Poop doesn’t gross me out anymore. I’ve changed loose poops, pebble poops, stinky poops, green poops, blue poops, black poops, mustard poops, etc.

Several months ago, while changing Nate, he pooped while I was changing his diaper. I’d only seen a person poop twice before (thanks, internets), but it wasn’t that shocking. It just came out how you’d expect it.

But tonight I was getting him ready after bath, and I noticed he had a little something that needed to be wiped. So I wiped him, and it didn’t move. Again. Nothing.

Then I realized it.

He’s prarie doggin’.

For all of you in similar situations (my condolences), I hope that you can use this post as an answer to people who would turn a blind eye to research and science and instead rely on Rush Limbaugh for “facts.”

Look. I know it’s hard to accept that the world is really big, and that there are billions of people in it. I can’t even conceptualize a billion anything, there’s 1, 100, 1000s, and “a lot.” But let’s just think about it. Each of us contributes a little, through our energy consumption and waste, to creating these invisible gases. Burning gasoline, coal, and oil are big contributors to this. It’s ok. We all do it.

Scientists noticed this several decades ago, and had also noticed a trend, that the temperature of the Earth was slowly (but steadily) going up. After tossing the ball around, they realized that greenhouse gases (a product of burning fossil fuels) could refract light in such a way that it doesn’t reflect off most of our planet the way that it should, essentially trapping heat. This has a compounding effect, that over time has the potential to be disastrous and really damn hot.

Now, let’s take a little step back and talk about science before I proceed any further, and why going off a consensus is a good idea for most of us. The goal behind scientific research isn’t to be “right.” The goal is to understand how the world works, and to help us control how the world will continue to work. To this end, millions of competing ideas are offered up every year, and bad ones are shot down, and good ones are tested, and some of those help describe the rules by which our universe operates.

There is no agenda here. Sure, a handful of scientists will have an agenda, but when they offer bad ideas and put them in peer-reviewed journals, they’re torn apart like the rest of us. Keep in mind that there’s always a bright, new guy on the scene looking to not only make waves, but to rip to shreds any ideas with flaws.

The spectacular thing about this whole operation is that it allows people to work into specialties, builds on centuries of knowledge, and means that we don’t have to figure out everything for ourselves. For example, I don’t know much about how the body works. I know what I learned in high school (which wasn’t much), but I wouldn’t advise anyone to ask me for medical advice; I’d advise going to a doctor, who keeps up on research and has several years of schooling under his or her belt.

So, to that end, it’s valuable for the rest of us who work in different fields to rely on scientific consensus. Doctors say “vaccines prevent diseases,” and we go with that (and it seems they’re right). Computer security experts recommend using a router as a hardware firewall, and it prevents lots of problems.

So, back to global warming. People will argue that it’s not happening with a slew of questionable evidence. Like, “the Earth isn’t getting warmer,” or “Paul Harvey said this,” or “Al Gore and the scientists just have a hidden agenda to offer a new religion instead of Christianity” (not joking, I’ve heard conservative pundits spout that bullshit).

You can proceed here with one of two questions. The simple one, “Are you a climatologist? And if not, on what grounds are you basing your alternative theory that you think hasn’t been shot down by the thousands of actual climatologists in the world?” Or the Patented Terrbear Dot Org one: What’s more likely, that you came across a piece of peer reviewed, legitimate evidence that blows global warming out of the water, and that Paul Harvey has the scoop over the thousands of climatologists in the world who study this kind of behavior for a living, and that ALL of academia has gathered up and decided that it’s time to supplant Christianity with a motivation to use less energy, or you’re woefully wrong, the peer reviewed evidence and studies point one way, and the media - once again - isn’t out to get you?

Go donate. I’m friendlier over there, but really, you’re a bad person, and donating to that charity will make you better.

See? I provide easy ways out.

First up, I think McCain actually was a solid candidate. I don’t think the pernicious effects of the religious right had taken hold of him, and I don’t think anyone would question that he would do what he thought best for his country. It was his selection of Sarah “People ride dinosaurs to work; the earth is 6000 years old; I speak in tongues; let’s have spiritual warfare; global warming isn’t happening; pay for your own damn rape kit; I want an amendment banning gay marriage; rape and incest victims should be forced to have their babies” Palin that knocked him out of any sort of contention, in my mind.

McCain was clearly disappointed in his loss, and I really felt for the guy. Had he been elected in 2000, I think our country would be in much better shape. Bush has made myopic decision after myopic decision, leaving us as nothing but a loner, stretched-too-thin bomb-first-ask-questions-later country that despises intellectuals and thinks academics are out to get us. A champion in any competition needs a favorable schedule as much as anything else, and McCain just came at the wrong time.

That said, the amount of negativity on Facebook is appalling. Unless you’re blinded by bigotry (which a few of my friends are, sadly), religion (…), greed, or are laughably credulous, you see that there’s at least *some* good from this. Obama provides us a leader who is articulate, thoughtful, intelligent, and inspiring. Bush wasn’t anything of the sort, and his campaigns centered around “god wants me” and “oh no! terrorists are hiding behind that bush!”

Essentially, we’ve dealt with this anti-intellectualism in America for 8 years, and it’s time to end it. We need to think through our issues, and not selectively “consult” some book that’s 2000 years old for guidance. We need transparency, not secret courts. We need a leader who sees our role in the world as a leader and a beacon, not as a “you’re with us or against us.”

Also, we need to get rid of this condescending “I’m a values voter” crap. What the hell do you think the rest of us vote on? Are we hypnotized to vote a certain way, and we’re voting according to the TV we watch? Fuck anyone who implies we lack values because we vote for a candidate who we think provides a better future for our children and our country.

The things that make our country great have been under fire for 8 years. Open courts, public search warrants, education, freedom from religion, transparent and honest leadership, and open dialogue are just a few of the things that we’ve started to stray from. It’s important that those things are brought back, and the stupid bickering between cable news networks is replaced with thorough explanations of issues.

I think the media takes cues from the government in this way, and Bush’s policy was to attack detractors more than to justify his own positions. This doesn’t do anything for anyone.

Obama signifies a return to a studious president. Neither candidate had an insidious agenda, and arguing otherwise requires overflowing uses of canards (”he’s a muslim and a socialist”) and arguments from ignorance (”I don’t know what he’s going to do as president, therefore he’s going to ruin the country”). Both candidates wanted to do what’s best for the country, and have different approaches.

After 8 years of seeing our country circle the drain, it’s time someone put the stopper in.

This is what happens when you (a) want to subscribe to conspiracy theories, (b) think the GOP is smarter than they are, and (c) are gullible and will read whatever someone writes on the internets.

Let’s take a look at what’s being argued here.

ES&S iVotronics touch screens have already been observed now in four completely separate States, flipping the votes, in the early voting that has taken place to date. Eye-witness reports of repeated, consistent flipping of votes (from Obama to McCain naturally) has already occurred in the States of: West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, and Texas that have had early voting.  Missouri, of course, is a key background State in McCain’s electoral vote math.

Ok, I want to hear how it was observed “flipping the votes.” Further, I’d question your run of the mill eye-witness voter, largely because they’re unreliable. If you press the Y and H key at the same time (and I’d bet people would press close to one button over the other), then can you tell me which one is going to get clicked? Even if you thought really hard, “I want the Y key to come up,” you couldn’t guarantee it.

As a developer, I come across people who all the time don’t quite understand how to use software. This doesn’t mean the software is corrupted, just that people don’t get things right all the time.

These are not “glitches“.
This is also not the result of just “one faulty machine”.
How about some straight-talk:

Fact: This is not a “glitch“.
Fact: This is not a one machine problem.
Fact: This is not a one State problem.
Fact: This is not a one Election problem.
Fact: This is neither a “theory”, nor speculation. It’s real.
Fact: The Democratic candidate is getting their (would be) votes systematically stolen.

For some reason, if you write for Daily Kos, you just have to say something and it’s true.

Anyone who says “that’s not a glitch, it’s intentional,” clearly doesn’t understand how subversive glitches can be. Further, they haven’t even shown reasonably (anyone have a YouTube video of a guy clearly pressing one button and the other candidate being selected? No? Thought not.) that it is a problem with the machine.

That the “glitch” has been observed across different machines only speaks to people using the different machines. As many people who write software can attest, it’s often not the system that’s broken, it’s that the functionality hasn’t been well conveyed to the user.

Multiple states have multiple people, thousands (millions now?) voting, and a handful have “issues.” Predictable. Even with paper ballots.

That it hasn’t been actually shown in a test case, and only by anecdote should make anyone skeptical. This is solely conspiracy bullshit, not meant for human consumption, but only Rtards who think that the government is *really* out to steal an election, that anyone who doesn’t support Obama or Paul is evil, and that [redacted to keep this on my RSS feeds].

Keep in mind, everybody, that two people saying they can repeat results in a hidden closet in a basement isn’t evidence. Much larger groups of people have testified to seeing Bigfoot, to seeing UFOs, to causing cold fusion, and to turning iron straight to gold. None of that happened, and people like to lie.

I find it best in these cases to ask yourself a question: “What’s more likely: two or three people from Texas trying to vote correctly and the machines failing, and everybody else not reporting their issues, and the GOP teaming up with voting machine creators to systematically sabatoge the election and being dumb enough to show evidence of this in *TEXAS*, a state that has no chance of going blue, or two or three country bumpkins not knowing how to correctly use a computerized voting machine?”

Recently, however, I’ve started playing more on GitHub and have started writing a lot more code for public consumption. While right now it’s just been Rails plugins, it’s been a lot of fun starting to work through the Rails codebase and start seeing how other people think.

Anyways, I figured I’d use this to plug a few projects I’ve contributed to in the past few weeks:

1. immutable_attributes - This is a Rails plugin that lets you specify attributes that shouldn’t be overwritten. The mechanism can be either an overridden setter (the original plugin) or a validation (my contribution). They serve different purposes, but it’s pretty cool to just say validates_immutable and be done with it.
2. tiny_mce - This is a plugin that I’ve got some mixed feelings about. It ties tiny_mce information into your controller, which I find tighter coupled than I like. That said, it makes upgrading tiny_mce (which can be a HUGE pain in the ass) trivial, so it’s an interesting tradeoff. We’ve ended up at work putting the TinyMCE config stuff in an initializer, which has worked pretty well so far. My contribution here has been trivial, but I thought I’d plug it anyways since it’s a good idea for a plugin.
3. uses_guid - So this is a fork of a plugin that was originally here. One of the most obvious changes? usesguid -> uses_guid. There were also some weird things that happened with the way keys were established, and the plugin wasn’t the most flexible. It still needs some work (like smarter intercepting of primary keys for guids and working accordingly), but it’s up there for people to play with.

So, if you’re bored, go add stuff to those plugins. Or to some of my other projects. They’re all up there on GitHub. Color me a fan.

But anyways, I was curious what that would do to googling my name. I hadn’t googled my name in a while, and the first hit is now some eponymous SEO douche.

SEO contributes largely to the smog of the internets. I realize it’s a natural progression once a medium gets popular to try to get *your* content on top, but the nice thing about the internets back in the day was that good content rose to the top and bad content stayed put.

SEO “consultants” screw that up, and instead you don’t always find what you’re looking for. Oh well, I’m sure the people at Google are smart enough to find a better way to defeat them.

A good way to do it? Don’t add comment backlinks to a site’s score. A nice side effect would be that I wouldn’t have to filter out a bunch of spam saying “nice site!”

Anyways, I’m not concerned with not being first for “terry heath,” (I’d rather be on the 2nd or 3rd page, to be honest), but figured I’d drop a little SEO rant.

He’s started to understand that when I say, “if you do that again, I’m going to take it away,” that it means something. The other day when he hit the table after I told him not to and I stood up, he ran across the house whining, because he knew I was going to take his spoons. I don’t care about having the power in the relationship, but I thought it was great that he realized his actions could have consequences, and there were some consequences that he didn’t like.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell him I’m going to take his hand away if he slaps me in the face. Believe it or not, I’m against amputation (except that one time, with his foreskin, which I’m still not sure I made the right decision). So we’re trying to figure out the best way to handle the situation, and are pretty confused.

Before anyone suggests it, and I doubt many who read this blog would, we’re not spanking. It’s not an option for us. I don’t want to send a message that, when you’re in total control of someone, you can do whatever you want with them, and that’s the message I think spanking sends.

So we’ve started reading around the internets, and still haven’t found a great answer. Do we redirect his attention? Do we just ignore it? Do we put him in timeout? Do we ship him to Russia where the kids behave better?

Lots of parents on these sites will offer their own children as evidence, but I don’t want anecdotes. I’d like actual evidence saying, “kids subjected to this disciplinary measure improved behavior and didn’t grow up to be terrorists.” Unfortunately, I haven’t found any of those yet.

Further, all of the so-called “experts” on child rearing seem fake. They’ll tell me about the inner psyche of a toddler, and I can’t help but equate them to animal talkers or astrologists. Nate can say 10 words. How, exactly, are you going to tell me what he’s thinking? I question anyone who says “your baby is thinking this,” because it seems they’re right about as often as they are wrong. Which isn’t helpful.

We’re not even sure how to administer timeout. I don’t want to hold him in place, so the options would be either just standing in front of him (apparently with our backs turned) and not letting him escape, or putting him in a pack and play.

Anyways, this is part of the problem with not believing everything you read, and questioning things other parents have done. It makes you indecisive. If anyone has any great suggestions for how to deal with a kid who is great 95% of the time, and 1% of the time provides no easy recourse for his behavior, I’d love to hear them.

The subject of transparency and social networking in the workplace has come up a few times in different blogs. In a related topic, I read a post by another twitter-er about self censorship a few weeks ago that has closely reflected my sentiment from time to time.

I tend to swing (to an extent) back and forth between a conservative and liberal posting policy, and this seems to tie closely with my job security and job searching. If I’m looking for a job, you can bet that my facebook has been locked down for weeks, I’ve locked down my tweets, have taken down my blog, and tried as hard as possible to break all ties with pseudonyms. If I’m comfortable with my job situation, and with the coworkers, I tend to let more out.

There’s a couple of things that sprout from this. Some are amazing, and I realize would never have happened 15 years ago. Others are annoying to terrifying.

First up, I’ve burned a few bridges. Not many, but I’ve gotten in trouble for my blogging a few times. Well, once. At Company ST, where I posted about how I was unhappy with how some features came out, that came to backfire. I was already considering working my way out of the company, though, so it wasn’t too disastrous. As a learning experience, though, I’ll only write company initials most of the time.

I’ve also learned things about coworkers in a much more vented atmosphere. While some tweeps keep their politics and opinions and religion to themselves, others pepper their stream with it. I do as well. This has led to some discussions, though rarely deep ones, that if anything let me know some of my coworkers better. I think this is fantastic.

What I think is incredibly important in this transparency process is that we provide ideas and reasoning behind them. This does two things. First, it provides a much better understanding for readers where we’re coming from, so we don’t just come off as crazy. And second, it gives opponents an arena for discussion, instead of having to go after the person or bring up some other unrelated garbage.

Anyways, back to the title. I think there’s two ways we can keep ourselves employed and be opinionated.

The first is to not share those opinions. It’s how things worked in the mid ’90s down to the dark ages, and if it was good enough for them, then it’s good enough for you.

The second is to share those opinions in a reasoned fashion, with enough volume that you’re not likely to be tagged by a single post. For those unfamiliar with Zed Shaw, the guy wrote a post “Rails is a Ghetto” that torched the Rails platform and community. It made it onto Slashdot, and even people who didn’t care about Rails or Zed thought, “holy crap, that guy just ended his career.”

Of course, if you read the rest of Zed’s site, you see that the post isn’t anything spectacular. He flames tons of different subjects on his site. What you also get from reading his posts? The guy’s incredibly smart.

Now, I don’t think Zed’s a shining example for flooding your opinions out there to provide a quick look at your character, I think as long as you’re not flaming people you work(ed) with and keep things reasonable without too much hyperbole, you’re not going to put too much of a bad taste in someone’s mouth.

Essentially, I think exposure is good. It helps you vet ideas. It lets people know you before they meet you. If you spout racist nonsense on your site, then I probably won’t let you through a phone screen. If you say you want to go to a burning man festival, which sounds weird to me, I’ll listen to what you have to say and think about both the technical merits of your answers and how you’d fit in with our culture.

I’m not sure how older generations feel about this, but it seems that people I went to school with subscribe to the same mindset. We disagree about issues, and try to write up compelling arguments justifying our points. I might disagree with you fundamentally on politics and religion, but I don’t think that should keep you from working with me.

*I generally don’t link to blogs of people I work with, because I don’t want to take responsibility for putting a link to my blog on your site, since I do let almost everything air out.