Seriously though, if I could at all believe in an overarching, long-term strategy to weaken an enemy, this would be a doozy of one. (please note, I do not endorse any arguments about women being a “weaker gender” by the previous statement, I only imply that a potential enemy of the West could)

Anyways Google’s chief of privacy says neckties suck and shouldn’t be worn.

Speaking as someone who hates ties and dressing uncomfortably for work (and who was in part turned down for a job for not wearing a tie in the interview), I whole-heartedly agree. Ties are pointless accessories that offer no real benefit outside of a slight personalization of ones attire.

I asked her why I should believe she was who she claimed to be. She assured me she represented VW Credit but could not provide any means to verify that identity. She offered to give me a phone number to call her back (along with her extension #). However that has exactly the same problem as her assurance: she provides no authority by which I can trust her word.

This is a potentially big deal, as I have received several third-party mailers claiming to be affiliated with VW alerting me to important warranty services that I am in desperate need of having. These postcards come from several different companies (that I assume purchased my info. from VW).

Anyhoo, back to the story.

I got the phone number (and the rep.’s extension) and told her I would verify the phone number and call back (if she was indeed call-worthy). I phoned my dealer who put me on hold and eventually gave me a different phone number. Calling that phone number I talked to another representative who I could verify the story of the first rep. (I also complained that rep. 1 had a non-authoritative phone number as well.)

I also informed the representative that there was an issue at hand (that caused this whole mess): VW didn’t process my request to sign up for direct-debit! I signed up in May when I changed my address—they never processed that request either! However they did receive my May payment.

Anyways, here’s the lesson from today’s little interaction: if you represent a company be damn sure you have a good way to verify your identity before asking me for any sensitive information.

I probably seem a bit curmudgeonly here but these things are important: it’s way too easy to defraud people in today’s society. If I can get a bit of information about a person (say from their Facebook profile) and I can telephone them I can probably talk someone into believing I’m of the authority to get sensitive information from them (that was quite the long sentence). People still trust the telephone and there’s little reason to do so.

If someone calls me I’ll damn well sure ask them every time how I can verify their identity and if I cannot I’ll ask them to mail me official documentation to do whatever transaction they want (this is good as it is still a federal offense to defraud people via the postal service).

Keep safe out there!

Here’s an overview:

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.”

It’s remarkably like the US Declaration of Independence, only with some elements of the US Constitution mixed into it. It’s really ambitious and sets a high standard for countries to live up to. What I find interesting is that the UN has this document, but there’s no enforcement of it.

Here are some more things I found interesting:

• Article 16 states that there are two genders required for marriage (unless you read the word “and” as a logical disjunction).
• The USA likely violated article 10 when it used military tribunals to try terror suspects.
• The term “everyone” is poorly defined: do children count as everyone? So can children own property? Do children have freedom of expression? If so, does parental punishment count as violating a child’s right to this freedom?

This is exactly the sort of document I would love to see our country define its economic policies by. Let the USA define favored nation status by how well a country stands up against these articles of human decency. We could clean up our trade deficits by requiring sovereign nations to demonstrate interest in upholding these standards. Without an obvious benefit I don’t expect many totalitarian governments to adopt these policies, so trade with the USA and the EU would serve to provide that benefit. I wonder if I’ll ever see this sort of policy in effect in my lifetime…

As I said earlier I was to teach on Confrontation. I had prepared my teaching earlier in the week, but decided to make two huge changes to the teaching due to some of the things I was learning about.

After the first night’s workshop I checked into a hotel to crash work on my teaching. I decided to begin and end with a story explaining how confronting someone properly actually does what EMI says it will do: communicate love. The story was one of me helping my friend Jerry, but I won’t share it here (there’s a lot to talk about and it I don’t feel like typing too much more at 1:32am on Sunday morning). The kinesthetic exercise I decided upon would be having my group pair off (that the Lord we had an even number of people!) and take turns proclaiming that when we argue “I am right and I will win.” The exercise was designed to make the hearer (in EMI-speak the “seeker”) feel defensive. To contrast and to demonstrate the goal of a confrontation balancing truth and love I asked the same pairs to repeat “I want you to be right and I want you to win.” Not exactly opposite statements and there can be a lot said about the word choice but the goal was to communicate by the speaker (EMI-speak: “helper”) a desire to not engage someone’s “defensiveness” mode of operation.

When 7:00 am came (which is 6:00 am in Central Standard Time) I was feeling exactly the way I had the morning before: “I don’t wanna go to EMI today, I just wanna curl up in this bed and forget about everything.” I didn’t prepare as much as I probably should have, but wrote it off to a belief I have about believing in the material and letting my heart speak.

Of course feeling ill-prepared I volunteered to go first In my world, setting the standard is always a good thing, especially when others top you later.

One thing I neglected to account for was how long the group activity would take to setup. That cost me valuable time from my presentation; I had to skip two out of the nine cards I prepared due to a lack of time. That stunk. I had three main points to communicate, and in the middle of point one I saw the two minute warning. I finished well, and was able to quickly choose what material to skip without taking away too much from the teaching itself.

The peer review that followed (while watching the tape) was quite positive. Of course my nervousness showed, and one of the main comments I took away was “RELAX!”

After all four of us had our chance to teach and be reviewed we broke for lunch. The afternoon consisted of some light lecture with a workshop of role-playing. As a group we were taught how to properly set up a role-playing exercise (I was sad I didn’t bring my dice).

There are three keys to executing a good role-playing exercise:

1. Setting up: a clear statement of what is being demonstrated sets the audience up. A vague hint can also be useful, but you can only use this as a teaser, not an excuse to be vague. Be sure to set the scene so the audience doesn’t have to waste their time figuring out who’s who and what happening.
2. Actually role-playing: demonstrating a skill through a short drama can prove quite useful.
3. Summary: ask the class questions about what they saw; ask the actors what they felt. Both will help to make sure your points got across.

After the role-playing exercise we pretty much wrapped up the weekend. We all received small monkeys to take back with us (EMI uses the monkey as a symbol of people’s burdens: you’re not to offload your monkey onto someone else, nor allow someone else to offload their monkey onto you–but you can help).

The trip back was a nice change from the trip to. As I entered Indiana I was passed by a van. The driver was lighting a cigarette. About two minutes later (and some leap-frogging) he passed me again and I noticed he kicked up a lot of moisture as he did. Nope, not moisture: it was smoke. His hazards came on and his smoking van quickly pulled over to the side of the road. I’m sure he just pushed his vehicle too hard, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this guy set fire to his carpet…

On a final note, some of you know I like to sing along to songs when I drive somewhere, especially when the drive is a long one. Friends, there exists a category of songs that men should be careful about singing, for they make you sound terribly gay. Son of a Preacher Man is one of these songs. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t a fun song to sing.

Here’s a pic:

This tat is pretty symbolic for me: it represents how close we are to being complete if we only would choose the pieces that belong (opposed to the pieces that we want to complete us). I think that thought says a lot about the struggle in all of us regarding the dichotomy of the flesh and soul. As Paul writes in Romans (paraphrasing cuz I’m feeling lazy and don’t wanna look it up) I do the things I do not wish to do, and the good things I want to do I do not do, wretched man that I am.

While I was looking on the hCard wiki I came across the contact page of Keri Henare. Being the inquisitive little whippersnapper that I am, I viewed the HTML source of Keri’s page and came across a nice little attribute in his Javascript element: defer.

You see, you can use Javascript on the client side to generate visible elements, such as tables, headers, whatever. defer tells the browser (or other HTTP user agent) that this <script> element contains no such mucking about. This is nice, as it would allow for that much of a faster rendering of the page. Cool (but not what I would call “very cool”).

One use I have for defer is to attach it to the web analysis library I’m in the process of writing.

The best part is that defer is understood by Microsoft so using it won’t be a waste of time.

Tough lesson. I feel pretty guilty about my own wallowing now.