I used to blog

Posted on April 15, 2012 by JASon

I started to say that I used to blog *more*, but then decided that saying “more” implies that I actually blog on a regular basis. Since my last post was almost a year ago I thought it better to leave it off.

With that out of the way, I do miss setting aside time to distil thoughts from life into text (on paper? screen? blog?). While my brain hasn’t shut off (completely), there is a cathartic release of sorts that comes by organizing a jumbled mess in the grey matter to coherent thought in print. Even typing this random blather out is making me a little more relaxed.

So, on this Sunday evening what pearls of wisdom will I share?

I have enjoyed being outside in the nice weather we’ve had these last few days.
I do not like weeds.
I like the way the strawberry beds look after removing said weeds.
I really do not like weeds.
There still are seven months until November, and I’m all ready to crawl into a hole to avoid the soap opera known as US Election Theatre.
I think I like weeds more than US Election Theatre. But just barely.

How Do I Respond?

Posted on May 1, 2011 by JASon

Tonight it was announced that Osama bin Laden was killed. Hearing that — correction, reading that on Twitter — took me back to the Fall of 2001. I feel a bit perplexed on how to react to the news.

I am relieved that this purveyor of terror can no longer terrorize the world. I’m fully aware that there are thousands more just like him, but his was a very important head on the hydra.

I’m wary of the retaliation that may be forthcoming. I’m already frustrated with the personal liberties we have lost in the aftermath of 9/11 (and subsequent attempts), so I’m not looking forward to what additional restrictions might come.

I grieve for the families who lost loved ones on 9/11. I grieve for the families who have lost love ones in the military action since. My only prayer is that this can help them find a greater sense of closure.

I think it’s human nature to say that one would be joyful hearing this news. The “playground bully” is not able to take our lunch money anymore. But I’m not finding myself feeling very joyful. Here’s why.

God created the heavens and the earth, and every living thing on the earth. God loves every living thing on the earth; evil or holy, pure or rotten, God loves every living thing. Even though bin Laden was, according to most of the world, an evil man, God still loves him. I cannot picture God rejoicing in bin Laden’s death. Evil though he was, God is still saddened by it.

And this is where I’m stuck. I don’t think there is a clean cut answer on how to respond. There is just the tension between the emotions of the flesh, and what God has called us to. The tension is not enjoyable, but it is through the tension that we are caused to grow.

What is Christmas?

Posted on December 19, 2010 by JASon

That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m really chewing on this question this year. I don’t have a solid answer to the stated question, but I do know what Christmas isn’t.

Christmas is not Santa Claus. While Saint Nicholas was real, and was known for his secret gift giving, the derived Santa Claus is a fairy tale told to children.

Christmas is not a catch phrase. While “keeping Christ in Christmas” has bothered me for a long time, my new favorite is “taking back Christmas.” As if some barbarian horde came and absconded with our beloved holiday, and we need to go to war to rescue it from their evil clutches. Those barbarians being the actual people whom Jesus came to save. I know the intent of both of these messages is to maintain the centrality of Jesus in celebrating Christmas, yet they seem to miss the point IMHO.

Commercialization is not the issue. Charlie Brown has been lamenting the “commercialization of Christmas” for 45 years, and yet we still find it necessary bemoan it today. Is commercialization going to be the downfall of the church? My wife’s love language is gift giving, so is she sinning if she buys a present for someone?

Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees. Have we become so focused on things that we control — our words, our money, our traditions — that we are missing what God was doing by sending his son to Earth as a baby? Tonight I’ve been dwelling on the first phrase of an old, traditional Christmas song:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King.

What does it mean for us to receive Jesus? I think when we figure that out we’ll figure out what Christmas really is.

So I Just Wrote My Congressmen

Posted on November 22, 2010 by JASon

I just sent this to my three congressmen. Enjoy, and comment if you’d like.

=========

Today I’m writing to ask you to protect the civil liberties of US citizens. In the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks various branches of the US government have taken steps to increase the security of our nation. The problem we are experiencing today is that good intentions do not always equal freedoms being protected

It is a noble undertaking that the TSA takes on; the responsibility of protecting airplane passengers is huge. I fear that the intense focus on security has created an environment where the very public method of security is quashing those very constitutional rights they are seeking to protect.

To say that I would be angry to see my wife handled in that fashion would be the understatement of the year. This type of physical contact would clearly be seen as molestation in all other circumstances. To me it doesn’t make a difference that TSOs only pat down members of the same sex. There are only two persons who should have that kind of contact with me: my wife and my doctor.

Not that I need to quote the Fourth Amendment for you, but it reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

When did choosing to fly become “probable cause?” I fail to see how the choice of air travel warrants the suspension of the Fourth Amendment.

I urge you to seek out a better way forward. Security of the nation’s airways is an important task, but security at the cost of civil liberty is contrary to what this nation stands for. I cannot sit quietly when we’re told that to protect our freedom we must give up our freedom.

Bacon: Round 1

Posted on October 17, 2010 by JASon

About one month ago I went over to a friend’s house, and they walked me through the process of butchering a half-pig. I took both boys with me, and they didn’t seem to have any problems with the whole cutting-apart-an-animal thing, so that was definitely a good thing.

One of the fun things with having all these cuts of pork in the freezer is that we get to prepare them how we want to, and we get to experiment with flavors, seasoning, cooking method, etc. Our first experimentation was with the best, most important cut from a pig: bacon.

Sarah shared a good base bacon recipe with us, and suggested one riff on the recipe. Here’s what I did.

1lb 13oz piece of pork belly
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp blackstrap molasses
2 tbsp kosher salt
1 tsp curing salt
1 tsp fresh ground black pepper

Mix the brown sugar and molasses, then add the salts and pepper.

Spread the mix (rub?) on the slab, and rub it in.

Place the glorious piece of meat in a zip top bag, and place it flat in your fridge, flipping it once a day.

After seven days (or so) the meat will be firm to the touch. The bag will have accumulated liquid over the week; these are the juices from inside the meat.

Extract the cured bacon from the bag, and rinse it well with water. Discard everything but the bacon itself. Dry it completely when you are done.

This can be the end of the exercise. You may slice up your slab of bacon and fry it up. Or you can continue on and go one more step. For our first go around I decided to go all the way with it.

You can either roast it in the oven, smoke it on the grill, or both. For this one I choose to roast it in the oven. I brushed on some Stubb’s Hickory Liquid Smoke, put it on a rack, and roasted it at 200 degrees for 2 hours.

Roasting done, I cut off a couple of slices and fried it up.

I was surprised at how simple the process was. And the result was amazing! I’m looking forward to the other 13 pounds of pork belly we have in the freezer, and curious about what other flavors we could try.

Buzz Thoughts

Posted on February 10, 2010 by JASon

So I’ve been playing with Google Buzz some today, and here are some of my initial thoughts.

What exactly is Buzz? Google is great at building compelling products. They often struggle, however, on finding coherence between there offerings. Google Apps is a great example of them building a coherent solution around multiple applications (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, etc) for organizations. But for individuals the offerings are vast, and a little too unrelated.

What Buzz is attempting to do is to consolidate your various online “life streams” — Flickr or Picasa for your photos, YouTube for your videos, Google Reader shared items, blog posts — and aggregates them into one channel. Beyond the life streaming you can give the typical “what am I doing right now” status updates. Your buzzing (to use that as a verb) can be worldly accessible, or made private to a group defined in your Gmail contacts.

Isn’t this just like Facebook? Well, yes and no. Facebook is a platform. What I mean by that is Facebook wants to be your home for everything. Facebook wants to have your photos and videos, and for those things that don’t come from Facebook by default, there is an application ecosystem so you can play your games and take your silly surveys. But everything is wrapped into the Facebook platform, and you access everything through facebook.com.

Buzz, on the other hand, is more of an aggregator. Sure, you can give a status update just like Facebook. But Buzz’s strength begins when you tie in outside services like Flickr. My photos are in Flickr; that’s just where I prefer to have them. Trying to get those into Facebook, through a Facebook application, is kludge at best. With Buzz, when it sees that I have new photos it creates a new “buzzlet” (buzz dropping?) automagically. It takes wrangling to get outside blog posts into Facebook, where Buzz will pull it in for me. Facebook wants to be the “one platform to rule them all,” where Buzz wants to bring things together from disparate places on the web into a single stream.

Isn’t this just like Twitter? I think Twitter and Buzz is a more similar comparison than Facebook and Buzz. Twitter is great for giving status updates, but can be challenging to follow the flow of conversation amongst the barrage of tweets. I’ve been using Twitter for three years now, and I find value in using it. Historically Twitter has been mobile friendly in the text messaging context, hence its 140 character limit. More recently they are expanding into mobile web, but the text message functionality is still available.

That said, to pull in life streams you have to rely on outside services. There are a bevy of blog plugins that will notify Twitter when a blog is updated. You can use a third party service to consume RSS feeds of blogs, Flickr, etc. and have that posted to your Twitter feed. With Buzz, that is all right there. No working with outside services. And as with many Google offerings, there is a really nice mobile web version of the application. No sign of a text messaging option, though.

Isn’t this just like FriendFeed? “What is FriendFeed,” you might ask. FriendFeed has been around for a while, and was recently purchased by Facebook. FriendFeed will aggregate data from 58 different types of services into a common feed. This includes well known sites like Digg, Delicious, Pandora, Twitter, and Flickr to more niche web sites/services like LibraryThing. I have a FriendFeed account, but I hardly ever use it.

Out of all the comparisons I’ve made or seen done by others, Buzz to me resembles FriendFeed more than any other service. The thing that I believe will make a difference is that Buzz is integrated into Gmail. Immediately Google has millions of Buzz users. And to top it off, I don’t have to go visit yet another web site. I’m always in my Gmail. I always found FriendFeed to be another tab to be opened, and never really got into it primarily because it was somewhere else I had to be online.

Isn’t this just like email? This is a valid question, primarily because when the Buzz threads you are a part of — someone comments on your buzz, or another comment on a buzz you previously commented on — when those threads are updated you receive an email in your Gmail inbox. Talk about inbox overload. This Lifehacker post shows you how to “turn off” that “feature.” You can also “mute” a post if you do not want to be notified about further comments on that post. To do that you click on the Comment dropdown on the top-right corner of said post, and choose “Mute this post.”

But no, Buzz is no more email than Google Talk (integrated into Gmail, too) is email. The main differentiator between Buzz and email is the public nature of it. Kinda like the difference between a message to a specific person on Facebook and a status update on Facebook. Your message (i.e. email) is to a specific person/group of people. Your status update is to all your friends. And just like Facebook status updates, people can comment on your update.

Do I have to use Buzz? No, you can turn Buzz off. If you go to your Gmail inbox, at the next-to-last line you will see a link that says “turn off buzz.” Click that link, and it is gone.

Final Thoughts: I think Buzz is promising. I always liked the idea of FriendFeed, but didn’t like having to be yet another place. I like that it is tied into Gmail. I wish there was some flexibility within the system, and I wish I could add more services (e.g. Digg, Lala). I have to give it some credit, though, since it has only been out for only 1+ day at this point. It is a brand new service by Google, and has been given a very prominent position within Gmail. Google will not let it flounder.

iPad This and iPad That

Posted on January 27, 2010 by JASon

Ever since the conclusion of this morning’s iPad introduction I’ve been trying to 1) figure out what I think about the new device without ever having seen it with my own eyes, much less held in my own hands, and b) how do I articulate said thoughts. So, here goes.

I think Apple set out to upscale the iPod touch. Obviously the iPad is physically much larger than the iPod touch, so the upscaled hardware was achieved. The second aspect of it is the upscaled software, which is not as easily achieved. Sure, they could have gone the easy route of just “super sizing” your typical iPhone applications — which they are doing with all iPhone apps as an easy way to port iPhone apps to iPad — but they have re-conceived the iPhone OS for the larger display.

I think Apple set out to crush the eBook market. Why would I pay $489 for a Kindle DX when I can spend $10 more to get an iPad? The screen size is the same, and they both have bookstores attached to them with wireless distribution. And that’s about where the similarities stop. And unlike the Kindle, the iPad supports the “free and open” ePub book format.

I think those disappointed because they expected this to be a laptop killer are kidding themselves. If you really wanted a “true” OS X tablet you should have purchased a Modbook by now. Why would Apple, or any company, want to steal customers from themselves? Getting customers to buy a laptop-replacing tablet rather than a more expensive system is ludicrous.

What they have done is created a desktop supporting product. You have your desktop computer (your choice between the Mac Mini, iMac, or Mac Pro of course), and an iPad for mobile support. I’d love to have a beefy Mac Pro under my desk, and an iPad to take to meetings. I already take my iPod touch to meetings, and the iPad would actually be easier to take notes on.

It’s not all roses from me, however. I do wish it had a camera on the bezel for video chat. I really wish they would have introduced running multiple apps simultaneously. Really wish they would have done that.

There is a lot more I could say, but this is enough for now. Anyway, I won’t have any sense of it until I actually use one. Perhaps I’ll have to go grab the latest SDK and give the virtual iPad a go.

Facebook’s Latest Security Change: Facts and Reality

Posted on December 14, 2009 by JASon

Tonight I saw this status update — or a variation of it — from a number of my friends on Facebook:

If you don’t know, as of today, Facebook will automatically index all your info on Google, which allows everyone to view it. To change this option, go to Settings –> Privacy Settings –> Search –> then UN-CLICK the box that says ‘Allow indexing’

I immediately went and checked out my own settings. Sure enough, my default Public Search Results box was checked to allow indexing. What caught my eye was the descriptive text below that check box.

Allow search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to Everyone

What this is saying is the data you have already made accessible to the world can (read: will) be indexed by Google. Sure, you can uncheck the box, and Google (and Bing and Yahoo! and anyone else) will not index your world-accessible, fully public data.

IMHO that’s a false veil of privacy. If you really want to know the data that will be indexed you can navigate to the same privacy settings page, and click the Preview My Profile button. I hadn’t seen this button before, but it is a really nice tool.

The initial view is your public view; it is what the world sees when they load up your Facebook profile. This is the data that would be indexible by third parties such as Google and Microsoft. But, it also gives you the ability to type in the name of a Facebook friend, and it shows you what they can see on your profile page. This preview tool allows you the ability to see how your privacy settings affect your profile page, and the data that people (Fb friends or not) can see.

Quick summary: unchecking this box is not securing your profile. It only keeps Google et al from indexing it into their search results. Random strangers will still be able to view your public profile. My advice, use the “Preview My Profile” tool to tune your public profile to where you are comfortable with the information given; all the way down to nothing if that is what you desire. Facebook is only doing what you have setup your privacy to be; if anything is marked as available to Everyone, they are making it available to everyone.

Caveat emptor.

Update – I don’t want this to sound like I’m anti-security. I’m all for security; privacy is a very important thing. I just don’t like the Jump To Conclusions Mat of “[insert company] is evil! They are sharing my data!” when you have specifically allowed them to share it. We need to take a step back and really evaluate what is, or isn’t, happening on our behalf. Then, take appropriate action to secure your data as you see fit.

Been a Long While

Posted on December 10, 2009 by JASon

Man, I am a crappy blogger when it comes to consistency. My last post was May 1, and even that was just photos. Here we are eight months later at the end of the year, and I’ve got nothing here to show for it. It’s not as if I’m not doing anything. All of my activity has been over at Facebook or Twitter.

What’s new? Well, three kids is a lot of kids. Not as many as five, but definitely more than two. The little miss is so different than the boys, and yet like them in so many ways.

Work is busy, as always. I don’t know if I could handle it if it wasn’t busy, so I count it as a good thing. Definitely keeps me excited / entertained. That, and I just enjoy the work that I’m doing.

You’d think that I’d have more to say after eight months off, but this all I got at the moment.

Boo!

Posted on May 1, 2009 by JASon

A sister for Munchkin and Half Pint.