Month: April 2015

I’ve built a website called amplifize. It’s a small community of 10-12 folks who share articles, and talk about them together. It started as a Google Reader replacement at scale, and has downsized into my own, small Internet water cooler shared by some really fun, random, and interesting folks.

Last week, I went to add the ability to edit comments… and I took the whole site down in the process 🙁

It then took me a full week to fix things. I was upgrading versions. Backing up data. Trying every darn StackOverflow article I could find to try to fix it. When it dawned on me that the only hope left was to rebuild the box. And that that wasn’t going to be pretty.

But I bit the bullet. The box is rebuilt. I need to reinstall some things, but the data was saved, and we’re back in business.

In the process, I cleaned things up. Removed a ton of unused files from the box. And lo and behold, the spring cleaning did the server, the app, and hopefully my soul a bit of good.

The week it was down though, I constantly kept looking for it. To find a wacky article. To debate some nuance of how funny a goat video could be. It’s something  that I’ve become so accustomed to just having there. And I genuinely missed it. And I think that means I’ve built something that I really love.

That’s a wonderful feeling 🙂

I’m glad it’s back up, and that we’re already sharing, commenting, reading, and just generally back to having fun.

Today is the 23rd of April. It will be celebrated across Turkey as The Children’s Festival. It’s the day that the first government was established after the independence war against the Greeks and Allied occupiers after World War I. It’s called the Children’s Festival because Ataturk dedicated the government to the children and to Turkey’s future. 

Tomorrow is April 24 – which to the Armenian community is Armenian Genocide Commenoration Day. Specifically, it’s the 100th anniversary of the events between the Ottomans and the Armenians. 

In Turkey, my blog would be banned for putting those first two words – Armenian and Genocide – together in a sentence. 

President Obama has announced that he won’t call it a genocide, which is a big “win” for Turkey according to the Armenian-American community. 

I think they’re wrong. I don’t think the word matters. 

Here’s what I propose we worry about instead…

Let’s all use tomorrow to think about how easily, and effectively, modern technology has made it to mass murder millions of individuals with whom we disagree. 

Let’s look at the actions of the Americans (Trail of Tears) Belgians (Congo), the Ottomans (eastern Anatolia), the Germans (the Holocaust), and way too many more to list over the last 200 years, and understand what we need to actively do to prevent industrial mass murder from happening again. 

Because you see I can’t change what happened in the past. And the title I give those events doesn’t change that they happened. What I don’t know is whether there are legal ramifications of calling it a genocide, but I doubt Turkey would acknowledge them anyway. 

So I acknowledge that I can’t change the past. I also acknowledge that the past happened (this too might be illegal in Turkey). But I can be part of building a future that makes sure that the innocent, the young, the disadvantaged, and the unlucky still have a voice and a protectorate. 

And I think building that future (by learning from those events in the past) is way more valuable than redefining the words the President uses to describe them.

So I don’t think whether a politician calls the massacre of Armenians a genocide or not matters. People who didn’t need to, and shouldn’t have, died in numbers that were appalling (regardless of whether it was 1, 400k, or 1.5mil). 

But I do think that we have a responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And those are the words I want to hear from the West Wing. 

There is a ton of DIY that I hate doing. And laundry. And in general most house hold chores. It’s just not my thing. 

But Micky is the exact opposite (except with the laundry). She loves DIY, and she does it well. 

Building the bee stand, and hives got me back in the spirit of building things, but I noticed something I know I need to fix. I measure once, cut twice way too often. 

I dinged our front door pretty badly a month or so ago, and so I had to fill it, and repaint it. Again, I measured once, painted twice. 

Doing these things where I don’t know the cheat codes is really frustrating. It’s slow. And I’m usually wrong no matter what I do. 

But when I redid the front door today, it looked like it had been finished the right way. And I could hear in Micky’s voice that it didn’t bother her to look at anymore. And that feels so good. 

I’ve been thinking about how to apply this at the office as well. If I know the answers am I waiting too long to share them with my team? What’s the balance of teach vs do? And how do I give that feedback successfully?

And on the flip side, am I demanding the right feedback from my peers? Are they letting me fail too much? And how do we help each other more?

All I know is, these days I’m the king of sanding, painting, and laundry 🙂

Micky and I are taking the week off to do tasks around the house to prepare for the baby. And before I started today’s adventures, I decided to sit at the back window and watch the backyard.

There’s a male hummingbird who lives in a tree two houses down. He loves our yard. He zips in and out. Always at the speed of sight. When the sun hits him just right, his red neck shines in the light like a neon Las Vegas sign. 

The bees agave made for themselves a home. They’re carrying in pollen, drinking the sugar water, and building their combs. 

A family of turtle doves sits at the base of the hive. I don’t know if they’re waiting for drops of honey or errant bees to make a snack out of. Either way they sing while they wait, and the harmony is beautiful. 

Spiders build webs. 

Along the fence evidence of skunks, rats, and raccoons are many and evident.

The artichoke plants are larger than life, with small artichoke hearts starting to make their way into the world. The grasses are growing. The bushes are blooming. The lemons ripen. 

Out of my window, in area code 94122, I have my own urban jungle. And a little sunshine to go with it.