Everyone harbors some measure of hypocrisy about something; it’s human nature. Others have pointed out how unnecessary and foolish it is to condemn hypocrisy in others while doing our best to minimize it in ourselves. It happens. We’re human.

I realized this afternoon that there’s some fundamental hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle about two issues that are important to me: gun control, and social welfare programs.

The stereotypically conservative view is that the ownership of firearms is a God-given right, put right there in the Constitution, and that they should be available to law-abiding citizens without many strings attached, because people (aside from a few) are responsible, and should not be restricted from owning guns due to the dangerous actions of a few. At the same time, welfare programs are a waste of money, because people do nothing to improve their lot in life, and just live off the government, sapping away hard-earned dollars reclaimed from others.

The stereotypically liberal view is that firearms have their place, but are too dangerous to be entrusted to anyone who wants one, without some kind of regulation in place to ensure that those buying the guns have exhibited a proficiency and responsibility in using them, or have some need to carry one (such as security guards and what have you). At the same time, we should support the poorest among us, and try to ensure that no one goes hungry, or lives on the streets, or dies from treatable illness or injury, because a couple strokes of bad luck could put any one of us in that position.

The prototypical conservative assumes the best of the gun owner, and the worst of the poor; the prototypical liberal, the opposite.

Reality is not so clear-cut, but in sweeping generalizations, I think these competing mindsets lead to a lot more division than necessary.

From WRAL.com:

A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.

The bill grew out of a federal lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In the lawsuit, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

I’m really curious about the overlap of “People who think it’s OK for North Carolina to establish a state religion in violation of the Constitution,” and, “People who think that state-level gun control is a violation of the Constitution.”

When I’m looking to buy something, I want to buy the best I can get for the money I have to spend. This is true of everyone, really, but it seems that geeks take to it with an uncommon zeal. For example, I know several programmers who dabble in photography, and it seemed that every one of them went straight from the basic point-and-click, to dropping a couple grand on a DSLR with a few lenses and who knows what else. Without much prior experience in photography, they immersed themselves in the available resources and researched all the possible options, and went for pro-level (or prosumer, I suppose) cameras. And, incidentally, they take some incredible photos with said.

I came of age during a time in computing when doing this kind of research was easy. You pretty much had to choose between Intel and AMD. The processor speed was clearly indicated in megahertz. A Pentium III would be faster than a Pentium II. 256 megabytes of ram was better than 128. You just got the highest numbers you could for your budget, because there weren’t multi-core processors, or different memory speeds, or SSDs, or anything else. The graphics card was probably the toughest decision to make, but even those had a specific amount of memory.

Just as things in the Wintel world started getting complicated—when they stopped using regular numbers for processors and made it all weird—I switched to Mac laptops, so I really only had one decision to make: pick a screen size, then customize it to the extent my budget allowed. At this point in my life, that works for me: I know how long I can agonize over different options when presented with too many of them, so it’s best if I just avoid having those options to consider. The Mac lineup is started to have that problem for me again, though: retina screen or regular resolution? Regular Macbook Pro, or Air? Core i5, or i7? (Is that going to matter for me? I have no idea.) This is why it’s sometimes best for me to just decide, “I’m buying a thing today,” and then drive to a store that stocks a couple of them and just pick one.

This point was driven home just yesterday. I’d like to get some camping gear: having just moved from DC to Denver, there’s a lot fewer people and a lot more space, so it’s reasonable to find a quiet camping spot without having to drive four hours out of the city. I pulled up the list of tents on REI.com, examined it thoughtfully for a minute or two, and politely closed the window because I had no idea what I was looking at.

I spent several years in Boy Scouts and went on a handful of camping trips, but all I really learned is that it sucks when it rains. I don’t know what I need now! I suppose we need a two-person tent, though having a bit more space is never a bad thing. Do I need a four-season? Probably not, we won’t be camping in the snow. They come with two doors now? What’s the difference between backpacking and mountaineering? What are combi poles? Do I want that or a pole hub? Why do some of these look like they were designed by Frank Gehry?

The customer reviews don’t help me any. I can check them out on REI.com, but a lot of the tents don’t have any reviews, so I could look up the same tents on Amazon to see what people there are saying, but then maybe I should also search forums to look for horror stories…

And then I remember: you are not a camper! You idiot! You will drive your car to some campground, and pitch your tent within 10 yards of that car, and it will be warm outside because otherwise you wouldn’t be there in the first place. If a couple trips like that go well, THEN we can worry about getting a smaller, lighter one for actually hiking in somewhere to make camp, but to worry about that now is just stupid (or “aspirational” if you want to put a more positive spin on it).

And so, I will ultimately do what I know is best for me: I will drive to REI, and I will look at the tents they have there, and I will choose a cheap-ish one, and I will actually make plans to go camping instead of debating the merits of various tent-pole arrangements.

I’ve spent the past couple of evenings converting this blog from Drupal to Octopress, and while I’m still figuring out how best to work with it, I think this is a step in the right direction. If you subscribe to this blog in a feed reader, sorry about that: I’m sure you saw a bunch of posts show up again.

So, why the switch away from Drupal? Frankly, Drupal wasn’t the appropriate solution for my low-traffic personal blog. I switched from WordPress when I started working with Drupal a few years ago, in part so that I would have a “real” site to play with and get more familiar with the CMS. I thought that I could make good use of some modules, and create different content types for the different things I would post.

It was overkill. I had aspirational content types: I wrote one actual movie review. I had a few portfolio items, but didn’t keep my portfolio up to date. Instead, I was constantly getting notices from Dreamhost that my VPS had been restarted because Drupal pushed past the the memory limit I was willing to pay for. I mean, this blog gets 100 hits on a busy day: there’s absolutely no reason for me to pay more than $20 a month to host it, and I don’t like trying to do any more server setup than I have to so I didn’t want to both with Varnish caching. I’d rather just generate HTML and host it for free. I can manually build portfolio pages if I ever decide it’s really necessary.

So, BrockBoland.com is now on Github Pages, and GodlessInDC.com (the other site I had on that account) has been retired, since we never wrote there anyway. I didn’t have any luck getting other Ruby-based migration scripts working (presumably because MySQL is running from MAMP), so I just wrote a quick Drupal 7 module to dump blog posts in Jekyll format. I opted to go with Octopress instead of vanilla Jekyll, though to be honest, I don’t have a good reason why, aside from the fact that I wanted a pre-built responsive theme to save me the trouble. I’ve been pretty happy with it so far: I went with the Greyshade theme and made some tweaks. I’m especially happy to have all my blog posts right in Markdown files. Plain text really is the best way to store and backup things like this.

[Note: I wrote this a couple weeks ago, but couldn’t post it then because I was having issues with my webhost.]

Like a lot of other people, I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about (and often obnoxiously posting to Facebook about) guns in our culture.

I’ve said several times that I’m still not sure where exactly I come down on the issue, but I doubt anyone believes me based on everything else I’ve said. An outright ban on guns is out of the question, for obvious reasons. Banning assault rifles does little, since their usage pales in comparison to that of handguns. Limiting magazine size or reload-ability—like forcing manual loading like a pump shotgun—make some sense, if only to slow down attackers.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that no other industrialized country in the world approaches the levels of gun violence we see here. There must be something we can be doing better. Some people will point out that cars and cancer kill more people than guns—implying that they are a small matter in comparison—and while that may be true, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be working to reduce all needless deaths, regardless of cause.

Many people say that new gun regulation serves only to weaken the ability of law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves, since criminals are criminals, so they’re not going to abide by gun laws if they’re already breaking others. But, the illegally-owned guns used by criminals have to come from somewhere, and some number of them are stolen from the rightful owners and find their way into criminal’s hands.

What frustrates me most, though, is that support for gun rights is generally a conservative position, meaning that it often (not always) comes with a variety of other conservative positions…like an aversion to higher taxes or welfare programs of any kind. We can all agree that the people who go on shooting rampages are mentally ill, but the oft-conservative supporters of gun rights are also often opponents of socialized health care that could ensure that such people get the treatment they need. And, as some have pointed out, the mass-shootings account for a low percentage of violent crimes; the more pedestrian, every day violence comes from gang activity, armed robberies, muggers, etc. Surely, much of this is driven by economics: the poorest among us are the most likely to turn to crime to get by. Some base level of economic support would undercut the situations that lead people to those situations in the first place. Not all of them, of course, but it would help.

But, most of the people who want their guns aren’t willing to pitch in to support the poor or care for the sick—or at least, aren’t willing to trust the government to do so. I don’t necessarily blame them for that, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. The argument I hear most is that we shouldn’t have to pay for deadbeats to get health insurance when they could just get a job (which is a whole topic unto itself) or pay for layabouts to leech off the government…but apparently, those same deadbeats and layabouts who aren’t responsible enough to make use of welfare programs only as needed are, at the same time, entirely capable of responsibly owning a firearm and should not be prohibited from doing so under any circumstances.

The solutions that have been proposed, like allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, or encouraging more citizens to do so all the time—I don’t see these ending well. If our best solution to society’s ills is to fight fire with fire, literally, then we’re doing something wrong. I can’t help but see this becoming an arms race: people worry that the government will restrict gun purchases, so they buy more guns. More make it into the hands of criminals, so more people start carrying. More shootings wind up happening, so even MORE people arm themselves. I have trouble seeing how this doesn’t lead to some kind of futuristic sci-fi film where society is on the brink of post-apocalyptic dystopia. As much as I pride myself on being an optimist, I am thankful I’m not raising kids, because I really worry about where this is all going to wind up in a couple decades.

Anyway. This was an interesting article from a guy with real background: An opinion on gun control. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but he’s obviously better informed than I.

(For those who haven’t heard, Erin and I are in the middle of moving to Denver so that she can attend gSchool)

In the past few years, I felt most at “home” in DC while riding in a cab from some transit hub back to my apartment. Before 2009 or so, taking a cab seemed like such an extravagance—since I had no money to spare, really—so my returns to DC would be underground on the Metro. But in recent years, those trips home from DCA after a trip to Michigan or Buffalo, Portland or overseas, or just coming from Union Station after a weekend in Philly or concert in Baltimore—it was like seeing the city anew again. Without a car, I never drove across town like that except when coming home, so I never became jaded to the sights along the way. That felt like coming home, to me.

But even then, DC never quite felt like home. I lived in the area for seven years: the first 18 months in Arlington, and in the District for the remainder. I lived in two different apartments in Arlington, and five in DC (all but one of those with Erin), so I feel like I got a pretty good sample of the area in that regard, but none of them ever really, truly felt like home.

I moved to DC expecting to stay maybe three years, four or five at the absolute most. That seemed to be how things worked, based on what I’d heard from college friends living in the area: people worked there for a bit, then moved on with their lives somewhere else. Those college friends were the only reason that I even moved there. DC was never on my agenda, after all, but there was work and there were friends, so that’s where I wound up after college. In the time since, those people have all moved away, to Seattle and Austin, New York and Raleigh, and some just to the western fringe of the metro area, an hour’s drive away in good traffic. Even more college friends have moved to the area in the time since I did; again, some of them have moved away. A few are still in the area—for how long, I can’t say—and another has returned to put down roots, after growing up nearby and then moving out west. Other friends that we made while in DC have moved back to Boston and Australia.

That migration and shifting of college friends played a larger part in my relationship with the area than I thought it would, or even realized that it had, until I sat down to think about it. The first couple years were all fun and games: like a small extension of college, with out-of-town friends coming to visit now and then. Then, we all grew up a bit, started getting married and having kids and moving out of town, and the social circle that I had considered to be my DC tribe quickly dissolved and dissipated in all directions. I am still friends with the people I was friends with then, and have made friends since, but I’m not nearly as close to anyone as I was to lots of people five years ago.

All of this adds up to my feeling that DC was never home for me, not really. I have friends there and I have Erin, but looking back, I never really felt like I belonged there. Ultimately, this served only to do me a disservice: for seven years, it felt like a place I was staying only while waiting for the next part of my life to begin. I never fully took advantage of the opportunities that are on offer when you live in the nation’s capital. I visited most of the Smithsonian museums, but only once, and none in the past year or two. I saw the major monuments and memorials, but again: only once, when someone was visiting from out of town, and not in some time. I never really got to know Georgetown or H Street or even Dupont Circle, let alone the neighborhoods that host less nightlife. I never did make it to Great Falls or Rehoboth Beach.

In short, I failed to take advantage of where I lived.

And so, I leave DC with regrets, but I also leave DC happily. I did not seize every day that I lived there, but I also never really felt like I should have been there in the first place. I am excited to try a new city. I know that Erin is a lot more apprehensive about this change than I am, and while I will certainly miss our friends in DC, I have no qualms at all about leaving the city behind to spend some time in Denver. I have been ready for a change and ready for something new, and the little bit that I have seen of Denver and the surrounding area has shown me that this will be some kind of change and some kind of new. I know that it is up to me—up to both of us—to take full advantage of the area while we can, especially since we don’t even yet know if we will be here for more than six months. I have started a list of bars and restaurants and attractions and day trips that have been recommended since we announced that we’d be moving: for the next six months, I intend to scratch one off every time we say “what do you want to do for dinner?” or “what should we do this weekend?”

Frankly, I’m also using this as an opportunity to take back some of my weekends and evenings. I don’t really feel like I’ve accomplished much in my personal time in a good long while. I spend my weeknights and Saturday afternoons poking at Omnifocus, feeling guilty about the things I should be doing on some project or community initiative, but feeling uninspired to do them. This move was the kick in the pants to start changing that: if nothing else, I had to give up helping to organize the DC Drupal meetup group. It’s not like I was spending that much time on it anyway, but I’m one of those insufferable people who feels like they should be doing something, and then wiles away the time agonizing about it instead of just doing something else instead. I intend to start withdrawing from other aspects of the Drupal community in the coming months as well: for example, I recently marked all my modules on drupal.org as seeking co-maintainers, because I do not want to commit any time to maintaining them for the time being. Instead, I want to use my nights and weekends to explore Denver and the surrounding areas, and to work on projects that I actually want to work on, not those that I feel I must work on.

My mother has always told me to live without regrets, and I try. I regret that I’ve left DC with regrets—if that makes sense—but I am thankful for this push that has caused me to make some changes, because it’s what I needed more than anything else.

Here I’ve been thinking that 2012 had been a pretty underwhelming year, but then I stopped to actually think about it.

I got to see all of my favorite bands live at some point during the year. Erin and I spent five days in Amsterdam, on a whim. I spent a week in Denver at Drupalcon. I joined Lullabot. I spent a week hanging out with my new coworkers at a retreat center in the woods. I got to speak on a panel at Drupalcon Munich, then spend a week exploring Munich and Berlin with Erin. I attended Drupal camps in Baltimore, DC, and Philadelphia. I spent a week with my family in Buffalo, then Erin and I drove an RV to Cleveland to do Thanksgiving with her family.

And right after the near year, we’re moving halfway across the country to Denver, where Erin will spend six months learning how to code for Ruby on Rails.

So, yeah, I guess that was a pretty good year after all.

I was going to write a post about gun control and stuff, but man…I just don’t want to. I don’t know how I feel any more. I grew up in a family of hunters, and know plenty of other responsible gun owners. I never thought that banning guns was a reasonable or necessary course of action—still don’t—but what we have now is not working. At this point, it seems clear that the right to buy and own guns is beginning to impede on everyone else’s right now to get shot at.

I’m thankful that the mental health aspect is getting more attention this time around (Aside: how fucked up is it that we can say “this time around”? Mass shootings are just a part of life now). Clearly, no one who shoots up a mall or a place of worship or a movie theater or a school is mentally well. But, we as a country haven’t even been able to agree that people suffering from a bullet wound should get the care they need, regardless of how much money they have or what they do for a living. How long will it take us to get to the point where mental health services are readily available to the one who would have done the shooting? At what point does the greater societal good take precedence over this libertarian cowboy bullshit?

But now, we won’t have a real conversation or get anything done again this time around. Some conservatives won’t budge on nationalized health care that could help the mentally ill that could become violent; some overlapping portion of conservatives, and plenty of liberals, won’t budge on a God-given right to the ability to carry a deadly weapon as they see fit. Instead, we’ll get the same run-around we always do: this wouldn’t happen if every adult in a school was armed, or maybe we should talk about car control since so many people die in traffic accidents. Why those still hold water, I have no idea: I have to question the thought process that leads one to believe that guns in our classrooms will lead to fewer shootings there.

The argument about traffic deaths is even worse: motor vehicles transport goods and people. They come with their dangers and we take a calculated risk in our use of them, and constantly improve regulations around their safety, both for passengers and pedestrians. And somehow, we are to believe that devices built for killing have the same net positive for society and should thusly be comparable.

At the very least, guns should be much, much harder to obtain. I saw an article somewhere yesterday about the fact that a lot of NRA members and gun owners actually agree with this sentiment. If we’re comparing guns to cars, why don’t you have to pass a safety test before being licensed to own one? Why can’t your license to use one be revoked on doctor’s order if you lose eyesight or suffer some mental illness (whether it’s schizophrenia or the more pedestrian epilepsy)?

But no, that’s not going to happen. We’ll continue having higher rates of gun death than every other industrialized nation, by a long shot, and our news stations will keep giving us 24-hour coverage to the people that commit acts of violence like this.

Another one from LinkedIn:

On 12/5/12 5:10 PM, Recruiter McOblivious wrote:

Hi Brock,

How are you? I hope all is well.

I came across your profile on Linkedin and thought you might be interested in a few current openings that [staffing agency] has currently opened. Your background would be an excellent match for a few of our goverment clients.

Please feel free to contact me so I can provide further details.

Thank you!

And my fairly-standard response:

Recruiter—

If you read my profile enough to find that my background would be an excellent match, you surely would have seen the prominent note that I’m not interested in being contacted about job openings.

Which means you did not actually read my profile to learn how my background would match your government clients.

Which means you opened with a lie.

This is exactly the kind of thing that gives recruiters such a bad name among developers. And just to be clear, I’m not trying to be personal here: I respond to messages like this just about every day, and most of the developers I know do as well. We know when you guys just match a few keywords and fire off the boilerplate “your background looks perfect!” or “I heard about your skills from a former colleague!” Take two minutes to actually read a profile before you reach out to someone: it’ll go a long way.

– Brock

I used to send polite replies indicating that I wasn’t interested, but these have become so common and so regular that I’ve surely made a number of enemies among recruiters in the DC area…which is a net positive, as far as I’m concerned.

My profile literally begins with “Recruiters: I am not interested in a new position, nor am I available for freelance work at this time. I don’t know how I can make this clearer; I’m just reporting you guys as spam at this point.” The Contact Me section gets even less notice:

I am not available for freelance work, nor am I interested in new full-time employment.

RECRUITERS: Please don’t try to connect with me about full time positions. I am perfectly content where I’m working right now. If you send me an invite without at least acknowledging this paragraph, I’ll know that you didn’t even bother to check if I wanted to be contacted, and I will make sure that I never work with you in the future. Also, I’m marking you as spam.

Furthermore, I can tell you right now that I don’t know someone else who might be interested in the position, so please don’t ask me to do your job for you.

From Wisconsin judge orders father of 9 who’s behind on child support to stop having children | StarTribune.com:

“Judges, they make rulings,” Curtis said, “they make them kind of hastily.”

Same way this guy has kids.