But for years I didn’t make them because I found it a hassle. I would get inconsistent results. Or, even if they were cooked properly, the peeling process was so overwhelmingly annoying that I would get frustrated and swear off attempting again.

Two things have completely changed my mind:

1. Using a sous vide cooker.
2. The “temperature shock” method.

Last year, I got the Anova Wi-Fi enabled sous vide cooker, which is excellent, and I use about once a week. Besides being brilliant for steak, chicken, pork, and salmon, it is really good at precisely “boiling” eggs.

The other thing I learned, via trial and error, is that how you cook the eggs determines how easily they peel, to some extent. Some eggs are easier or harder to peel based on their quality and age. But you can tilt the odds in your favor with the “temperature shock” method.

The Method

1. Prepare a large ice bath. I use a large plastic mixing bowl.

2. Turn on your sous vide to 170° F.

3. Boil water (3 to 5 inches) in the biggest pot you have.

4. Gently (but quickly) place eggs in boiling water, gently lowering them to the bottom with a side skimmer spoon. I like using a skimmer spoon because I can fit three eggs at a time, and the flat shape makes it easy to gently place the eggs at the bottom of the pot.

Note: Some of the eggs will slightly crack from the quick temperature change, and a bit of egg white will leak out and instantly cook. This is fine. Leave those eggs in. Being super gentle will minimize this.

5. Boil the eggs for 3 minutes.

6. Remove the pot from heat and quickly (but gently) use your skimmer spoon to move the eggs to your ice bath, where they should sit for 10 minutes.

You can remove any loose egg white at this point, so it doesn’t clog your sous vide cooker.

7. Once the sous vide temperature is reached, gently lower the eggs into your sous vide container.

8. Cook the eggs in the sous vide for one hour.

9. Remove the eggs and place them back in the cool leftover ice bath water.

10. Let the eggs cool for five minutes.

11. Refrigerate the eggs. Use within one week.

My theory is that the quick and sudden boil, followed by the ice bath chill, causes the egg white to pull away from the shell a bit, instead of sticking to it. When I peel the eggs, I do so under running water, and sometimes can remove the shell in a few large sections.

Enjoy!

There is one major downside to portable computing: ergonomics. I’m tall, and laptops are tiny. Increasingly I found myself hunched over at a coffee shop, or curled up on a couch. Not good for my back or my neck.

I recently purchased a solution, and it’s working really well.

That slim black plastic thing is the Roost Laptop Stand. That’s what it looks like all folded up. Here’s what it looks like in action:

This raises my laptop screen between 6 and 12 inches (it is adjustable), which means I’m not peering down at it, but am looking straight ahead. It seems like a little thing, but it makes a huge difference in my comfort.

Setup is simple… just pull it apart with your fingers, insert the front edge of your laptop down into the clips, and then let the back of the laptop sit down. The clips are rubber, and rotate down as the laptop’s back-end is lowered, pinching the front edge quite effectively, and eliminating the need for any fitting.

Once in place, the stand is quite stable. As long as the table under it is stable, you won’t need to worry about it.

Setup takes about 20 seconds, from completely folded, to laptop in place and ready to work. Teardown is even faster. I decided to get the RKM carring case to carry my Roost, keyboard, and mouse trackpad (thus the “RKM”). The case is well made. It has a specific slot for the Roost, and a bigger compartment for your keyboard and mouse (or trackpad). That compartment is unnecessarily large for my Apple Magic Keyboard and my Apple Magic Trackpad 2, but it does the job. There is a zippered compartment on the outside that I keep a Lightning cable in, to periodically recharge the keyboard and the trackpad.

The stand is incredibly light: 3.2 ounces, so I just leave my RKM case with the Roost, keyboard and trackpad in my laptop bag all the time.

Speaking of my laptop bag, I switched to the eBags Professional Slim Laptop Backpack a few months ago, and am loving it.

It has a ton of room, including a dedicated e-book/iPad Mini pocket, a padded main compartment, a Napoleon pocket, a hard case pocket on the bottom (good for glasses or anything that might get crushed), a small side pocket for keys and ChapStick, and a fold open compartment with a selection of zippered and slide-in compartments for cables, pens, and such. This is a great bag.

Another thing I’ve found useful is keeping a dedicated power supply in my laptop bag. It’s best to minimize the number of things you’re taking in and out (ideally, it’s just your laptop). That way, you don’t forget anything, and the process of moving from place to place isn’t so annoying that you feel disinclined to move.

God bless Donald Trump for bringing out the true character of America’s hateful, ignorant underbelly.

We see you clearly now. We know what you stand for. We see the decrepit character that has been guiding your political choices.

Now, I admit that I find Hillary Clinton to be an uninspiring candidate. I disagree with many of her positions, and she does little to spark enthusiasm in me. But you know what? She can do the job. Of the four main candidates for President, she is the only one who is qualified for the job, and I know will keep a sane, steady hand on this nation. And she isn’t going around grabbing people’s genitals, hitting on 10-year-olds, degrading people of color, or making wildly impractical promises (“we will build that wall, and Mexico will pay for it” — sure, sure). There is only one reasonable candidate this election, and it is, by a wide margin, Hillary Clinton.

But she’s a Democrat. She supports a right to abortion. She’s a woman. And for those reasons, she is hated. For those reasons, people who claim the moral high ground with their religiosity have decided that things like being openly racist, bragging about sexual assault, and having the temperment of a toddler don’t matter, because Trump isn’t Clinton (boo, hiss, we hate her), and he is the GOP nominee, and he’s saying the right things about taxes and abortion.

I try to see things from other perspectives. Many Americans feel disempowered and angry, and Trump speaks to that anger. But this election, there are two choices: Hillary Clinton (with as many asterisks and sighs as you want to append), or “I’m an idiot and/or a bigot, and I want America to be run by a hateful imbecile.” That 35% or more of Americans will likely choose the latter is horrifying, but at least the light is shining clearly on the problem.

[…] with iCloud Drive, you can safely store all your presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, and any other kind of document in iCloud. Then access them from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC […]

— Apple.com

That’s pretty cool! All your files on all your devices. And I like the part about “safely”. After all, if you’re trusting Apple with all your precious photos and personal documents and work files, you’d better hope Apple won’t just lose them on you. That would be terrible. That would be heartbreaking.

But that is exactly what Apple’s iCloud Drive does.

iCloud Drive deletes your files. Without warning. Without any recourse*. Your files: gone forever*.

Let’s take a common scenario: getting a new Mac. If all your documents are stored in iCloud, this is easy! Just sign in to iCloud on your new Mac, and boom, there are all your files. Right? Well, so it appears. But of course, your new Mac can’t download these files instantly. So what look like local copies of your iCloud Drive files are actually just dummy files. “.icloud” files, to be exact. These files masquerade as the real thing, but they are just placeholders.

So, let’s say you have a folder full of these placeholders. Large Keynote presentations, Photoshop files, and personal photos. And let’s say that, on your shiny new Mac, you want to move these files from iCloud Drive to your local hard drive, or to another synced drive like Google Drive or Dropbox. Well, you can just drag their folders do the other destination, right? You sure can. Apple kindly warns you that your dragging action is moving that folder, and that the files will be moved to your Mac, and won’t exist on iCloud Drive anymore. Fine. That’s what dragging a file from one place to another generally does!

But what happens if there are files inside this folder that haven’t yet synced to your local machine? Well, the move operation will be slower, because your Mac has to first download them from iCloud Drive. But once they download, they’ll be in their new location. Right?

Nope. Those files are now gone. Forever*.

In their place, is a file named FILENAME.original-extension.icloud. This file, only a couple kilobytes in size, is the placeholder that OS X uses to pretend that the file existed on your system. Your original file is gone. It’s gone from iCloud Drive, and it exists nowhere on your hard drive.

But OS X will just see those .icloud files and use them to download the originals from iCloud’s servers, right?

Nope. Those files are now gone. Forever*.

But you can just go into the web UI and roll back a folder to an earlier version, right? Nope. Unlike Dropbox, and many of its competitors, Apple does not keep old copies of files.

But surely there was some “loading indicator” or something to indicate that this data wasn’t ready for manipulation, right? Nope. There is no indicator that a folder contains non-synced files. There are indicators in individual files, but not on folders that contain non-synced files. And even if they did, that is not a sufficient warning that an unknown selection of unloaded files will be deleted if that folder is moved.

Cloud storage is a brilliant idea, but the way Apple has implemented it is reckless and irresponsible. People’s data is sacred, and Apple makes it really easy to just vaporize it, forever.

*Update: Dan Moren mentions that the “Recover Documents” screen on iCloud.com can be used to recover deleted files, so “forever” might not be forever. All I can say is that I became aware of this issue when it happened to a friend, and Apple Support was not able to recover her documents. I don’t know what was different in this case. Maybe the sheer number of files involved. I’m currently trying to replicate this issue with a larger data set (lots of medium-to-large files) to see if there is some limit on document recovery.

Update 2: October 20th, 2015 — Apple informs me that they believe this bug to have been fixed in the OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” release!

So, last month I decided to upgrade my portable, to a 2015 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

Wow.

I’ve enjoyed several of my previous Mac portables, but none so intensely as this.

The form factor

I’ve gone up half a pound from the MacBook Air I was using. And I’ve gained some fractions of an inch in thickness. These haven’t mattered at all. I actually found the knife-sharp front-edge of the MacBook Air to be annoying. Reclining on a couch, it would stab into my stomach, leaving a lovely red line below my belly button. The MacBook Pro has a thicker front edge that feels more comfortable in any position.

The extra weight is only really noticed when I’m carrying the machine around by a corner. In a backpack or a bag, I notice no difference. I wouldn’t call either machine “light” — not in the iPad sense — but neither is either heavy.

The build quality on the MacBook Pro is better than the Air. First, the screen is glass instead of plastic, and the bezel is flush with the screen, whereas it is recessed on the MacBook Air. The recessed screen not the MacBook Air was massively annoying to me, as it collected lots of dust and dirt and lint. The MacBook Pro is easy to keep clean.

Battery life

The battery life is unreal. Apple quotes it as 10 hours. I’ve gotten that. I’ve also gotten more (on a long flight, with Wi-Fi off). I take it places and don’t even consider bringing a power cord. Even if I know I’m going to be using it all day, for serious work. I want Apple to look at the compromises they made for this machine (more weight and more thickness for more battery) and apply them to the iPhone. Let us arrest the tyranny of “thinner, lighter” and actually get devices that last a day.

Performance

The SSD on this beast is incredible. It reads and writes at 1.2GB per second. The processor (I went for the 2.7GHz i5, not even the fastest) is quite speedy. I went with the standard 8GB instead of 16GB. It’s plenty, even with running VMs.

Trackpad

This was the first Mac to get the new “Force Touch” trackpad. First know that the previous mechanical MacBook trackpad was probably the best trackpad in the industry. Second, know that the “Force Touch” trackpad absolutely blows the previous one out of the water. The “haptic” click sensation is uncanny. You cannot convince yourself that the pad isn’t clicking. In the Apple store, they showed me two machines, next to each other. One was off, the other on. The off one’s trackpad was a rigid object. The other seemed to bend and delightfully click at my touch. But of course each was moving the same amount (which is to say, almost not at all).

The ability to click anywhere on the trackpad is game-changing. No more lifting your finger and reaching down, or relying on your thumb to rest in a “click-friendly” zone. Glide your finger, and click where ever you end up.

Screen

Lastly, the screen on the 13 inch MacBook Pro is phenomenal. Bright, colorful, and super high resolution. You can choose between resolutions. Normally, I choose the 1280×800-equivalent Retina resolution, with perfect pixel doubling. Sometimes, if I need more room for something, I’ll jump into a 1680×1050 mode. Using the fullscreen capabilities most OS X apps now have, I rarely feel cramped.

Conclusion

This is my favorite Mac yet. I find myself taking it everywhere, and I’ve been a lot more productive on it. Don’t be fooled by the outward appearance that seems the same as machines 3 or 4 years old. This is a beast, and it is an absolute delight to use. Highly recommended.

• Alignment — Lets me block-align code (so, the equals signs are even, for instance)
• Better CoffeeScript — CS syntax highlighting and other commands
• Bracket Highlighter — While over a bracket or parenthesis, it will highlight its matching open/close one
• DocBlockr — Facilitates inline documentation creation including autocomplete
• Gist — Lets me publish directly to gist.github.com and puts the URL in my clipboard for code sharing
• Git — Control a Git repo without leaving the editor
• Highlight — Enables “copy as RTF” which I use when pasting code examples into Keynote for talks
• Modific — Highlights changed/added/removed lines in both SVN and Git
• nginx — Syntax highlighting for Nginx config files
• Puppet — Syntax highlighting for Puppet files
• Sass — Sass syntax highlighting
• SCSS — SCSS syntax highlighting
• SublimeLinter — Linting as you code… bad PHP, CSS, JS, etc, gets immediately marked for me to fix
• Theme – Soda — Much nicer looking GUI theme
• TrailingSpaces — Highlights trailing spaces, and provides commands for removing them
• WordCount — Tells me how many words, sentences, characters I have

All of these packages can be installed with Package Control. Let me know on Twitter what some of your favorite ST3 packages are!

Tampa isn’t particularly the most cultured city out there. It struggles with a lack of a vibrant city center, and a car- and suburb-culture that means most people live in satellite communities, 30 minutes from every other place in the area. Seriously, it’s almost mystical. Even given a linear layout of locations A, B, and C: A will be 30 minutes from B, and B will be 30 minutes from C, but A will also be 30 minutes from C. It’s the least transitive property obeying place on earth. But what Tampa does have a lot of is restaurants. It has a lot of chain restaurants. But it also has local gems. And we are now on a mission to try them all.

So far:

The Refinery — Excellent food and beer selection. Casual hipster vibe. Best if you can get seated outside, on the rooftop patio. Their menu is locally sourced, and changes weekly. I had roasted quail, the best I’ve ever had.

Red Mesa Restaurant — Casual, but with valet parking (huh?). Not much to look at inside. Doesn’t take reservations, but got seated immediately. House margarita is tasty. The food was some of the best Mexican I’ve ever had. The duck enchilada with raspberry sauce was… why am I not there right now?

Fly Bar — A little loud, but otherwise nice atmosphere. The in-house cocktails were delicious, but suspiciously low in alcohol content. Food is tapas style, delicious, and quick to come out (so you can order one course at a time, and have a nice long dinner experience). Really liked the rabbit tacos.

Ella’s Americana Folk Art Cafe — It’s exactly as hipster as it sounds. The food was good. Large portions. But it was the atmosphere I liked the most. High-backed cushioned chairs and booths, lots to see, and a real energy from the staff and patrons.

220 East — The food didn’t blow me away, with the exception of the toasted brie with walnuts, brown sugar, and apples. But it had a real sense of authenticity. Like it had been there a long time, and always would be. A real neighborhood joint, where I actually saw staff members sitting down with patrons and looking at pictures of their new puppy. We didn’t partake, but they seemed to have a good wine selection as well.

The cliché is that parenthood activates within you vast reserves of untapped patience, empathy, and love. It’s true. It’s also true that children ruin your life in the nicest way. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about this:

“What was silent in the father speaks in the son; and I often found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

And this:

“Fathers have much to do to make amends for the fact that they have sons.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Parenthood makes you feel incomprehensibly vulnerable. It is as if there is your own small, perfect, ignorant, delicate, and infinitely valuable personal avatar out there in the world, who is effectively impossible to fully protect. You well and truly know that the only thing worse for your quality of life than you stepping out in front of a bus, would be them stepping out in front of a bus. This transforms otherwise saccharine moments such as you holding their hand and walking them into the store to buy them their first bicycle into tableaus of terror. The irrational immortality I felt in my twenties was suddenly and grotesquely transformed into paralyzing and near-paranoid levels of impotence and worry.

What if he wrenches his hand from mine and takes two steps to his right as this car passes at far too great a speed oh shit shit shit slow down you ignorant cockwagon, don’t you realize I’m escorting my own intentionally created concentrated meatbag of personal vulnerability mere dozens of inches from your steel weapon of perfect child murder?

Parenthood is that. Constantly. All while your higher brain is telling you to stop hovering and stop insulating them from the world and to stop prioritizing the minimization of your own vastly inflated worries over their development as an independent being.

As much as that whole parental maelstrom of lizard brain v. monkey brain consumes you and makes you want to collapse into a heap the moment they are safely tucked in bed (but also maybe silently choking to death on that toy you forgot to remove from their room you negligent monster), that’s not the thing that has hit me the hardest as a parent. It’s what Nietzsche said.

Getting to know your offspring as people is the most embarrassing, terrifying, uplifting, eye-opening, and utterly unexpected journey you can take as a human being.

Envision every shameful instinct you harbor. Every psychological manipulation you undertake and immediately regret. Consider your bad habits, your deepest fears, your greatest failings as a person. Recall the things you do and then pretend you didn’t. Think about the things you refuse to think about yourself. Go ahead, dig deep. Imagine all the things that only you know about how you’re broken and insufficient. Examine those traits you strive to hide, but which you know have hurt the people you love, and yourself besides.

Now imagine all of those things laid bare for everyone to see, realized through the clear and magnified lens of a child’s emotional experience of the world. Moreover, prepare to learn new terrible things about yourself. Things that you only knew on the level that one remembers a waking dream, months past; the things that are shockingly obvious once revealed, but impossible to articulate while still obscured. Imagine yourself on a fainting couch, confessing your innermost failings to a therapist. Only you’re not in control of what is being said. And everyone is listening in.

Being a parent changes you, irrevocably. But only part of that is due to the experience of parenting your child. The other — and in my view, more potent — factor is the experience of getting to know yourself through your child. It is impossible to ignore, because the presentation of these facets is raw, and unfiltered by social pressures or learned defenses.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche ponders about the advent of science and secular morality rendering the concept of “God” dead, and whether humanity is up to the task of rebuilding a system of morality now that we have destroyed what we thought was its foundation.

Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

So too, is the crisis of confidence suffered after you, as a parent, are utterly deconstructed by a being of one sixth your size and one tenth your experience. So too, are you faced with the task of rebuilding yourself anew on top of the rubble your own flesh and blood has chiseled away from your ego. But you will. And you’ll never see yourself, or the world, the same way again.

Knowing yourself is a necessary step in you being able to optimally function in society. We don’t consume the universe’s raw inputs; we filter them through our abilities and personalities and experiences. If we don’t cast a critical eye on these aspects of ourselves, we will see a skewed version of reality and not even realize we are doing so.

If you want to know yourself, procreate. Much will be illuminated.

Then this happened:

I'm just going to see how far I can move him like this. http://t.co/jz5Mfm40uE

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

I’m just going to see how far I can move him like this.

Got him downstairs. http://t.co/gG46PGvdNF

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

Got him downstairs.

Outside. http://t.co/Muzsto4THS

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

Outside.

Inside his cedar play house. http://t.co/PU9EJWWgWE

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

Inside his cedar play house.

In the hammock. http://t.co/vWdnfxfX9U

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

In the hammock.

Difficulty level: Moses. http://t.co/MRXJhb219c

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

Difficulty level: Moses.

Balanced. http://t.co/eqc5lMKos3

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

Balanced.

Finally got him to wake up.

The adventure ends. http://t.co/lcvkLb1ctO

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

I showed him the photos and videos. He went from sleepy to bemused to incredulous to recounting stories about his adventures.

So the only two sleeping photos Atticus doubted were the cedar house and hammock ones. The rest he “remembered”.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

And that was the end of his adventure. Then, as I was about to post this, this happened:

And… he got stuck in a trash can. http://t.co/xq5QtDOoaN

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) January 28, 2014

And… he got stuck in a trash can.

Oh, Atticus.

Review of Squatty Potty “Ecco” Toilet Stool

I gingerly climbed on top of the plastic contraption now ringing my porcelain throne. It soon became apparent that I couldn’t keep my britches at my ankles as I normally did. No, they had to go entirely, along with my underthings. And if there is anything more ridiculous on this planet than the sight of a human man wearing a t-shirt and nothing else, I have yet to experience it. So in the interest of saving myself this unfortunate view, I doffed the shirt as well. Now entirely naked, I again attempted to step onto the device. I was unsure, but it seemed to hold. I settled down to the seat, with only the extremities of my posterior touching. My knees were up at my chest. This, plus my complete nakedness, felt very primal. It felt third-world and adventurous. It felt… RIGHT. I concentrated on the task at hand. I had felt a slight urge to go, and had been eager to try out the new purchase. I had been intrigued by the promise that my business would henceforth require substantially less effort on my part, because of the wild beast–man position it forced upon me. But I was still skeptical. It sounded too good to be true. Surely the difference couldn’t be that dras— HOLY HELL I’M POOPING.

Well, let me clarify. It wasn’t so much that I was dropping a deuce. Oh, it was being dropped; that much was undeniable. But I couldn’t really claim agency on said descent. Gravity was doing the work. I was merely the meaty husk from which it made its hasty escape. Used to more of a segmented approach to waste disposal, I was quite surprised that the creature making its egress from my nethers had more the appearance of a python. Smooth, and consistent in width, it coiled luxuriously in a pool of toilet water that is (or at least was) cleaner than the water that most of the people on this planet drink. As it continued to coil, my emotional state flowed from one of surprise, to horror, to amazement, and then again to horror as the snake coiled higher and higher, like soft serve ice cream at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. It was now surfacing above the water line. But still, the snake showed no signs that it was anywhere near finished with its journey. In a panic, I pawed at the flusher. The poor toilet strained, but eventually sent things on their way. But I wasn’t done yet. As the toilet flushed the waste away, more came to replace it. As the flush subsided, the coil started anew. And then I was done. I tried to catch my breath as the toilet flushed a second time. I felt my liver shift and expand, unsure what to do with all the extra space now afforded to it. I cleaned up and stood, almost dizzy after the affair. “Wow. A+++”, I thought to myself. “Would poop again.”

“Very well,” my bowels seemed to answer, “let’s have another go!”

“Surely you’re joking”, I thought, scrambling to once again work myself into proper Tarzanic stance. There couldn’t possibly be anything left inside of me. I genuinely began to worry that what would come out next might be some vital organ, brought to a freedom-seeking frenzy by all the commotion. But no, it was yet another perfectly formed tube of human excrement. I sat, mouth agape, as number two (round two) breached the water line and came to a graceful finish, leaving an improbable conical shape below me. As I flushed the toilet for the third time in what had astoundingly only been about 70 seconds I wondered if life would ever be the same again.

I don’t know why everyone is complaining about http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v. If you know how to use the Chrome inspector to edit HTML, it’s easy.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

GLaDO-HHS: “The Department of Health and Human Services regrets to inform you that this next http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v screen… is impossible.”

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Here’s a cheat code for defeating the http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v “no, I didn’t marry my own grandchild” level boss. pic.twitter.com/90dWZaxYat

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v makes all sorts of fucked up assumptions about Florida families. These are non-editable. pic.twitter.com/L4XbKkvgbR

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Non-editable http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v family relationship assumption #1: My wife is the daughter of my sons.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Non-editable http://t.co/QTGHDipC8q family relationship assumption #2: My second son is the father of my first son.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Non-editable http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v family relationship assumption #3: My wife is the sister of my sons.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

@markjaquith Given how genetics work, your family is *definitely* going to need healthcare.

— Bryan Jones (@bdkjones) October 22, 2013

Now one of my sons is his own sibling. And http://t.co/nXZXXR8a8Q wants to know if he is also his own ward. pic.twitter.com/98sq8g580x

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Opened up http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v live chat feature for help with it thinking that my son is his own brother. Agent’s name is… Mark. O_O

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

I decided to use the http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v Live Chat feature to figure out my complicated family relationships: https://t.co/2nuYaaCjTM

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Live chat transcript:

[10:18:00 pm]: Thanks for contacting Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat. Please wait while we connect you to someone who can help.
[10:18:03 pm]: Please be patient while we’re helping other people.
[10:18:07 pm]: Welcome! You’re now connected to Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat.

Thanks for contacting us. My name is Mark. To protect your privacy, please don’t provide any personal information, like Social Security Number, or any other sensitive medical or personal information.
[10:19:37 pm]: Mark Do you have any questions that I can help you with?
[10:20:30 pm]: Mark I seem to be stuck in some sort of redneck family relationship loop.
[10:21:37 pm]: Mark It thinks my wife is my grandaughter, my second son is my first son’s father, and that my wife is the sister of my sons. And now it thinks that one of my sons is his own brother. And also possibly his own legal guardian.
[10:23:53 pm]: Mark I’m also considering the possibility that you are actually me, from the future. Pretty sure time travel is the only way to resolve this neatly.
[10:24:33 pm]: Mark you can call the marketplace at 1-800-318-2596 and they can help you resolve this issue.
[10:24:41 pm]: Mark I apologize for the inconvenience.
[10:25:24 pm]: Mark Thanks for your interest in the Health Insurance Marketplace. We have a lot of visitors trying to use our website right now. This is causing some glitches for some people trying to create accounts or log in. Keep trying, and thanks for your patience. You might have better success during off-peak hours, like later at night or early in the morning. We’ll continue working to improve the site so you can get covered!
[10:26:56 pm]: Mark Do you have any other questions that I can help you with?
[10:27:44 pm]: Mark Nah. I’m probably going to have to talk to my wife and a really clever geneticist to answer my other questions. Thanks!
[10:27:53 pm]: Mark Thank you for contacting Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat. We are here to help you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
[10:28:24 pm]: Mark thanks for the laughs, you have a great since of humor about the whole thing.
[10:29:27 pm]: Mark
[10:29:37 pm]: Mark Thank you for contacting Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat. We are here to help you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
[10:29:40 pm]: ‘Mark’ has left the chat session.
[10:29:42 pm]: Your chat session is over. Thanks for contacting us, and we hope we’ve answered your questions. Have a great day.

@markjaquith Thanks, now I have the I'm My Own Grandpa song stuck in my head

— Karen W (@KMarieMW) October 22, 2013

@KMarieMW Just another day in the complicated webs of Floridian procreation.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Now http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v now asks me this question 4 times in a row. The fourth time, it won’t let me continue. pic.twitter.com/xypaIrKjkr

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

@markjaquith That is . . . wow. Even with reasonable assumptions of who's who, it still makes no sense.

— James Huff (@MacManXcom) October 22, 2013

@MacManXcom I was going to mark it up with him as “Mark2”, but it’s better as-is, I think.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

Since http://t.co/U1xJazRu2v won’t let me correct my apparently circular family structure, I’m making my own queries. pic.twitter.com/0p0gZu7MNm

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) October 22, 2013

This is my son. Indubitably.

The certainty only grew from there. Not only did he start to resemble me physically (facially, hair-wise, in terms of his predicted adulthood height, and in his similarly unfortunate torso-to-leg ratio), but it became clear that in terms of his stubbornness, intellect, interests, and constitution, I might as well have cloned myself. Some amount of parental similarity is to be expected, but this level of gene expression by one parent seemed like an amazing opportunity.

I was given the gift of getting to raise someone eerily similar to me, but with the advantage of knowing everything I have learned about myself.

One of the first things that Sarah and I learned with Atticus was that he, like me, wanted to feel like he was in control of his immediate environment, and in control of the choices that affected him. Of course, we didn’t want to spoil him or always let him get his way — we’ve seen what that does to kids. So began a very carefully orchestrated campaign to create a system of “choices” that would give him short-term control over various aspects of his life but that would also later converge in ways we could predict. For example, instead of telling him he had to take a bath, we could give him the option of taking a bath and then reading a story, or reading a story and then taking a bath. You might laugh, but just letting him choose the order of the events made him feel like he was calling the shots. What would have been a screaming fit about “NO TAKE BATH!” instead became “oh, okay, story first!” This is how you win with a strong-willed child.

Now that he’s a little bit older, he’s grown wise to some of our usual “plays”. So now when we ask him if he wants to take a bath, he says “NO take bath NO take shower.” He knows the script. But as he’s grown enough to understand these “choice” scenarios, he has also started to truly understand the concept of consequences. Enter phase two.

Sarah and I don’t treat “punishment” as punitive. Really, we don’t even use that word. Instead, there are consequences. Consequences are great. Consequences aren’t angry. Consequences aren’t capricious. Consequences just are.

Well, that’s a simplification. Yes, we create many of the consequences, but they are mostly naturally derived or based on solid concepts.

• If you are leaving the table, you put your plate in the sink
• If you’re not done eating, you stay at the table
• If you hit, you sit in time-out
• If you scream when we leave the pool, we don’t come back for a while
• If you’re well-behaved at swimming lessons, you get a Ring Pop

There are dozens of these. Atticus has learned them. And he understands that as far as he is concerned, they just are. And that brings us to today. Atticus is three years old.

Atticus has long been a fan of his binkies (pacifiers). He found them soothing as an infant, and continued to enjoy them as a toddler. We had reduced them to only being used at bedtime and in the car, but attempts to take those last strongholds of pacifier use proved difficult. The first thing he asks when I put him into the car is “Have a binky? Green binky?” I would try my Jedi mind powers on him. “You don’t need a binky”. It didn’t work. There would be a screaming fit.

Then it hit us: consequences.

There was this pirate ship he played with at a friend’s birthday party recently. And oh my was this a cool pirate ship. It made noise, it had a working cannon, and a crocodile would burst out the side of it when you pressed a button. It had real cloth sails. He was in love.

We sat Atticus down and asked him if he’d like a pirate ship toy. “Oh yes”, he replied, immediately. “But here’s the thing”, Sarah added. “You have to give them your binkies to get it.” I was pretty sure he didn’t understand what she meant. “That means no more binkies, buddy. They’ll be gone forever.”

We went back and forth a bit. I wanted to give it a shot, even though I didn’t think he fully grasped the concept. He and I gathered his binkies (four in all) and put them in a ziplock bag. “This is what we have to give them to get the ship”, I said. He and I bundled into the car. “Need a binky?” he said/asked, as usual. I lifted up the bag of them sitting next to me on the seat “but I thought you wanted to trade them in for a pirate ship!” He furrowed his brow. “Oh, okay.” I pulled out of the driveway. Target was a short 5 minute drive away. After taking him out of the car, I went to hold his hand for the walk through the parking lot “NO HOLD HAND” he said in his sing-song “I’m being contrary” voice. “You have to hold my hand in the parking lot, buddy. Just until we get to the sidewalk.” He pulled against my hand as we walked. I kept my grip. At the sidewalk I let his hand loose and said he could walk by himself the rest of the way “oh yeah, by myself” he said, strutting into the store next to me, full of independence.

The pirate ship wasn’t in the aisle I expected. We spent a good five minutes going up and down the aisles looking for it. “Do you see a pirate ship, Atticus?” He shrugged “I can’t find it!” Eventually I figured out that it was in an aisle beyond the two pink-painted rows of gender role reënforcing “you’re-only-good-for-childcare-and-cooking” bullshit that makes me so crazy every time I’m in the toy section. I saw the pirate ship from a distance, but said nothing. As we approached it, I stopped, pointed, and said “hey, look!” Atticus turned toward the pirate ship. The pirate ship he had played with before, thought was totally awesome, and really wanted to be his. I was all grins, looking at him to soak up his adorable excitement.

But it didn’t come. His face didn’t light up. His dimples didn’t emerge. He didn’t give me an open-mouthed grin or announce to me “I’m so happy Dada” as he frequently does when we’re out doing a dad-and-son activity. Instead, his little face sank. His eyes turned vacant, and his head turned down until his chin was on his chest. “This is the ship!” I said, kneeling down next to him. “Don’t you want to play—” and then his arms were around me. Turning away from the shelf he was hugging me tightly and burying his face into my neck. Was he embarrassed? Weirded out that I knew about the ship even though it was Sarah who was with him at the birthday party? Overwhelmed? “Thanks for the hug, buddy…”, I said, trying to size up the situation. I waited a good ten seconds and then put my arms down and started to pull back. He gripped me even more tightly.

Oh fuck. He understands. He really and truly understands what is at stake here and doesn’t want to go through with it.

This wasn’t what I expected. I thought that either he wouldn’t fully understand, or that he’d understand and easily make a decision. I hadn’t accounted for the possibility that he would fully understand and then be devastated by the seriousness of the decision he had to make.

So there I was, kneeling on the floor of a toy aisle in Target, engaged in a minutes-long silent hug with a 3-year-old who was doing the first real soul-searching of his life, and I was blinking back tears as the other shoppers rolled by, oblivious of the moment that was transpiring.

Eventually I got him to release me from the death grip. “Are you sad?” I asked him. “No”, he said, calmly, and seriously. He had distinctly oriented his body and his head so that he couldn’t see the shelf with the pirate ship.

“Is something wrong?”
“No.”
“Do you want to play with that pirate ship?”
“…No.”

But he did want to. I know he did. He just didn’t want to play while having the knowledge that taking it home would have irrevocable consequences.

He took my hand. “Come on, Dada.” He led me to the end of the aisle, where we couldn’t see the pirate ship any longer. He stopped. Still holding my hand, he looked down at the floor. Not sad, but all manner of serious. Shell-shocked, even.

I texted my wife, and relayed what had happened. “My heart is breaking” she said. “Shut it down.”

I didn’t think I could go through with it either. The whole point was to make it his choice, right? He understood what the choice meant. And he wasn’t ready. We’d just try again in a few months. No big deal. It will be better if it’s his choice.

We started to leave. He was walking faster than I was, leaning forward and pulling me through the aisles, like he couldn’t bear to even be in the vicinity of his terrible decision. And then I saw it. The Thomas and Friends Take-n-Play Lion Canyon playset. Atticus is a huge Thomas the Tank Engine fan. He knows all the characters, the songs, and the episodes. He knows the difference between a tender car, a freight car, and a caboose. And this was one cool looking Thomas playset, with a roller coaster ramp off of a mountain, divergent tracks that met at the bottom, a gate, a little lion that Thomas was towing as his cargo. Big things for kids his age. “Hey, what do you think of that, buddy?” There was a slight flicker of excitement in his eyes. “Would you like to look at this one?” I asked. “Yeah, okay.” I got it down, and he inspected the set closely. He touched what he could, through the open front of the box. He wordlessly turned it around and looked at the picture on the back.

“Would you like to take this one home?”
“Okay… this one.”
“This is the one you want?”
“This one.”

He wasn’t excited. He was resolved. I knelt down again, and took the plastic bag of binkies from my back pocket. I showed it to him.

“Do you understand that if you get this toy, we’ll need to give Target the binkies?”
“Yeah.”
“So there will be no more binkies. They’ll be gone. Gone forever. You can’t have them again.”
“Okay.”

I handed him the set. He stood there, holding it, looking off into space. Refusing to make eye contact with me. He had made his decision. And he knew the consequences. He was giving up something precious and comforting to him. And even though it was worth it, he still felt the weight of it. As did I.

We started the long trudge up to the front of the store. About halfway there, in front of a display of Isaac Mizrahi-designed housewares, he paused. I didn’t notice for a few steps. When I did, I turned around. He looked like he was in pain. I knelt down for a third time. “You sure you want to do this?” I asked him. He paused. He considered. “Yeah”, he said, quietly, and continued walking with the giant playset, easily twice his width.

I was hoping to find an older, motherly type who might understand what was happening for the actual trade off, but apparently Saturday morning is 19-year-old male cashier day at Target. “Rocco” had a short line, so we queued. When we got to the front, Rocco saw the Thomas playset and got excited. “Thomas! I used to love Thomas when I was young.” The set was scanned. “Okay, here’s the deal”, I started. “He’s buying this set with these”, and I held up the bag. “Can you accept these as his portion of the payment?” Rocco said he could. “Ready, Atticus?” I asked. “Yes”, he said, some of the seriousness lifting. We handed the bag over to Rocco. Rocco slammed the bag into the trash can on his side of the register. The bag of well-used pacifiers hit the bottom with a satisfying thud. “Done!” exclaimed Rocco, smiling, looking at us, and not once having glanced at the trash can. I swiped my card and took the toy under my arm. As we walked out, Atticus wrapped his arm around my leg and leaned against my thigh. My own personal leg splint. On the sidewalk, which had earlier been his zone of freedom from hand-holding, he fumbled for my hand with his chubby fingers. We walked to the car, hand-in-hand, in silence.

As I strapped him into his car seat, he talked to me about being excited to see his mother and his brother. He uttered not one word about wanting a binky. I let the playset, still in its box, ride on the seat next to him, so he could look at it. “I’m so proud of you,” I said back to him on the drive home. “Of course, Dada”, he said — his default pseudo-patronizing I-don’t-know-what-that-means response. We drove on, in silence. “Are you okay, buddy?”, I asked, turning onto the main street of our development. He cheerfully replied “yes Dada!” It seemed that he was at peace with his decision. I took a deep breath. I felt good about it too. And for the first time since his initial hug, I didn’t feel like there was a golf ball stuck in my throat.

Then a small voice came from the back of the car.

“Dada?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Binkies are at Target now.”

Not once during this entire episode did he shed a single tear. I cried the rest of the way home.

 Don’t pray for us
We don’t need no modern Jesus
To roll with us
The only rule we need is never givin’ up
The only faith we have is faith in us

Also, hello there, Rdio embeds in WordPress.

Vengeance is a strong desire. But it’s an ugly, primitive, base desire. And it’s a desire we should overcome as a species, as it no longer serves a worthwhile purpose. It might take a shift of perspective to accept that.

People are machines. Nuanced, fascinating, incredibly complex machines. This is not how we normally think about humans, primarily because we are more advanced than any manmade machine and are able to do things that seem very un-machine-like, such as emoting, thinking, and desiring. None of these things render us supernatural. We are subject to the same laws of physics as any other system. Our blood lust regarding evildoers is very much centered around the misconception that we each have an ability to make decisions that lies outside of the determinism of natural laws. A misconception that we are in some way outside of consequence. It’s a convincing illusion. We frequently sense that there is a little person living inside our brain. When we feel an emotion, we can feel the little person — our “self” — reacting to it, as if it is distinct instead of part of the same unit. Thus we imagine murderers and terrorists having a little person in their brain that goes “muh ha ha, I’m going to do something evil today”. But that’s not how it works. Imagine a calculator that is programmed to know that 2 + 2 = 5. The calculator doesn’t know that it’s wrong and merely disregard that fact. It actually thinks that two and two make five. Terrorists and psychopaths are just broken or just have maladaptive programming. They have no more ultimate guilt than a broken clock, or a computer with a virus.

Free will is a hard idea to shut down. People hear of a crime and think “well I would never do something like that”. They might not. But put in the perpetrator’s body, of course they would do it! If no part of them was different, there would be no part able to act differently. It is only because they were born who they were, and had the experiences that they did, that they are them, instead of someone else.

When a machine is broken, and you don’t know why, you don’t discard it. You don’t hate it. You inspect it. You question the circumstances that led to it being made this way. You try to see if there is some way to avoid machines being made this way in the future.

I hope we find some answers with Tsarnaev. Answers are more useful than vengeance.