Why Was This a Great Week?

This has been one of the best weeks ever for working in high tech amateur radio. I'm really looking forward to bringing all of it to the community over the next year! This is a golden age for SDR, cognitive, microwave, and advanced digital modes. Why was this week good? Here's why.

This year, I co-founded a research institute devoted to Open Source and Open Access in research and development. It's called Open Research Institute (ORI). Our site is here: https://openresearch.institute/

Most of what we do is for amateur radio satellite and terrestrial use. Why start a research institute? We wanted a formal structure for the work we all had been doing all along, and existing clubs were either unsupportive, unresponsive, full up with their own work, or not aligned with open source and open access. The last significant part of setting up ORI was getting the 501(c)(3) approval. That happened 6 March 2019.

ORI gets work done through projects. The list currently include Phase 4 Ground, Phase 4 Space, GRC Localization for Japanese and German, and Open Cars. There are several other projects in the initial investigation stages. There's room for plenty more! Phase 4 Ground and Space produces work that benefits all amateur radio space organizations. Libre Space, AMSAT-DL, JAMSAT, AMSAT-UK, TAPR, and more have been wonderful partners.

The Breakthrough Listen GNU Radio workshop coming up in mid-May is another big step forward. I got news I was accepted to it as a participant this past week. While not primarily an amateur radio event, the participant list has a lot of hams! It's quite thrilling to see how many really smart and amazing amateur operators there are in the GNU Radio community. There are SDR people coming to the event that I cannot wait to meet and work with. Things we talk about and work on at this workshop will be available to and will benefit advanced digital modes and their implementations in amateur radio.

I am the co-chair for GNU Radio Conference 2019 (Huntsville, AL) and have volunteered with the conference since 2016. It's an honor to be involved with and support event. Our ham exam session has been very successful, with 40-50 licenses or upgrades each year. Amateurs are a big part of GNU Radio. We decided to feature space communications as our conference theme for the Apollo landing anniversary year of 2019.

We tried repeatedly, starting in 2017, to get amateur radio conferences to co-locate and collaborate with GNU Radio Conference. The proposal was, they would each have their own space and track and keep all their identity and branding and whatnot, but share vendor space, food and meeting room costs, and get free proceedings, program publishing, schedule, shipping, and a variety of logistics support from us. The traditional organizations all flatly refused or ignored the proposal. One simply cut and pasted the city and venue to 2018 after perusing the proposal. I got confused phone calls from the venue we'd gotten quotes from for weeks. Two other bad experiences with other amateur organizations deliberately scheduling their conference on top of GNU Radio Conference have happened, despite a lot of effort to communicate, coordinate, and cross-promote. 

On the surface, this isn't great news or a good experience. But digging deeper, we realized that getting doors slammed in our faces by leadership hostile to change opened up a series of much better opportunities for us. The right response to the initial disappointments is gratitude.

And now, there is cause for hope. Over the past couple of weeks, one of the organizations that responded with grumpy indifference has changed direction. In another two years, I expect a drastic improvement in collaboration and cooperation between the two communities. There is substantial overlap. It's silly not to work together.

Another silver lining has to do with sexism and bigotry. Sexist and racist crap happens in tech. There is not a lot of good news here. Amateur radio organizations are very homogenous. Much more than the ham population as a whole. In the US 15-20% of hams are women. In more traditional organizations and clubs, it's at or below 3%. In many cases, it's literally 0%. Traditional organizations are stacked with people that don't like working with women and will pull a lot of underhanded garbage to make sure women who show up and volunteer are made to feel lesser, smaller, and unwanted.

Speaking up and speaking out against bad experiences is difficult. If you speak up or speak out, you will be punished for it, every time. You can assiduously document, you can follow all the rules for complaining about it, you can simply work twice as hard and try to "lean in". None of this will work. If sexists have any power over you in any way, you are doomed.

These experiences aren't the biggest problem. Yes they suck. But, the much bigger problem is the almost complete failure of any bystander men to deliver any repercussion, at all, to the men who behave in sexist, demeaning, bigoted ways. When the behavior is documented, when complaints and testimonies given, when it is observed and reported, men in general do absolutely nothing about it. If you're lucky, they'll wring their hands in private and commiserate.

The most outspoken men, who argue technical details with energy and force and commitment and devotion, fall completely silent in the face of sexism or bigotry. Even when it's obscene or explicitly illegal, they will do nothing. Poke or prod a bit, and then they get irritated, annoyed, or angry. "What do you expect ME to do about it?!" Any inconvenience at all is just too much to ask. They're generally ok with women being shut down, shut out, ignored, or their work erased. Gaslighting is normal.

This stuff is a cultural disaster that will not get even slightly better without men stepping up and enforcing repercussions for acts of sexism and bigotry. Just enforcing repercussions is the first step. The fact that most amateur operators won't bother with taking even the first step is telling. It is a big reason why women show up for one meeting, one project conference call, one email thread, one tour of HF with their new privileges, and then they either leave or get eliminated by men who just can't stand women speaking.

When you are the butt of jokes or comments that assume you are non-technical, are not really a person, are preventing men from enjoying themselves, are "spending husband's money", are "nothing but trouble", don't belong, are equated with children, or will suffer violence for expressing an opinion, the community in general has failed you. This stuff is common on HF and repeaters. It goes almost completely unchallenged on the air.

This is a root cause of why many, if not most, women express a fear of operating an amateur radio in voice modes. But there's an even deeper issues here too. Women suffer an enormous amount of violence at the hands of men that personally know us. We are socialized from birth to not offend or upset men in any way. Speaking as equals is offensive to many men, because we are *supposed to be* only supportive and only agreeable and never ever "right", on our own. Embarrassing men in any way is just not allowed. Being right in even the friendliest and gentlest way about math or science or engineering or leadership or financial opportunities or fundraising doesn't matter. Asserting an opinion that isn't strictly agreeing with a man results, worst case, in violence. This violence is real and even in "polite" and "civil" hobbies like amateur radio, it profoundly shapes the casual communication patterns.

Women in amateur radio consistently explain a reluctance to get on the air with "I'm afraid I'll say the wrong thing". Pay attention at the YL forums and YouTube videos where we are asked about this. Read the essays. This is a permanent refrain. Fear.

Men hear this, and hear "mic fright". No, this is not mic fright. Being afraid of operating on the air is a rational and justified response to the violence delivered from men to women in our society. Women police themselves in ways men simply do not have to. This is observable in general amateur radio operating, let alone technical volunteering.

Women therefore, in general, are expected to cede the communications space to men. Amateur radio is so heavily dominated by men, that the fear and subservience effect is easily observable. Break the "rules" and enough men will be truly enraged, and they will exact revenge.

I've been very active in amateur radio for almost 20 years. I've volunteered in advanced digital communications for over 10. I've been very successful in a variety of projects. I'm not a bad volunteer or leader. Some amateur radio organizations are hopelessly broken in terms of sexism. I choose to speak up and speak out and assert technical opinions. I am not an asshole about it, but I'm not Wimpy Wanda, either. I choose to pay the sexism tax on my work. Sometimes that tax means that effort sadly goes into the red. I'm kept out or attacked while mediocre men get to stay or are rewarded. There is really no appeal that works when this happens.

But. Sometimes leaders and fellow volunteers negate that tax! This is how you know who to spend your time working with. And this week, spending more time with those types of people and a LOT less time with proven sexists and bigots has paid off enormously. I felt obligated for many years to conform, serve, and respond within organizations that treated me like garbage. The last little bit of that "good intentions, terrible results" type of thinking evaporated this week. I'm late to the party, but better late than never to get rid of unnecessary baggage.

This is where starting our own organization (ORI) has made the most difference. It's a night and day difference to work with people that are unafraid to enforce basic standards of fairness. I cannot understate how truly important it is to have people with privilege go to bat for you. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my fellow ORI co-founders, Bruce Perens and Ben Hilburn, for simply being equitable and fair.

Does your (amateur or other) organization have a code of conduct? Is it enforced? Does your favorite event make it clear, through written policies and clear procedures, that everyone is welcome?

Things like a Code of Conduct are the minimum standard. They are not really that hard to implement. There's lots of resources to get up to speed here as an organizer or leader. This isn't a new issue. There's a metric ton of electrons devoted to endless essays about sexism and bigotry, and the huge cost to homogenous organizations as a result.

Phase 4 Ground has made substantial technical progress in our test plan, application layer, link layer, radio architecture, and user interface definition. One of the most difficult aspects of Phase 4 Ground has always been recruiting enough people for the FPGA/HDL/ASIC work. People that understand radio, coding, and reconfigurable digital logic are rare and in great demand from industry. But, we've never been in a better place in terms of human resources than we are right now, and I got additional contacts this week.

For big ambitious open source interdisciplinary designs, recruiting continues throughout the entire life of the project. Phase 4 projects welcome anyone, regardless of how much time they can commit, and we meet people where they are technically. One of the goals of Phase 4 is to give people a friendly and supportive place to learn advanced digital techniques. That's one of the purposes of amateur radio in general, and there's a great need for anything past the "hello world" type of FPGA design.

This means that some volunteers will benefit from ORI more than ORI benefits from them. This is on purpose. It's paying it forward to the community.

ORI takes risks that other organizations do not. ORI deliberately chooses difficult work that has a higher degree of failure. This is on purpose. Someone has to say the things and take the risks.

So, this week, the practice of risk taking and generosity paid off. Some weeks it doesn't go as well! There are a lot of setbacks when you take risks and try things that are new or challenge the status quo. Defending friendly, inclusive, supportive, collaborative work styles in a world that rewards opaque, authoritarian, discriminatory work styles can feel no-win. Unfortunately amateur radio has a lot of opaque, authoritarian, and discriminatory aspects. ORI provides a deliberately different alternative, and this week it paid off in several ways. No, I can't list them all, but if even half of the steps forward that happened this week pan out, then the next few months we will have a lot of happy announcements.

-Michelle W5NYV

Badge Hacking from DEFCON 17

Our badge hacking report from DEFCON 17, held in Las Vegas, NV.

Pie crust cookies "I Love Christmas Trees"

Pie crust cookies "I Love Christmas Trees", originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

Pie crust mix prepared then rolled thin, then cut into hearts and tree shapes. Excess rolled into small balls. All of it cooked at 450 F for 12 minutes. Store-bought icing applied to hearts, then trees (sprinkled with allspice) placed on top of icing. Small balls placed on icing as well. Yum!

Smithville

Happy Thanksgiving!

A pleasant restful day with relatives and great food. We worked on cub scout belt loops, watched the Space Shuttle/ISS pass, and I received some feedback on the Neon-test tutorial. I corrected the typos and republished the document.

Smithville – Amory

Day 4

The first order of business was to work out at the gym. The gym is across the parking lot from the hospital in Amory, which is about 7 miles away. I listened to POTUS, a satellite radio channel, in the rental car on the way. POTUS was launched to cover the 2008 presidential election, but remained on in lesser form as a political news channel. The degradation in quality, from my point of view, is the current domination of daytime programming by a dreadful talk-format program called Stand Up with Pete Dominic. It’s hours and hours of a tepidly presented and superficially informed blowhard-style call-in, with the host always “running out of time” on his way to talking about nothing in particular.

This racing to nowhere style talk radio (and TV) is the bane of my existence. I can’t stand it. I don’t like it. Have I mentioned that I find it irritating?

“Blah blah blah and in the 9 seconds remaining, can you recommend a solution for mid-east peace?”

“Well, host person, it’s a very complicated issue with great historical and cultural –“

“I’m sorry! We’ve run out of time! Up next, we’ll ask our next guest about Afghanistan!”

“Welcome back to our show!

“Blah blah blah, and in the 9 seconds remaining, should we sent more troops to Afghanistan?”

“Well, host person, it’s a very complicated issue with enormous political and economic consequ-“

“I’m sorry! We’ve run out of time!”

Rinse, repeat, all day long.

If it’s not patchwork crazy quilt pseudo conversations, it’s yell kings baiting guests to snap and bite at each other like clever children. This is why I watch about 3.7 hours of this stuff per year. Just to check and see if it’s still as bad as I remembered.

I know I sound like a total grouch. I’m not, really. I just prefer a real conversation, where you put your opponent and your comrade in the one and the same most positive light; where you direct your remarks to the most intelligent person in the audience, and not the most base or partisan.

Anyway, the gym was great. I covered three miles and had some good coffee there in the small café overlooking the pool. I’m updating the Livescribe smartpen (I highly recommend this tool) and have some work to do today in terms of packing up things in the storage room in downtown Smithville and in continuing the interview process for the writing project I’m here to start.

Smithville - Aberdeen - Smithville

Day 3

I got up after it turned light outside. The bed is really comfortable here, so it took a while. It was still pretty early. My son was still soundly asleep and wasn’t going to get up. I didn’t blame him – he played pretty hard yesterday, and probably still needed some beauty sleep. Upstairs seemed deserted. My relatives are true morning people. While I may be at my best in the morning, they have already had a good head start on being productive and such by the time I get around to thinking about getting dressed.

Eventually, they noticed I was up and Atom, and I got some coffee made for me (yum!), talked about global warming deniers and the latest news about Palin, had a small very tasty cheesy-egg breakfast, went to the gym, jogged 3 miles with a few huff-and-puff walking breaks on a treadmill while listening to the beginning of Ayn Rand’s “The Art of Nonfiction”, came back home, took a shower, had lunch, got a tip about a document I need to read, checked in on the NEON/FFTW Google wave, headed out to visit more relatives, went to storage site where I’m supposed to pack up a bunch of stuff for the movers to take back to San Diego, packed up a bunch of old hardback science fiction from decades ago that my grandfather had collected as a science fiction book club member, had cheese and merlot for dinner, then talked about all sorts of things before settling into the first big book interview.

The task ahead is to gather, gather, gather information and then try and define, define, define the story for this project. There isn’t any way to really summarize the complexity of the engineering project that I’m trying to talk about. The most important thing, to me, is to try and make it possible for people to feel what it was like to work on a particular, large, complicated engineering project during the cold war, and to provide some understanding of how the context and justification for the project shifted over time.

Olive Branch - Memphis - Smithville

Day 2 of travel

We got up and strolled over to help-yourself-to-hot breakfast. A seated and nearly-done-with-breakfast party of four was the only other non-staff people I’d seen in the hotel since we checked in. The television in the lounge was blaring what appeared to be a soap opera. It made the room feel like a bad meeting at work.

When the female lead on the show threatened another with a gun, I asked the party of four if they were watching it. None of the middle-aged and British-accented people admitted to being interested in the program. They had been trying to talk over the Shatneresque dialogue for a good minute or two, which is the classic sign of not really being into a show.

I walked over to the set, which was a nice new flatscreen mounted high on the wall, and failed to find a power switch. Waving my hand along the side, searching for any buttons, caused a staff person to magically appear.

“Do you want to change the channel?”

“Not exactly,” I said politely. “I want to turn it off.”

“Well!” she said, her eyebrows raised as high as they could go. “I don’t know if we should do that. I mean, these people might be watching it!” She seemed surprised at the very idea of shutting off the television.

“They said they were not. I would not do that without asking,” I said quietly. The foursome interrupted me to enthusiastically agree about shutting off the set. She retrieved a remote control from an Undisclosed Safe Location back in the kitchen and shut the TV off.

We resumed breakfast and it was a lot more pleasant. The atmosphere seemed to clear, volume-induced stress melted away, and violent acts weren’t looming in my peripheral vision. I talked with my son about all sorts of funny things, since I can finish my breakfast way faster than he can play with his. The other folks finished their post-breakfast conversation and cleared their table, ambling off down the hall. I made a cup of coffee, and was expounding on some fact or another to him when another staff person whizzed through the room, checked the coffee, the egg tray, the oil-soaked bacon, and the untouched grits and gravy, and asked if I wanted the television on.

“No thanks,” I answered, turning from my son to the staff person.

“But what about the news? Or cartoons for your boy?”

And interrupt a great conversation? Are you kidding? I said, “No thanks, we’re enjoying the quiet.”

You should have seen the look I got.

After breakfast we packed up and headed out for the Pink Palace Museum. I’d been lured there by talk of a fashion/sewing exhibition. The museum, overall, was great. The sewing exhibition was somewhat of a disappointment.

http://www.memphismuseums.org/mu-event_program-13252/

The clothing hinted at on the website was indeed there… with a big “Coming Soon” sign in front of all the clothing (on manikins), which were crowded onto a small dais in the center of a room dedicated to other stuff. There was limited placard verbiage. There was no interpretive elements, diagrams, explanations, definitions, or even the fabric content of the clothing. There literally was more content on the website teaser than there was actually in the exhibit.

Another minor annoyance was that one of the exhibits required an additional ticket. I must have missed the part at the ticket counter. They have an IMAX theater, and I didn’t get that ticket either (on purpose). However, when you sell an “exhibits” ticket, then I guess I sort of expect to be able to see all the exhibits.

Regardless, it was worth seeing – if only for the Indycar themed Christmas tree in the decorated Christmas tree exhibit hall. It was garlanded with slot car tracks! Photo set to follow.

There was a space science exhibit, minerals, natural history, and New Madrid Earthquake area. There were lots of fossils, plenty of really good regional history exhibits, and an animated hand-carved enormous circus model. It was larger than HO scale, but smaller than G, and was pretty incredible. One guy spent pretty much his whole hobby life working on it. His particular style reminded me of a ceramic monkey statue that Ken won for last place at a charity golf tournament at work. It had that pre-Mattel toy vibe, with a palette of colors from the 1930s, and wonderful hand-lettered signage. The track was unique - the horse-drawn carriages and traincars are actually drawn by the teams of hand-carved horses. Along one side of the room (the entire center was the circus animated model) was a case detailing the process the artist used. Quite the exhibit all on its own! And, there was more.

The Pink Palace is a mansion that was being built by the guy that came up with the idea of self-service grocery stores. Before, it was like oldschool libraries, where you were not allowed back in the stacks. You had to bring your list to a clerk. Grocery stores were like that too. The guy that founded Piggly Wiggly (the most awesomely named store ever) was named Clarence Saunders, I believe, and a full-sized model of the first self-service grocery store in was just down the hall from the giant animated circus.

After my son couldn’t stand it anymore – literally, his feet were aching – we got back in the car and headed for the Wal Mart supercenter. We got a gigantic lego set and clothes. This would be the first time that I’ve ever attempted to live off the land, as Ken puts it, as existential frontiersmen. Frontierspeople. Frontierspersons? Whatever.

Anyway, this was a travel experiment. Money saved by not checking baggage: $40. Money spent at Wal Mart (minus the legos) buying the same stuff I would have packed if I had checked the baggage: $200.

Ok, existential-frontier-travel-light-live-off-the-land-plan version 1.0… #fail.

And, this was shopping selectively – mainly from the sale and clearance racks. I got pants for $3. Running shoes for $20. Shirt for $8. Wal Mart is in-your-face cheap. It pulls no punches. There are no questions about where the decimal point is in these prices, and it’s almost always further to the right than you expect.

But, 5 days worth of clothes for two people, a workout set for me, and a jacket for the son adds up. Oh, I also bought bacon, two things of cheese, breakfast sausages, and cheddar wurst sausages. I probably wouldn't have packed that. But still, those things didn't cost the $160 difference between "would have spent" and "spent".

The checkout clerk complimented me on my savings, so I didn’t feel too bad. Let my experience be your guide. Go ahead. Pack heavy for the plane. Pay the fee. It’s really hard to buy a suitcase full of luggage for the fee they charge, unless you buy half-off fabric and have a sewing machine, time, and skill at your destination. Oh, and did I mention time? It took a good 1:45 to achieve shopping nirvana. The good news is I actually got some new clothes that I didn't sew myself. It was kind of fun. I might do it again someday. Not anytime soon, though, because I love sewing.

We arrived in Smithville after a leisurely drive, and visited all evening. We went out to Mel’s Diner and had a pleasant late dinner. My relatives know everyone there, and we wrapped up the evening in the lab, talking about the decline of newspapers everywhere, comparing and contrasting newscasts (San Diego Channel 10 and the local news received in Smithville), standardized testing in Mississippi and California and all the fallout thereof, political scandals, all the recent photography projects, and a bit of the philosophy concerning doing photography for free, which is pretty much what I do with a large fraction of my time.

Looking forward to the gym and packing up stuff to ship to San Diego, and research for a book project, all things I hope to do tomorrow.

San Diego - Dallas - Memphis - Olive Branch

Today my son and I traveled from San Diego, California, through Dallas, Texas, to Memphis, Tennessee, to Olive Branch, Missisippi.

We were dropped off at the airport early in the morning. I was able to teach my little one about airports, security, carry on luggage, tickets, boarding passes, jetways, terminals, and concourses. We had a wonderful time watching all the parts of the wing move. I explained pitch, roll, and yaw, and we went over every square millimeter of the Boeing 757 emergency exit guide in the seatback pocket. We had our escape routes totally memorized.

The plane change in Dallas afforded two opportunities to take the tramway, since there was a gate change in between then time they announced it on the plane and the time we showed up at the gate. This gave me another opportunity to emphasize the importance of checking the monitors because "things change".

Michael bought his own Subway sandwich, and got a drink on the house for being a gentleman in line. He successfully negotiated a window seat with the gate agent for the flight from Dallas to Memphis.

We took the bus to Alamo rental cars and picked up a nice car. I used the new phone (Droid) to navigate, and experienced a few setbacks. The database didn't know about one-way entrances, and roads that were marked as "no left turn". This resulted in a detour through some really sad looking neighborhoods. Several boarded up houses and an entire apartment block boarded up and busted up, with "KEEP OUT" spray-painted ineffectually on the plywood. It looked pretty scary, and it was still daytime.

We got back on track on Union Avenue, and parked on Beale Street. Our destination was Hard Rock Cafe, Memphis, and we had stageside seats for our big dinner.

We bought t-shirts, we spent a lot of time looking at all the items displayed on the walls, we talked at length about Elvis, Beale Street, rock and roll, and playing the drums, since my son started playing the drums in the school band this year. In the gift shop, we were able to buy "Memphis" flame-decorated drumsticks!

While walking to the car, after a stroll around the somewhat-down-at-heel Beale Street Drag, I told him that his drum teacher would be quite impressed with his fancy new sticks. To this, he declared that he wanted to keep the drumsticks as a souvenir instead of using them! Alas, he takes after me. I might have to buy a second pair - one for keeping and one for using.

We're now in the hotel room. He's watching a football game and cheering for Chicago, and I'm working on various documents that have to do with understanding the NEON processor better, so that I can help add NEON support to a software package called FFTW. We're looking forward to more travel and adventure tomorrow.

Something Really Ought To Be Said

Something Really Ought To Be Said
30 October 2009

On the 28th of November, I took my 8-year-old Bear Cub to his Pack Meeting. It's held in a multi-purpose room at a nearby school. We arrived about the same time we always arrive - a few minutes late due to soccer practice getting out a scant 15 minutes before the start of the Pack meeting. Since I make him change into his scout uniform before going in to the meeting, we arrive just at the close of the opening activities and the beginning of the meeting itself.

This particular Pack meeting had a special guest. The email announcement said:

"This month's theme is Jungle Safari! We have exciting guests this night.

* Master So and So, 6th Degree Black Belt
* Boy Scout Troop ###
* Mrs. So and So to help prepare for Holiday Caroling"

Hey! Neat! A 6th degree black belt! This was going to be interesting. Maybe he would talk about martial arts, culture, and history. Maybe he would demonstrate a form, or break boards with his bare hands, and talk about the power of the individual to rise above limitations with hard work and diligent practice.

Mr. So and So and his able student assistant did indeed demonstrate martial arts techniques. And, he did speak about discipline. However, something unexpected happened. He linked discipline and martial arts training to material success and made fun of people living in Aguanga and El Cajon, which are two nearby towns here in California. The focus of the entire presentation was fighting back against "predators". This was, in essence, a paranoia-drenched safety seminar about what to do if you, the cub scout, are kidnapped by a pedophile.

But, first, let's analyze the message about materialism. The reasoning went something like this. People that live in Carmel Valley, San Diego (where the Pack is located) are successful. Not everyone can live in Carmel Valley. Discipline allows your parents, and therefore you, to be successful enough to live in Carmel Valley. Not like those people in Aguanga, or El Cajon. They aren't successful enough to live in Carmel Valley.

Aguanga was described by the martial arts speaker as having a population of 25. That's off by two orders of magnitude. As of 1990, it had a population of 2,309. It's an unincorporated small town in Riverside County.

Drawing the obvious conclusion, people in Aguanga and El Cajon don't have discipline. People in "those other places" are not successful. It's ok to make fun of people that are less-advantaged than you.

As of the 2000 census, there were 94,869 people, 34,199 households, and 23,152 families residing in the city of El Cajon. According to estimates by the San Diego Association of Governments, the median household income of El Cajon in 2005 was $47,885.

According to the San Diego County Assessor's Office's 2006 estimates, there were 42,047 people residing in Carmel Valley, which is an increase of 49.2% from 2000. The median household income was $120,886. 17.8% of the households made $200,000 or more and 12.3% made $30,000 or less.

While the median household incomes are different, with Carmel Valley being higher, this really should not be held up as proof that people living in Carmel Valley are "more disciplined" or even "more successful" than people living in El Cajon. At least, not without an awful lot of careful definitions of terms and a recognition that different people value different things.

Importantly, El Cajon isn't impoverished. The median household income for El Cajon is right about at the median household income for the entire state of California. Therefore, El Cajon is a very good representative of material success in the state of California. Poking fun of El Cajon, as if they were a bunch of backwards, lazy, hayseed, no-accounts, doesn't make much sense, since it's equivalent to making fun of the entire state of California.

Carmel Valley, by comparison, isn't even a city. El Cajon was incorporated in 1912. Carmel Valley, being a master-planned neighborhood, mooches off San Diego for services and other expensive things that El Cajon has the discipline and focus to provide the citizens that live there.

I wonder who Rancho Santa Fe cub scouts make fun of at their Pack meetings? Could they possibly be making fun of phony, high-maintenance, new-money Carmel Valley set?

Where does a scouting organization get off promoting the idea that the most important things in life are material success? Is this a core value of scouting? I wonder if the organizations that help fund scouting, say, United Way or other agencies, would be happy about scouts talking down to disadvantaged persons at their meetings?

Is this the only time this year that this sort of thing has happened? No, it is not.

Several months ago, when each scout at the Pack meeting had to stand up and answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up," nearly every older cub scout, the two groups of Webelos, answered "I want to make a lot of money" or "I want to be rich". My own Bear Cub later admitted he felt kind of silly saying he wanted to be a Lego Designer, but first work at Souplantation (his favorite restaurant). This made me feel sad. Here we were, confronting the corrosion of a natural desire to grow up and do productive things that made him feel good about himself and others, and it happened at a Pack meeting - the sort of place where I'd hoped we could find the opposite environment. In the face of a series of smarmy "I wanna be RICH", the simple statement of serving food to others at his favorite restaurant became something to be emabarrassed of.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having money, earning money, or spending money. Much of the time, things worth doing are paid well enough to make a good living. If you are lucky, prepared, willing to sacrifice and work hard, then you might be paid more than the average. However, there are plenty of cases where wealth came from being in the right place at the right time, or from being the children of wealth, or from giving up happiness, or from stealing wealth from others, or from taking advantage of a loophole in the law or a fad or a shortage.

There is no guarantee that discipline and grace will make you wealthy. Ask any priest.

The lessons on how to handle a predator and the message of paranoia are controversial, and I have no good answer. An 8-year-old is no match for a full-grown adult. Putting the idea in their minds that they can resist or win a physical confrontation may or may not be a good idea.

The demonstrations consisted of the martial artist pretending to be a stranger kidnapping a boy from Toys R Us. The message that strangers are the real danger is categorically wrong. "There are a number of commonly held misconceptions regarding child sexual abuse in the United States. [such as] ...the perpetrator of the sexual abuse is always a stranger" ("Sexual Abuse of Children" Renee Z. Dominguez, Ph.D., Connie F. Nelke, Ph.D., Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.)

Children are far more likely to be abused by a family member or someone already known to them. By emphasizing the danger of strangers, we both erode civil society and we also set up a false expectation of where the danger really lies.

Why do I care so much about the message of materialism?

About 20 years ago in Arkansas, I earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do from the exact same organization that the speaker represented. In no way, shape, or form, was the message presented back then that discipline would make me financially successful. It doesn't hurt, but it wasn't presented that way. Those that were less-advantaged were actively respected, especially if they made what was quite often a larger sacrifice to come to class and work hard on developing their skill, self-confidence, and poise. It was dishertening to see the difference that 20 years and living in a different part of the country can make in the presentation of the meaning of martial arts to youth.

Quilt Project Part 1

Quilt Project Part 1



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Conclusions of MIssissippi Travel

The adventure to Mississippi that me and the three kids took concluded yesterday with a drive from Monroe County to Memphis in a rented minivan, a short shuttle bus ride to the airport, a four-hour plane ride to LAX, and a long ride home in our own minivan with a diversionary visit to grandparents and Giovanni's pizza in Fullerton.



Here is baby in her carseat on the airplane, about to land back home in San Diego.

The visit to Smithville was quite enjoyable, although the heat made for cabin fever. An editorial in the paper compared the situation, where one cannot go outdoors for more than a few minutes after the sun is up, and the evening cools down only slightly, to being snowed in. The comparison is quite apt. Keeping three small children entertained indoors without their own toys and away from all the Big People Stuff was very tiring. It was like some sort of parental boot camp.

I think I learned multiple new Mommy Skills on this trip, but so far I have not been able to form them from the murk of wrong-time-zone sleepiness. Maybe after a few days back here in the paradigm-schedule-shift of the new school year, the bones of the lessons will be revealed.

With this school year, the two oldest will be going to the same school, which is very nice, while the baby is still here at the house with me. I am very much looking forward to some increase in uninterrupted time. My resolution is to take full advantage of it while continuing to provide as much "homeschool style" interaction as possible with the children.

I'm happy the summer is over, and that feeling somewhat surprises me, since I did enjoy it. Being quite comfortable with ambiguity, I've been giving this sort of dichotomy a somewhat mistrustful look out of the corner of my mental eye.

Up with the Vertical, Out with the Dancing, Down with the Solar

I have a grid-tie solar system here at Silver Home, and the household had noticed an increase in our very small electrical bills and a decrease of the power being created by the solar panels on one of the two inverters. The inverter was suspected as source of the problem, but with a bit of assistance from someone that works with solar power all the time and a voltmeter, the problem was narrowed down to one of the four strings of daisy-chained solar panels.

There are 40 panels up on the roof. They're divided into 4 strings of 10. The bad string was removed at the inverter, so 30 are now in use. Unfortunately, none of my records easily show which 10 are connected to that particular pair of wires! The only way to find out is to go up on the roof.

Speaking of the roof, a ladder was climbed by a very helpful someone who assisted me in getting the 2m vertical installed on the solar panel side of the house. The antenna is as-yet-to-be tested, however, so I can't declare victory quite yet. In order to test it, I need to connect a radio up to it and give it a spin. That will happen today.

Finally, I went out dancing at Club Montage last night. I'm none the worse for wear, but I did experience an interesting effect which was due either to eating a whole bag of carrots the afternoon prior or my innards getting reverberated with the exact wrong frequency of bass from the speakers-taller-than-I. Regardless of the cause, a fun time was had by the both of us that went out dancing. San Diego Pride is going on this weekend, so the place was festive and gay and the energy quite enjoyable.

A highlight of the evening was an exotic dancer (male) who performed on a pair of long red diaphanous curtains suspended from the ceiling. It was quite acrobatic and dramatic.

Magic Rocks by Geneva

Check out this video: Magic Rocks by Geneva



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Geneva Crystal Experiment 1 - Citrine

Check out this video: Crystal Experiment 1 Citrine



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Quote of the Day

"damn, I should have bought that hundredweight of unclaimed canary yellow cardstock."

19 June 2007 Fire in Mira Mesa, CA

19 June 2007 Fire in Mira Mesa, CA



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Summer School Day One

Mommy Science School kicks off the 2007 season.

Summer School 1



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Ivory Soap Experiment

Ivory Soap Experiment



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Midget Electric Vehicle Converstion Blog 1

MG Midget Blog 1



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Fun at the Park

Bicycle weirdness: