Definition of Community Organizer

I swear the Republican Party is on crack and wants to win at any cost. They are sleazy, lying scum bags. I don't think I've ever felt so pissed of during a presidential campaign. One of the points they keep trying to make is when discussing executive experience for governing, Palin and McCain have it, while Obama has only been a "community organizer" (wink wink). The constant reference to it, first by Mr. 9/11 Rudy Giuliani, and then repeated often by Palin, is deeply offensive in so many ways. Joe Klein on Time's Swampland blog laid out just what Obama did as a community organizer:

What a Community Organizer Does:

This morning, I received a press release from a group called Catholic Democrats about the work--the mission, the witness--that Obama performed after he got out of college. Here's the first paragraph:

Catholic Democrats is expressing surprise and shock that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's acceptance speech tonight mocked her opponent's work in the 1980s for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.  She belittled Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago, work he undertook instead of pursuing a lucrative career on Wall Street.  In her acceptance speech, Ms. Palin said, 'I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.'  Community organizing is at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching to end poverty and promote social justice.  

So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn't know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed--job training, help with housing and so forth--from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord's work--the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a 'task from God.')

(Via TIME: Swampland.)

Sounds like a faith-based initiative to me. What also upsets me about this is that our son has been developing a very high sense of social justice, and I can see him doing something like this as he moves through college, or even after. He's even talking about joining the Peace Corps. You just have to hope that vomit like this doesn't end up turning the young idealistic people of today away from public service.

I hope people wake up in time to call bullshit on the whole lot of them.

Almost empty nest

We moved our son to his college dorm last week. He started classes today. Strange feeling for both of us. Even though our daughter is home, it really does feel like the end of a major chapter in our lives, and the start of another. Certainly not lacking for things to do though, with work, several home projects to do and complete on the house, the band, and so on.

Maybe even start to write more. I certainly could use some discipline here.

graduation weekend

The long graduation weekend is over. It had its ups and downs, expectations met and not met, joy and disappointment.

Obviously it should have been all positive, yet maybe that's impossible with young adults and their parents, and the parents with their parents.

Maybe that's enough said.

another life passage

i can't believe my baby girl is graduating from college this weekend. Where did the time go? It's all the usual cliches. But with things like this, time really does seem to go far too fast.

We head out in the morning for Spokane, then down to Pullman (WSU) for the big day on Saturday.

I'm not going anywhere...

...at least not now. Early last week the oh so very formal "form" arrived in the mail. Just a standard HR form with several lines that could be checked, depending on the purpose of the communication. The line "you were found to be qualified for the position but another candidate has been selected" was checked. No phone call, no feedback. I suppose I could call or email. However, my supervisor (who knew I was interviewing and knows many of the principles) is attending a meeting this week where many of them will be. Maybe I'll hear something through him. Oh, and yeah, it did go to the inside candidate. But he is well qualified.

Would I have gone? Even though I knew it was a long shot, I pretty much had decided that I would probably have taken the plunge. My wife was willing. Time to get my mind back on things here.

Now, we really have to focus on our kids graduating and getting my son to pick a school. One he likes has a soccer program he could probably contribute to, and the coach likes him. It's a very conservative evangelical Christian school a couple of hundred miles away. We have no problem with 99% of the school curriculum and mission. However, one major tenet is the believe that sexual immorality includes homosexuality, and that is a belief that we do not accept. Both my wife and I have had gay friends who are very moral, it's not even a view I've ever considered to be acceptable. So while it's an easy decision for my wife and I, It's a bit tough on my son because he really wants to go there. I wish we had completely read the mission statement before he applied.

more post interview thoughts

I’m writing this on the flight home from West Virginia. It’s a relatively easy drive from the science center I interviewed at to Dulles Airport in Virginia, outside of Washington DC. One can easily visit DC from the location of the center after about an hour and a half drive.

Still mentally decompressing and self-exit interviewing today. I woke up today thinking that I really hope I’m in the running. Before coming I was more ambivalent. It would be such a challenge although I think, I know I could do it. But certainly everything would change. I guess what I think about most is the impact on our parents, and on our kids. That’s the hard part for sure.

Today I was given a tour of the area a very knowledgeable ndividual, who also happens to be a contract officer who covers two local ARS stations. Very quickly one realizes the history of the area, civil war battlefields everywhere, and towns such as Harper’s Ferry, Leesburg, Mecklenburg, and so on. WV is a little depressed economically compared to Virginia and Maryland, and in fact many of the employees live in those states because of the school districts. I guess we wouldn’t have that worry, and one could get a big house and a lot of land for about 2/3 the same thing would cost in Seattle. So while many people drive from 20 miles away or so to work, I bet we could find something much, much closer.

After the area tour, Greg and I toured the station itself and I saw the complete operation, including all of the fish rearing and water treatment facilities. The latter includes both pretreatment (hard water, high calcium because of the limestone), and effluent treatment. Available lab space is more than adequate, as well as office space for techs and post docs. Major equipment is largely shared across projects but there’s everything I could think of needing, thermocyclers, real time PCR, DNA sequencers, micorarray readers, colony pickers, and so on. Project funding seems adequate and they’re sitting pretty good this year and next. There is certainly more detail in the project and reporting process than NOAA, but upon reflection, it doesn’t seem that bad. Research planning follows a five year process, then annual milestone reports.

I’ve gone back and forth all day as to where I think I stand in the process. I know the internal candidate is good, and has the background and history of working at the station. I know the other outside candidate is very good, certainly much more personable than I am, very respected in the aquaculture community since that’s the . What I have over both of them is much longer term government administrative experience, initiating research projects, mentoring students and staff, and so on. There’s probably more I should have talked about, as I expected there were things I now wish I would have said or at least articulated better. Oh well, that’s the experience part of the process.

I’ll be following up with the Area Leader tonight with a few budget questions and a thank you. As I finish writing this I’m thinking I want to be in the running. When I re-read paragraph 2, I’m not so sure!

Interview complete

Well, today was the day. A very long day in fact. As outlined in the last post, I spent the day giving a seminar, meeting with the selection panel, meeting with the lab scientists and general staff, and a final meeting with the selection committee. The process ends tomorrow with a tour and the long flight home.

Do I want this if offered? It would a tremendous change of life and lifestyle. So many things to think about. It would be very challenging job.

interviewing

I've been away from home for a week and a half, three full days to go before returning. The first week was a vacation with my wife--it was a celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary. I'm still on the east coast, attending a conference at which I gave a talk yesterday. Getting a little tired of hotel rooms, and I look forward to getting back home and sleeping in my own bed.

So, I am getting a job interview with the research center in West Virginia (see "options"). it's in two weeks and from all the information sent me, it will be pretty intense. There are three candidates. Besides the the seminar, there is a 3 hour session with an interview panel, tours, meetings with lab heads and staff, and a final meeting with the agency area head. My boss knows, out of fairness I told him. It's a weird feeling. It is so far away and it would mean starting over research-wise. huge life change for my family. It may be very tough on my son, but he will be starting college next year. Really tough on both our moms.

But all this is getting ahead of myself. The other two candidates are very, very qualified, and actually more so because of their closer experience with fresh water aquaculture. It will be a good experience. Nervewracking, but positive.

the end of my third browser

As quoted from Slashdot, it's the end of the line for Netscape.

Netscape Finally Put Down: "Stony Stevenson writes to point out that Netscape has finally reached end of line with the release of version 9.0.0.6. A pop-up will offer users the choice of switching to Firefox, Flock, or remaining with the dead browser, but no new updates will be released. 'Nearly 14 years after the once mighty browser made its first desktop appearance as Mosaic Netscape 0.9, its disappearance comes as little surprise. Although Netscape accounted for more than 80 per cent of the browser market in 1995, the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I used Mosaic and Lynx (text only) before Netscape, but then it came along as the first, I believe, "commercial" browser. it was the best for awhile. But later versions sucked on Macs, and even IE was a better choice for the longest time. After the transition to Mac OS X, I used early versions of Omniweb before settling on Safari (with occasional dalliances with Firefox). The sale to AOL killed innovation in the browser....I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.

BusySync 2.0 Will Sync iCal with Google Calendar

BusySync 2.0 Will Sync iCal with Google Calendar: "BusySync makes iCal work the way it ought to work right out of the box.

(Via Clippings.)

I installed BusySync a few days ago to get my calendars syncing again. I still use Entourage's calendar, but had figured out a few years ago how to get a WebDav server running on my work desktop and use it to sync an iCal calendar. Kind of convoluted, but any new addition to Entourage would use sync services to add the same event to iCal. And then, to sync my laptop calendar, I'd vpn into my work network, let the two iCals sync, and that was it.

But then the WebDav server config I had going broke after my Leopard upgrade. During the conversion to BusySync, I dumped all calendar entries into iCal from Entourage. That's when I found thousands of old entries back in 2001-2003 that never auto deleted. In fact there were only about a dozen unique entries, with hundreds to thousands each. This was obviously due to bad syncing (I suspect my Palm Tungsten); all were repeating events anyway. Once I manually deleted all of these, sync services did it's magic to sync everything between iCal and Entourage, and Busy Sync does it's thing between two Macs over the internet.