El Gringoqueño

All a man needs out of life is a place to sit ‘n’ spit in the fire.

Author: Jim (Page 7 of 50)

Father of 4, Engineer, Social Worker, longtime blogger, #linux user. Opining on the internet? What else is it for?

He’s A Good Guy

September 26, 2018 /

I think I’ll weigh on the Brett Kavanaugh thing, okay? I wouldn’t do it unless I had something to say that is different from what I’ve heard in the media. It’s been talked to death, I know, but there’s something I think people are missing.

“He’s a good guy. That’s not the Brett I know,” said various classmates who have signed letters of support.

So what’s missing? Isn’t that the end of the story?

“He pushed me to the bed, placed his hand over my mouth and got on top of me, attempting to remove my clothes,” said Christine Blasey Ford. “His friend Mark Judge, kind of jumped on us knocking everybody to the floor and I was able to collect myself and escape.”

There’s a glaring difference between the two descriptions of Kavanaugh, and it’s not just one is bad and the other good.

Shifting gears a bit, I do these resume, job search, interviewing workshops for folks looking to better their job hunting skills. One of the tips I give them is to make sure your accomplishments are specific. “I was the best worker at my old job” isn’t as strong as, “I exceeded my sales quotas by 25% in four consecutive quarters” or “I was awarded with employee of the month among 40 employees for the month of July 2018.”

Those are specific achievements and tell us much more than, I was a hard worker, or I was liked, or I was a good guy.

Now do you see it?

A criminal can be a good guy. A criminal isn’t defined 24/7 by his criminal activity. Actions can be discrete. A person can rob a bank and still be a loving son and friend, a “good guy.” In fact, don’t we hear it a lot? He seemed like such a good guy, I never would have expected that type of behavior from him. It’s almost cliché.

Okay, so what’s the takeaway here? For starters, I want Mr. Kavanaugh’s resume to contain specifics. He needs to firm up his statements of “I’m a good guy” with something that demonstrates his good guyness. What are those actions that make him a good guy? Tell us more about his character? For example:

“Brett was the kind of guy that would always look out for others. Now, I know there was alcohol at these parties, and yes, Brett was there, but he was always looking out for others. If you had too much to drink, he’d make sure you were okay. Since he was on the football team and a respected leader, when he asked you for your keys, you didn’t refuse. That’s the kind of guy he was. There was this time I watched him charm the keys out of the hands of a much bigger boy. He just kind of disarmed him, didn’t embarrass him. The guy afterward acted like Brett had just done him a great favor, which he did, of course, but you know how these things can get problematic.”

Or

“I remember distinctly, this one time that Brett intervened with a girl that looked cornered by a drunk young man. He didn’t make a scene or get in a fight or anything, but just the force of his character was able to cut off the unwanted affections from the young man and usher the young woman away. He looked out for the girls, and I think he knew that some of the boys could be problematic. But that was not Brett.”

Or

“It wasn’t enough for Brett to achieve, he wanted to make sure that others did as well. In addition to the service hours that were required by the high school, he went out of his way to establish study sessions, giving of his limited free time between football and basketball practice to make sure that his classmates were not falling behind. When we say he was a good guy, that’s what we mean. He didn’t just stick to his achievements, he wanted everyone to achieve. If you look at the class as a whole, you will notice that Brett’s class had a higher average GPA than classes before and after. I can’t prove it, but I think it had something to do with Brett.”

But I ain’t heard none of that. Not even a peep, other than “That’s not the Brett I know” or “He’s a good guy.” All I hear is the stories of a paper tiger, an entitled douchbag who has managed to keep his head down and maintain the status quo for his entire life, checking the boxes, being a generically “good guy” in the same way that white men who occupy high positions have gotten passes for decades – just on the strength of their outwardly normative behavior.

Let’s be clear. There are specific allegations against him. Those specific allegations cannot be dismissed by “That’s not the Brett I know.” If you want to portray Brett’s character, you’re going to have to come up with some specific stories of that demonstrate that character.

UPDATE (Later this same day – I swear I’m not making this up): Well, shit, Brett, you don’t seem like a good guy AT ALL.

I just wanna say

July 3, 2018 /

Although I agree ideologically with people that are upset at officials within the Trump administration, if you are berating someone while they are having a meal or kicking them out of your restaurant, you are a crackpot.

Wow – this article came out today

April 3, 2018 /

It’s like Richard Stallman is reading my blog! 🙂 Haha, is joke.

Finally, don’t forget the software in your own computer. If it is the non-free software of Apple, Google or Microsoft, it spies on you regularly. That’s because it is controlled by a company that won’t hesitate to spy on you. Companies tend to lose their scruples when that is profitable. By contrast, free (libre) software is controlled by its users. That user community keeps the software honest.

Read more

This is pretty much why I use only software libre. I can’t write it all myself, but I have more trust in groups that don’t hold profit as a motive when I entrust to them my data. These non-profit companies develop software that allows me to see and manipulate the source code. I can do anything I want with it, except close it up.

Open Source serves the user – Closed source serves the company

April 2, 2018 /

Just wanted to jot down another frustrating example of how closed source software serves the creator company before it serves the user and why particular choices are made at the point of development.

I have been doing some research and have come across hundreds of PDFs of doctoral dissertations written by smart people about extremely interesting topics, but surprisingly nearly all the papers begin with “Microsoft Word – …” as the prefix to the paper’s title field embedded in the PDFs property data and dutifully indexed by Google as such. In none of the cases is “Microsoft Word” relevant to the topic discussed.

Curious, no?

So let’s ask ourselves why might Microsoft Word appear as a default prefix to the topic title of the work you are producing. Maybe it’s the particular manner of the chain of custody between Word and the PDF renderer (I don’t use Windows, so I have no idea how it works in that world). Maybe it’s Microsoft Word itself. I have no real idea. But the problem exists – your work, your data, your investigation has Microsoft branding barfed all over it.

Why?

Microsoft wants more search engine traction. By making all PDFs produced with Microsoft Word embed the string “Microsoft Word” into your work’s title, they ensure that every search for your work will also yield a boost for them. Microsoft is piggybacking on your hard work.

Microsoft just wants everybody everywhere to know that there is only one way to write an academic paper. Using the same motivation as the search engine, Microsoft hopes that for every paper published or read, people will continue to regard the string “Microsoft Word” as the only manner in which people may produce textual works. It becomes so conditioned into our expectations that when it doesn’t appear we think, something must be wrong.

I mean, it’s no secret that Microsoft, a for profit company, seeks its own ends, that these decisions are made to benefit them and no one else. Why else would they helpfully embed their brand into your document? Does that help you?

There’s a better way, however. Contrast Microsoft’s tack with that of the Document Foundation, whose values favor and empower the user rather than the organization. Among others, here’s a particularly nice gem from their core values: We commit ourselves to allow users of office productivity software to retain the intellectual property in the documents they create, by use of open document formats and open standards.

And we find that when you output a PDF from Libreoffice it doesn’t alter your title. Cool.

White Privilege – A Clarification

March 19, 2018 /

Hey, I get it. You don’t feel privileged. You’ve worked hard to accomplish something in your life. You’ve faced some hard knocks, but you’ve persevered and you have achieved. You might hear “white privilege” and dismiss it as offensive and racist; somebody’s trying to take away something from you that you earned.

I hear you, but I want to clarify something.

White privilege is a group phenomenon, a larger social issue rather than an individual one. In fact, I’ll equate it to climate change. Human driven climate change isn’t weather change, as certain U.S. Senators would like to imagine. Climate change works on a global level and is manifested as an increasing global average temperature. Yes, there are local fluctuations, but OVERALL the planet temperature is rising. White Privilege is a social phenomenon whose effects are felt in aggregate as asymmetric incarceration rates, greater income inequality etc. Yes, there are fluctuations. There are some suffering white folks just as there are some affluent black folks, but overall, there is a general social and economic advantage in America to being white.

I will concede that perhaps “white privilege” is a term that is probably unnecessarily antagonistic and when launched as a rebuke certainly isn’t building bridges. Still, I would exhort people who would classify themselves as white to attempt to understand where it comes from and own the concepts behind it. Try to see the collective position of power not as privilege for oneself, but as a duty to correct the sins of the past.

Information Technology Marginalization

January 17, 2018 /

It’s been twenty years, and I keep observing it, in all places, and at all levels. It doesn’t matter your education. It doesn’t matter if you are an employee or upper management, Puerto Rico has a problem with information technology marginalization, made worse by all the status, power, and access issues associated with its colonial status with the U.S.

I looked over the shoulder of an employee editing a document in Microsoft Word. She was proudly showing her boss the changes she made. She dutifully highlighted her changes and created a legend to mark deletions, insertions, and changes. She had carefully thought through the problems related to sharing her work, and cleverly developed a system to communicate it.

After her boss left, I gently showed her the track changes features of Word. I have never interacted with her in English, and I don’t imagine she speaks even a word of it, but her version of Windows 10 as well as her office suite, Microsoft Office were entirely in English. In fact, every single computer in the organization was the same way. I don’t doubt that there are people there that speak English, but no one has it as their first language, and no one wouldn’t benefit having their computer system presented to them entirely in Spanish. Your native language invites discovery, ownership. Your non-native, opacity and confusion.

I know this, because I always use unfamiliar systems in English. Even though I am perfectly fluent in Spanish both reading and writing, there is a distance from the words that is a challenge to overcome, and I don’t pay a social cost for choosing my native language.

The people of Puerto Rico pay a social price for choosing their own native tongue.

“Oh, no, these things are understood better in English. I’m accustomed to it that way.”

I commonly hear this, and I always shake my head internally and I have never been successful getting people to switch to a Spanish interface. There is no way that you are benefited by using it in its native tongue. Us it in your native tongue.

The resistance, of course, is due to issues surrounding status. English is seen as the language of the elites, those richer folks who put their kids in bilingual or English schools, vacation in the U.S. and send their kids to American Universities. If you admit you don’t speak English well, then you are effectively labeling yourself as lower class.

If you choose Spanish, you stigmatize yourself. You buy into the imposed narrative that you are less. Lesser politically, of lesser intelligence, a lesser human being. This young woman clearly showed both intellectual and emotional intelligence. She had successfully thought through the problem domain of how to track changes in a text document, and then placed herself in the shoes of anyone who would see it after herself, making sure that they could follow. And yet, she is held back, relegated to a second-class status because of her lack of access to English. Forget about English, I say, make the computer YOUR servant, and leave the idea that you must interact with it in its language in the past.

By the way, I later showed her boss how to turn on “track changes” as well.

 

Post María Calm

December 4, 2017 /

I approached the counter at the DMV smiling and said, “Good morning!” Well, actually, “Muy buenos días.” or VERY good morning. I asked the clerk how she was. Did she have electricity? Water? No, no electricity, only water. “Gracias a Dios,” I said. At least. That makes me happy. I told her that I hoped she’d get electricity soon. I was still smiling. I explained why I was there, what I had, and what I needed.

I have to be aware how I come across. I am impossibly physically large for Puerto Rico. I look like a big white American gringo federal agent, and that can immediately put people off for their assumptions of how I will act based on how I look. I don’t want to traumatize anyone. Yes I speak Spanish, no you don’t have to go find someone who speaks English.

I slouched to make myself smaller, fumbled with my papers, and dropped the pen. I filled in the wrong field and then made a self deprecating remark about not being good at following instructions. She chuckled, and told me not to worry about it. When she finished with the computer, she passed me my activated RFID sticker, and I paid the small fee. I thanked her profusely for her time and wished the people in line a good morning as I made my way to the parking garage. I waved at the parking attendant and thanked the cashier for taking my parking fee, paying with exact change.

I queued up a gentle string quartet on the car stereo, nudged the car out onto the street, and waited at the non-functioning traffic light to let some cars pass. They were in a hurry. I wondered what their lives were like, how they were, what they were feeling, what they were going through. No aggressive moves. There is no hurry for me, just go with the flow, be in the moment. Let others go first.

Puerto Rico is a nation in crisis. We are a people in crisis. Every individual is in crisis. We are all aware of how delicate our state is, and there seems to be some sort of tacit understanding that we must treat each other delicately, because we could lose it at any time. We are all broken, held together by a revisited gentility post María.

But we know we may crack and shatter at any moment for the loss of our livelihood, a loved one, the care for elderly relatives, for living without electricity, and worrying about the future. In the dark after the sun goes down and the hum of generators drowns out the night creatures we find ourselves alone. What about our hopes and dreams, our utility, our self? Where will I go? What will I do?

Maybe tomorrow, when the sun comes up, it won’t seem so grave. Things will seem brighter, more hopeful. Muy buenos días. ¿Cómo se encuentra? Very good morning to you. In what condition may you find yourself? or How are you?

Perhaps we can hold each other gently enough and for long enough that we may not fall to pieces.

Okay, I Get it. Small Government is Best. The Constitution Never Made Provisions for Social Welfare…

December 3, 2017 /

…but can we stop fetishizing the “founding fathers?” Please?

I do get “it,” though. The nearly religious beliefs of the right are that the founding fathers were enlightened individuals endowed with some sort of special insight into what it takes to govern. They had the prescience to foresee all the basic needs of humanity going forwards hundreds of years. They were brilliant and made the US Constitution so specific and at the same time so general as to make it universally applicable. Bravo. Clap clap. Here’s a gem from the Declaration of Independence:

All men are created equal.

All men?

Well not African men, or African women or children for that matter.

What about white women?

Are they men?

No.

Then not them.

You see how this is starting to sound like the Monty Python Cheese shoppe skit, right?

These are the same guys who didn’t see the acute moral problem of slavery? Oh, but it was the times, you say. Times were different. Sensibilities were different. They did the best with what they had. I could agree with you, yes. But then you want to eat all that delicious slave cake too when you ascribe to them some sort of mystical transcendental infallibility. They knew exactly what our modern diverse society needed but had no clue about their own time? Remember, for as long as there has been slavery there have been abolitionists. Don’t give me that, “they didn’t know better” crock. Lots of people knew it was wrong. How come our super smart humanist Enlightenment thinker guys didn’t get that “little” detail right too?

Bah! Stop fetishizing the past, the Constitution, and the founding fathers. I do not want to be shackled by them (for many it would be literal) to a history replete with genocide, injustice, inequality, slavery, no collective bargaining, where half the population had no vote, where the monied and the landed had all the power, where the rich made laws that benefited them and exploited the masses. Wait! Hold up, I’m starting to think this sounds vaguely like the present. Maybe the founding fathers had it right all along, and this outcome is exactly what they intended.

My prediction. The Republican tax cut bill will increase inequality in the U.S. The rich will get richer. The poor will find their ranks swelling. Maybe if we wish hard enough we can go back to the way things were in 1788 and make America great again.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

September 19, 2017 /

I’ll be offline probably for a couple of weeks if past hurricanes and storms are any indication. Maria looks to be heading directly for us like a freight train, and I don’t think we’re gonna be able to slip this one. We will probably have no water or electricity for a while.

I think we’ll be okay, though. The island will be mostly okay too. That is, the people are resilient and of good humor. When confronted with human need, I think most people rise to the occasion. The people of Puerto Rico seem to excel at having a generous spirit. Maybe it comes from not having a lot. I don’t know, exactly, but sometimes it’s the people with the least that are the most generous. I think it’s a learned thing.

Most everyone here has concrete houses and the topology is rather mountainous. We don’t get deep storm surge like in Florida or the Gulf Coast. It’s still super deadly near the water though, and tons of small businesses, mom and pop diners, stores, gas stations, hardware and furniture stores and assortments of small offices will probably go under. The crushing poverty in oppressed communities will get worse. The struggling owners of a small business that were probably just making do, will now throw in the towel, leaving their boarded up locale to collect mosquitos and rats.

But us personally? We’ll be okay, and I’ll check in again when things are less hectic.

*update note – haha, María was WAY worse than we thought. This post is laughable in hindsight 🙁

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