Nothing But Words

Walking from the train to my office this morning, it slowly dawned on me that the 80s Go-go’s song Vacation was playing on an endless, interminable loop in my still half-asleep brain. I don’t think I’ve heard that song in probably 10 years, so I was wondering how it managed to worm its way into my head. Then I remembered a dream I had last night: the Go-go’s were in one of those 60s Gidget beach movies, and they were going to play a concert on the beach. But there was a problem: everyone in the band was only 2 inches tall. All the cool kids didn’t care they were small, so it was up to the requisite uncool/unfun girl on the beach to lecture the Lilliputian Go-go’s on the reality of the situation: the Lifeguards won’t let you play because they’re worried someone will step on you, and besides, since your amplifiers are miniature too, no one will be able to hear you.

I don’t know if the world would be a better or worse place if we could more easily tap into our subconscious while awake. But I can tell you this: it would definitely be a funnier place.

I’m feeling ambivalent about my new blog title. First I need to reveal how I came up with it: it’s an anagram of my name. So I think it’s clever, but I’m also thinking it’s just too goofy. There are other amusing anagrams of my name, but none of them are really blog title material: “a CIA hemp plot,” “eat a milch pop,” “a polemic path,” “thelamic pope,” “Alcoa the pimp,” and – if you include my middle name – “metaethical crepe porn,” “ham protein receptacle,” and “reelect maniac prophet.” I got all these from an anagram generator, btw, as word games are not my strong suit.

I’ll keep the new title for now, but I’ll see if I can think of something else.

Here are the Kanji characters for Eidan’s name:

301|3

Ei: first character; wise, decisive, distinguished
Dan: decision, judgment

Here are the characters in UTF-8 encoding:
英断

Last week was the culmination of my work so far here at Penn. I was hired to overhaul the Med School’s web-based admissions tools. Over the past year and half I’ve written over 32,000 lines of code for this project. That means there are a lot of moving parts. The more moving parts you have, the more features you can offer. On the downside, every moving part you add introduces another possibility for something to go wrong. In a post about a year ago I explained the home-grown development tools we use for UI development and database access (since then we made the unfortunate choice of renaming our “LDL” database access tool to “the API”). With the admissions project I added to this toolset, introducing the concept of “data objects” (I called them that to distinguish them from the UI objects my coworkers were already familiar with). Here’s a presentation I made about a year ago if you want to know the gory details. But the basic point is that, to minimize the potential for chaos, confusion, and things generally going wrong when you have so much code, I went with an object oriented design for managing and manipulating the data (done properly, this gives you clearly defined containers for your data and functionality, and provides a set of unambiguous “touch points” between all the moving parts). Last week we launched the new tools for the applicants for the 2006 class, and I’m told it’s been the smoothest launch since the Med School first moved the process online four years ago.

That might not be quite the achievement it sounds like, as they really had nowhere to go but up. That’s not the Med School’s fault though. When someone applies to medical school, they don’t apply directly to the school. They send their application to AMCAS (the American Medical College Application Service), and it’s up to AMCAS to get the application data to the schools where the applicants want to be considered. When AMCAS moved to doing this electronically several years ago, many of the med schools were nervous, so AMCAS tried to cajole them into feeling better about it with the Who Moved My Cheese? approach. Then when their new electronic system went live, it was a total disaster. Which goes to show that sometimes fear is a perfectly rational response to change. In the years since then they’ve improved their system, so there haven’t been any repeats of what happened the first time, but it takes time to rebuild trust after an experience like that. I was rewarded the other day with a t-shirt saying “AMCAS moved my cheese.” I’m amazed they’ve stuck with that slogan.

I haven’t blogged much this month as I’ve been burning the candle at both ends, at home and at work. Eidan’s due in a few weeks (it’s nice not calling him Baby X anymore!), and Maria and I are having a race to see who finishes first: she’s determined to have the baby at least a week early, and I’m just as determined to get our house not just livable in time for the baby, but actually comfortable. Over the past month I’ve finished the dining room, our bedroom, and the rec room. Before Eidan arrives I need to finish the 3rd floor stairwell (it has no railing or balusters at the moment) and the 3rd floor bathroom (it’s painted, but I haven’t installed the sink and toilet yet). Pictures are below.

This past weekend wasn’t about construction or painting though, it was about unpacking. Last November we packed up just about all of the stuff that was in our old rec room and put it in boxes. This weekend we unpacked it all for the new rec room. Since most of it was Kai’s toys, and since Kai can barely remember as far back as November, it was like Christmas in July for him. He spent the whole weekend playing with his “everything old is new again” toys. That gave Maria and I some time to sort through baby clothes. We have Kai’s old clothes, plus some clothes given to us by family and friends, and even more from a surprise baby shower Maria’s friends had for her last week. So if you’re thinking of getting something for Eidan, please don’t get clothes, we have plenty!

We’ve even hung art on the walls in the dining room, the rec room, and the bathroom. Seeing the pictures on the walls after we put them up provoked a lot of feelings for me. We had spent two and half years working on our house in San Mateo, and didn’t finish it until about 45 seconds before we put it on the market. So we never got to enjoy it. If you don’t know the story, here’s the two sentence version: picture Mike, Maria, and infant Kai living in a 790 sq. ft. house for two years with Maria’s parents, while Maria’s father went through a liver transplant, and we didn’t have a kitchen (we put an addition on the house, and it attached on the kitchen, so the kitchen was unusable for most of that time). There are pictures of the old house on my first Route 50 page if you want to see how it came out – the addition more than doubled the size of the house. Then we moved here to PA, and we’ve spent the past two years fixing up this house. And we now have a few rooms that are actually done – so done that it makes sense to put pictures on the walls. So after more than four years of working on houses, putting up the pictures made me feel like we’ve finally arrived.

Note that when you click on one of the picture’s below, don’t click on the page’s navigation arrows for the next picture – click your back button to come back here, and then pick the next picture. (The problem is that my photo albums for the house projects are organized by floor, but that’s not how I’ve organized the pictures here. This is another good example of why I’ve starting working on my own software that’ll let you distinguish a slide show from a photo album.)

I got bored with “The Process” as my blog title a long time ago, probably because it’s a really boring title. It had a meaning to me that I thought was cool, but “process” as a word is the epitome of dull. I stuck with it though, simply because I couldn’t think of anything else I liked. I was warming up to “Happy Fun Ball,” but then I Googled it and discovered I’m not the only one who remembers old SNL skits – there’s even a happyfunball.com.

So I went with Impeach Plato. I encourage you to not look for any deep meaning in it, as there isn’t any. But the source of those two words will amuse you. I challenge you – the few, the proud, my faithful readers – to figure out what it is.

Fortunately we don’t use much Microsoft software at my job. But we do have one vendor-dependent application that requires us to use SQL Server. I needed to add a column to a table indicating when a record was modified. So I dutifully went to Microsoft’s MSDN site to learn how this is done in SQL Server. I came across the “timestamp” data type. “Hmmm,” I foolishly thought, “maybe this will help me with creating a time stamp.” But no, the documentation says: “The SQL Server timestamp data type has nothing to do with times or dates.” It’s actually a sequential record modification marker that’s useful in data recovery, but it has “…no relationship to time.”

I guess this is the kind of stuff people have to spend their time learning when they go for Microsoft Certification.

While Kai and Maria were away in Denver I had dinner over at my friend Chris’ house, and his wife had one of her students from Japan visiting. Also, Chris is half Japanese and speaks the language. So it was an ideal opportunity to get more feedback on our list of possible names. They pointed out that Nikko, Saigen, and Kigen aren’t really names. In Japan these days you can make up a name if you want to, but those three would be considered very unusual. They liked Kenta, and also suggested Genta, if we wanted to do something with Gen. They also mentioned that “-zo” is a trendy ending for names in Japan these days, so they suggested Hanzo and Genzo. I thought Genzo sounded too much like Gonzo though!

So I called Maria the next day, and she had some new suggestions too, but neither of us were too enthusiastic about any of them. We’d reached the point where we were getting jaded about the whole thing. But then she called me back about half an hour later with an epiphany. She thought of a name we had previously overlooked: Eidan. It’s pronounced almost the same as the Celtic name Aiden (which means “fiery”), and the Jewish name Aden (which means “handsome”). In Japanese, there are different Kanji characters you can put together that will give you the same pronunciation but different meanings. The characters Maria and her folks came up with for Eidan mean “a wise decision,” or “an intelligent choice.” So this name is very good at promoting itself . We both liked it immediately, but there was one more test the name had to pass: Maria’s parents wanted to examine the name’s “kakusu.” As explained on the Japlish Japanese Superstitions page, this refers to the number of strokes used in writing the Kanji characters for the name. If they added up to an unlucky number, then they’d have to think of different characters for the name. Fortunately the characters passed the kakusu test. And it’s a good thing we’re not in Japan – if we were, we’d also have to make sure the characters were on the government’s list of 2,231 officially sanctioned Kanji characters (characters not on the list cannot be registered – see more in the article What’s in a name? if you’re curious about this and the other unique challenges involved with choosing a Japanese name) .

It’s been a couple days since Maria first thought of the name, and we still like it a lot, so we have a winner: Eidan Lee Toppa.

Kai and I had blast in Newport last weekend. Our flight from Philly to Newport was a nightmare though. We were supposed to leave at 2:30, but we didn’t board the plane until 4:00, and then they kept us sitting on the runway for three hours. We finally took off at 7:00. Kai was a trooper – he actually handled the frustration better than some of the adults on the plane. The worst part is that we missed that night’s celebration of my father and step-mother’s 25th wedding anniversary. So much for my feelings of superiority over those who drove for the holiday weekend.

We spent most of our time in Newport enjoying the beach, along with my mother, my sister, and her two kids. We also visited my brother John at the farm where he’s working this summer – see the pictures below of the kids with the animals! I also got to catch up with a couple of old friends I hadn’t seen in years.

We also had trouble getting back to Philly – our flight Tuesday night was canceled, so we came back Wednesday morning. We got to the airport just in time for Kai to get on another plane to Denver! He went with Maria to visit her folks again. Since she’s nearing the end of her pregnancy, this was her last chance to travel for a while. Her father is just hanging on – we’re hoping he’ll hang in there so we can bring the baby to meet him once the kid’s a month or two old.

While they were away I moved our bedroom from the 2nd floor to the 3rd floor. In our old room, I patched all the holes I had made in the walls for new electrical lines, and got the room and the adjacent hallway ready to paint (we’re going to turn our old bedroom into a rec room). I’ll have more home improvement pictures soon. In the meantime, enjoy the Newport pictures

This entry is cross-posted at Daily Kos.

President Bush has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Justices Thomas and Scalia, who are by far the most conservative members of the Supreme Court. The religious right is vocally reminding him that he wouldn’t have been re-elected without their support, and with a vacancy on the Court, the Christian conservatives are calling in the debt. However, Bush’s popularity is well under the 50% mark, as is his support for the Iraq war, he’s losing his battle for changing Social Security, he’s got a deficit spending crisis on his hands, he can’t get his UN nominee John Bolton confirmed by the Senate, and the House even thumbed its nose at him recently, passing legislation for expanding federal support of stem cell research. As a second term President approaching lame duck status faster than most, he’s not in a strong position for pushing a controversial Supreme Court nominee through the Senate. So will he replace the moderate O’Connor with another moderate, or a “strict constructionist” in the mold of Thomas and Scalia?

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, I predicted that, when the time came, he would nominate a conservative to the liking of the religious right. I’ve changed my mind – I think he’ll nominate a moderate. Here are my reasons:

1. I used to think Bush would appoint someone friendly to the religious right because he played himself up as a true believer. But I’ve come to believe his attachment to the religious right has more to do with electoral exploitation than sincere beliefs. One reason for my change of heart is a story I heard Howard Dean share when I saw him debate Bill Bennett last Fall. He described an encounter with Bush when they were both governors. It’s a story he’s told elsewhere as well: “‘I hate those people,’ he’d once snarled at me when I ribbed him at a White House governors’ gathering about some trouble he was having in Texas with the Christian Coalition.” Also, if you read this interview with Al Franken, it seems that Bush doesn’t know all that much about what’s in the Bible, despite two years of Bible boot camp and his claim in the 2000 campaign that he reads the Bible daily.
2. The strongest argument in favor of Bush appointing a conservative is that he can’t afford to anger his base, and that the average voter doesn’t get worked up about Supreme Court nominees anyway, so why not give the religious right what it wants? I disagree with this for three reasons:
   1. He can afford to anger his base. His base can’t help him with all the problems I listed in the first paragraph. Bush won’t be running for re-election. Republican House and Senate members who need the Christian conservative vote will get it if they pander sufficiently. The religious right has become highly mobilized in recent years, and I don’t think they’ll sit out the 2006 election, even if they are angry with Bush (their anger at Bush will be outweighed by their almost hysterical fear of possible Democratic gains).
   2. The people who can help Bush right now are moderate Republicans. They can help him salvage something from his stalled Social Security initiative. They can help him get his nominees through the Senate. If Bush nominates a radical conservative to the Supreme Court, it will undoubtedly trigger a Democratic filibuster, causing Frist to pull the trigger on the “nuclear option.” The Democrats will then respond by shutting down the Senate. It’s unclear who would suffer the most politically if this were to happen, but there’s a good chance it would be Bush, and I don’t think he’s willing to take that chance. The average voter may not be very interested in Supreme Court nominees, but they would pay attention to a Senate shutdown, and all the mudslinging that would undoubtedly ensue.
   3. As a second term President, Bush is almost certainly thinking about the “L” word – no, not liberal – “legacy.” All things being equal, I’m sure he’d like to be remembered for putting a strong conservative on the bench. But given the current risks of trying to push one through, he probably doesn’t want to be remembered for another Bork-style flameout.

If Bush does choose a moderate nominee, and John McCain (or another moderate) emerges as the 2008 Presidential nominee, I think there’s a very real possibility of a GOP split, with the Christian conservatives putting up their own 3rd party candidate for the Presidency. Take a look at this Humphrey Institute poll from 2004:

The poll showed that in a one-on-one race with Kerry, Bush would win 87 percent of the GOP vote. But when given the option of Bush, Kerry, and a conservative third-party candidate, GOP support for Bush dropped to as low as 75 percent.

I think the support among conservatives would drop even lower if an avowed moderate got the 2008 Presidential nomination, especially if Bush doesn’t give the Christian conservatives someone they like on the Supreme Court. But my guess is that Bush isn’t thinking about 2008 right now. It’s more likely that he wants to make sure he ends up with something to show for his last three years as President.