university of missouri

The immoral, despicable “journalism” at the Church of the Nativity

Dave Farquhar Writing , , , , , ,

Charlie asked what I, as a trained and sometimes-practicing journalist, think of Caroyln Cole’s work at the Church of the Nativity.
Well, the story linked here hits on precisely why I’m not a full-time journalist slogging words for some magazine full-time and climbing the ladder towards editorship. What usually passes for journalism today can at best be considered advocacy; in the case of what Cole sometimes practices, it’s better described as fraud.
Read more

My Klez adventures

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire , , , , , , ,

Today should have been a happy day. After all, the Kansas City Royals finally wised up and sent the worst manager of its history, Tony Muser, packing. And there was much rejoicing. It was all over the front page of the Kansas City Star. In other news, Boeing 747s are having a difficult time avoiding pigs, and Royals utilityman Donnie Sadler is hitting .265.
Unfortunately, a serious development in my life quickly jarred me back into the real world. An e-mail message arrived. I had Klez! I guess I shouldn’t have double-clicked on that attachment titled “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” at work. But since everything on the Internet is true, and since the kid who mows my friend’s cousin’s neighbor’s lawn says his uncle told him e-mail travels over the Internet, I thought I’d better check it out. Opening that unexpected attachment from a complete stranger seemed like a good idea at the time.

The evidence that I had the Klez virus pointed back to a really old e-mail account I had, back in my days at the University of Missouri. So this must not have been the result of me opening the last “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” e-mail I got. It must have been the result of a “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” e-mail I got sometime in 1997 or 1998.

That’s really scary. Klez had the ability to trigger itself FIVE YEARS before it even existed, yet lie dormant until such a time as it did exist. Very powerful stuff. Very scary stuff. This is even bigger than the firing of Tony Muser. I think I should leak this discovery to The Register. Or maybe The Inquirer.

Then I looked at the headers more closely, and I noticed that even though it referred to that really old account, it also had a reference to my new Verizon account.

Then I realized I don’t have a Verizon account. So there’s only one possible explanation. Klez signed me up for a Verizon account! The nerve of it! And I’ll bet it’s using that e-mail account, and possibly also the cell phone that goes with it, to make marriage proposals to one of my ex-girlfriends. Probably the closet homo sapien. I’ll be in even more serious trouble after it realizes that all of my ex-girlfriends are closet homo sapiens and it proposes to all of them. This is bad. Really bad. I don’t think I’ll be able to blame this on Tony Muser.

I sure hope those cheerleaders know my new address in St. Louis. After all that scary Klez stuff, I could use some cheering up. They haven’t shown up yet, but that message never said when they’d show up.

When I went to lunch on that wonderful Tuesday, there was a TV in the lunchroom. There are always TVs in the lunchroom when important, newsworthy events of national impact occur. It was there so we could watch the latest developments of the Tony Muser firing as they unfolded on CNN.

I don’t think my coworkers believed me when I said that. So instead we talked about what I had learned about Klez. They were all really excited to hear about it. One of them asked if it had really neat graphics. I said sometimes. Another one asked if it would run on something as ancient as a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with GeForce4 Ti4400 video. I said it probably would. They all wanted copies.

When I got back from lunch, there was something else waiting for me in my e-mail: an invitation to a meeting to standardize our virus delivery to one or two tools and formats. I thought this was a great idea, because when we limit our clients’ abilities by forcing them to use limited tools–tools that were designed for another purpose entirely, of course–of our own choosing rather than their choosing, they are always much more productive and they thank us for it. Ideally, these tools should cost a lot of money and should require expensive outside consultants to set them up, so that these outside consultants can later go to the clients directly and do what consultants always do, which is this: Tell people what they already know. In this case, what they already know is how this overpriced, clueless consultant can do the job much better without our involvement. Next thing we know, we’re out of the picture, the clients are happy, the consultants are happy, and I’m happy because there’s not as much work for me to do, and if this kind of thing happens often enough, I’ll find myself without a job and then I’ll have something in common with my longtime hero, Tony Muser.

So of course I was falling all over myself to attend this meeting.

I asked the person who invited me if his new laptop has a DVD drive. He said it did. I told him I’d bring a copy of Office Space to the meeting. He said he didn’t have the drive configured to work in Linux yet because he hadn’t yet had the need to watch a movie on his work laptop.

Obviously, he needs to go to this meeting even more than I do, if he’s too busy doing real work to waste time watching DVDs really loudly on his work laptop and disturbing the rest of us in the office. It’s all due to the lingering effects of the decisions Tony Muser made during his tenure as Kansas City Royals manager, of course.

I’m sure a few scenes from Office Space will help us to prove our point. And, besides, if you read User Friendly, you know it’s fun to violate the DMCA.

Tony Muser will have a lot more time to do that kind of thing from now on.

Dinner with an old friend

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Whew. I’m glad that’s over. Well, I’m not so sure it’s over. But that was a little too weird for me.
I had dinner last night with a former colleague I hadn’t seen in a while. Too long, really. When I first met him, I was an ignoramus with some ambition. I knew where I wanted to go, but I had no idea how to get there. He took me under his wing and showed me the road. And for a time, we traveled that road together.

I continued down the road after we parted ways, and I still haven’t arrived at that destination, but I’m not sure we ever do. No matter what we accomplish, it’s never enough. We never know enough, see enough, or have enough. The destination always moves. Not that that’s always a bad thing.

We reflected on that, and he shared some wisdom. I’m frustrated. He helped me sort some of that out. Not everyone wants to go along for the ride, it seems. So things change, and sometimes we’re disappointed.

Just as importantly, he brought his new girlfriend along. I was glad to meet her. She’s a nice girl, down to earth, and doesn’t take herself too seriously. She can take a lot of good-natured ribbing, and she’s not afraid to dish it out either. She came across as being more than just pleasant to be around–she was fun to be around.

At one point in the conversation, he started talking about “his girlfriend” as if she wasn’t there, describing her, saying what he liked about her. I could tell part of her enjoyed hearing it, but part of her was embarrassed. I was impressed. I’ve done that in the past. The last girl I did that to was too full of herself to be embarrassed. (The embrace I got afterward was pretty cool. Too bad it was worth about as much as the advice that was dished out in these pages yesterday.)

I just smiled knowingly as he went on and on about her. He was doing good. “Stop it,” she said. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“You know her?” he asked.

Bzzt. Wrong answer, Jack.

She let him get by with it. The cool ones always do.

She left the table for a minute and he told me a few things. Things he didn’t want her to know, at least not yet. I’ve forgotten what they were, which is just as well. He mentioned some potential red flags that never rose. Good signs all. I gave him my observations, for what they were worth, based on living for three years with about 30 guys, most of whom had girlfriends, and from other friends’ relationships. He didn’t have anything to learn from my personal experience.

I looked over my shoulder a few times as I was talking. It would have been awkward if she’d returned in the middle of a sentence, potentially. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I had one last thing to say, and I finished it as she was sitting back down at the table:

“…and you can see it in their choices of where they go to school, or where they start their careers,” I said.

She sat back down. She didn’t demand to know what we’d been talking about when we were gone. She didn’t ask what that was about. Nothing.

I was severely impressed.

We shifted gears in the conversation a couple of times. She has a brother who’s going to be starting at the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, soon. I told her I’d answer any questions he had. I told her about a few of my misadventures in my four years there. I had more than a few. The head of my sequence still remembers me, to this day, and not because I was one of his most brilliant students (I got an A in his class, by the skin of my teeth). We tangled bitterly. If duels had been legal, I would have challenged him to one. I never backed down. I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me, no matter who he was. And he was somebody–ultimately, the decision whether I got into the program and could continue my major rested with him. He backed down. He won a battle, definitely. But I won the war.

He’s one of two professors who teach that class. When her brother asks which professor to take, I’ll be torn.

She asked if he could call me. I said certainly. Actually she asked me for my phone number.

“I see,” my friend said. “I take you out to dinner with one of my friends, and the next thing I know, you’re getting his phone number.”

She had trouble finding a pen. “And now you’re going to ask me for my pen so you can write down his phone number,” he said.

She found her pen. I told her my number. I look forward to talking about journalism with her brother.

I don’t know what the future holds for them, and two hours does not a final impression make, but I know most guys settle for a whole lot worse.

Linkfest Friday…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s start things off with some links. Web development’s been on my mind the last few days. There’s a whole other world I’ve been wanting to explore for a couple of years, and I’ve finally collected the information that’ll let me do it.
Redirecting virus attacks — Your neighbor’s got Nimda? Here’s how to get his IIS server to quit harassing your Apache server. (Suggests redirecting to a bogus address; I’m inclined to redirect either to 127.0.0.1 or www.microsoft.com, personally.)

DJG’s help setting up MySQL. Apache, MySQL and PHP are a fabulous combination, but bootstrapping it can be a painful process. People talk about writing a sendmail.cf file as their loss of innocence, but I’ve written one of those and I’ve tried to set up the LAMP quartet. The sendmail.cf file was easier because there’s a whole lot more written about it.

Short version: Use Debian. Forget all the other distributions, because they’ll install the pieces, but rarely do they put the conduits in place for the three pieces to talk. It’s much easier to just download and compile the source. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, use Debian and save some heartache. If you’re stuck with the distro you have, download ApacheToolbox and use it. You’ll probably have to configure your C/C++ compiler and development libraries. That’s not as bad as it sounds, but I’m biased. I’ve compiled entire distributions by hand–to the point that I’ve taken Linux From Scratch, decided I didn’t like some of the components they used because they were too bloated for me, and replaced them with slimmer alternatives. (The result mostly worked. Mostly.) You’ve gotta be a bit of a gearhead to take that approach.

Debian’s easier. Let’s follow that. Use this command sequence:

apt-get install apache
apt-get install php4-mysql
apt-get install mysql-server

Next, edit /etc/apache/httpd.conf. There’s a commented-out line in there that loads the php4 module. Uncomment that. Just search for php. It’ll be the third or fourth instance. Also, search for index.html. To that line, add the argument index.php. If you make index.php the first argument, access to PHP pages will be slightly faster. Pull out any filetypes you’re not using–if you’ll never make an index page called anything but index.html or index.php, pull the others and Apache will perform better.

Got that? Apache’s configured. Yes, the php installation could make those changes for you. It doesn’t. I’m not sure why. But trust me, this is a whole lot less painful than it is under Red Hat.

But you’re not ready to go just yet. If you try to go now, MySQL will just deny everything. Read this to get you the rest of the way.

Once you’ve got that in place, there are literally thousands of PHP and PHP/MySQL apps and applets out there. If you can imagine it, you can build it. If HTML is a 2D world, PHP and MySQL are the third and fourth dimension.

Am I going to be playing in that world? You’d better believe it. How soon? It depends on how quickly I can get my content whipped into shape for importing.

This is the holy grail. My first editing job was doing markup for the Digital Missourian, which the faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism believe was the first electronic newspaper (it came into being in 1986 or so). By the time I was working there in the late summer of 1995, it had been on the ‘Net for several years. About eight of us sat in a room that was originally a big storage closet, hunched in front of 486s, pulling stories off the copydesk, adding HTML markup, and FTPing them to a big Unix cluster on the MU campus. We ran a programmable word processor called DeScribe, and we worked out some macros to help speed along the markup.

No big operation works that way anymore. There aren’t enough college students in the world. You feed your content to a database, be it Oracle or IBM DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL or PostgresSQL. Rather than coding in straight HTML, you use a scripting language–be it PHP or ASP–that queries the database, pulls the content, applies a template, and generates the HTML on the fly. The story goes from the copy editor’s desk to the Web with no human intervention.

There are distinct advantages to this approach even for a small-time operation like me. Putting the content in a database gives you much more versatility. Some people want overdesigned Web sites. Some want something middle-ground, like this one. Others want black text on a gray background like we had in 1994. You can offer selectable formats to them. You can offer printer-friendly pages. You can even generate PDFs on the fly if you want–something some sites are doing now in an effort to gain revenue. If you have content from various sources, you can slice and dice and combine it in any imaginable way.

I can’t wait.

I’m back again.

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

More video. One of my Christmas gifts was The Pretenders: The Singles. The Pretenders are one of the most underrated bands of the past 20 years, and while they get plenty of radio play, it’s limited to just a few songs from their extensive catalog. But I already had that disc, so I went to exchange it yesterday. I had trouble finding anything that really struck my fancy. I walked over to the (very small) “Inspirtational” section, which basically held anything vaguely religious that wouldn’t fit in the New Age section. I found a bunch of stuff I’d have no interest in, such as Petra (I don’t like that style of music regardless of subject matter) and Newsboys (an ex-girlfriend of mine thought they were great any time I can avoid being like her, I jump at the opportunity) but I did unearth two things that sounded interesting: Sonic Flood’s self-titled 1999 effort and Listen by Michelle Tumes. Both were used copies, and I guess that kind of stuff doesn’t sell too well at that shop (downtown Columbia, near the University of Missouri) because they were extremely eager to do an even-up two-for-one exchange despite the marked prices. So they were happy and I was happy.
I was even happier after I gave the discs a listen.

Michelle Tumes has a haunting, atmospheric sound about her, and she has either a gorgeous voice, a great producer, or both. Allmusic.com compares her to Enya, and musically I think that’s a fair comparison, but I’d place her voice somewhere between a Jewel and a Loreena McKennitt. She’d be good to listen to late at night when you want to calm down.

Sonic Flood, on the other hand, is someone to listen to when you want to get fired up. Think contemporary power pop with a little edge to it. To draw a secular parallel, the energy and guitar tone in their version of “I Want to Know You” reminds me of Third Eye Blind’s “Never Let You Down.” I could live without the spoken word interludes, as they’re not particularly profound and the second one is completely incoherent, but the musical bits are delightful.

To get a little more practice with video sequencing, I grabbed their version of “I Want to Know You” and started assembling video, using leftover clips I didn’t use in my last project. I had a bunch of clips that just–in my mind at least–seemed to fit perfectly. I grabbed a bunch of high-energy stuff that seemed compelling for the last project, but the high-energy stuff just didn’t fit a song like “Mary Did You Know,” which is a contemplative song. On the other hand, “I Want to Know You” is a celebratory gem.

This is just a mental exercise; I don’t expect to do anything with it. Legally, the Fair Use doctrine should allow in-home experiments like this. Should I decide I want to do something with it, I’ll probably look into having someone re-record the song (I can already hear someone with local connections doing a phenomenal job with it), juggle the clips to fit the re-recording, then secure permissions to the video clips I used.

The beginning of an end (but I don’t know of what)

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I took the Wolfe Battery Programming Aptitude Assessment yesterday. It’s a grueling, obnoxious test, simulating data structures like linked lists without saying the words and without giving any hint about what they’re useful for. (Good thing I already know that, courtesy of Computer Science 203.) It’s a five-problem test that most people, according to the testing company, complete within four hours. It took me between four and a half and five, but I had nearly an hour’s worth of breaks and interruptions.
It’s been my experience that tests tell you something (but not everything) about some people (but definitely not all people) some of the time (but definitely not all of the time). After administering a standardized test, you may or may not know anything more than you knew before the test, and you have no way of knowing whether you know any more, but if you believe in the things, at least you feel better.

My sister’s never done well on standardized tests. From looking at her test scores, you’d never guess she graduated high school in three and a half years and got her bachelor’s degree in another three and a half. I do well on standardized tests about half the time. Two IQ tests rated me average intelligence; a third rated me a genius. My SAT score was uninspiring; my ACT score got me automatic admission to the University of Missouri, plus a very nice scholarship. The first time I took Wolfe’s programming test, the results stated that I’m incapable of deep, detailed analysis. As far as I know, that’s the only time that’s ever been said of me.

I’ve had coworkers with outstanding test scores who were capable of superhuman feats with a computer. I’ve had coworkers with outstanding test scores who, when trying to fix something, would break it worse than I’d be able to break it if I’d been trying. I’ve had coworkers with test scores worse than mine who were more capable than me.

Personally, I’m a whole lot less interested in someone’s raw ability than I am in what that person does with it. If someone’s got 91 points of ability and isn’t using half of it, and I’m standing over here with 50 points and using almost all of it, which of us is more valuable? Now, supposedly there are tests that try to measure that too. I have no idea how those could work.

I don’t know how I did on the test. The last two questions are a series of simple problems, with each answer dependent on the previous, before you finally get a final answer. Each one took me about 20 minutes to finish. Then I went back and double-checked the problems, and found I made a mistake early in the sequence in each of them. So I ran through the problems a second and a third time, getting the same results the last two times, and they differed from the first. But I’m still not entirely confident I got them right.

My career pretty much hinges on those two problems. If I got them right, I’m promotable where I am. If I didn’t get them right, my chances of ever being promoted appear to approach zero.

Either way, a change is going to have to happen, and soon. I’m tired and beat up. I haven’t felt like writing. I got my hair cut earlier this week, and there was more grey hair on my apron than brown. I wasn’t that grey a year ago. I’m working the kind of hours that sent my dad to the grave at 51. I’ve been extraordinarily irate, to the point that I wonder if anyone likes being around me, because I sure don’t like being around me when I’m that way.

I’ve been here before. First time, I dealt with it by losing myself in a girl. That wasn’t fair to her; the fling lasted about two months, and it scarred us both. What she did in the end wasn’t fair to me, so I guess we’re even. Second time, I dealt with it by losing myself in writing. Now that all’s pretty much said and done with those books (one will be obsolete in a couple of weeks, while the half never made it into print), I made about $4 an hour writing one and a half books, then I acquired a repetitive stress injury. That wasn’t fair to me–I’d have made twice as much flipping burgers on the evening shift at White Castle, and I’d have had nearly as much prestige.

I know I sound like a broken record; every twentysomething I know is asking what he or she should do with life. And I don’t have an answer either.

And when I look at history, it tells me it doesn’t really matter. Even when whole generations set out to do something, what they do rarely makes a difference. That ought to be liberating–I can do what I want because it doesn’t make any difference in the long run.

But somehow it’s not.

Conspiracies, conspiracies everywhere

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

The topic of the day yesterday was Timothy McVeigh. I’d forgotten that yesterday was his day–I saw the lead story on The Kansas City Star announcing McVeigh was dead yesterday morning when I went to read up on the day’s events.
McVeigh raises a lot of uncomfortable questions. So let’s go back to a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, because that was when I got my wakeup call.

I was a crime reporter for the Columbia Missourian, a flaming liberal little daily newspaper in, frankly, what would be a worthless little town if it weren’t for the University of Missouri being there. But Columbia is situated in the middle of nowhere; aside from Columbia and Jefferson City, Central Missouri has no good-sized towns, and those two “cities” are cities only by Missouri standards. St. Louis has suburbs bigger than either of them. Central Missouri is backward, or rural, or backward and rural, depending on where you go.

Well, a guy by the name of Don Albright drove to Columbia one night and got drunk. He was pulled over, ticketed, and charged with driving while intoxicated. Albright maintained it was his constitutional right to drive drunk. Actually, he said his constitutional right to travel was being violated. “A driver is for hire,” Albright told me. “A traveler is a private citizen.”

I had a very long conversation with Albright. Albright was one of the biggest conspiracy theorists I’d ever talked to. He believed the United States was still technically a collection of British colonies; that there are actually two United States of Americas; that the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and the Kennedy Assassination were all directly linked and part of the same conspiracy, and other bizarre beliefs. Another belief he shared with me was the New World Order, a belief Timothy McVeigh shared.

He was also militant. He took out liens on judges and prosecuting attorneys. And, on the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Albright, along with others, threatened to attack government buildings as well as press organizations that didn’t “tell what was really going on.”

By this time, I was on Albright’s black list. One of his friends anonymously called me one day and told me to watch my back, so I took the threats seriously. I consciously avoided the newsroom, courthouse, post office, and police station that day. Fortunately, nothing eventful happened.

I suspect Albright’s motivation was primarily racial. During that single conversation, he brought up plenty of racial overtones. When we investigated him further, what we discovered was a person who didn’t want to accept any responsibility for his own past.

Albright had numerous supporters in and around Columbia. I spoke with a number of them outside the Boone County courthouse on the day of one of Albright’s scheduled court appearances. The only one who would give me his name was a guy by the name of Hobbes (I think his first name was Ken). An older woman, who would only go by “Mrs. Hobbes,” (I assume she was his mother), talked to me a little bit less. They were certainly fundamentalist Christians. They gave me pamphlets, a Constitutional Driver’s License (whereby I could grant myself the right to travel the nation’s roads freely), a copy of the Constitution, information on how I could secede from the United States and become a sovereign citizen, and other materials. But they sang exactly the same song Albright did, though Albright appeared to be racially motivated.

In 1992, while a senior in high school, I met a conspiracy theorist of another feather. He was a fervent believer in the writings of George Adamski, a UFO author who claimed he had been visited by beings from a yet-undiscovered planet in the solar system. Adamski, as I recall, had been widely discredited in the 1960s. But this guy’s beliefs (I don’t recall his name anymore, unfortunately) fit these others like a hand in a glove. He, too, spoke of the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, and other oddities.

So… There are plenty of kooks like McVeigh out there. Some of them, like the last one I mentioned, are quirky but harmless. Albright, I believe, could be extremely dangerous. And, interestingly enough, although each type begins with a different premise at heart, they all come to nearly identical conclusions.

The common thread is that none of them trust the government and none of them fully understand the world around them. That’s fine. I don’t trust the government and I certainly don’t understand everything about the world around me. You can do one of two things when that happens. You can just accept that you don’t know everything and you never will know everything, and just try to understand the things that interest you or the things that affect you as best as you possibly can.

Or you can explain it all away as a giant conspiracy. Of course you can’t be the one that’s messed up. The rest of the world around you is messed up. And they’re doing it on purpose!

Time for a reality check.

Hard Fact Number One: Members of the hard left are every bit as disillusioned as members of the hard right. Most of my college professors despised Bill Clinton every bit as much as I did. They were liberal. We’ve got people on the hard left who can’t get what they want. We’ve got people on the hard right who can’t get what they want. [observation]Isn’t that called compromise?[/observation]

Hard Fact Number Two: It’s difficult to get people to cooperate with one another. It’s even more difficult to get organizations to cooperate with one another. If you spend any length of time within an organization of any considerable size, you begin to wonder how it keeps from unraveling just because of internal politics. And these are people who share the same interests! Want an example of how conspiracies are so difficult? Fine. Here’s one: Oracle and Sun and the United States Government against Microsoft. Remember how they bungled that one? And why? None of the parties could figure out what exactly they wanted on their own, let alone what they wanted collectively.

Conspiracies can happen. But they’re rare and generally short-lived.

McVeigh killed 168 people. Or, at the very least, McVeigh participated in the killing of 168 people. We don’t know if he and Terry Nichols acted alone. Probably not–there was a John Doe No. 2 who was never found. But McVeigh did kill innocent people, and he did it willfully and he expressed no remorse.

Yes, the United States Government is partially responsible for that. The Clinton administration did a lot of detestable things. Part of that was because Bill Clinton is and was a hopeless idealist, and he surrounded himself with the same types of people. They didn’t know how to handle people who didn’t share their worldview. And most of them probably didn’t forsee the possibility of a McVeigh-like backlash to Waco and Ruby Ridge. Holding the government accountable for those actions is necessary. Not handing the presidency to Al Gore is a good start, but that’s only a start. And the country was bitterly divided over that.

If you want to take that argument to its logical conclusion, who was it that put that administration in office? Hint: If you live in the United States, scroll up to the top of this page, get a good look at my picture, then go look in the mirror. You and I did that. But you didn’t vote for him, you say? Neither did I. Fifty-seven percent of us didn’t. The problem was, the 57% of us who wanted someone else couldn’t agree on the someone else to put in office, and we paid the price. But the fact is, most of us don’t care. So, since we put this government in place, aren’t we also responsible for its actions, especially when we refuse to fundamentally change it?

But blaming the United States Government for Timothy McVeigh’s actions is childish. When I was in fifth grade, another kid named Benji used to act up and then blame his poor behavior on the outcome of the 1985 World Series. There is no difference. Benji wasn’t mature enough to deal with his disappointment about the baseball season in a socially responsible manner. Timothy McVeigh wasn’t mature enough to deal with his disappointment with the government’s behavior in a socially responsible manner. The St. Louis Cardinals didn’t make Benji misbehave, and the U.S. Government didn’t make McVeigh blow up that building. The victims of McVeigh’s atrocity deserve better than that kind of logic.

Yes, the government is partially responsible because McVeigh’s actions are the consequence of some of its own actions. And the government’s job is to clean up its own mess. I’m not convinced it’s totally done that. But McVeigh was guilty, and he even admitted his guilt. The U.S. Government did what its laws call for it to do. So it actually owned up for once.

Don’t get used to it. Except for it only partially cleaning up, that is.

And, like it or not, McVeigh is now a martyr in some circles. Actually he’s been a martyr since the day of his arrest. But there’s a grain of truth in McVeigh’s beliefs. Our government is out of control, it’s irresponsible, and it’s not accountable to anyone.

But that’s our fault. Our government is supposed to be accountable to us, and as long as our Congressmen send plenty of pork back home, we keep them in office. And we vote for our presidents whimsically. The government knows that as long as they give us bread and circuses, we don’t care about much else.

And if we want to keep this kind of crap from ever happening again, we’re going to have to start giving a crap about more than just food and entertainment.

I’m not holding my breath.

What the press doesn’t want to tell you about Kaycee

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Dan Bowman forwarded me a string of e-mail yesterday that raised a number of questions about the press. Apparently there is at least one reporter trying to find out how many people gave gifts to “Kaycee,” and that’s raising some concerns. Why? And why does the reporter want names and phone numbers? And how do you know if the guy’s legit or if he’s making some kind of sucker list?
Being a former reporter myself, Dan solicited my opinion. Maybe he figured a former reporter would recognize one of his own. And I do.

One concern was the reporter’s apparent use of a free e-mail address. This doesn’t cause me any great concern. Not all newspapers have a mail server because not every newspaper can afford to pay a mail administrator–or maybe they’re just not willing to justify keeping a full-time IT guy on hand who’d make more than the editor in chief. Plus there’s the portability issue–use a free, Web-based mail service, and you can read your mail from anywhere with Web access. No need to mess with VPNs or direct dialins or any of that nastiness.

Another concern is why does the reporter want a phone number. Practicality is one issue; a five-minute phone conversation can glean far more information than a mail conversation that takes all day. And the reporter probably wants to hear your voice; the sound of your voice tells a lot. The reporter can’t print that information, usually, but that gut feeling provides valuable guidance. Plus the reporter needs to verify that you really exist, which is something that anyone who had any contact with “Kaycee” will understand.

But if the reporter were any good, he’d be able to track you down, right? You bet he could. But that’s ruder than establishing contact via e-mail. You want the source to be as comfortable as possible. Plus it takes time to do that. In something like this, you’ll cast a wide net as painlessly as possible. If I were writing this story, my very first step would be to go to Weblogs.com, do a search on “Kaycee,” and when I find sites that mention her name a lot, I’d read the posts to get an idea of whether there was any relationship, and if I find any indication, e-mail that person. I may e-mail 100 people. But it only takes three sources to make a story.

Will the reporter honor your wishes, like not printing your full name, or your real name? Quite possibly. I know MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan knew Julie Fullbright’s identity. (Bob taught one of my journalism classes way back when, back when he was a grad student at the University of Missouri. I e-mailed him after his story hit the Web.) He didn’t publish her name–he said her identity couldn’t be confirmed at press time. A white lie? Kind of. But I know Bob didn’t knock on Julie’s door and confirm it. I don’t know whether he called her on the phone and asked if the pictures were her yet still chose to say her identity was unconfirmed. Bob said he wanted to protect her privacy, and knowing Bob, I take him at his word on that. If this was going to turn into a three-ring circus in the press, Bob didn’t want to be the ringmaster. Once her identity became common knowledge, you started seeing her mentioned by name in the news too, and not just on the Weblogging sites.

Chances are very good that the reporter(s) will talk to dozens of people and probably run the best quotes he gets from some of them. For example, I found a nugget in one of Dan Bowman’s messages: “Shelley would really like to know who ate her cookies.” Yes, on one level that’s funny. But baking cookies for someone is a fairly universal act of love, and just about all of us–even baking-challenged superbachelors–can understand the feeling of betrayal when you bake up a batch of cookies and send them to someone, then find out they never got to that person. And if that person didn’t exist at all, it hurts even more.

If you feel like you should give the reporter a piece of information but don’t want to be quoted, use the phrase “off the record.” Most reporters honor that. If you can give them someone else who’ll corroborate what you say, the reporter is even more likely to honor it. Even if that someone else wants to remain anonymous, once three people say something, a reporter can pretty much count it as fact. And since there is some danger of retribution, a reporter will honor that. Most reporters have a soft spot in their hearts for people in danger.

I know you’re nervous about talking about this with a reporter, because I was a crime reporter. Being taken for money is one thing. People don’t like to talk about that because they don’t like to think of themselves as suckers. I know that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that. But being taken for love is entirely different. People are far less likely to talk about that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that too. All too well. He or she isn’t likely to do anything to hack you off when good sources are hard to find.

Why is the press taking this angle? Well, the root word of the word “news” is “new.” This is a very old story by news standards. This is the only angle left to take, and the national media has probably stopped caring. If it turns out that more than $1,000,000 worth of gifts were sent to Kaycee, then it’ll become a national story again. If a few hundred people sent postcards and cookies and trinkets, I doubt you’ll hear about it anywhere but in Kansas and Oklahoma newspapers. But in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, anything new that comes about in this case is news.

Why can’t the reporter just read your Weblog? There’s a decent chance s/he already has. But the reporter will want to know how you feel about this now. (That “new” thing again.) And no one wants to print exactly the same quote some other paper did. If you interview the person yourself, your chances of having verbatim quotes lessen.

Is the reporter in cahoots with the FBI or local law enforcement agencies? Probably not. That would be a conflict of interest. It crosses the boundary between reporting news and creating news.

And how can you tell if a reporter is legit? Do a Web search on the reporter’s name. Chances are it’ll show up somewhere. I did a Google search on the reporter’s name in this case, and the first hit had his name, his employer’s name, his editor’s name, and his newspaper’s phone number. If worse came to worse, I could call that number and ask for him. If he’s not there, you can ask whoever answers the phone if the reporter is working on a story along those lines. There’s no guarantee that person will know, but reporters do talk to one another, and future stories do come up in newsroom meetings.

Hopefully that helps people see this thing from a reporter’s perspective. And I suspect that’s probably the last I’ll talk about Kaycee here–the story seems to be losing momentum and people seem to be moving on. And that’s a good thing.

Speeding up the Computer

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

MAILBAG:
From: “Andre Vospette”
Subject: What can I do in my Windows folder to speed up my computer

Dear Dave: I’ve read your column ever since you published your book. I’m visiting my father-in-law in Wyoming, and his Presario 400 mhz is acting like a 486 –and not a fast one, either. I’ve done everything I feel confident doing, but the big step I want to take is rearranging the applet/applications in the Windows directory. I left my copy of your book at home, so I can’t remember which programs I can move to a c:windowsbackup folder. Can you help me out here? If I pull this off I’ll reach rockstar status in my in-laws’ eyes.

Sincerely,

Andre Vospette BJ 91, University of Missouri (photojournalism sequence)
~~~~~

Hi Andre,

What you can move depends a bit. Certainly move *.txt, *.bak, *.old, *.grp, *.—, *.log, *.001, *.002, –that kind of stuff into a backups folder. I also move all the BMP and WAV files elsewhere. There are some programs you can move into C:WindowsCommand, like ping, telnet, tracert, welcome, ftp, route, arp… Don’t get too aggressive there; I’ve heard of rare occasions where moving all the files I listed can cause problems. Clearing that dead wood out should make a huge difference. Be sure to defrag later.

I hope that helps. And thanks for writing, it’s always good to hear from another Mizzou grad, especially a journalism grad.

~~~~~~~~~~

I feel this sudden urge to prove I really exist…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts.
Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.
–Mary Schmich, “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen”

I want to prove I really exist, and I’m trying to figure out how I can do it. What are the tell-tale signs of a hoax? Lack of pictures and a claim of hating to have your picture taken. Well, I hate having my picture taken. Gatermann’s got an album full of pictures of me holding my hands in front of my face. He collects ’em or something. I know of four pictures of me floating around on the Web, total, and two of them were scans off newsprint.

Another sign: Lots of people claiming to have talked to me via e-mail or even over the phone, but not in person. Dan Bowman and I have talked a lot, and I consider him a close friend. Other Daynoters or Webloggers? Tom Syroid and I used to talk on the phone. But that’s it. I’ve had conversations over e-mail with Doc Jim, and with JHR, and with Matt Beland, and with Brian Bilbrey. But who’s seen me in person? Well, Steve DeLassus and Tom Gatermann, both of whom I claim to have known for more than 10 years, but I could have fabricated them too.

Debilitating problem? Well, carpal tunnel syndrome is very small potatoes compared to leukemia, but it is a death sentence for a writer. I disappeared for about six months over it.

Really, it’s pretty hard to prove I’m not a hoax. I can link to my old writings from college that are online, circa 1996, (I published under “Dave Farquhar” in those days) and of course there’s that O’Reilly book and those Computer Shopper UK articles. Those will establish a consistency of writing style. My relatives that I mention don’t Weblog, and their writing styles are pretty distinct from mine–both my mom and sister are pretty good writers but I’ve got a lot of quirks they don’t. And neither have made many appearances on these pages.

I’m going to hold back a lot of personal details, because someone I hadn’t spoken to in about 10 months freaked me out back in January and, after reading my weblogs in their entirety, recited to me virtually every detail of my life based on what I’d written and a few educated guesses. Some of the details were wrong, but not enough of them were.

But if anyone really wants to check, I was born in Kansas City, Mo. I lived a lot of places, but most notably in Farmington, Mo., from 1983 to 1988, and in Fenton, Mo., from 1988 to 1993 (and I continued to call Fenton my home through 1996 when I was in college). I graduated from Lutheran High School South, St. Louis, in 1993. I graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, with a degree in journalism (no minor) in 1997. I was employed by the University of Missouri in 1997 and 1998, so I’m even listed in the 1998 issue of the Official Manual of the State of Missouri. All of this should be pretty easily verifiable.

Or you can just take me at my word. It comes down to honesty, and futility. Why would anyone hoax a 20-something systems administrator? And why would they publish a book and a bunch of magazine articles under my name? It would be pointless. A pile of computer tips isn’t a compelling enough story to fake.

So what is compelling? A struggle. This past weekend’s struggle with a system upgrade showed I was human and don’t really care if people think I’m a computer genius or not. I guess that’s kind of compelling, because most of us can’t get our computers working quite right. Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen endeared himself to thousands when he admitted in a magazine interview that his home PC crashes a lot and he never did get his printer working right. But an underdog is better. Noah Grey is a whole lot more compelling than me, because we’ve all felt a little shy sometimes, so his agoraphobia is something we can somewhat relate to. He can reach out to the world and we can share a little in his struggle and root for him. And Kaycee Nicole Swenson, well, she was just too good to be true–a 19-year-old who was wise and mature well beyond her years, a great writer, insightful, broken-hearted, sincere… Every male over 35 wanted her to be his daughter. As for the males under 35, she’d have made a great kid sister. But I suspect a good percentage of them would have wanted to date her, or someone just like her.

I don’t remember if this was exactly how she put it, but an old classmate once observed that the Internet allows us to safely pick our friends from a pool of millions, and usually we can find people who at least seem to be a whole lot more interesting (or better matches for us) than the people we can meet face-to-face, and we can quickly and painlessly get new ones and dispose of them on a whim. She wrote those words in 1997, but aren’t they a perfect description of Kaycee and the rest of the Weblogging phenomenon?

Steve DeLassus raised an interesting point this afternoon. He asked why a 19-year-old dying of leukemia or complications from leukemia would weblog at all. Wouldn’t she have better things to do? That’s an honest question, but I know if something like that were happening to me, I’d weblog. It’s cathartic, for one thing. When I was struggling with depression, I wrote about it in my newspaper column. I found it a whole lot easier to just pour my heart and soul into my word processor than to talk to someone about what I was feeling. I needed to get it out of my system, but you never know how people are going to react. When you can detach yourself from the words, it doesn’t matter. Some will scoff, but you won’t know. Some will totally understand, and you won’t know. Others will totally get it, and they’ll reach out to you, and then it’s all totally worth it. You know there’s something to them, because they had to make an effort to find your words, probably, and then they had to make an effort to communicate with you. You find special people that way.

Yeah, it’s kinda selfish. But it’s safe, and when you’re vulnerable, you need safe.

I’ve given zero enlightenment into the whole Kaycee Nicole hoax. I know a lot of people are hurting. I never got attached to her, because I only read her a couple of times a month. Over the weekend, I went back to Week 1 and started reading from there, to see what I missed. I guess I figured catching the reruns was better than missing it entirely. And I started to understand her appeal a bit more. And now I understand the hurt. It’s not nice to play with people’s hearts.

And some people will probably put up their walls and vow never to be hurt that way again. It’d be hard not to blame them.

But I hope they don’t. Because the only thing worse than the feeling after someone played with your heart is the feeling of being alone.

More Like This: Personal Weblogs