I read something this morning that has made my day. One of the local Portland weekly newspapers, the Portland Mercury, is holding a charity auction. And this year the beneficiary is the organization that taught me how to be a mediator and (indirectly) gave me my slashdot name.

May I please introduce Resolutions Northwest:

You may not have heard of RNW and their successes, because all their cases are kept strictly confidential. But I can share with you their success rate: Over 90 percent of RNW's mediations have been successful in solving the conflicts in question. Plus, 97 percent of clients would recommend the services. Here's another stat that should pique the interest of most taxpayers (even those who don't believe in conflict resolution): Mediation has been shown to be 10 TIMES less expensive and four times better in reducing future crime than the court system.

1. What is your occupation?

Network Administrator for a medical clinic.

2. What color are you socks right now?

About A0A0A0.

3. What are you listening to right now?

The bookkeeping department's new Tanzanian employee ask questions, the Medical Records department discuss a chart request, and the building HVAC system trying to warm the place up too much for my tastes.

4. What was the last thing that you ate?

A clementine.

5. Can you drive a stick shift?

Tolerably well. I have some trouble switching between my SO's Honda hotrod and my neighbor's Dodge Ram with a Cummins turbo diesel, but I haven't killed any clutches yet.

6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?

One the baby has drooled all over.

7. Last person you spoke to on the phone?

Ummm. I dunno, it's been a few days.

8. Do you like the person who sent this to you?

Mr. Slashdot is a member of the OSTG, so who wouldn't?!

9. How old are you today?

39. No, really. 39 for the first time.

10. Favorite drinks?

Carrot juice. No, really.

11. What is your favorite sport to watch?

City youth soccer. Or maybe "Everyone pile on [stepson] and tickle him!"

12. Have you ever dyed your hair?

Not yet.

13. Pets?

Six cats: Crier, May-bell, Cole (he sees dead people), Phobia (called Phober; this cat has half a brain), and Phober's two kittens Chip and Looty (with half a brain between them.)

14. Favorite food?

Trinidadian Curried Goat from Sweetwater's Jam House in Portland. Sadly, the restaurant has been defunct for years so I'll never get more.

15. What was the last movie you watched?

The Fifth Element on DVD, Flushed Away in the theater. Flushed Away is excellent.

16. Favorite holiday?

St. Crispin's Day!

17. What do you do to vent anger?

Flame.

18. What were your favorite toys as a kid?

Legos.

19. What is your favorite: fall or spring?

Fall.

20. Hugs or kisses?

Yes, please.

21. Cherry or blueberry?

Blueberry.

22. Do you want your friends to send this back?

23. Who is the most likely to respond?

24. Who is least likely to respond?

The three above are not really relevant here.

25. Living arrangements?

A large 1910 house, rented (gonna buy it) with SO, two stepkids, six cats, and a surprising lack of fleas.

26. When was the last time you cried?

About two weeks ago.

27. What is on the floor of your closet?

someone else's cruft.

28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you're sending this to?

My long-time offline friends have already done this one, or something very much like it, so I'll spare them.

29. What did you do last night?

Saw the young cousins who had stayed with us over the weekend off, then collapsed in a twitching heap while enjoying blessed quiet.

Bonus item!

I listened today to a very interesting interview on the radio: Jimmy Carter on Fresh Air.

Two things struck me as interesting about this interview. For starters, Terry Gross gives what is for her a very confronational interview. It is still pretty polite, since she is not exactly a hard-hitting interviewer, but I could clearly hear what seemed to be deep skepticism and annoyance in her voice. Haven't heard that since Bill O'Reilly was on.

Second, I think what Mr. Carter has to say is something many Americans need to hear. If you're concerned about the violence in the region, I think this interview (and presumably Carter's book) contains information that provides valuable perspective on the conflict. Give it a listen if you can.

(I know this is a difficult subject to discuss in a civil manner, but sometimes I just can't resist playing my role no matter how foolhardy it seems.)

A list of the top ten cities for beer lovers, according to MSNBC puts Stumptown at number 8. Ahead of Prague.

If, as Franklin said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy" then we're truly blessed around here.

It was a close call just south of Sandy Sunday night after a tree branch fell in the middle of a sleeping couple.

Jerry and Denise Chilson awoke at around 10:45 p.m. to discover an 8-inch-thick alder branch had punched through the roof of their home at 22215 Cottontail Lane and stabbed all the way through their mattress.

Follow link for photo.

"We came to Washington to change government and government changed us," lamented Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., his eye on the next election in 2008. "We departed rather tragically from our conservative principles."

It is a sad day. They had a historic opportunity to work for positive change (as they saw it) and they squandered it.

The Democrats would be wise to take this as a cautionary lesson. I hope they are sincere in their statements that they want to foster a more civil relationship between the parties.

Please.

Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office

By JAMES GLANZ
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen's supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

Mr. Bowen's office, which began operation in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a permanent bureaucracy as the key to its aggressiveness and independence.

[...]

Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill.

Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree.

"It's truly a mystery to me," Ms. Collins said. "I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time."

"The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion," she said.

[...]

The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday that he plans to run for president in 2008.

Mr. Holly, who is the House Armed Services spokesman as well as a member of Mr. Hunter's staff, said that politics played no role and that there had been no direction from the administration or lobbying from the companies whose work in Iraq Mr. Bowen's office has severely critiqued. Three of the companies that have been a particular focus of Mr. Bowen's investigations, Halliburton, Parsons and Bechtel, said that they had made no effort to lobby against his office.

The idea, Mr. Holly said, was simply to return to a non-wartime footing in which inspectors general in the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere would investigate American programs overseas. The definite termination date was also seen as helpful for planning future oversight efforts from Bush administration agencies, he said.

But in Congress, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, there have long been accusations that agencies controlled by the Bush administration are not inclined to unearth their own shortcomings in the first place.

The criticism came to a head in a hearing a year ago, when Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, induced the Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, to concede that he had no agents deployed in Iraq, more than two years after the invasion.

A spokesman for the Pentagon inspector general said Thursday that Mr. Gimble had worked to improve that situation, and currently had seven auditors in Baghdad and others working on Iraq-related issues in the United States and elsewhere. Mr. Gimble was in Iraq on Thursday, the spokesman said.

Mr. Bowen's office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and about 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other oversight agency in the country. [...]

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Thanks, Mr. Hunter. I'l be sure to remember this in 2008.

My Federal gosh-darn Senator, the Hon. Gordon Smith, is due here any minute. He's the Republican half of Oregon's split delegation. I respectfully disagree with him on a number of issues, of course, but he seems to be a decent fellow.

He's here to campaign on behalf of the Republican candidate for Governor, who is also going to be here. He strikes me as a complete tool, but so does the incumbent Democrat. (As one local wag put it, it's a choice between a Goldschmidt crony and a Goldschmidt consigliere. Both probably knew about the ex-Governor's rape of his babysitter and helped cover it up until the statue of limitations ran out.) I think I'll write in Ben Westlund.

Anyway, the nominal purpose of the visit, and the reason they're coming to our clinic, is that they're here to support the Reach Out and Read program by reading to a bunch of kids in our fancy new waiting room.

Staff has been asked to leave politics aside for the day. Our focus is to be on the literacy program, not the political overtones. Therefore, with some regret, I have decided to avoid the event and the surrounding media circus. I'll probably be hiding in the server room.

If his tour of our facility happens to lead him to me, he'll probably notice that I happen to be wearing my Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee shirt. Strictly a concidence, of course - it was on top of the heap of clean laundry. Really.

But if my plans go completely awry and I happen to chat with Sen. Smith, I might suggest to him that, with all due respect, an excellent use of literacy is for Senators to read the bills presented to them before voting upon them.

Update: The managing partner steered the tour well clear of me. I expect everyone is better off.

MacBook Pros can use 802.11a with their built-in radios.

It's not just the new Core 2 Duos, either, but the older MBPs as well.

There's a nifty undocumented feature.

Suggested remarks by Mr. Kerry:

"I made a statement last week that caused great offense. Many military people were offended by my statement that people had better get an education or they'd get shipped to Iraq. They were right to be offended by the implication that the military consists mostly of uneducated people. I am sorry. That is not what I meant to imply. That implication is simply not true anymore and hasn't been true for many years. I spoke thoughtlessly, and I did not mean to insult the military. I did mean to point out the foolishness of this administration's policies, and I don't apologize for that. I'll come back to that later.

"Some of you will not believe the sincerity of this apology. To you, I say that I spoke from my own experience in the military, which is of course decades out of date. The habits of youth can be hard to shake, and I am sorry for having spoken thoughtlessly.

"Back then, what I said would have been true. At that time, many of those in the military with higher educations were volunteers, like myself. During the Vietnam war the military had many draftees, and those draftees were disproportionately from among the poorest and least educated segments of our society. Those pursuing higher education were allowed to defer or avoid the draft. As we all know, many members of the administration took advantage of their wealth and influence to avoid combat, or even avoid military service of any kind.

"Of course, we haven't had a draft for many years, and the military has changed dramatically because of that. Since the institution of an all-volunteer military the services have become more selective, and have offered substantial educational benefits to many volunteers. Indeed, many have joined the military as a way to pay for higher education because they could not afford it otherwise. Over the years, this has resulted in a military which is even more educated than the general population, and I think all Americans can take some pride in that.

"But that's today. It wasn't true thirty-five to forty years ago when I served. And if this administration continues its reckless foreign policy, it may not be true in the future either.

"We have already seen that our military forces are being stretched thinner than we'd like, and there's talk of deploying even more troops to Iraq. And then there's the Korean problem to consider. In addition, some services are not meeting their recruiting goals.

"Will this administration continue in its recklessness to the point where we will need to reinstate the draft?"

You can take it from there.

(Unless you're the guy who put those idiotic words in his mouth to start with. If so, then do us all a favor and STFU.)

Last week my eight-year-old stepson and I had an evening to ourselves. I took him shopping for a present for his friend's upcoming birthday party, then told him we got to eat out for dinner... and he got to pick where.

"Anywhere?" he asked.

"Almost. No fast food. Pick a sit-down restaurant."

"Ummm. There's this one place... Tan-Tan?"

"Tin-Tin? The chinese buffet?"

"Yeah! Let's go there!"

"Oh man. That place kinda sucks. Great Wall is better."

"But they have rat on a stick!" he argued.

"They have WHAT?" I exclaimed.

"Rat on a stick. It's really good, and you get to use the wooden things after as toothpicks."

"Oh," I said, figuring out that this was some sort of kebab. "Is that what you call it, or what the restaurant calls it?"

"I think they call it that."

"Wow. Are you sure they're kidding?"

"I dunno."

"What if it really is rat?"

"Well," he said, "I'm pretty sure they cook it enough that all the germs are gone."

"Fair enough."

We survived the move to our new office. No servers died, or at least not unrecoverably so. Critical systems downtime was seven and a half hours, which (amazingly) was bang-on my predicted downtime.

The building is designed from the ground up for our use. Among many other advantages, this let us design reasonably good physical security measures to protect our data. I can now (or can soon, anyway) confidently tell any HIPAA auditors that our servers' physical security is better than the vast majority of clinics our size. Like all medical clinics, we have a reasonably large store of data that's ideal for identity theft. Physical, electronic, or combined break-ins specifically aimed at our data are a significant threat that we need to counter. Our previous facility had irredeemably terrible physical security, so this is a really welcome change.

We're still working out some bugs with our alarm and access control company, though. They've really dropped the ball in a number of different areas, and if we weren't paying close attention we would never have known that they didn't meet our spec. I've got their feet held to the fire, and they're working to make it right.

They decided to be very diligent yesterday, to try to restore my shaken confidence in them. They wanted to make sure that my user list and alarm call list was correct. So they sent me a list that included our address, each person's name and PIN, and noted who was authorized to make changes to the security system. Everything someone needs to know to disarm the alarm while impersonating any user after entry.

By e-mail.

Not encrypted e-mail, either, even though they have my certificate in their inboxes from previous signed e-mails I've sent. (I'm not exaggerating when I say that they don't even know what S/MIME is .) No, they sent it plaintext.

Now I get to change everyone's alarm PINs. I'm sure my staff will be thrilled.

In Oregon, a deer gets a bit too friendly with a teenage boy. So far as is known, no congressmen were present.

Posted on Oct 19, 2006

By Kevin Tillman

Editor's note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.

It is Pat's birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice... until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few "bad apples" in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It's interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don't be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that "somehow" was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat's birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

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Now get out there and vote . Maybe we can't set this right in just one election, but we can surely throw out many of the people who got it wrong.

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Update: Please see also some important (to me) caveats here.