afongen

I was talking with a coworker today and a couple times he couldn’t understand me.

Me: … I’d be part of QA.
Him: Huh?
Me: QA
Him: ???
Me (carefully): Q. A.
Him: Oh, I thought you’d say “key way”

Yeah. Not notable, except that at dinner tonight, I pronounced a word strangely, so I related that story to Kiara.

Me: … I’d be part of QA.
Her: Huh?
Me: QA
Her: ???
Me (carefully): Q. A.
Her: Oh, I thought you’d say “key way”

Oh, great.

Then she tells me that I sound really strange on my appearance on First Crack. While listening to it, she kept thinking, “geez, where is this guy from?”

Funny thing is, not an hour before I that was recorded, I was consciously trying to get my accent under control. I’d just been listening to LugRadio and found, while talking to myself, that I had adopted their accent. (Accents, really, but who’s counting?)

The real reason I’ve lived in Minnesota my whole life? I couldn’t stand to listen to myself if I lived anywhere else. I’m too damn linguistically impressionable. It doesn’t take long before I begin to adopt the accent and speech mannerisms of whoever I’m talking with. Honestly, I don’t mind this much, but it tends to annoy the people around me.

Update: for clarification, I do not sound like the LugRadio guys in my conversation on First Crack. I’d at least got that much under control.

Coleman quotes an article by Stephen Prothero in its entirety, well worth reading. His introduction is spot on:

I’ve often noted that much of what I learned in seminary I should already have known. Our pews are often full of well-educated professionals whose corresponding level of Christian education is that of kindergartners; thus we should not be surprised when this results in our churches being mired in childlike debates. How can congregants move past beliefs in, for example, biblical inerrancy or dispensationalism or understand what the Bible really says about poverty and violence if they have not been provided with solid instruction in biblical interpretation and theology, let alone interact responsibly with people of other religions? If this doesn’t happen, their beliefs will be – and, in fact, are formed by the Christian bookstore – a scary thing.

A Unitarian minister once described her experiences in the ecumenical association in which she participated in White Bear Lake. New priests and ministers, fresh out of seminary, were often the most religiously conservative and resistant to genuine ecumenism, whereas the older ministers were quite willing to openly discuss new ideas and to bridge the gap beyond religious dogma. Her impression was that just starting out in their careers, young ministers were worried about offending their congregations by sharing modern scholarship and thinking about the Bible — what they had just learned in preparation for the ministry. So much for challenging the spirit.

Not that I’m one to talk.

Simon Willison mentions a prototype Eclipse download page, which is a serious improvement over the current one. The new page exposes projects I didn’t know about but that look very interesting and useful, such as Web Tools (which includes Web Standard Tools and J2EE Standard Tools), Web Service Validation Tools, Eclipse Modeling Framework, and UML2. I knew about EMF because I’d seen a book, but everyone I mention it to is surprised to hear of it.

Here’s hoping that new page goes into production soon.

Janus Boye on CMS Watch: Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value?

A few years ago vendors were touting personalization software. A major buzzword of the dot-com age, personalization would ostensibly solve a series of business problems and enable a new IT paradigm. Many personalization projects failed due to lack of adoption, long implementation times, problems with the technology, lack of clearly defined business goals, integration and testing difficulties, and cost overruns.

Today many companies are experiencing the exact same difficulties with a new breed of enterprise software called portal software.

…

Most visitors of local government sites don’t want to rearrange their own pages and portlets. They just want to know when the next garbage collection will be or what times the local swimming pool opens. If my local council proposed offering me a portal, I would tell them to spend the money on a decent search engine. Forget about the personalized portal experience — just show me the right content and show it to me quickly.

I’m not saying a thing.

Update: I fixed the URL to the article. And no, I’m still not saying a thing except to those who know where to look. I’m not sure why: eventually I’m going to burst out in a huge rant, I might as well just get it over with.

This has been floating around the back of my brain for months and is just dying to get out. Please do not consider it Microsoft bashing: it’s just funny.

During a bit of a crisis last fall, a few of our network and server admins were gathered around the phone on a support call with Microsoft.

“Sorry if we don’t do this right,” I heard one of them say. “We’ve been a Novell shop for 20 years and have never had to call tech support. We don’t know how.”

I knew it was coming but I didn’t expect it on the front page: Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s article about podcasting in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press (registration required for archived version).

Eric Meyer writes about using sign language with his daughter. We have also signed with Owen from an early age, and I, too, cannot recommend it enough. Controlling speech muscles is hard: it requires a level of coordination that just plain takes a while to develop. Children are able to use sign language long before they are physically able to speak. Why not give them a way to express themselves?

I don’t think it fair to credit Owen’s remarkable language skills to early exposure to ASL because I know plenty of parents who used sign whose kids are barely verbal at the same age, but I have no doubt that being able to communicate at an early age has helped him in many ways. The “terrible twos” are due in no small part to a toddler’s inability to voice her desires and frustrations. Using sign language at an early age can help alleviate some of that. And what a thrill, watching him sign with other kids!

I’m not such a fan of the Baby Signs book, though it is a classic and landmark in the field. I just don’t accept that signs need to be modified or made up, which is something that the authors have done. Still, a fine book.

Once you’re willing to let a child watch TV, the Signing Time videos are fantastic. I’m a big fan. They’re paced well, they address multiple learning styles, they’re engaging for children and adults, and they do a good job of introducing key signs right away. What I like most, I think, is that we see lots of different kids signing, so you can see for yourself that there’s a range and variety in how kids sign. You don’t need to worry if you or your child doesn’t immediately “do it right”: there’s still some dexterity involved and lots of practice. Years of practice. Signing Time makes it fun. Really. It’s one of the few things we let him watch, and he loves it.

We don’t sign with Owen as much anymore, probably because he’s so freakishly verbal, but we all still have fun with sign language and I’d like to keep with it. Maybe I’ll take classes at Saint Paul College, which has a well-respected ASL program.

Cody on vinyl podcast plays music from his out-of-print vinyl collection, which is a Good Thing for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the amazing music he shares. Case in point: an outstanding rendition of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Gladys Knight and the Pips. No, really: go listen to it now.

You didn’t, did you? Sigh. I’m serious.

… waiting …

There. See what I mean?

Now, wouldn’t the world be a better place (not to mention safer for intellectual property) if this were locked in a vault for another several decades?

(tip o’ the hat to Garrick for pointing this one out)

Garrick Van Buren interviews me on First Crack Podcast.

We met the other night for coffee, and when he suggested recording a podcast I was willing (obviously!) but unsure how on earth our conversation would be interesting enough. What I didn’t know at the time is what a skilled interviewer Garrick is. I am not a scintillating conversationalist, yet he smoothy managed to keep me talking.

You can hear how being a model introvert comes out in my speech: long pauses, slow speech as it takes a long time to dredge up memories, lots of false starts and starting in the middle of a thought. Heck, I’ll stop talking in the middle of a thought, unaware that I’ve done so. I think Garrick edited out the worst of it (as well as my longish rants about Java :).

He’s got a cool little setup: a basic clip-on microphone, a nice little pre-amp, piping to Garage Band, where he edits the audio before exporting to iTunes.

A correction: the San Franciscan sample roaster that I mentioned does not cost $1000. It’s more like $3500 or $5000, depending on whether you get electric or gas — and again, that was 10 years ago. I don’t even know whether the company that made it is still in business. It was a smart little roaster to work on, though. I think that you can still see it at White Rock, which is at the same location the Roastery was.

Via Matt, a judge has ruled that textbook disclaimers that caution students against believing evolution are unconstitutional. These are the same disclaimer stickers that inspired the cutting counter-disclaimers from Swarthmore that I have posted on my wall at work. The debate is far from over, but it’s a good step.

My favorite comment so far is from Mainstream Baptist:

Theocrats need to stop trying to force their medieval scientific beliefs on public school children and start focusing on sharing the gospel with whoever they can get to voluntarily attend their churches.

Unfortunately, as Swarthmore’s Colin Purrington points out, this entire debacle will serve not only to inspire uninformed debate, but also to bring financial strife to the school district:

But it’s really too bad the Cobb County school district, the loser in the decision, now has to pay the rather large legal fees, sucking valuable assets away from school budgets. To cover the expected revenue shortfall, and to avoid tax increases in Cobb County, perhaps Marjorie Rogers (the Creationist who started the whole mess) can extract donations from the 2,300 supporters who signed her original petition that objected to evolution instruction. Just an idea.

Something tells me that I’d really like knowing Professor Purrington, whose gift ideas for science teachers include body armor (“Great for making presentations to backwards school boards, but light enough for daily use in the classroom.”) and unprotected sex (“If your kid’s teacher is single, set him or her up with another clear-thinking breeder and tell them to have lots of kids”).