a belated apology
I was listening to a story on NPR this morning, and I am now compelled to apologize for the behavior of my older self. From the time I was 4 until I was a freshman in high school, I lived in Somerset, NJ - a small suburb near New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University. My Dad commuted on the train into New York City every day. It was a small town, really. Central New Jersey was like that - lots of small towns, all up next to each other. I went to school with a somewhat diverse set of people. Mostly white, but also black and a few Hispanic. We had Protestants, Catholics, Jews. A few people that stood out more than others - Hyeop Cha, who was Korean, and Namita Gupta, who was Indian. I'll clarify that she was Indian, not Native American, as that becomes important later on in this story.
We all went to the same elementary school for many years. Fourth grade was a big year - it was supposed to be our final year in elementary school before we moved up to middle school. One of the big transition events was that all the 4th graders from the whole district went to Stokes State Park in Northern New Jersey for a week.
So there we all are, many of away from home overnight for the first time. We're camping in cabins, staying up late, doing summer-camp like stuff. The student-teacher ratio is very high, and we're spending a lot of time unsupervised. I don't remember what the impetus was, but I still remember sitting around with several friends of mine when Namita walked by. Someone made the "Native American" gesture of the fingers flat over the mouth, with the "Whooping" kind of sound. It seemed to upset Namita, so other joined in. 'Cuz that's funny to 4th grade boys. Eventually, she cried and ran off. I felt bad about it then, but didn't say anything.
Life went on. I was pretty smart, Namita was pretty smart, we had a lot of classes together through middle school and Junior high. We weren't close friends or anything, but we were friendly. Then, I went to a private high school while most of my friends went to the public high school, and then during the middle of my freshman year we moved to Houston, TX.
I ran into Namita again later in life - sometime in High School. I don't remember all the circumstances, but somehow we discovered that we lived in different parts of Houston. I think she was coming to my school for some sort of competition. We talked for a while about old times, about the culture shock of moving to Houston.
Anyways, that's a lot of lead up to this. I listened to the story this morning. It was about an Indian girl growing up in the US, and some of the difficulties she faced. It made me think of the difficulties that Namita must have faced, and how I was one of those difficulties once. And I'm sorry for that.
Multiple Personalities
I've been lucky over the past several years to meet more people in the Austin tech community, and to become a bit more involved in it. Recently, I was invited to start blogging with the Los Techies crew, so from now on I'll be doing my technical postings over there and keep my random ramblings over here.
I hope you start following me there. With the added pressure of the group, I hope to post a bit more regularly.
p.s. - sorry about the recent website outage. I updated my web infrastructure and it took me a while to get everything sorted out. Somewhere in the update from pebble 2.0.1 to the most recent version the template jsp files got moved around and that hosed things up in a not-so-easy to find manner.
Using is.gd url shortener on the iPhone or iPod touch
Another tool you need for your iPhone or iPod touch. I have been using the twinkle twitter client, and have wanted to put in shortened URLs. Again, lack of cut-n-paste is a problem. 1. read all the directions first, and get them in your head.
2. Click on the link below, and then bookmark the page that opens.
3. Change the title of the bookmark to 'shrink with is.gd' or something similar.
4. After bookmarking the page, go to your bookmarks, and select 'edit' at the bottom left.
5. tap the newly added bookmark to edit it.
6. Change the URL by removing the leading part of the URL, all the way up to 'javascript:'
ok - now go install the 'shrink with is.gd' bookmarklet!