Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

We finished filing the current spate of paperwork for Eloïse this morning, with the submission of her application for an American passport. The document in question should arrive around six weeks from now. Even if her Dutch passport arrives first, it's illegal for an American citizen to enter or leave the US on a non-American passport, so we really need the evidence of Yankeedom before we can move a muscle internationally. We have no travel plans before August, anyway, so that should be fine.

Once nice thing about the paperwork has been that it's been getting us out of the house. The days pass by in such dissatisfyingly nondescript fashion if one doesn't get out of the house at least once for an hour or two. Besides, it's been a great opportunity to push our Bugaboo Cameleon around town.

We've uploaded a few new photos from Eloïse 's third week of life, but they're not terribly interesting. I need to take more photos without using a flash, as the flash discolours her hair and accentuates her pigmentation, which ends up making her look like a little goblin. She's a lot better looking in real life!

I finally took the plunge and upgraded the server blog software to Movable Type 3.17 today.

It was a fairly substantial upgrade, requiring a lot of template and style sheet editing, as well as the copying of files hither and thither, but I think I've got everything more or less covered now. If you see anything strange on the site in the next couple of days, please report it to me.

My own homebrew methods of dealing with comment spam in Movable Type 2.x had been starting to try my patience, so I'd finally got around to taking a long-postponed look at the MT-Blacklist plug-in during the last couple of days. The upgrade to MT 3.17 allows one to use a much more powerful version of MT-Blacklist than the one available for 2.x, so I have now installed and configured that. It remains to be seen how much more effective this proves than my own hacks, but the interface is certainly very nice and I like the fact that it automatically updates itself with the latest list of spam domains from the Comment Spam Clearing House.

Eloïse continues to demand all of our time and attention. I can't really tell whether she's growing, but I assume she is. The only obvious sign to me that she is aging at all is that her strawberry blond hair is rapidly becoming more voluminous.

I had a shot at massaging her today, following up on our infant massage class at Blossom yesterday morning.

Eloïse lost patience about half way through, even though I'd put on Robin Guthrie's Imperial album to create a nice, relaxing ambience for her. Oh well; I'll try again tomorrow.

Gifts continue to trickle in. I had to pop into work a few days ago to pick up a couple of things. When I entered my office, I was surprised and delighted to find that my boss, Joe, and his wife, Lorah, had left a bag of baby gifts for me. How kind.

Today, we received gifts in the post from one of Sarah's aunts. Happily, she sent us clothing for between 12 and 18 months of age, as we have lots of garments for use during the first year.

A wedding invitation arrived from my good friend, Bas today. He and his lovely fiancée, Kylie, will be getting married in Malta this September.

Sarah and I (uh, and Eloïse ) still need to try to figure out if we can make it to this, as it would be a lovely occasion and so nice to see them again (in fact, Sarah and Kylie haven't even met before). And Malta looks so nice from Bas's photos.

Have you ever noticed how life in the movies is subtly different? For example, how women get out of bed and drag all of the bedding with them to the bathroom? Or how presents are never gift-wrapped, but simply come in large cylindrical boxes with overlapping lids?

Well, those aren't the only two ways in which the world as depicted by Hollywood is subtly different.

Fokke & Sukke have discovered blogs.

Suicide Bomber Barbie is the conduit through which one artist expresses his feelings.

"By his appropriation of a consumerist icon, the artist creates an emphatic subversion of this process, the artist seeking to help create the conditions of political change."

Or something.

My new green card (a.k.a. permanent residence card a.k.a. alien registration card a.k.a. I-551) arrived today. The conditional status has been removed and I am now a fully fledged permanent resident of the US, with all of the viral tax obligations this privilege carries.

For example, if I return to The Netherlands and do not surrender this card, I am still bound by US law to file tax returns and, if my earnings overseas are high enough, pay tax to the Internal Revenue Service, even though I would no longer be living in the US. In fact, if I keep my green card too long (8 years out of the last 15), even surrendering the thing ceases to be an option for the purposes of avoiding the tax obligation.

Anyway, since I've only held a green card for some two years now, I needn't worry about this particular problem. With the arrival of this new, unconditional card, that's me finished with American immigration bureaucracy for the time being. This card doesn't need to be renewed until 2015, by which time we'll be long gone and living in another country.

Barbara Walters, a talk show host in the US, recently commented on-air that she had recently had the misfortune of sitting next to a woman on a plane who was breastfeeding her baby.

"It made me very nervous," Walters said on the May 17 show. "She didn't cover the baby with a blanket. It made us uncomfortable."

This disgraceful comment resulted in lactating mothers in multiple cities organising a synchronised feed.

Another sterling example of how repressed some people here are, when someone can say that another woman breastfeeding makes her "nervous".

In these times of the global village and commodity travel for all, it really is important to decide on an internationally acceptable name for your child, as proven by the parents of the chairman of the Dutch Socialist Party.

I wonder how this guy copes when he travels to the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, etc.

My new blog anti-spam defences seem to be holding up well.

The current configuration starts with MT-Blacklist, which blocks more than 95% of the comment and trackback spam by checking for blacklisted strings in the various fields of the incoming data.

The little bit of spam that makes it through is then funnelled into SpamLookup, which does some advanced extra tests, including a check to see whether a trackback ping originates at the IP address of the blog claiming to be sending it and a dynamic check to see whether a comment is being sent via an open proxy. Clever stuff.

I also have MT-Moderate installed, which allows SpamLookup to also moderate trackback pings.

This combination of plug-ins is working very well. It could be that SpamLookup on its own can do the job and that I could simply disable MT-Blacklist at this point, but I haven't felt inclined to try that out just yet. For now, I'm happy to see how many comments and pings get denied or just moderated.

It's lamentably insane that this problem even exists, but since it does, as with e-mail spam, one simply has to have effective measures against it.

Using a new tactic that the Scientologists can only wish they could adopt, the US Marines have taken to kidnapping reluctant young men and applying the techniques of deceit and treachery in their rather desperate attempt to recruit bodies for the ignoble cause.

That one came in from Geoff. Geoff, when are you going to get a blog up and running, so I can send you a trackback ping?

Updated 18th June 2005

A follow-up article with readers' reactions has been published.

Eloïse 's fourth week on Earth draws to a close today, so we've whipped up some more photos to satisfy the grandparents. Taking photos is something we need to be more disciplined about or else we might regret it later. We've been pretty lax about capturing quality shots, because we're just so busy with her, but with a memory like mine, I really need these visual mementos.

The baby massage is going well. Yesterday, Eloïse let me progress through all the leg and foot manoeuvres to start on her stomach. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far with her belly before she became overwhelmed and started to cry, but we'll just take it a day at a time.

We found a nice local café yesterday; I was very surprised to find that the place on Showers Drive that I've passed by hundreds of times is actually nicely laid out inside and, more importantly, makes decent sandwhiches and drinks. It's not open at the weekend, but something tells me we'll be spending quite a few weekday hours there in the coming weeks.

A busy day today. Sarah had to be at Blossom for her first parent/baby support group meeting. I had a dental appointment for a cleaning at 11:00 in Palo Alto.

Afterwards, I took a game back to Fry's and then went to pick up Sarah from Blossom, where she was now engaged in a post-partum appointment with Rosanna, our midwife.

Once Sarah was ready, we headed over to Michael's for lunch. I gave Geoff a call, who was more than happy to use us as an excuse to chill out and watch the ravenous local birds try to steal our food. It's always good to see friends.

By the time we got home, it was about 15:45. Where did the day go? Both Sarah and I were knackered and Eloïse was sound asleep, so we took her upstairs and the three of us went to bed. Sarah was woken by Eloïse at some point, but I got a good three hour nap in before Sarah woke me. I felt as groggy as hell afterwards, but the sleep was much needed.

Rosanna weighed Eloïse today. She's reached a respectable 3870g, so those boobs are definitely doing the business. It somehow suddenly seems amazing to think that one can sustain the life of another human-being, using nothing but one's own body. I've always known that, of course, but it suddenly seems awe-inspiring.

It's another busy morning tomorrow, with the second of our infant massage classes.

I've spent the last couple of days tweaking a few small aspects of the site. The CSS that lays out the main page's three column look is now as it should be, I believe. Previously, it was a rather hit-or-miss affair, with the potential for the AdSense to overlap the main, centre column at low resolutions. Everything should display properly now at any resolution.

The Amazon links in the sidebar now provide an image of the product to which they refer in the small pop-up that appears when you run your mouse over the link.

In case you're interested, I thought I'd document the various bits and bobs on which this site runs. The following components are used to bring you caliban.org.

The server is Apache 2.0.52, running with PHP 4.3.11 and mod_ruby 1.2.4.

The blog is constructed around Movable Type 3.17, with MT-Blacklist 2.04b and the latest beta snapshot of SpamLookup providing anti-spam capabilities. New blog entries are entered using Markdown, rather than raw HTML. I find Markdown to be much more convenient, as it simplifies the commonly needed stuff, whilst still allowing the full spectrum of HTML to be used as necessary.

The Amazon products are periodically pulled from Amazon's AWS API, using Ruby/Amazon 0.9.0 and stored in YAML format. These are then reloaded and processed dynamically when the front page is requested, thanks to some server-parsed Ruby scripting within the page, interpreted using eRuby. The final display of the data in a nice little pop-up is handled by version 4.17 of Erik Bosrup's excellent overLIB library for JavaScript.

The stock quotes come from version 0.2.1 of Ruby/Finance. The quotes are regularly refreshed and saved as YAML. The server-parsed Ruby code loads the file and displays the quotes whenever a page request is made.

I recently purchased a copy of the third edition of Learning the bash Shell by Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt.

Those of you who know my background know that it's been quite a while since I learned my way around bash, so it was for other reasons that I bought this book, namely that I regard it as one of the better tomes on shell scripting in general and therefore just something I feel I need to have on my bookshelf.

This edition of the book covers the most recent major release of bash, 3.0, and therefore includes an appendix on programmable completion, which I proofread for Cameron, a fact that even scores me an acknowledgement in the preface. Seeing my name in print always appeals to my vanity.

In my experience, the vast majority of system administrators still haven't discovered or grown accustomed to the features that bash 2.x gave us, and that was some eight or nine years ago. How many sysadmins do you know, for example, who make use of the arrays introduced in bash 2.x?

Anyway, if you've only ever half-learned shell scripting by picking up bits and pieces of knowledge here and there from colleagues on the job, this book could be exactly what you need to unlock the full power of the tool. If you can learn how to wield all the power encompassed in this book, you'll be a very adept shell user, indeed.

Marc Felt recently revealed himself to have been the character known as Deep Throat in Woodward and Bernstein's exposure of the Watergate scandal.

Ever eager to polarise issues and people into convenient, bite-sized chunks of good and evil for the unthinking masses to digest, the American media have largely painted Felt as a latter-day hero for his part in bringing down Nixon. Few sources seem interested in also examining the deeds that comprise the rest of Felt's career with the FBI.

Doug Ireland recently published an interesting article on Felt's involvement in COINTELPRO, a constitution-usurping campaign of terror on the left wing of the day. Felt was even convicted of conducting illegal break-ins, but later pardoned by Reagan. These details are conveniently left out of the articles written by those who would paint Felt as a brave and selfless bastion of good, rather than a self-serving figure with a grudge against Nixon.

I don't know the truth, of course, and this posting should not be mistakenly interpreted to indicate that I'm a fan of Nixon or, by extension, Republican politics. I'm just someone who finds it predictably lamentable that shades of grey are, as always, missing from journalism in this country.

Newspaper and television journalism in the US seem not intended to promote and provoke thought, but to present a sequence of pre-deliberated bullet points, so that the busy reader, whose modern lifestyle allows precious little time for deliberate thought, instantly knows where he or she should stand on a given issue.

The trouble is, who is to say what conclusion the hapless reader would reach on his own? Is it not the job of the media to present the facts, which may then be carefully weighed by the reader, allowing him or her to reach his or her own conclusion?

That's how it still is where I come from and I like to think the US must once have been like that, too. These days, however, as many facts are omitted as are presented, and the conclusion is happily provided by the opinionated reporter, as having to reach one's own conclusion has become yet another time-consuming inconvenience, along with manual transmission cars, cooking for oneself and getting up off one's arse to change the television station.

I've posted some new photos from weeks two, four and five into their respective sub-albums. These are from our small camera which we have taken to carrying with us in our diaper bag so we can catch interesting moments when they occur. I am particularly fond of the week five sequence of Eloïse trying to wake up while lunching at Clarkes. She is particularly talented at making horrible faces.

In tabular form, here's a concise overview of US military intervention over the last hundred years.

Man, they sure export a lot of democracy over here.

Whilst idly browsing -- well, I was reading about Janeane Garofalo, if you must know -- I chanced upon this Salon article about the use of thimerosal in American vaccinations given to babies and small children up until a couple of years ago (and still sent overseas to developing nations).

It makes for pretty shocking reading. Read how the CDC and FDA conspired to suppress research that demonstrated a link between thimerosal and autism in those injected with it.

I bet they injected me with that shit a couple of years ago, when I was forced to subject myself to certain immunisations as part of the green card process. Never mind the fact that I'd already had the diseases as a child, which gave me immunity against them; I couldn't prove I'd had them.

Last Thursday saw us attend our final midwifery appointment with Rosanna. She's been such a large part of our life over the last ten or so months that it's hard to imagine we won't be seeing her again. At this point, she feels much more like a friend of the family than someone we hired to do a job. There were quite a few tears at that parting.

It was six weeks to the day since Eloïse had been born. She weighed in at 4270  g, which means she's growing at a very respectable rate. Photos from week six of her life on Earth are finally available for viewing.

As our little girl puts on weight, her cheeks are filling out and becoming nice and chubby. It's getting harder to fasten the nappy around her waist. That breastmilk is good stuff. She's getting prettier by the day. All parents think their child is beautiful, of course, but I really think that Eloïse is objectively pretty. You see plenty of ugly sprogs out there, but she's not one of them.

This is my last week of paternity leave. It's been a great time and I'm going to make the most of the rest of the week, but the darkness at the end of the tunnel isn't very far away now. It'll be strange to be back at work again. It's been so long since I was there that I'm feeling very detached from the place now.

Fenella wrote to me the other day to tell me she had joined Netflix and ask for some movie recommendations.

I'm really the wrong person to ask, as I hardly ever watch movies. Nevertheless, it just so happens that I've seen a handful over the last week: Ali, K-PAX, The Corporation and House of Sand And Fog.

Of these, the only ones that I would unequivocally recommend are The Corporation and House of Sand And Fog.

The former is a documentary about the phenomenon of the American corporation, an entity legally imbued with the rights of a person, but devoid of the responsibilities or accountability that accompany American citizenship.

Since the legal standing of the corporation equates with that of a person, psychoanalysis is performed on the personality of the corporation, credibly leading to the conclusion that, if it were an actual human-being, it would be classified a psychopath.

The film is an incredibly well-balanced examination of corporate America. People with widely differing views on the morality of doing business in the modern age come together to have their say. The 2 disc DVD set is packed with extra interviews that didn't make it into the film and, all in all, it's a must-see.

House of Sand And Fog puts Ben Kingsley together with Jennifer Connelly and demonstrates what can happen when a series of minor events escalate out of control.

In a way reminiscent of the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the rain forest, Connelly is evicted from her house, ostensibly for not paying a tax bill. However, the bill has been sent in error and so the eviction, too, is erroneous.

Before Connelly can have the mistake rectified, the local council sells her house to Kingsley, an Iranian immigrant, for a knock-down price. Connelly makes vague attempts to persuade Kingsley to hand back the house to its rightful owner and Kingsley is superb at commanding sympathy even as he refuses.

Connelly is then befriended by a local cop stuck in a loveless marriage and the scene is set for a cascade of minor events that must ultimately end in tears.

In short, House of Sand And Fog is a terrific film, demonstrating how sometimes there are no good or bad guys, just people and catalysts. Sarah has read the book of the same name and says it's even better than the film, but assures me that the film is a faithful depiction of the book.

Anyway, there are two good film recommendations from me, if anybody cares.