A former Nigerian President criticizes the current leadership that he once supported, for their utter failure to act swiftly to rescue the 200+ girls kidnapped by terrorists in April 2014. His hopes for their recovery are low, but says continued public attention is the only hope to pressure the Nigerian government to do something.
Don't let these children be forgotten. They deserve to be rescued and returned to their families.
Last night after a long work week I ignored all the grown up responsibilities and kicked it on the sofa with the cat and watched The Italian Job while the kids are off with their dad for the long weekend.
Today I made up for last night.
All three bathrooms fully cleaned top to bottom. Also the kitchen, dishes, appliances, cabinets done. All floors vacuumed and steam mopped. Stair handrails and windowsills washed. Aquarium fully cleaned. Five loads of laundry washed, folded, and put away. All three beds stripped and re-made. Trash and recycling taken out. I even opened a bunch of mail, paid bills, and designed a custom desk for the new house that will be ergonomically better than what I'm using now, and will only cost me $250 in materials.
No wonder I'm tired. But I have to admit I am feeling pretty damn accomplished. Tomorrow I tackle sorting and inventorying the charity stuff in the garage. About 15 garbage bags of children's outgrown clothing. Ugh. Ozomatli and Pentatonix helped keep me motivated today, hopefully I can keep the momentum going tomorrow with the help of more upbeat tunes.
Helping my productivity... I'm a week into dropping off of Facebook, though I still haven't broken the habit of reaching for my phone to check what is going on or to post some trivial status or lyric. I've complained about Facebook several times before, both about how it fosters empty calorie style communication and about its lack of privacy. Lately I'd been bitching about the UI and how they kept reverting to "Top Stories" despite the fact that I keep reconfiguring my settings to "Most Recent". I even logged a bug even though I don't believe Facebook gives a damn about how annoying they are so long as they are profitable. As I was logging the bug I decided that continuing to complain was ridiculous. I have many times been a sympathetic listener to friends who were complaining about one thing or another... and years later still been complaining about the exact same thing without having done anything material to change it.
Embrace it or change it.
But one way or another, stop bitching about it.
So I took my own advice. I deleted the Facebook app on my phone and only check FB once a day (or less) on a PC now. Sometimes I don't even read my news feed, I just check messages and notifications. I'm doing more texting and phone calls to friends and family. Right now I'm feeling pretty disconnected from a lot of my friends and family, but I am also aware that experiencing an almost entirely virtual social life was preventing me from having a real social life. I'm optimistic that when I get through this transitionary period and settled in the new house next month, I'll have a less gadget focused life that is fairly devoid of actual social engagement with people. Part of my 2014 lifeplan is investing in me and my local social connections (i.e. making friends). Based on the last week I have a hunch that eliminating social media will actually improve my social life. Huh. I have to admit, I did not see that coming.
If you don't remember, it has been too long.
I often find that it is the people who have the least who tend to give the most. And I don't mean they are giving hundreds of dollars - they may give $5 when they only make $10 or $13 an hour to start with. What I mean by "give the most" is that they give the most often. Whether it is helping the person at the check out line who is putting back something because they are short on money, or donating time/money to an animal rescue, they give freely not because they have an excess of resources but because they know what it is like to need.
I grew up poor. But my mom and I once drove home from a fast food restaurant at 10pm to get blankets for the couple that were living in their car in winter. We didn't have much, but we sure had more than that couple had. I'm not telling you this to show off my generousity or imply I'm special or deserve admiration. I'm telling you this because I want to inspire you to find ways that you can make a difference for people. Did the used spare blanket that was probably 5 years old mean as much to us as it did to that couple? Not a chance, it meant FAR FAR more to them. This is a phenomenon I call "The Exchange Rate of Kindness". I can give something trivial to me, and have it mean significantly more to someone in need. So while I don't attend church or believe in God, I tithe. I give directly to people in need. Sometimes they are charities. Usually they are individuals, like the guy at the gas station who humbly asked if I could help him out with a gallon of gas in his container, his car ran out about a block away. I filled his 2.5 gallon can, because I could. The $10 meant very little to me, compared to what it meant to him.
You don't have to hang out at the gas station waiting for someone to walk up with a red gas can. If you don't know where to start, here are a few people who could use a hand.
If none of these causes is moving you to donate $5 or $25 or $100, find your own cause that you are passionate about. There are plenty of ways you can make the world a better place for your fellow man. I can recommend shelters for juvenile victims of sex trafficking, domestic violence shelters, homeless services such as soup kitchens and transitional housing, support centers for child victims of sexual abuse, international aid organizations to provide clean water or vaccines to villages...
You know how you feel when you get to the drive through window at Starbucks and the person ahead of you has "paid it forward"? You can do that pretty much anywhere - just do something nice for a stranger, with no expectation of direct repayment but the belief that the recipient will in turn do something good for someone else at some point. The more often you help strangers, the easier and more reflexive it gets. And you can involve your family, it is a great learning experience! My kids help choose what we donate to each month, and often they want to donate some of their own money as well.
Need more inspiration? Check out the One Spark Foundation. They have lots of easy and low cost ideas on how to make other people's day a little brighter.
It has been 6 weeks since I last blogged. It is not that there hasn't been interesting stuff to blog about, but that I have been BUSY, and it has all been amazingly wonderful good stuff kind of busy. My 2014 has been surreal in its sheer overwhelming awesomeness as a parent, friend, and professional.
Blogging had to wait.
But I've saved all the articles I read that I wanted to blog about for the last 6 weeks, so...
First up: this article about how teamwork is overrated. The author suggests that the focus on teamwork and collaboration is actually having a negative impact on productivity and quality, because people are making consensus driven decisions by committee and not speaking up when something is a bad idea (everyone else on the team seems to think it is ok!) or are so focused on fostering teamwork that they aren't rolling up their sleeves and just getting shit done. It is an interesting article to me because while the team I am on at BlackBerry is incredibly fantastic and amazing, I've been on teams before that were so horribly dysfunctional and unhealthy, you really have no idea.
When you've been in an awful team or had a bad manager, I think it makes you value the good ones even more because you know how important they are to your career, happiness, and sanity. I feel incredibly thankful and lucky to have spent the last several years in a team made up of highly competent people who focus on the organizational and team goals. No one is a glory whore, no one is trying to make others look bad so they look better, everyone just gets things done and still makes time to pitch in and helps each other out when needed. So when I read this:
And if your EQ is way higher than your IQ -- and you couldn't produce anything of value if I locked you alone in a room full of books, computers, and sandwiches for a million years -- then you'd sure as hell better try to attach yourself to a team.
it occurred to me that the team I'm on is made up of a bunch of lone unicorns that have chosen to run in a herd so they can run further, faster. They don't need a team to mask their failings. May I forever have the good fortune to work with people as exceptional as those that are in the BlackBerry Security Incident Response Team, they have raised my standard for teamwork.
And the kids were abused by the school officials themselves!
You might say I am being sensationalist or overdramatic, but I assure you that I am not.
If I were to serve my children a meal and then suddenly take the plate away and throw the food in the garbage, giving them only milk and a piece of fruit and telling them "daddy didn't pay the child support this month, you don't get dinner" I would be abusing my children emotionally, and probably physically by intentionally not feeding them a proper meal.
That is exactly what the Salt Lake City school district did at Uintah Elementary School. On Monday they tried to notify parents that had a balance due in their children's lunch accounts. Then on Tuesday, after children had been handed lunches, someone came and took the food away from the kids and threw it in the garbage because their parents hadn't deposited money into their lunch account yet. Maybe payday isn't until Friday. Maybe mom forgot. Who knows the reason, it is still totally unacceptable to take food away from a human being and throw it out.
Salt Lake City school district has just punished and humiliated children for an issue that was entirely out of their control and should have been handled directly with the parents. They just sent these children the message that "we would rather take food away from you and throw it in the garbage than let you eat it, that's how little you matter". No normal human being with a heart would have taken food away from children because of their parent's debt. The person who made this decision and every person responsible for carrying it out should be fired and not allowed to work with children ever again. They humiliated and emotionally scarred children, and for what? They didn't recover the money their parents owed, they didn't recover the money for the lunches they threw in the garbage, they simply wasted food and traumatized children. And while they may think they only hurt 40 kids (only! One would have been too many!) the reality is that every kid who saw this happen now has reason to fear their school lunch being taken away and thrown out too.
Seriously. People need to be at minimum fired for this.
In the last 8 weeks, my XBOX has failed, my stereo receiver has failed, my son's new tablet that Santa brought him for Christmas has failed, and this morning my laptop screen was inexplicably rotated 90 degrees to the left. Try turning your mouse to the left and getting around the screen when left=up and up=right. Turns out that was an easy fix, and likely caused by my cat walking across the keyboard. :)
The XBOX issue was solved by charity - a friend shipped me their old XBOX 360 since they had gotten an XBOX One. Super thankful for their generousity.
Tomorrow maybe I'll have time to tackle the tablet failure and figure out how to get it resolved via warranty repair or something since even a factory reset had zero effect. Pretty sure it should work more than 5 weeks, especially when I know my son has taken good care of it.
Today I did manage to carve out a little time to call Onkyo about the receiver, which had failed a year ago and got repaired under warranty at an authorized repair shop. It is still too early to tell if Onkyo is going to do the right thing and support their product, my call did not end with a satisfied customer. But my subsequent post on their Facebook page seems to have illicited a helpful response, so we will see where that goes. It is pretty sad that the 20 year old Radio Shack receiver in my bonus room has had no problems, while this new reciever has now stopped working a total of four times (twice I managed to get it reset on my own) in a little over 3 years.
Whatever the outcome of the latest interactions with Onkyo, two things will happen. 1. I will blog about the entire experience, good or bad. 2. I will make all new electronic purchases possible from Crutchfield from now on. I am good at many things - data analysis, cooking, drywall repair - but I don't know a damn thing about A/V. I don't have the time to do all the research on what I should buy to replace this receiver (if it still comes to that), and a friend suggested Crutchfield has advisors who will help. So I submitted the online webform asking for product recommendations. OH MY GOODNESS. They were prompt, helpful, didn't just try to sell me the most expensive item possible, great service, no high pressure sales, and when I replied with a heavy sense of humor, they volleyed right back and made me laugh out loud. I am so incredibly impressed with their customer service, I can't say enough good things about them.
In the big picture, while having these gadgets all go wonky at the same time is a huge pain in the butt to deal with, super frustrating, and potentially expensive, it is such a First World Problem that I can't get too bent over it. Me and the kids are healthy, I'm working on some cool stuff in my job, really the year is off to a pretty good start.
That said, please Tech Gods, don't break anything else for awhile please.
<-- poster from The Watermelon Factory
It is like a logjam, just of thoughts.
I've been doing more reading this year, and as a result there is a lot of interesting stuff in my head. But I haven't had time to blog for a few days, and now there is so much bloggable stuff, I'm a little overwhelmed with it all. Great articles on poverty, sexism, abnormal psychology and neurology, racial divide, parenting... Any of these topics will take more time than I want to put into the blog tonight.
So tonight I'm just posting a cute picture of a teddy bear made by a woman for her pet rat. Because Friday. Which was the same reason we had a hilarious discussion today at work about a cannibal rat infested ghost ship which someone encouraged our lead to go find and lay claim to so he could have his own Navy. He was concerned that he wasn't qualified to be an Admiral since he doesn't know how to sail, but I'm pretty sure that since this boat doesn't actually have sails it is more like driving a Suburban in the water - can't corner for $#!7 but since you're bigger than most everything else on the water, it won't much matter. When he logged off for the day we let him know that the search grid would be complete by Monday so he can conscript local fishermen to begin looking for his ship. I figure that my crazy cat lady lifeplan can be repurposed to deal with the rodent problem, and the team can just work remotely as we travel from sunny island to sunny island. Sure, we will need to recruit a dermatologist, but think of all the fun the team's kids will have growing up on a boat!
That's right, I don't always have to be having big thinky thoughts around here.
I'm really busy (but it is all really good busy), and my new year is off to a great start. Nothing is ever perfect, but I'm focusing on the good things in my life and feeling optimism and hope for our future. And that is a great feeling.
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