afongen

A couple agents from the Secret Service stopped by yesterday, investigating something for which they needed access to our systems. All the while I kept thinking how little I know about what they can and cannot legitimately expect from us. I wasn’t directly involved so I don’t know what they were asking for or whether they had or even needed a warrant. The USA Patriot Act changed a whole lot, including emergency situations in which a warrant is deemed unnecessary. Librarians might be aware of the changes, but I don’t think that techies in the trench are. I hope that management is.

Pity that our IT conference has been cancelled, this would make a good session.

The agents were nice guys, though, clean-cut snappy dressers with a good sense of humor. Not a jack-booted thug in sight. I didn’t get a good look, but they were apparently quite handsome: one woman said she was trying to type but the guy standing next to her was so cute that her hands were sweating. Heh.

I volunteer as a reading tutor in a local school, where I heard someone today comment about how many kids were home sick. “Must be a virus going around,” they said. I was briefly puzzled, thinking they must mean a computer virus and wondering how could that impact children’s health.

Sigh.

Yes, stopped using subjects in my sentences. How observant of you. Sometimes verbs, too. Easier.

A few years ago I gave up the passive voice for Lent. This seems easy at first but is actually extraordinarily difficult. Which is, of course, the point. Which is even funnier since observing Lent is not part of my tradition.

Avoiding the passive voice was made even harder by the fact that at the time I was taking a French linguistics course in which I studied use of the passive voice. I made an exception for that class. At the same time, I was writing quite a few very diplomatic memos and email at work. It’s tricky business to be diplomatic without the passive voice. Just try it sometime.

It turned out to be a very worthwhile exercise in self-discipline. Out of necessity, I became much more conscious of everything I said or wrote.

Then somewhere along the way, all that went to hell. And you’re reading the result.

Speaking of bad things happening in the Legislature, there’s a bill before the House (HF 341) to remove sexual orientation as a protected class in the Minnesota Human Rights Act and elsewhere. That is, GLBT Minnesotans would no longer be protected from discrimination in employment, housing, education, public accommodations, hate crimes, etc.

Being protected from discrimination does not mean that you have special privileges.

This seems to be happening with little debate. If this bill is approved, Minnesota would become the first state to ever extend then rescind protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I remember well when these protections were first enacted. That was a joyful day. Let’s not go backwards and screw it up.

Turns out that this bill is being pushed by the Minnesota Family Council — an innocuous-sounding name for a right-wing Christian lobbyist organization. (Whenever anyone claims to uphold “Judeo-Christian principles” they usually mean “conservative Christian values” in the “nuke a godless, communist, gay baby seal for Christ” vein. Why is that?) Aided by misinformation, distortion, and exaggeration.

More information on OutFront Minnesota’s web site and the Twin Cities Independent Media Center, which I’ve just discovered. Do something about this. Please.

Module::Build, a pure Perl replacement for ExtUtils::MakeMaker. This will be great. I work with some production boxes that don’t have make available, so installing a Perl module is kind of a pain. I also expect to have a much easier time reading a Perl build file than a makefile.

Thank you for not raising my taxes!

Let’s see… you chose not to raise my taxes by a maximum of $1,000 per year for the next two years and instead your decision will cost us $4,150. Wow I am glad we moved to Minnesota to admire your “common sense approach” to government. Now I remember why I don’t vote for republicans.

Right on. I cannot believe that people are really being fooled that not raising state taxes will result in cost savings. Of course the costs are being pushed off to city and counties, so people may well end up spending more in taxes. Not to mention the cuts in human services that will result in higher long-term spending. Hopefully the legislature will pass something a bit more sane than Pawlenty’s no-new-taxes approach, but I doubt it.

I confess that I am having a hard time looking at the big picture in budget questions beyond the cuts that might put me out of a job. Normally I’d be outraged about gutting programs that do serious good in people’s lives, all in the name of silly, short-sighted campaign promises. Okay fine, I am outraged. But it’s taken some time and more energy than I have available to think beyond how this will affect my ability to put food on the table.

That selfishness, of course, is part of the problem. I love Bob Collins’s comment about people in the suburb where he lives, who

…often have houses that are too big, which they purchased for the status of it all, they’re running a couple of SUVs which costs $80 a throw to fill up and probably are leased or have a pretty large monthly payment. They’ve got 3-bay garages, better to hold the boat and SkiDoo with and they think the reason they’re having a had time making ends meet is their property tax bill.

Damn frelling straight.

From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: Ready.gov. “Don’t be afraid, be ready.”

An editorial in today’s Minnesota Daily, “A Test for Norm Coleman“:

With Republican Sen. Norm Coleman’s election last November, Minnesotans seemed to affirm a belief that he had reformed his chameleon ways. Minnesotans seemed to forgive past flip-flopping transgressions on issues such as privatization, party affiliation, abortion, a motorized Boundary Waters Canoe Area and education reform. During his campaign, Coleman even stood in firm opposition to President George W. Bush’s proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But after refusing to sign a bipartisan letter to oppose ANWR drilling last Tuesday, Coleman’s hue seems to have changed — again. We’re forced to wonder if the chameleon, now in office, has returned.

Er, yes. Isn’t that obvious? Probably not to anyone who lives outside the Metro area and didn’t have to live with him as mayor. I don’t think people ever really understood his “chameleon ways.” Perhaps now they will.

Well, one thing’s clear: assuming that I still have my job after this upcoming round of budget cuts within Minnesota state government, those same cuts make it pretty damn unlikely that I’ll make it to this year’s Open Source Convention. Pity. That was one of the most valuable things that I did last year.

Heck, our own IT conference within MnSCU may not happen. I’m supposed to hear today, but that’s what I was told a couple weeks ago.

I’m going to start saving to go to OSCON next year on my own dime.

I just noticed that you can set the language in Google preferences to, among other things, Elmer Fudd, Bork! Bork! Bork! (that’s Swedish Chef for you Muppet-ignorant heathens), and Pig Latin. And Klingon, of course.

Once you’ve set it to Elmer Fudd, the language preferences include “BLAH (BLAH)” and “Norwegian (Jibber Jabber).” Too bad, that last one, I’d have expected “Nowwegian (Jibbew Jabbew).”