The best gift

I was in the kitchen of our office at lunchtime and overheard someone talking about giving gifts. She said that there just wasn't enough time to go shopping for some of her relatives for Christmas and she had resorted to making up packages of useful things (as she thought of them) and giving those instead. She got things like bottles of household cleaners, useful tools for the kitchen and things like that and wrapped them up as Christmas presents. She heard nothing but praise for the gifts. She said that next year, she was going to do more of that.

It reminded me of when I bought my first house. I was an old house that needed a LOT of work. I threw a house-warming party and got lots of nice gifts but the best ones were the useful gifts. I got a portable light with a clamp that I could position where I needed it. And I got a small copper pipe cutter. I tried using a hacksaw on the pipes (as I saw in a do-it-yourself book) but the edges were always rough and didn't join correctly. The pipe cutter made a nice, clean cut and I didn't need to clean the cut nearly as much as I had to when using a hacksaw. The clamp light came in useful in many situations and not all of them related to working around the house.

I don't remember what other gifts I got at that house warming but I'll never forget the light and the pipe cutter.

From a distance

This is a funny story where any of us could be the one making the mistake. In this case, though, the mistake comes from the fact that an airline company (like many other companies) has moved their reservations center to a foreign country (India in this case). They do this to decrease the costs of maintaining the service. I guess.

One of the guys in our office was planning a family ski vacation to Colorado. He had reservations to fly from Boston, Massachusetts to Denver, Colorado and then, making a connection by a smaller airline,  to a smaller, local airport in the mountains of Colorado. But a storm is coming and he wanted to change his reservations to leave a day earlier. It was a last minute change and he expected problems. But the reservation agents were having real trouble getting the connections to match. It looked like he was going to have to spend a night in Denver and then take the local flight the next day. In an attempt to be helpful, the agent in India suggested that perhaps he could drive from Boston to Denver and then the airline could fly him the rest of the way by plane!

This joke may be lost on anyone outside the United State so I've put a map here to explain the joke. As you can see, the majority of the distance of the trip is from Boston to Denver (1767 mi or 2844 km). The distance the airline offered to fly him (approximately 150 mi or 240 km) is less than a tenth the distance they asked him to drive. To people in India, I suppose, once you're in the United States, everything is close. Of course, you would hope that the airline would have provided their agents in India with a map so they could check these types of problems but, apparently, the airline was really trying to cut costs and decided a map was too extravagant. From a small map, though, it might look like the two cities are are really close. Like the song From a Distance. From a distance, all of our differences, seem small.

So, before we laugh, imagine if someone asked us if it was better to drive from Mumbai to Kalyan (both in India) or from Mumbai to Bengaluru. Yeah, I wouldn't know, either.

A tale of two amendments - part 2

As I mentioned in my previous post, my post today is a continuation of my ideas on the shooting in Tucson on January 8  and how many people are using it to frame their arguments about the Constitution. The previous post concerned my feeling that some people are incorrectly tying this tragedy in with the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Today I'll weigh in on the people who are incorrectly saying that this tragedy shows how we should limit free speech because it brings about such terrible events. In this way, I believe, these people are not living up to the First Amendment to the Constitution.

We've all heard the old story about how free speech must be limited in cases like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Well, it's not illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater if there really is a fire in the theater. As explained here, the real quote is that it would be illegal to falsely shout "fire" in a theater. Gabrielle Giffords is a US Representative to Congress. The calls for blame in this shooting come from a campaign advertisement that placed Ms Giffords' district under a crosshairs symbol (as in a target of a gun) on a map. You can see it here at Gawker.com with a bit more explanation of how the man running against Ms. Giffords added more worrisome actions to this. While I call this "stupid speech", I wouldn't call for it to be illegal. I think the people who use these kinds of images and words to attack their opponent can be brought to light and argued (after all, we, too, have freedom of speech), the demand that all of this kind of speech be outlawed is wrong.

We all say stupid things. When the anonymity of the Internet is thrown in, we may say some really stupid things. The worst part of the "crosshairs campaign ad" story is that while the woman who authorized the advertisement took it down after the shooting, she never apologized or admitted to being wrong. Of course, this same woman is a loud-mouthed quitter who used to be a governor but left the office and now only seeks attention. No matter what overweight radio talk show hosts or governors-who-quit say, their speech and ideas should not be banned. But we should always argue with them about their speech. We need to stand up to people who lie or imply that other people are "dangerous" and need to be removed - forcibly if necessary.

I saw a very interesting article the other day written by a columnist, Jeff Pearlman, for Sports Illustrated. In the article (available here), he mentioned how writing about sports for a widely read publication opens him up to a lot of abuse. He's gotten used to it and usually just moves on. But one especially bad incident led him to try to find the people who were delivering such vile comments. When he finally tracked them down, with their anonymity removed, they were apologetic. They couldn't really explain why they had been so cruel with their words. My guess is that they wouldn't have done it if they'd known him or were talking to him face to face. It's our job to keep the people who spout this kind of talk, be they talk show hosts, governors who quit or anyone else, responsible. We need to remind them that they are talking about real people who are just as vulnerable as they are.

The picture above, of the Bill of Rights, is a slightly enhanced version of the one from the National Archives here.

A tale of two amendments - part 1

One event - two Constitutional Amendments. This post concerns the shooting in Tucson on January 8  and how many people are using it to frame their arguments about the Constitution. The arguments concern the First Amendment and the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

It makes me a little frustrated when I hear people saying that if only more people had guns in Tucson that day, some of the 19 people shot (and 6 of those died) could have been saved. I read an opinion piece in the New York Times this morning that made me realize how wrong this idea is. It also reminded me of talk after the shooting on the campus or Virginia Tech that if people were allowed to carry guns on campus, this all could have been prevented. Yes, I can just imagine a group of people roaming the campus with their guns drawn. Who was the shooter? What did he look like? Was it a man? Is that him - the guy with his gun drawn, "furtively" looking around? I'll be a hero - I'll shoot first and ask questions later. Yes, that would have stopped the slaughter. Please read the New York Times article, though, It puts it much better than I can.

But likewise, there are people who would like to ignore the First Amendment and ban all "hate speech". Yes, I think a lot of speech in political ads and on radio and TV has gone too far. I'll write more about this side of the argument in a later post.

The picture of the US Constitution above is from this site.

Oh, the excitment of Christmas

This is a funny picture I took at Christmas that I forgot to post. Our kids (and my wife) weren't the only one's anxiously awaiting the chance to open their gifts at Christmas. The cats were eying the tree and presents on Christmas Eve.

I took this the morning of Christmas Eve and the sun was really bright coming in the window. This isn't the best picture I've ever taken. It's pretty blurry but it's still funny.

Nice use for a pot holder

As I mentioned previously, my daughter has started a blog to show the craft projects she has been working on. I thought I'd show one pf the things she made for me.

I like to drink tea during the day. I have a nice tea pot that my wife bought me and I fill it up at the beginning of the day and pour a cup when I need it throughout the day. But it cools down as the day goes by and I wanted something to keep it off the cold desk. So, my daughter suggested I use one of her pot holders. It works but there is still a loss of heat through the top of the pot. So, if you're listening, Emma, maybe another project could be a tea cozy to cover the top of the tea pot, too.

This bottom picture shows the pot holder in use with a picture of Emma watching over it.

My daughter's blog

My daughter has caught the blogging bug. She already had the "crafting" bug so she has combined the two. She started a new blog named "Crafts Made by Me". She loves making things and she loves showing those things to us. So, this blog seemed like a natural project for her.

One bad thing is that Google/Blogger doesn't seem to allow a young person like her to have their own blog. Goggle doesn't even let her have her own Gmail account. I was surprised at this. Yahoo let us set up an email account for her after having one of us sign into our account and verifying that we are letting her have the account. They charge our credit card $0.50 to verify that we are an adult and that's it. It all makes sense. I did that after having Google tell us we couldn't set up an email account for her because of her age. So, I assumed that once we had the Yahoo mail account, we'd be able to set up a Blogger account for her but we got the same notification from Blogger that we got from Gmail.

So, my wife has set up a new blog in her own name and is just letting our daughter use it. In case you don't get a chance to visit the new blog from this post, you'll see that her blog is listed on the right under my "Other blogs" list. I think you'll like the variety of projects she undertakes. She is quite a remarkable young lady and I'm proud of her.