What is this controversial amendment, you ask? Well, to answer that we start by understanding what the bill say before the amendment. First a quick caveat, I haven’t read the bill so this is all second hand reporting… consult a health care expert for full details. But do keep reading, as I do have a genuine thought near the end here that will only make sense once the context is provided. Anyway, the bill itself currently contains a compromise between some (read: not all) anti-choice Democrats and the pro-choice wing which requires that in any given insurance market there always be at least one insurance option that provides abortion services and one insurance option that does not. Once those requirements are met any number of additional plans, with or without abortion services, can be offered. My understanding is that, at present, most insurance plans in the United States cover some level of abortion services, so the existing compromise is a net “gain” of sorts for anti-choice supporters, as this increases their own ideologically-pure insurance options.

Of course, the compromise itself is somewhat silly, because most Americans don’t select their own insurance but rather sign up for their employer’s plan. Even at my tiny company where worker opinion is solicited for important business decisions on a regular basis, the health insurance decisions are quite opaque. But even though it’s a “win”, it apparently wasn’t enough of a win. The anti-choice partisans are worried that poor Americans who receive insurance through the new Insurance Exchange with federal subsidies will have access to abortion services paid for by federal dollars. This, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, is a big deal. Money is fungible, and if you really have a problem with the idea that your money is paying for abortions, just pretend like all of the taxes collected during your entire lifetime goes to pay for .001% of a cruise missile used to blow up something in Iraq… but I digress. Years ago an amendment was passed called the Helms Amendment that prevents the spending of any federal dollars for abortion services unless in the case of incest, rape, or saving the life of the mother (note, no general health exception is provided… she has to be dying to get access to federal funds). Thus medicad — the primary source of health funds available to those still able to reproduce, since medicare is primarily for the elderly — have always been highly restricted.

The original compromise maintains this restriction. Someone buying insurance on the Exchange, even the one with abortion services, would only be able to access those services under the Helms Amendment restrictions. In order to cover any other abortion services you would need to purchase additional coverage. In this, it was believed, the status quo was more or less maintained.

Not so, says the anti-choicers! Best as I can figure, their argument boils down to this: if the government is providing subsidies to help me purchase insurance, that leaves me with more money in my pocket which I can then use to purchase the “full service” abortion package, and thus federal taxes are indirectly being used to pay for non-Helms-Amendment type abortions. The proposed solution is to ban the sale of abortion service insurance on the Exchange entirely. That’s right… NO ONE on the individual market or public option would be able to buy insurance that covers abortions. To draw an analogy… by providing food stamps to the poor, we enable them to spend what money they do have on alcohol, which is probably not a good use of their funds. The obvious solution then is to mandate that the poor can only purchase food at one approved location, regardless of whether they are using stamps or hard cash, and that said location will not carry any products we deem inappropriate… and that since we are dismantling all the rest of the stores while we are at it, everyone is going to have to buy from that same no-alcohol location even if they aren’t on food stamps. Only then can our conscience rest peacefully.

Okay, context is provided… here’s my original thought. I don’t think this amendment can stand legal scrutiny, and I think the Democrats know it. Access to abortion is a legal right in this country, and insurance is the way we pay for it. The government cannot prohibit insurance from paying for a service that is a right as it’s functionally no different than an outright ban. I suggest that prohibiting a whole section of the population from even having access to insurance options is more or less the same. But this is a gamble. The court isn’t what it used to be when it comes to choice. Though the case wouldn’t ultimately be about choice as much as a questions of the power of Congress to regulate beyond the scope of federal dollars (remember, there is only a tenuous connection between federal dollars here). Given this, I’d still place bets that the amendment can’t withstand scrutiny. Which I think is why the vote is going forward. As long as they can get together 216 votes today, the Democrats can worry about the five votes on the Supreme Court later.

The recipe called for four large handfuls of mushrooms and a number of other vegetables I didn’t have in the house, so Brett and I headed over to Berkeley’s Monterey Market for heaps of fresh produce. I was able to choose from a number of fine mushroom specimens, eventually selecting oyster mushrooms, baby shiitakes, chanterelles, and the elusive matsutake (eat your heart out Santa Cruz anthro students!). The day of the event I went down to our local grocery store and picked up “no-chicken” chicken stock and some desserts. Then I embarked on my cooking adventure.

Pre Cooking Kitchen

First I had to clean the kitchen. My apartment has no dishwasher, and I am a lazy, lazy man… so it took a while to work through the dish backlog. But eventually I got to the sparkling kitchen you see above.

Cooking Begins

The recipe is divided into two steps, the initial preparation of the risotto followed by the preparation of the mushrooms and integration of the same with the risotto base. Above is the first stage of the risotto, which I realized was designed to feed eight people!

Not Enough Vermouth

Sarah had told me there was vermouth in the cupboard meant to be used with a risotto but had never been actually used, so I assumed there was a more or less unopened bottle up there. Not so! I was two ounces shy of what was needed, but figured I would be fine with what I had.

So Much Rice

Risotto is made by pouring in small amounts of warm stock which the rice absorbs while it cooks. This is supposed to be a time consuming process full of concern for whether or not the risotto is going to actually absorb all the liquid. In this case, that was never a concern. The rice continued to absorb the stock seconds after I put it into the pot. This probably should have been cause for early concern.

Risotto Step 1 Complete

After step one was complete the recipe instructs you to put the rice in a large pan to let cool while preparing the next step. Here you see all the rice. This turned out to be a pretty dangerous setup, as there isn’t enough counter-top space to put this pan down, so it ended up on one of my kitchen stools where my dinner guests kept running into it while moving about the kitchen! Thankfully it never actually fell off the stool.

Mushroom Specimens

I had originally purchased four mushrooms types, but I think I bought too much of each, so I decided to drop the shiitakes from the mix. That still left three varieties, oyster on the top, chanterelles on the right, and matsutakes on the left. I wasn’t 100% sure of the best way to prepare the matsutakes, so I ended up cutting the stems into smaller bits — which was good as the stems were chewy — and the caps into roughly 8ths. The oyster mushrooms were more or less diced, and the chantrelles were cut into strips. This allowed one to identify which mushroom was which based just just on the size.

Five Cups of Mushrooms

After the mushroom prep, I ended with five cups of mushrooms. That’s a lot of mushrooms!

Mushroom Medley

Into the frying pan with a ton of butter. This started to smell fantastic about five minutes into cooking.

Risotto when Finished

Now, I don’t have any photos of the steps between mushroom prep and the final product, but this is where the wheels fall off the wagon. It turns out my risotto isn’t anywhere done enough. I keep adding stock, it keeps soaking it right up, rice continues to be crunchy. We eventually add WAY more stock than the recipe calls for, throw on the lid and let it cook for an additional 15 minutes untouched. This finally got the risotto rice to soften up in the core, but it also ensured the rice converted to roughly 70% paste. The final product was not “oozy” so much as it was “gooey”.

Fellow Diners

Here we are about to sit down for the meal. I picked up a bottle of white wine from South Africa called “Goats will Roam” that was pretty decent, but not great. I had hoped it would be less fruity, but turned out to be amazingly fruity. The risotto itself was perfectly acceptable. It was quite dense and cheesy, and you couldn’t always taste the different mushrooms, but I still enjoyed it. I can’t say the matsutakes where anything amazing. Perhaps they are meant to be savored in a more delicate dish? We rounded off the meal with a loaf of bread.

The Forgotten Lemon Juice

Later that evening I realized I had failed to add the lemon juice I had squeezed earlier. Everyone agreed that the risotto would have been much better with the juice, as it would have helped to cut the richness and perhaps reduced the gooey factor. Rookie mistake.

Risotto Leftovers

With only three people eating a dish designed to feed eight, I ended up with lots of leftovers. Thankfully it cooks up really nice in a fry pan and I’ve already had one good meal with almost no prep required thanks to my overcooking.

Post Cooking Kitchen

Of course, the kitchen ended up a disaster once again, but such is the cycle of life.

I found a publisher who translates Japanese manga teaching manuals into English on technical topics like physics and calculus. Each one has a cast of characters with different problems which are solve by use of the book’s subject matter. Much to my eternal joy, they had a book on databases which I quickly snatched up for my, erm, collection. They were also selling copies of XKCD Volume 0, but I had just received mine direct in the mail a few days earlier.

Another publisher was selling sophisticated choose-your-own-adventure books that were mildly interesting. But what really struck out about this particular booth was a contest to win a new book if you could solve three brain teasers. I grabbed a copy of the puzzles and spent the rest of the convention coming up with solutions. The first puzzle, a chess board where you had to find mate for White in two moves, wasn’t very challenging… though there was a trick I had failed to see involving whether or not Black could castle. But that didn’t mater, as the moves I indicated were still correct. The second challenge had me ordering a series of seven polaroid photos, each taking on a different consecutive day of the week. Some of the photos had other photos in them and others had calendar page. It was pretty challenging to figure out, but there were just enough clues to solve and it was most satisfying.

The final challenge was, erm… debatable. We were tasked to argue that at any time there is at least one spot on Mars where the antipode has the exact same temperature and elevation. Brett and I struggled with this problem for quite sometime eventually deciding it simply wasn’t possible and that all we had to do was argue something so we wrote down some BS and turned it in for grading. Well, the dude back at the booth had a crazy theory about how you could prove the temperature and elevation were independently equal somewhere, and then employed a logical fallacy to argue that these points must eventually coincide. His first argument, proving temperature and elevation independently, was actually pretty good, but fails to account of the existence of limits (sheer cliffs or sudden drops in temperature) such that there is no guarantee that even those parts were true. Suffice to say, we didn’t believe him, he didn’t believe us, and I didn’t win a free copy of the book.

But I did not walk away from the convention a loser! We attended the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s charity “art-off”, where attending artists drew sketches on subjects suggested by the audience that were then raffled off. I bought just one ticket, more as a donation than anything else… and wouldn’t you know, I won something. I’m picking it up this Tuesday and will be sure to post a picture. Don’t get your hopes up too high.

Lastly, I went over to the TopatoCo booth where the writer and photographer for a Softer World were selling books. I was really excited to buy a copy of Overqualified and get it signed by Joey, the author. Sadly, this was not to be. Joey had stepped out just before I bought my copy… and though I was told he would be back, he was never there each time I circled by to check. The booth proprietors also suffered from a common problem at these conventions where they are more interested in their friends than the fans. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they were all really nice people, but clearly they were more interested in chitchatting amongst themselves than actually talking to me I rarely try to talk to the booth people mostly because I don’t have anything to say and I figure they have more interesting things to do than talk with random fans. But I had hoped Softer World would be different, since its played an important role in my life these past years… alas, no. So, sour experience at the booth and an unsigned copy of Overqualified. Kind of a bummer way to end the convention, but at least I won my art-off sketch!

Then, unrelated to anything I did, MoveOn released this really great video on the Public Option.

That may be the single best piece I’ve seen on the topic.

Sarah Left for Holland

The most life changing news is that my fiancée has left for her year long fieldwork in the Netherlands. She will be staying in Enschede, which technically isn’t part of Holland, but saying “The Netherlands” sounds weird. Not having someone sentient around the house on a day-to-day basis is hard, and I think will only get harder as the months go by…

I Moved to San Francisco

Part of the agreement that lead to me relocating to Santa Cruz after law school was that once Sarah finished her course work and no longer needed to be on campus every day, we would get out of dodge! Well, three years have come and gone, and I’m officially out. I now reside in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. The weather her is not at all like Santa Cruz, a lot more fog, a lot more cold, and even a lot more rain. It’s very much like Seattle… and while I love Seattle weather, it’s going to take some time to reacclimatizes myself. The apartment was knick-named “Mountain Top” as it rests up a big hill and so I have a great view of the neighborhood.

View from Mountain Top

Getting Involved in the Community

Now that I live alone in this great city, I’m trying to get more involved with the communities that are around me. The first step was to eat everything I could get my hands on and write a review about it so I would remember. It was an expensive hobby there for a while, as Sarah and I ate out nearly every night before her departure, but now I’m down to a much more manageable frequency. I’m also getting to know my neighbors, who all seem like really great people. It’s always nice to know some people in your building.

Next on the list is joining the local technology interest groups. I’ve joined the SF-LUG and the Ruby Meetup Group… we shall see what other organizations present themselves. I also plan to drop in on the local game shop’s board game night… because one can never play too many board games. The final piece is to find some volunteer/political activities in which to get involved. Still need to investigate what’s out there, but my guess is one need simply express some interest.

LegSim Resurgence

This past summer I’ve been working on a new version of LegSim written on Rails. We have a beta class running right now at the University of Washington and it seems to be going pretty well. The trick is that a lot of the features aren’t done yet, so it’s sort of a constant race against the clock to get a feature deployed before the students need it to complete an assignment. But that’s the sort of pressure I need to get me really motivated, so it’s all for the good. There’s some other really exciting things going on with LegSim right now that I hope to post about in the coming weeks.

Changes in the Workplace

Leaving Santa Cruz meant leaving my cool downtown office… which was sad, as I really liked the ladies who worked there and the space was great. Now I am once again confined to my apartment and the local coffee shops, but I’m not too worried. The much bigger change is that our company’s Lead Developer decided to peruse other opportunities earlier this month. What that means for me is I am now listed as the “Project Manager” of our big new Content Management System. I actually hope to blog a little about that in the coming weeks as well, as there are some really cool technical problems to overcome with that project and I hope to share some earned wisdom.

I think that about covers the main highlights. With luck there will be more regular — and shorter — posts in the future.

I certainly buy the corollary relationship between a popular president and positive media coverage. It’s not hard to extract from the basic rules that “Media outlets want to sell subscriptions” and “News stories about popular people sell subscriptions” to reach “Media outlets write stories about popular people.” But the analysis can’t stop there. You have to ask yourself two questions: (1) is there a reason why the President is popular, and; (2) is there a reason the press isn’t writing negative stories about a popular president?

Samuelson has a whole list of answers to #2. My personal favorite is “they agree with his agenda (so it never occurs to them to question basic premises).” When has policy agreement ever stopped a journalist from writing a damning story about presidential mistakes? Certainly Bill Clinton enjoyed the same sort of policy alignment with the Washington press corp, but enjoyed no such kid gloves. Samuelson never even tries to address #1.

I propose a different sort of answer to both questions, one that Samuelson could never write in his column. Obama is popular and enjoys positive press coverage because he’s doing a decent job. Past performance is an excellent indicator of future performance. That’s why we give promotions to those who have done well at their jobs, not those who may grand claims about what they are going to do in the future. And by many, many objective standards, Obama is doing well. Even when he has messed up, he’s known the right way to admit his failing and get moving.

Now, let’s compare his first 100 days against the last two presidents. W. Bush came in under a heavy cloud of election uncertainty and a questionable Constitutional ruling. He governed in such an isolated and fiercely conservative manner that Sen. Jeffords left the party, handing control of the chamber over to the Democrats. Clinton came into office without a majority popular vote thanks to Ross Perot. He then also governed in a very closed manner, leading to the eventual failure of health care reform in ‘93 and the disastrous midterm elections of ‘94. Obama came in with a clear and decisive majority vote and has lead the most open and accessible government in the modern era.

Both past presidents came from previous executive positions… in fact, you have to go back to JFK to find a President who was not either elected from the Governor’s mansion or the Vice Presidency. Ironic that Samuelson says the only President who has enjoyed such positive media coverages as Obama was Kennedy. Perhaps, just perhaps, executive bravado isn’t what’s really needed in the White House? Perhaps all it really takes is a steady hand, a strong — yet tempered — ego, and a willingness to work hard on any good policy idea that comes their way. I’m certain that should Obama ever stray from that formula, we’ll see a flood of negative press. But until that happens, I consider it a positive sign that the press has good things to say about a good man, instead of just trying to tear him down.

• Interbellum Generation
• Greatest Generation
• Silent Generation
• Baby Boom Generation
• Generation Jones
• Generation X
• MTV Generation
• Generation Y
• Generation Z

I’ve substituted in the more common names for a few of them… because Wikipedia is clearly wrong… “Millennium” Generation indeed. Another point where Wikipedia is wrong is declaring that Generation X includes those born in 1981. As someone who was born in 1981, I flatly reject inclusion in that humdrum and directionless generation.

But it did get me thinking about the naming scheme in use here. First, the MTV generation seems pretty silly and is entirely too narrow of a period to be an entire generation. Supposedly this is where I fit, but I think the label MTV anything was (and still is) a pejorative comment developed by earlier generations as a way to belittle us. So, screw that too.

What it leaves us is this series of generational labels that start with X and, seemingly, ends with Z (…AA?). I always liked Generation X as a concept, because “X” meant something… it was an undefined indifference that seemed to permeate many of those who are ten or so years old than me. It’s not universal, but it’s certainly prevalent. But where “X” was cool, “Y” and “Z” have nothing going on. They are simply the letters that follow after “X”. It is exactly the sort of name I would expect Baby Boomer and Generation X pollsters to ascribe to those who are coming to take their place in the world… we have no other descriptive attributes than “those who came after”.

Well, allow me to propose a better term for those born in the 1980s, experienced puberty and high school in the 90s, and were in college during the time of Napster: The Talented Generation.

I did not select this monicker lightly. But these past two weeks in Seattle I have been dumb struck by the number of amazing things my generation is doing in their twenties. Their twenties people! Instead of pursuing quixotic protest projects or experimental drugs, my generation is doing incredibly things at an outrageously young age.

Here’s just a brief run down of some of the stuff I’ve seen in the past two weeks. Two friends are putting together weekly podcasts about the Seattle Beer scene, interviewing local brewers, attending events, providing high-quality advice on homebrew projects. A friend in D.C. is publishing articles on how to be domestic in the modern age, yet avoid becoming like Betty Crocker. Two friends — and their much larger circle of friends — coordinated and put on an entire musical. A friend in San Francisco is working with Google to track not just Swine Flu, but influenza in general. Another in San Francisco is working at UCSF on technology that may radically alter our relationship with biofuels… and the list goes on!

Some of these efforts are real jobs, but most are not… and even the guy working at Google proposed and sold the idea to upper management, it wasn’t formulated from on high. You might also say that some of it is pretty small potatoes, right? Seattle Beer… who cares? Well, turns out lots of people do, and these guys are providing a service that others want and having fun while doing it.

Part of what we are seeing is the empowerment of the digital age, of that there is no question. But I also think we are seeing a new sense of volunteerism. It’s not the old one, where you signed up to help work at the local park on Saturdays… this is a new kind of volunteerism, that is highly personal and self-driven, yet fills an important community niche and provides a mechanism to give back outside of the old rules.

I don’t expect any of this to create the next big thing, but I’m also not convinced there ever will be another true big thing in our lifetime. Sure, there will be those who try to promote whatever as big and next, but the truth is, what’s really next is going to be lots of small things… each one the brain child of a talented person looking for a way to contribute in their own way. Personally, I couldn’t think of a better time to be coming into our prime.

If you’re not familiar with git as a version control system, I encourage you to check it out. I came from Subversion, which was great… but, at least for me, git is better. Better yet, if you use git with open source projects, you can use github.com for free to host your code, which is pretty cool, and self-hosting isn’t very challenging either. One of the aspects of git I’m just coming to understand is git-submodule. The idea is that there is an external project you’d like to pull into your project, but instead of committing it to your own repository, you want to use the external project’s repository. Lots of reasons to want to do this, such as making it easier to track upstream changes, or reducing the size of your own repository.

Ever since I learned about git submodules, I’ve thought that ExtJS seemed like a perfect candidate. As there is a mechanism to change the library at runtime without changing the code on the file system, there’s very little reason to have the library in your own repository. On top of which, ExtJS is big, so why waste the space. Sadly, the fine folks at extjs.com do not provide ExtJS in git form. There is a subversion repository for commercial clients (of which my employer is) but subversion is not git.

Thus, I have decided to take matters into my own hands. As ExtJS is licensed under the GPL, I have the legal right to redistribute the code. So I created my own git repository just for ExtJS at github which anyone can use as to add ExtJS as a git submodule. I’m still trying to figure out some aspects of git-submodule… like, is it possible to specify a tag from the external repo? If so, I will start adding tags to the repository as new versions are released.

For those who want to jump right into using the repo, here’s the magical incantation you want to run from your project root (change the “public/extjs” part to the relative path you want to install ExtJS at):

git submodule add git://github.com/probonogeek/extjs.git public/extjs
git submodule init
git submodule update

Lastly, if there are any extjs.com folks reading this who object to what I’ve done, please don’t hesitate to contact me. While the GPL gives me permission to do as I’ve done, there is a big difference between legal right and community consent. Right now I’m operating on a sort of tacit consent, but will take the repository down if requested.

I was actually a bit worried about waiting until the last minute as I am using H&R Block’s online system and there have been reports in the past of the site going down on tax day. But I had clear sailing the whole way and am now ready to begin my 2009 tax odyssey!

However, with the release of Debian/Lenny, Debian/Unstable has seen a flood of new packages including the transition from KDE3 -> KDE4, meaning it was simply no longer an option to avoid KDE4. Sure, I could have switched off of Debian/Unstable, but I’m just not that kind of guy. But I had hopes to delay the inevitable as long as possible.

This morning I could delay no further… too many packages were getting held up and it was time to bite the bullet. To my great pleasure, the upgrade has proven a much more enjoyable experience than last time. Instead of KDE 4.1, Debian/Unstable now runs with KDE 4.2.2 and it is just so much better.

Lots of GUI related stuff has cleaned up, applications work like I remember or have alternative mechanisms that I’m willing to learn, and generally things seem faster. I decided to turn off all of the eye-candy, as my laptop isn’t quite as powerful as one might want. But general CPU use is low enough that the fan doesn’t turn on, unlike the first attempt where it ran non-stop. Perhaps the most important feature enhancement is the introduction of a 12 hour clock! Not that I don’t appreciate 24-hour clocks, but my head just doesn’t work that way and I am otherwise surrounded by 12 hour clocks… it simply wasn’t practical to retrain and switch back-and-forth.

I think my only lasting critique is that KDE 4 was designed for big monitors. Everything seems to take up just a little bit more screen real estate that it used to, which makes a big difference on my tiny laptop monitor (only 14 inches, I think…). The appearance is much more in keeping with Web 2.0 design philosophy, which I generally like quite a bit, but on tiny monitors presents certain challenges. My guess is it will look gorgeous when I try it out my desktop’s 19 inch monitor.