MeyerBros

The usual readers of this blog (all three of you) may find this quite uninteresting, but I’m posting it here as Google-fodder in hopes it may be useful to someone out there.

Say there’s an internet audio stream that interests you (like, for example, a radio feed). But say you’d rather not listen to it while tied to a device with an internet connection - you need to rip it to a file on disk. And lastly, just for kicks, say the radio feed already has its advertisements kindly blanked out with silence by the stream provider, but you find those three-minute silences irritating to skip over manually.

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I’ve been kicking this article idea around in my head for awhile, but Sam Hurst actually wrote it. Good stuff.

Hurst: New Iraq sounds an awful lot like the Old Pine Ridge (Rapid City Journal, Mar 18 2007)

bonus:

No land, no shalom: Indigenous group wins land battle

We didn’t know about this until we saw it on MCC’s website - and we still don’t know how to get in touch with these people. MCC seriously needs a dedicated “indigenous issues” desk, or at least an email group or something.

I was just reminded at Ilyka’s that today is not only International Women’s Day, but also blog against sexism day. So I thought it would be a good time to take a break from our other recent conversations and, um, blog against sexism.

The gender-split commentary over on this post at Hugo Schwyzer’s got me thinking about how patriarchy hurts men (or, in gennimcmahon’s ever-so-much-more-eloquent version, “how the cultural view of men as irresponsible children whose backs hurt from the weight of following their dicks around, hovering in the air like a divining rod that�s found a ocean beneath their feet, is damaging and limiting”), and conversely how men so often love to divert conversation about patriarchy into “but women do bad things to men too!”, which is a technique for denial and minimization of male privilege.

I do think it’s important for privileged people to reflect on how privilege warps and damages our spirits, because until we do this internal work, any anti-privilege work we do is all about “helping out those poor oppressed women/people of color/queers” and not about a mutual struggle for liberation (cf the tagline quote over at AllyWork). It’s equally important for us to recognize that our privilege benefits us in lots of very concrete ways - recognizing our own hurts doesn’t make things “even”. And we’d better not think it gives us the right to take over a marginalized group’s conversation space with our tales of woe-is-me. That’s why I’m posting this here. And lastly, this can really verge on navel-gazing, so I’ll try to skim the edge of that cliff and (hopefully) keep this interesting or relevant to someone besides me.

Anyway, two personal stories come to mind. Not surprisingly, they both have to do with parents - hi Mom and Dad!

The first story I don’t remember myself, but Mom has told me several times. I guess at age three or so I had a pair of Raggedy Ann/Raggedy Andy dolls that I loved to pieces, including “nursing” them (Mom must have been breastfeeding Eric at that point). I told Mom that when I grew up I was going to be a Mommy, and she (very compassionately, I’m sure) informed me that I would never be a Mommy, but that she was sure I’d be a very good Daddy. Apparently this was crushing news to me, and I put those dolls away and never played with them again. (Mom makes it clear when she tells the story that she still regrets that, and given a do-over would just tell me “I’m sure you’ll be a great Mommy” and leave it at that).

What does that say about my images of mommy-ness and daddy-ness at that age? How much of this difference is due to the biological reality of mother-child attachment (maybe some, but I’d guess not the bulk of it), and how much is due to what I had already experienced from my parents (or observing other parents)? And what will I do to help my child, due next month, see both Mommy and Daddy as tender, attentive caregivers? (Given that I’m totally speaking out my rear end here, having never been a parent, I’d love some reflective - and patriarchy-aware - commentary on this from actual parents - including my own!). Also, if I so clearly understood Mommy to be the one responsible for tenderness towards children, and I was told early on that I couldn’t be one, how might that have impacted my later perception of myself as able to relate tenderly towards children?

The second story that comes to mind (I was reminded of it by gennimcmahon’s quote above), is the whole saga of parental reactions to my wife and I sharing a room in one context or another before we were married. Both her parents and mine reacted strongly to this at different points. In both cases, I initially thought it was just a generational issue of worry over “what others might think” - and to some degree it was. But the more we got into conversation about it, the more stunned I was how much of the resistance seemed (at some level) rooted in the idea that, essentially, men are unable to control sexual urges or make good choices about them.

Now, clearly men make awful (even evil) choices all the time, up to and including rape and sexual assault. I’ve made some pretty poor choices myself (though thankfully not to that point). But assuming that men are inherently unable to control themselves justifies rape and sexual assault. Instead of putting the onus firmly on men to take responsibility to stop being violent and dominating, the responsibility gets put back on women to “not put themselves in the wrong situation” — because the man can’t be responsible for something he apparently can’t control. Others have written more clearly about this whole issue - this post at Feministe is a good recent place to start.

The idea that men are incapable of self-control is also insulting and damaging to the spirit of men. It limits my vision of who I can become as a man, and even perhaps becomes self-fulfilling.

Anyone else have stories or thoughts to share? How has patriarchy/sexism impacted you?

Check out openID: the open (i.e. not-vendor-locked-in — hello MS Passport) single-sign-on web identity standard. Pretty cool. I just got myself a free identity page at myopenid.com. I thought about setting up an openID server at meyerbros.org, which doesn’t look hard, but then I ran across these instructions on using openID delegation. So I let myopenid.com handle the details of running the server and I can still use carl.meyerbros.org as my openID login URI. Nice.

Next step - setting up blog.meyerbros.org as an openID consumer (so people can login to comment using their openID identity instead of having to register). Looks pretty easy.

Interesting (and, not surprisingly, somewhat fiery) conversations in the blogosphere recently about diversity, gender, exclusion, and affirmative action in the web-geek world. Our favorite Meyerbro homonym web-geek Eric Meyer started things off by posting his personal manifesto about why he doesn’t care about diversity, and why when he plans conferences he chooses speakers based purely on “merit” and without considering gender or race. (To borrow liberally from the pithy genius of the other Eric Meyer: “Race and gender are irrelevant. That’s what I (white male) always (white) say (male).”)

(update: I shouldn’t have given Eric Meyer credit for “kicking things off” - he was responding to this Jason Kottke post where he simply lists the percentage of female presenters at various recent “webby” conferences.)

Tantek quickly weighed in with his thoughts, in which he a) blames women for not taking enough initiative to promote themselves in the industry, and b) wonders why nobody is concerned about including enough green-eyed people. (”It’s women’s fault for not working hard enough. And anyway, gender doesn’t make any more difference than eye color. That’s what I (male) always (male) say (male).”)

Then Anil Dash jumped into the fray and chastised Eric Meyer and John Gruber for “defending the boys-only nature of [their] treehouse,” and followed it up by offering a list of “the essentials of Web 2.0 your event doesn’t cover”, following which he notes “Where are the men? Don’t worry - the door is open to them. As soon as one of you has done something with the impact of Flickr…”

Today things took an interesting twist. Apparently Eric Meyer (the non-Meyerbro one) is doing some serious soul-searching about all of this, which is great. (Though apparently there hasn’t been sufficient soul-searching yet for him to stop trying to defend the innocent goodness of what he was “really trying to say”).

In all seriousness, wrestling with privilege — with the stupidity and blindness it sometimes causes us to display, even with the best of intentions — is really gut-wrenching stuff, and I wish Eric all the best. I hope he can come to a place where he might even recognize that “what he was really trying to say” itself might have been coming from a place of privilege and ignorance, and that “who he really is” is a good person whose identity, like all of us with privilege, has been deeply warped and shaped by the blindness of privilege.

See, I’ve always put “personal productivity” schemes in the same box as “motivational speakers” and cheesy shallow self-help books. In other words, I scoffed in their general direction. But I’ve been humbled - humbled by Getting Things Done.

I’m not going to thoroughly describe the system here, so follow that link if you want to read about it (or just read this excellent shorthand summary of GTD). I’m just going to tell you why I love it.

I love GTD because it doesn’t try to totally change the way I work. Instead, it takes the tricks I’ve already discovered on my own and helps me make them more effective.

For instance, usually somewhere between once a week and once a month I’ll realize I’m totally stressed out and I don’t even know why. I’ve learned on my own that I can deal with that - I sit down with a pen and paper and try to dump out everything that’s on my mind that might be contributing to my anxiety. Usually I discover that I don’t really have as much to be anxious about as I thought.

Also usually somewhere between once a week and once a month I gather up all the little papers that I’ve scribbled notes on, the Amnesty International action alert I want to act on, the phone and electricity bill, the card from Aunt Jane that I want to respond to, and all the rest. I go through the pile one by one, either dealing with each item or consolidating it onto my main todo list. It feels great.

(Alright Mr. LiteralPants, I don’t really have an Aunt Jane. But I didn’t want to single out any of my real aunts, and if I did have an Aunt Jane I’d try to reply to her cards. For reals.)

But there have been some problems with these tricks. For one, I don’t do them nearly often enough or regularly enough. I let myself be stressed out and completely procrastinatingly unproductive for weeks or even months sometimes without doing either of those things.

For another, my resulting “todo list” has always been a massive gargantuan creature, with a few small actionable items that I will actually do mixed in among a menagerie of amorphous vague scary phrases like “think about Project X” and “organize my life” that I will NEVER actually get around to doing, and some of which have actually sat on my todo list unchanged for over three years. I see all those giant unapproachable todo list items that never go anywhere and I feel small and ineffective. So instead I go play a few games of StreetSoccer on LittleGolem.

GTD solves these problems. The “empty my mind onto paper” trick? It’s the first step in the GTD workflow - the “mind-sweep” to collect all my “open loops” (unfinished items causing my brain anxiety) into one place, ready for processing. The “collect all my bits of paper” trick? Part of the same first step, “Collect”. But then GTD gives me an effective and all-encompassing system in which to place all these collected items - a “project list” on which I only include multi-step projects that I am actually committed to completing (the Circle of One Book website), a “someday list” of projects I might someday want to commit to but have officially decided that I am not committed to now (tagging all our digital photos from the past five years).

And then, the most beautiful thing of all. The actual todo lists? They’re firmly restricted to one “next action” per project. Each “next action” has to be a single action that can be completed in 20 minutes or less, worded in physical verb terms (no “think about” or “decide” - only “call John to set up meeting time”, “write down three ideas for proposal X”, “move shelf to other side of bed”). And every week I review all my lists to figure out what the next action is for each project, decide if there are projects I’m no longer really committed to (so I move them to the someday list or trash them), see if I have “next actions” on my todo lists that are hanging around for too long because they either skip a necessary dependent step or because they’re worded too vaguely.

OK, so now I am describing the system. More things I love about it:

• I love my HipsterPDA
• I love using my TiddlyWiki for keeping all my todo and project lists.
• I love having a visual list of projects (not mixed in with little one-off items) that shows me in a glance what I’m committed to doing in my life right now, and gives me a hint if I might need to cut some out. The project list helps me actually make decisions about whether a project is something I really want to or can commit to - at the top of my project list it says “Committed to completion. Desired outcome (one sentence).” and if I’m not really willing to commit myself to achieving that desired outcome, it doesn’t go on the list.
• I love only having physical 20-minute-or-less items on my todo list, and only one per project. Totally reduces the intimidation factor of big projects.
• I love the horizontal balance among projects and variety of activities that comes of tackling one “next action” at a time instead of thinking that I have to tackle a whole project in a single sitting.
• I love the idea of the “procrastination dash”. If I’m having a hard time starting a task, I set a timer for two, four, five, eight minutes and tell myself I’ll work only on that task until the timer goes off. Then I can go back to playing Blue Max or whatever else I was doing to procrastinate. Thing is, after the four-minute dash, I’ve usually gotten over the procrastination “getting started” hump and I’m actually energized to keep working on the project.

It’s embarrassing, but it’s the truth. My name is Carl Meyer, and I use a productivity system.

Peter Gutmann has done a cost analysis of Windows Vista’s “premium content protection.” A sad/scary/ridiculous/amusing overview of the tangled webs Microsoft and its content-industry buddies are trying to weave in order to perform the impossible task of “protecting” content from the same person who’s legitimately viewing it. Worth reading. Some choice items: If Vista doesn’t think your shiny new HD monitor / high-end sound card is secure enough (few HD monitors sold today have the required security features) any “premium content” sent to that device (and any other content being played on the system at the same time as “premium content”) gets intentionally fuzzied by the OS, or blacked out completely. And if a “security” problem is discovered in a previously-approved piece of hardware, Microsoft can at any time revoke the key for that piece of hardware, disabling its ability to function with Vista at all. After you bought and paid for it.

Anyway, read it. Definitely read it if you’re even thinking about buying Vista, or a computer with Vista installed. And this is good too.

Ok, I think everything is moved over to the new server now, including the full email setup moved off zoneedit and onto our own server. Blog post-by-email (which I don’t think any of us have been using, but hey…) is now done via post@blog.meyerbros.org. And if this post appears, it’s working.
Not that anyone else will find any of this particularly interesting. Server maintenance, la la la…

In the annals of “things I hope I don’t do as a parent”:

The other day, a six-year-old asked Karissa where the baby was going to come out. Reasonable question, and she got about two words into a reasonable answer before the kid’s mother jumped in to shuffle him off in another direction, with “God has a special place for that.”

Hmm. Kid, file that one away for future reference: God is a crutch grownups use when they’re trying to avoid being honest with you.

Karissa and I have been sharing a sore throat/cold thing all week long, and Erin K is visiting. So I’ve been ignoring my work todo list and have spent most of the week playing Carcassone and Five Crowns and cooking/eating good food. Erin and Karissa made Ethiopian doro wat and injera two nights ago, I made French onion soup and french bread last night.

On Tuesday we zoom down to Denver for a brief visit with Jacob, fly to Orlando to see Kimberly, and then drive down to Ft. Lauderdale for MCC US board meetings, where we’ll have an hour to talk with them about why it matters for MCC to recognize Lakota sovereignty. Then back.

The director of MCC resigned last week.

I think I’ll go for a walk now.

We’ve all heard plenty about the federal government’s “incompetent” response to Katrina. Bush finally even (belatedly) apologized for it. But I never had a real clear sense of what “incompetent” meant. Now I do. Apparently it means “shameless cronyism.” (Ok, honestly I did already know that Mike Brown, Bush’s appointee to run FEMA, had previously held a job as the Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. But this is even more reckless.)

Greg Palast reporting for Democracy Now! a couple weeks ago around the Katrina one-year anniversary. (mp3 and transcripts for the two segments here and here):

What kind of evacuation plan would leave 127,000 to sink or swim? It turns out that the Bush administration had contracted out evacuation planning to a corporation, IEM, Innovative Emergency Management. I couldn’t locate their qualifications, but I did locate their list of donations to the Republican Party. We went to Baton Rouge to talk to them.

Palast goes on to report about how the evacuation plan, which IEM was paid a half-million dollars for, is mysteriously missing. And about how the real emergency management experts at LSU had never heard of these guys until they got their fat contract. And the kicker? After people drowned in New Orleans because these guys never came up with an actual evacuation plan (very innovative, I have to admit), guess who Bush contracted with to study what went wrong? That’s right - another fat consulting contract for IEM.

More info on IEM from SourceWatch.

Items from my day:

1. Turn on the radio on the way home from Rapid: Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun“. It’s a bad song. Don’t follow that link. But wow - did it ever take me back to high school. Yeah, those two years when I went to high school.

2. Same radio, same car, same drive: teaser snippet from some radio comedian whose name I didn’t catch. Roughly:

Now whatever you think of Bush, he really seems like a fun guy.

(At this point, I fear we’re headed for mushroom jokes, at best, and offensive politics, at worst. This is a generic ClearChannel music station, after all.)

… I mean, he does, he seems like a fun guy. Like the kind of guy who shows up at your barbecue, and you can always count on him to get the whiffle ball game going. He shows up, and you’re like, cool, yeah, that’s cool, everything’s good. Whiffle ball. Tony the whiffle ball guy.

But then somebody decides to put Whiffle ball Tony in charge of EVERYTHING. And you’re like, whaaat?! I mean, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. He’s kind of competitive. And pretty soon he’s breaking into the neighbor’s yard, challenging them to whiffle ball. I KNOW you want to play whiffle ball, and I’ll take you! Like that. Um, no, we didn’t say we wanted to play whiffle ball. And then he starts chucking hamburgers at them, and you’re like, hey, Tony, what’s up? And he says, Dude, they were just about to start chucking hamburgers at me!! Only then you find out, they never even HAD any hamburgers…

Ok, well, I found it funny.

3. We played a round of disc golf in Rapid while waiting for an estimate on the damage to our front bumper from some guy who had a little trouble parking at Safeway. Scored ten over par, my worst round yet on that course. It was windy, and I was getting used to a new driver. But a beautiful day anyway, and what better excuse to wander around in a park for a couple of hours?

If you search for “meyerbros” we’re hits one through eight, beating out such noteworthy competitors as, well, Meyer Bros. Construction.

And the seven Google searches which have led people here:

dilbert conceptual design
elephant s dream review
review and courageous conversations about race
rene steinke
walmart bad ethics
eric meyer resume
research paper on drive-in movie theaters

I feel bad for whoever was searching for “elephant’s dream review”, as I didn’t actually review it. Sorry, whoever you are.

Twelve minutes long, all animated, created entirely with free/open-source software (notably Blender). Released under the Creative Commons attribution license (just like this blog) - all of the production files are available for reuse, remixing, whatever.

I’d review it, but I haven’t watched it yet. Still waiting for it to download (I’m going for the low-quality 155MB Quicktime download instead of the super-duper hi-def 5.1-surround MPEG4 850MB download).

Oh, don’t forget the link.

(or Blue Heron Web Development, as Eric recently suggested on the wiki page. I like it.)

Business2.0 can tell us How To Build a BulletProof StartUp. To begin, all we’ll need is a T-1 line, 20 employees, and several million dollars in venture capital to burn through. Apparently we shouldn’t expect to break even until we’ve thrown $20 million down the tubes…

But before you waste precious hours of your life reading through their crap, let 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) tear it all apart. Much more entertaining, and way better advice. Hansson concludes:

People often ask us “what should I do to build a company like 37signals?”. I think we finally have a succinct answer now: Do exactly the opposite of what Business 2.0 tells you to.

Remember that?

Halliburton/Kellogg Brown & Root gets $385 million “emergency detention centers” contract from the Dept of Homeland Security.

The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.

Republican leaders are also thinking about repealing or modifying Posse Comitatus (the law that prevents U.S. soldiers from doing domestic law enforcement), and the deployment of National Guard troops to the Mexico border has no end date.

Got this on email today and found it self-examination-provoking.

Glenn Singleton, author of Courageous Conversations about Race, offers the following characteristics of individuals committed to being anti-racist leaders:

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So, this blog thing is a good deal. And I’d like to start promoting it a little bit - like at least let our family, some friends know that it exists. But there’s one problem - lots of people, unknowingly and against our better judgment, are still using Win IE. Some of them are even people we know. And like. And while we have four or five really nice CSS layouts for this site, we still don’t have one that actually works in Win IE. Black and white is mostly OK, except the header is funky. The two bird designs (my favorites) push the sidebar down below the main content. (Ok, so the Emacs design works in IE).

So - are you (eric) up for fixing this? Do I need to dig into the CSS? Right now it’s all that’s holding me back from spreading the word more widely.