 yards long, to eventually present the sticker to a woman who then placed it on a page where I was to sign indicating I was who I said I was, and initial because I used a driver’s license rather than my voter’s registration card for my ID. Given the voter’s registration card has no photo on it, the need to initial for using a driver’s license seemed backwards in terms of verifying identity.

Next, I got to give the second part of my sticker to a fierce-looking woman who then said made some kind of notation in a book and had the man next to her type something on a touch screen so his thermal printer would spit out a curled bit of paper with a four digit code I was to use in the voting machine itself. Visions of vote-tracking to names flashed through my mind, then I walked over to a third line, this one around a corner into the school cafeteria and about 25 yards long. I asked the woman in front of me why we stopped using the optical reader paper ballots, and she said she liked them better because she didn’t need to use a special booth to fill it out. I mentioned that the paper trail it left was much more confidence building than what we were experiencing by using the electronic voting machines today.

Yes, optical scan ballots are old tech, but guess what, they are more secure, leave a paper trail, and don’t crash at the polling station. All you need are enough ballots and enough pencils. Double voting or not blacking out the circles sufficiently just shows that if you are not intelligent enough to use that simple form, perhaps you shouldn’t be voting in the first place.

Before we claim to be the city on the hill exporting democracy to the world, perhaps we should focus a bit more on getting it right at home.

…especially those who lecture other nations on democracy and freedom:

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.
   -Bill Vaughan (1915-1977)

The packing is all finished (finally!!!), and today we move into our new house. We sold my house two months ago, and we sold my wife’s house two weeks ago so that we could buy a new house together for the new family. It’s been a bit stressful, especially in dealing with the builder and the contractors we had do work on the new house after the builder finished, but it will all be worthwhile once we are settled in. Our infrastructure is a bit wobbly at the moment, I’m stealing bandwidth from a neighbor who has an unsecured wireless network, but I hope to have something up and running at our new house before the weekend is over.

Since this time last year, I’ve moved from France to the US into temporary housing, then from temporary housing to my old house, then after I got married into my wife’s house, and now into our new house together. I think this will be my last move for a LONG time, and I hope I will have more time to write very soon. My blog is suffering from neglect…