I’ve cleaned up the footer presentation by removing the links to two older forms of the syndication feed. The only feed I am currently supporting is the 2.0 specification. Also, I fixed a display error where the footer was displaying outside of the page boundaries on individual posting pages.
Boring stuff, but necessary.
The link below is to a video shot by a British photo journalist in Iraq. It is not easy or pleasant to watch. However I think it is necessary to watch. Whatever your political stance, whatever your moral code, whatever your belief system, whatever your opinion on the Iraqi war, you need to watch this video.
At the end we are all of us humans. Whether we are Iraqi, American, Saudi, solider, citizen, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise, we are all humans. That there are humans on all sides of this horrifically complex issue dying is appalling.
I am reminded of a quote from a unlikely source, “I think the surest sign of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
Sean Smith in Iraq.
An excellent fan-made commercial for iPhone, based on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They say that the third time is a charm, and in the case of getting a new passport that appears to be the case for me.
Attempt Number One Yesterday afternoon, armed with passport photos fresh from Target, we stopped at the post office on our way home. Sibylle opted to wait in the car and as it turns out she had a rather short stay. The post office only processes passports between the hours of 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. Naturally I missed seeing that sign and ended up getting rather brusque treatment from the woman behind the counter when it was my turn.
Attempt Number Two Looking at the USPS web site I determined that there were at least two post office locations within walking distance of my office downtown so I resolved to take care of the application over lunch today. Patience not being my strong suit I actually walked over to the first location shortly after 10:00 am only to discover that I had forgotten my birth certificate. (As it turns out I didn’t have that key document with me Monday afternoon either.) The postman was generous enough to review the application and statement of theft to save me any future hassle when I returned.
Attempt Number Three Leaving work a bit early today, and with Sibylle bringing the errant birth certificate, I was at the post office near home by 3:30 this afternoon. The postal clerk certainly knew his stuff and was able to rapidly process the theft letter and the new application. Since we are leaving in just 52 days I had to request an expedited passport; non-expedited processing is currently running 12 to 14 weeks.
At the end of all the paperwork, and when the fees have been collected you are asked, “Do you swear that you are <your name here>, that the information submitted is true to the best of your ability, and that the pictures are a likeness of yourself?” You say yes, and he stamps everything in sight vigorously.
In about a week I should be able to track the application’s progress on the State Department site, and, hopefully, in two or three weeks I’ll be getting an express letter in the mail with my new passport.
With absolutely no fanfare one of my domains died over the weekend. The site had been languishing for more than a year and it had never really been active; either in a visitor sense or as an advertisement for my company. I am of two minds about it being gone, I miss the idea of it and I am glad to be past it.
In a very real sense it represented one possible path for my life to take. That path was littered with obstacles and challenges, and resulted in some major setbacks professionally and financially. I’ve picked up the pieces and moved on so letting go of the site is a good thing in a sense. Still, it is odd to know that partitionsoftware.com no longer leads to me.
Eventually I’ll have another website, one that more closely aligns with my professional goals today. For now though, I am satisfied to be just zanshin.net.
Tonight after dinner, at my request, Sibylle and I spent a couple of hours digging through the final unexplored boxes in my locker. The ones at the back. On the bottom. Ten feet in and ten feet under.
With one of my hands effectively out of commission the bulk of the lifting, moving, opening and sifting fell on Sibylle. The locker space is cramped and mildly claustrophobic. You end up standing on boxes, reaching over other boxes, breathing in stale vaguely box scented air and getting itchy from the chaffing against all that cardboard.
We found stereo equipment and old books and an entire collection of old tee-shirts and other treasures. We did not find my passport. Through out this search I’ve been avoiding the obvious answer - they were stolen last October when I was robbed. At the time I thought only my camera was taken, along with a single piece of luggage. However, the desk drawers were pulled out and their contents stirred. Several rings and other valuables were at the very back of one drawer and they were untouched, so I assumed that nothing had been taken from the drawers.
I am convinced now that the missing passports were taken and are forever lost. It saddens me to realize this. It’s piece of my life I’ll never get back. Coming to this realization also leaves me feeling the same need to take a shower with everything I own so as to scrub the imagined stench of the vermin who rifled through all my belongings.
So tomorrow I’ll stop by the downtown post office and hand in my forms and a check for $157 to get a new, expedited passport. And I’ll stop searching for but not stop missing, my original passport
Yesterday afternoon by the time I arrived at home, my injured finger was swollen enough to be very uncomfortable. Although we understood the mechanics of heating a paper clip and using that to create a opening in the nail to let the blood, and therefore the pressure, out, neither Sibylle or I felt comfortable doing this at home. So we went to urgent care to have them do it.
Urgent Care, it seems, exists in a world of their own choosing. Unlike your family doctor or the emergency room, they get to be choosy about what they do or don’t handle. When we explained to the receptionist what had happened and that I needed to have the blood drained she informed us that they “don’t really do that here.” They would be happy to diagnose my finger but not treat it. We both reacted to that statement saying that we didn’t need a diagnoses just treatment. She did call someone in the back and got a tentative acknowledgment that treatment might happen.
So we sat down and filled out about 900 pieces of paper with a detailed medical history going back 12 generations complete with mitochondrial dna samples and blood work from everyone I’ve ever known in my life. Or maybe just a half page about the usual drug reactions and brief medical history,
After a few minutes wait we go to see a very nice doctor (“He looks like he’s from the 1950s,” said Sibylle) who offered two treatment options. Either burn a hole through the nail with a white hot gizmo or bore one using a small needle. I opted for the needle and shortly thereafter the pressure in my finger was largely gone. He warned me that we had now converted a sealed injury to an open one and that we now needed to be careful to avoid injection, but the relief in pressure is more than worth some extra care around my finger.
While I was getting my degree one of the courses I took was called “Small Group Communication.” We studied the roles and interactions of people in small groups, which has proved invaluable in my career as a software developer and architect. One of the concepts I still remember from that class was the idea of “consciousness raising.”
Consciousness raising is what occurs when people share similar experiences in order to form tighter cohesion with each other. It’s the “forming” part of “Storming, Forming, Norming, and Performing.” There are many positive outcomes of this type of interaction, and unfortunately, some negative ones as well.
The society here in the US can be generalized (I know generalizations are bad) in this sentence: “Winners are good, Losers are bad, and Everything is a contest.” Don’t believe me, watch the cars around you the next time you are on the beltway; you’ll be able to pick out the one’s driven by people who want to “win” at the car driving game, even though there is no way to win.
This week’s finger injury brings up an example where the negative side of consciousness raising, combined with the mania to win, has a potential bad result. Returning to work with a broken finger resulted in three different stories from co-workers about how they’d managed to mangle fingers using drills, hammers and saws. I wasn’t able to even tell my story in one case before other’s were relating what had happened to them.
Comparing injuries is not a contest. One-ups-manship isn’t a desirable social trait; it leaves the other person feeling diminished and less-than - after all, I only caught my finger in a car door, I didn’t tear the nail off with a drill bit. I think it is a sad commentary on our society that we place more value on having a worse experience to “top” the other guy than we place on being able to listen with appropriate compassion for two minutes.
Last evening Sibylle and I set out to explore the rear most boxes in my storage locker in a last ditch effort to find my missing passport. Time is running out for me to get one before our trip to Germany in September and, while we await the arrival of a certified birth certificate, I wanted to continue the search.
When we arrived at the locker facility I managed to shut the locked car door on my right forefinger. Sibylle quickly unlocked the door and we examined the now rapidly swelling and throbbing digit. The nail wasn’t broken but a dark pool of blood was already forming in the nail bed. Walking across the parking lot to the store fronts there Sibylle found a small church that was open and got a bag of ice for my hand. We sat in their lobby for a few minutes while I felt faint and then set off for the local urgent care facility.
Urgent care was closed (I guess after 8:00 what ever you have that’s wrong is an emergency) so we proceeded to the hospital. St. Luke’s is a new, modern facility staffed by some very friendly folks. Being a Wednesday evening in an upscale suburb meant I was the only patient at the time. We weren’t even fully signed in at the reception desk when I was called back to a treatment room. Before we left, a scant 40 minutes later, I had the attention of three nurses, two x-ray technicians, and a pleasant doctor who looked to be about 16 years old.
My finger tip is broken, a distal phalanges break, and I have a subungual hemotoma or blood under the nail. They put a split and an ace bandage on to immobilize my finger, gave me Oxycodone for the pain, and offered to poke a hole in the nail to drain the blood. As the doctor explained, the rule of thumb for draining is 50% or more of the nail involved with the blood. Last evening only about 40% of my nail was involved so we opted to not drain it.
After leaving the hospital we drove to the nearest 24-hour pharmacy to fill a small prescription for more Oxycodone and then went home. Thanks to lots of ice and the wonders of a mild narcotic I was able to sleep fairly well all night. I’m taking at least the morning off as one isn’t supposed to operate heavy equipment while numb from Percocet. The nail is now almost completely black but as I am not feeling pressure from under the nail we haven’t done anything about getting it drained.
In 3 - 5 days I’m supposed to follow-up with my family doctor, otherwise I’m fine. Being a nerd I took several pictures of my finger, which I’ll post on my Flickr page shortly.