What I thought would be a quick confirmation of the partial collapse and then a surgery schedule/release turned into a week-long stay in the hospital and a lot of time in bed with IV catheters, chest tubes, stitches, spinal epiderals, and catheter-catheters (yes, that kind). I’d never been under general anesthetic before, so that was kind of fun to discover that yes, it’s just like how they say it is – one second I’m lying on a a hard table in a gown, and the next I’m staring up a bunch of different faces and wondering why there are so many wires running into me. It really was as instantaneous as a switch being flipped.

It's definitely an upgrade in drama from the previous hospital stay, where all I had on me was a breath mask!

After another 3 days in the hospital recuperating and slowly learning how to walk again while being on intense painkillers, I was released back home on Friday and have been trying to keep on the mend. The last time I had intensive surgery was when I was 7 or so when surgeons merely had to pull some glass out of my chest (punching a window is never a good idea) and those were relatively shallow cuts. This time, my entire left lung had to been deflated and blown back up over the course of a few hours. Every time I try to take a deep breath I feel like my ribs are in a vice, and there is a 5″ square patch of skin on my chest that’s completely numb because the chest tube incision required that a bunch of nerves in that area had to be severed that led to that area. It might take 2-3 months for those to grow back, even after the scars themselves have closed over (hopefully!)

The pneumothorax occurred just a few days after one of the most unusual Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever been part of – and I’m counting roasting a turkey in a 50 gallon oil drum buried in the Jordanian desert sand in that one too! My father has been sent to Antarctica – specifically the South Pole – for work on the Ice Cube Project. He’ll be doing some drilling there to plant the optical sensors that he helped build during his normal work here in Wisconsin. He left just a week before Thanksgiving, so we had an internet-powered teleconference with him while he was in layover in New Zealand. He could see and hear us from our laptop on our side of the ocean, but he could only type back to us (his laptop wasn’t equipped for transmitting anything but text, unfortunately). So he watched us as the 7 of us at the table carried on with our usual boistrous conversation at the table, and I glanced at the screen occasionally and transmitted dad’s questions and comments to the rest of the table so that they could ask him new ones.

As dad is normally the main chef for Thanksgiving, it was amusing watching mom holding the laptop’s webcam up to the turkey so that dad could inspect its moisture levels, and demurring the state of the drippings left in the roaster to a screen (especially when she was just reading what he was saying and not telling the rest of us, so it looked like she was just having an argument with herself).

Since then, dad has since arrived at the South Pole and presumably he’s set to work! I’ve created a posting account for him here on this website (there might as well be a 2nd Heise on HeiseHeise.com, right?) but I see there aren’t any drafts in the admin section of the website yet, unfortunately. He’s a great writer (where do you think I get it from?) so I hope that if he has time, he’ll share more of his thoughts on the incredibly unique experience of a 5-week driller down at the South Pole. To be honest, I’m jealous – it’s an incredible opportunity that such a tiny percentage of humans will ever experience, and he didn’t even need to sign up for a year-long contract down there in the frozen wasteland – just a little over a month!

I’ve been letting the blog languish quite a bit, unfortunately. Without something new and exciting like a trip across a major ocean, I just don’t seem to have the energy to write the lengthy blog entries that people came to expect from me. I’ll be going camping for a 5 day weekend at the end of the month, right before Halloween. I’ll be rejoining my old friends from Jordan who have all since returned stateside, like me, for a little bit of Appalachian mountain hiking and camping.

A little bit of fun that my friends and I have been having over the past couple months are Lords of the Trident music videos. My friend Ty is the lead singer of this amazing metal band, and not only does he sing like a guttural, insane, metaltastic songbird, he also does most of his own mixing, artwork, back-story writing, and now – music videos.

Here’s the first one that he did – his most recent album’s title song, “Chains on Fire.” Both my brother Josh and I are in it – him you can recognize with the axe and venomous look on his face during the crowd shots. You can’t recognize me because I’m wearing a robe and death’s head mask.

Today’s shooting, however, is for “Face of the Enemy,” and is going for a more story-based video instead of melt-your-face rocking like “Chains on Fire.” We spent three hours rolling about on the concrete getting some great shots (and “shot” at), with Ty acting as our director. Making an action video is so much easier in the 21st century for a bunch of young folks – you don’t need blanks, fake blood, or questionably legal explosive compounds – just a high definition camera and Adobe After Effects (please note in the previous video: Ty did not actually light a stone building on fire, or disintegrate those people (including Christine, one of the poor vaporized victims)).

It took 3 takes of me pulling off my shades and sprinting towards Bookman, our hero in the khaki trenchcoat. I destroyed my black shades on the first take when they hit the ground, then Ty gave me his to use, which I promptly scuffed against the concrete on the second take. Two casualties in less than five minutes! Some soldiers never go home…

So, enjoy the first rough cut! And of course, I’ll be posting the final as soon as Ty completes it. He tends to work himself to the bone on these videos, so I expect we’ll see the entire thing shot, edited, and with special effects within 3 days. Just kidding, Ty.

Our trip started off with my usual trip from Madison on the bus, and we took the front two seats. The difference was this time I discovered that our driver was the uncle of one of my best friends back when I went to school in Janesville almost two decades ago, so we began chatting. Then he continued chatting with me as I started to take a nap, and Christine muttered to me in Arabic “mumkin hatha kursi mish kwayis” – maybe this wasn’t such a good seat. However, I enjoy bantering and learned that Illinois drivers are terrible, and also that the Texas Roadhouse is a darn good steakhouse.

Out of the two modes of transportation for today, though, Spirit Airlines was definitely the worse of the two. We weren’t overly perterbed when we saw that our flight from O’Hare to Fort Lauderdale had been bumped back an hour (apparently because it had been struck by lightning and it needed to be “safety checked” or something silly and inconsequential like that) but we became less happy when Spirit told us they were booting us from our second flight from Florida to Costa Rica. I knew Spirit was budget, but they basically just screwed up the travel plans for at least 2 dozen people (it was a long line to get the answer to my question, with only one computer and no screen with times on it at the gate) because the second Spirit airline wouldn’t wait 15 minutes for our flight. Then, the discounts that they offered us for a hotel for the night were approaching $80 (and that’s with the so-called “discount code” they provided me). I called their hotline and left them a formal complaint, but what could we do?

I regaled my companion with the story of when my family spent the night sleeping in O’Hare airport after returning from Colorado, but she wasn’t going for it – a hotel was needed. Thanks to some quick smartphone searching, we found a Rodeway hotel for $60, only 1.5 miles away from the airport and with a free shuttle. Of course, as it was now 11 at night, the shuttle was no longer running and we had to pony up for a $22, 10 minute taxi ride by a disgruntled guy with a Carribean accent. Jordan pricing, this was not. And Spirit will never get our business again, that’s for sure – an extra $80 because of this ridiculous delay means it’s not so budget anymore. Hopefully the post title will show up in some search engines for other people thinking they’re getting a “bargain.”

It all seemed worth it, though, after getting checked in at the hotel and confirming our shuttle times for the next morning, with a bottle of wine out by the pool (“it’s closed now,” said our hostess, “but if you’re quiet no one is going to care”) and watching a few shooting stars coming in from the Perseid shower.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better.

I have no way of posting pictures from my actual camera now (and I shan’t insult people by using cameraphone pictures) but I’ll have to add them all into my posts when I get back to America.

I’m no stranger to back pains, even ones that last for a couple days. But these ones were different – they didn’t seem to be caused by lying, standing, sitting, or slouching in a particular way. It was kind of a dull ache that was focused specifically on my lower left shoulder blade, and over the next few days, i found that its intensity would increase while walking, running, biking, or doing anything that wasn’t sitting perfectly still. I noticed at work that I was getting a bit out of breath while climbing the stairs (and since the elevator up to the 8th floor has been out all summer and I have numerous computers to configure up there, I have been using those stairs pretty constantly). After returning my desk, though, the pain would fade to its general dull ache. At its worse, it felt like a needle being jammed into my lower back that would slowly radiate pain up into my upper shoulder – but always on my left side. At my parents’ house for my birthday this past weekend, my family urged me to look into seeing a doctor. But I kept hoping it would just go away.

Besides taking a sick day off of work and sitting with an ice pack occasionally at home, I didn’t do anything about it until a week later, when I finally called the doctor this past Monday. I imagined at best it was pleurisy, at worse it was a very slow-acting heart attack. Most likely it was just a deep muscle ache that a back rub couldn’t reach. But why was I short of breath?

Although I wouldn’t be able to use my new “primary care provider” due to a 9 month long waiting list for an introductory appointment (ah, so that’s why people make fun of HMOs) they got me into an appointment on Thursday, although they said that if it was an emergency of course they wanted me to come in right away. I told them that if I had made it this long without seeing anyone, I probably wasn’t going to keel over.

At yesterday’s appointment with UW Health, they shuttled me between the x-ray room and the on-call doctor. After explaining to a nurse and Dr Greg my entire family medical history – a downside of switching to my own insurance with a different provider than my parents – Greg listened to my lungs through his stethescope several times. He reported that my left one sounded different, and sent me down for the first set of xrays. He looked at them, then sent me down again to do more, this time while exhaling my breath entirely outwards so that they could see where my lungs were. I could tell what they were assuming, and it didn’t look good.

After I returned to the exam room, Greg sat me down with the xrays and showed how the upper edge of my left lung had detached itself from the pleura and there was now a pocket of air pushing its way around between my lung and the inside of my body cavity. The bubble would shift itself around as I moved about, and would probably explain why I felt most comfortable while lying down. He transferred me over to a pulmonologist in another building who explained things even more clearly – apparently, I am the perfect demographic to get this injury, which is called primary spontaneous pneumothorax, PSP, or more colloquially – a partially collapsed lung. Sufferers are usually tall, skinny, male, and between 20 and 30 – how fitting that I had just passed my mid-twentieth birthday. “Basically, people who look like Abraham Lincoln,” joked my specialist, Dr. Cole. He further explained that it was because I was tall and skinny that my lungs had a lot of surface area on them, and a lot of weight pulling them downwards – apparently, the left one had succumbed to gravity and pulled away from the upper pleura.

I had several options, he continued. I could either wait and see how quickly it would heal – as it was only a 3% partial collapse, he figured that I should heal up nicely. More drastic measures would be to stick a needle into me and pull the lung wall back out again, taking the air with it, or keep a quarter-inch thick chest tube in my side for a week to siphon out the air. But those would be overreacting, he concluded. Because I have a trip to Costa Rica planned for next month, however, I asked him if there was anything else I should worry about.

He got a little more somber and told me that possible health complications could result from the air pressure change in a flight, and that although the risk was small in my case, it could be a big problem if that air pocket swelled while in reduced air pressure. Some airlines don’t even let you fly unless you can tell them you haven’t had a pneumothorax for 6 weeks or longer. He said that if we could get it done with 2 weeks of safe period before the flight, he’d think I was safe.

Two weeks from today is when I fly out. Well then, our fastest and least invasive procedure is treating you overnight on 100% oxygen, he told me. It seemed suspiciously easy to me – lie in an air conditioned hospital room with a mask on? How could that possibly remove air trapped in my chest? Because the air in that pocket is plain atmospheric air, Dr Cole explained. Pure oxygen in your lungs will cause the nitrogen-rich regular air molecules to diffuse through the lining and back into your lungs, where it can be exhaled normally. Then your lung will be able to press up against the pleura again – and then hopefully reseal itself there permanently.

I checked myself back in later that evening, and was escorted up to my room by an admittance nurse. Over the course of the next hour, three different women visited – two with badges that said CNA, and one RN. No oxygen during that entire time, so I just read my book and snacked on my jug of peanuts I’d brought with me. But eventually someone came in with a mask in a sealed plastic bag and a long tube, which was plugged into a green faucet-looking device that came out of the wall. Gone are the days of individual oxygen tanks, apparently. They plugged it in, plugged me into it, and cranked up the output to 15 liters per minute. Considering that the normal flow rate for senior citizens on oxygen is about 2 LPM, the attendent CNAs must have wondered what on earth could be wrong with me that I would need that much oxygen.

I amused myself for a few minutes watching little rubber output gasket on the side flutter as I exhaled, but the constant hissing noise of the system got tiresome quickly (I wish that I had bothered to check for earplugs sooner; I found some on the nightstand in a little bag the next morning). The nurses cycled around through shifts, each time coming in and checking my pulse and oxygen count with a little device that clipped onto my index finger, which without making any sort of cut in me, was able to measure oxygen percentages in my blood. I had been at 96 that morning, but after being on pure oxygen for a few hours, I hit 100 each time.

The oxygen mask had a strange little bag under it, like a wattle on a goat, that didn’t seem to do anything except be filled with air at all times. It’s not like it was needed, though – the hose kept an unceasing supply of air roaring at my nose and mouth at all times. The bag constantly got in the way though as I shifted and tried to get comfortable in the bed as midnight drew near; it’s difficult to lie on your side with a tube coming off of your mouth and an air-filled bag trying to sit under your chin. I licked my lips occasionally; I could feel them getting chapped with the gale-force winds blowing at them.

I woke up somewhere around 4 in the morning when a nurse named Walter with a Russian sounding accent came in to check my vitals yet again, and he rolled down the shade facing the east (I could see the capital rotunda from my window, twinkling cheerfully at me in the darkness) and whispered to me that otherwise, I would be blinded by the morning sunlight in a few hours. The next thing I remember is my alarm waking me for work at 6:45, causing me to snap my head upright and the airbag to pop up and bap me playfully in the eye. It looks like you can sleep through anything if you get accustomed to it, even a hissing, oddly-constructed air mask.

My morning x-rays followed some hours later as the sun rose. It was time for the doctors to see if the pneumothorax had indeed withdrawn into the comforting fold of my lungs yet again. I wasn’t willing to bet anything, yet – my back always hurts on strange new (hard) beds like this one, so I couldn’t tell if I felt any different yet. And the nurses certainly weren’t assisting in my wish to see if I was still in pain – I was carefully bundled out of bed into a wheelchair, with a blanket wrapped around me, as nurse Ginny soothingly told me that she would disconnect my air just for a second and then she quickly attached it to a portable air tank on the wheelchair. None of the nurses seemed to understand that I wasn’t suffering from oxygen deprivation and that I wouldn’t turn blue and die if I was off the feed for a minute – they just saw the high flow rate and assumed that I should be treated like delicate glass.

I was carefully wheeled down the hall a “transport” nurse, to the elevator, and down to the x-ray room, where the x-ray technician told me I didn’t need to remove my nightshirt or my oxygen mask; a far cry from the torso disrobing that was ordered the previous morning. Once again, it seemed like I was being treated very gingerly. I wasn’t sure if he knew that the only way to see my small pneumothorax was to take the x-ray while exhaling fully; after all, the previous technician hadn’t apparently known it on the first try yesterday. So I did so without telling him (even though he told me to inhale, like most x-ray techs do) as I hoped it would be helpful to Dr Cole or whomever would look at the scans. Then I was carefully eased backwards into my chair again (the whole process had required me moving all of a foot) and a second transport nurse took me back to the room. She asked me in a slow, over-annuniciated voice if I was a student at the UW. With some amusement, I told her that I was a computer consultant and technician for the UW. “Oh!” she replied with a note of some surprise. “Well that must be a very good job for a smart young man like you!”

It’s interesting how one’s attitude towards people change if they seem helpless, ill, and needy. To the eyes of the many nurses who had been attending to me for hours, I was a skinny, frail looking guy with glasses in pajamas who had been wearing an oxygen mask all night and needed chest x-rays. They spoke in a very cheerful, evenly-paced upbeat tone without fail. Once I asked about whether their computers were running Epic’s medical software, or mentioned my work as a consultant for another UW department, the tone changed a bit and then they would talk to me normally – or at least, until they cycled out again and a new nurse arrived and I needed to repeat the process over again. I felt silly being babied and assisted about. I had gone 9 days with a partially collapsed lung and I knew I could handle it – so I didn’t feel like I should be accepting their professional kindness. I didn’t want to be a burden.

After returning to my bed and my wall-based oxygen source for another half an hour, Dr Cole came in with the good news – the pneumothorax had disappeared, and my x-ray looked normal – his plan had worked. My back was still stiff enough (probably in part from the lack of my own personal locomotion!) that I couldn’t tell if I felt better or not, but I was greatly cheered that things looked normal from his perspective. He confirmed his guess with a quick listen to my lungs again with his stethescope, and I could feel the tension and relief ebb out of me – I could go back to normal.

But wait, he cautioned – I still want you to come back next week for a followup. Oh. Well, of course that makes sense. “And,” he continued, “we’ll need to keep an eye on your lungs. No lifting anything over 20 pounds for 2-4 weeks. Also, you have a 33% chance of developing a second pneumothorax, now that you’ve had one.” I asked him what the odds were for the general population. 18 in 100,000 he replied. So my odds of a relapse have increased significantly. And if I were to get a second one, my odds of a third one would increase to 80%. “At that point, there is a surgery that we would recommend after the second to irritate the pleura of the lungs with some powder, which would then develop a sticky blood clot along the edges which has a 98% success rate at making your lung stick in place, permanently.”

I took off the breath mask and shut off the oxygen myself after Dr Cole left. The room felt very quiet without the constant hissing sound I’d grown accustomed to for the past 15 hours, and it took me an hour to become re-acclimated to working hard to breath again in the regular air. I packed my things and prepared to walk back to work, but the nurse told me that walking a mile seemed like too much stress for me because it was “very hot outside.” She wanted me to take a taxi but in the end we compromised with the bus system.

It feels really good to be free of that twinging lung pain (and have it replaced with good old familiar vertebral back pain again) but I guess it was a wake up call for me – they never tell thin young people to be on the lookout for collapsed lungs. In comparison with heart disease and diabetes, I guess I’ll be thankful that there’s comparably less things that affect people with my body type. Except, as I told my boss, the fact that people like me will be the first ones to succumb after the next ice age due to the lack of fat storage!

I contacted this website’s host to see if they could migrate my 4.0.2 SQL database to 5 for me, dryly reminding them that when I built the blog back in 2007, it was on their own pages that they recommended choosing 4 instead of 5 because it was “well-tested and stable” instead of version 5 which was apparently scary and new for everyone back then. My host refused, telling me that I’d need to use phpMyAdmin to manually back up everything in my blog (a rather large 16 MB pile of text in SQL format; it takes Notepad 3 minutes to open it) and then reimport it into a new version 5 MySQL database.

That was back in February 2010, and thanks to lots of other irate users suffering from the same issue, there was no shortage on instructions for doing some SQL database tweaking. However, no one else seemed to have my problem, which was that re-importing into MySQL 5 destroyed all of my Arabic characters and replaced them with garbage text. Stymied, irritated, and in the process of getting ready for my trip to Egypt the following month, I decided just to stick with WordPress 2.8.6 until I got around to figuring out how to fix the problem.

Fast-forward to now. Sony, Sega, Nintendo, CIA.gov, Bank of America, and dozens of other big-ticket websites are being hacked on a regular basis, and script kiddies (talentless hackers who use pre-made scripts to hunt for websites with vulnerabilities, instead of doing the research/attack on their own) are coming out of the woodwork to infest any website they can with Trojan downloaders to ensnare people using Google and Google Image Search.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve winced as I’ve read these articles and thought of my own poor, dust-collecting HeiseHeise.com. I’m not so vain that I think that any hacker would actually target my site directly (if I was that shallow and self-centered/boring, I’d just use Twitter and tell you what I was eating for lunch and how cute my nonexistent cats are), but it would be simple for a coder to just use scripts to scan the internet for websites using outdated versions of WordPress. WordPress is, you have to remember, the most famous and widely used Content Management System in the world, and just like the Windows operating system, is a fat and juicy target for the sharks out there. If my site was discovered in an automated search like that, I didn’t want to be the unlucky discoverer of a remote takeover security hole, and own up to the embarrassment of not practicing what I’ve preached for years to friends, family, and students: I haven’t kept my blog software up to date.

That was this morning. I’m pleased to say I’m writing this to you from a brand-new database on a freshly upgraded copy of WordPress 3.1.3. It probably doesn’t – and shouldn’t – look any different to you. All of the improvements have been made on the administrative side of things, or deep within the system code to hopefully batten down the hatches. What was the fix I finally discovered? This lengthy page on the WordPress Codex* explained that before WordPress 3.0, there was no function in the configuration files to ensure that the blog’s database was being stored in the universal internet character set, UTF-8, so things were probably being written as ASCII, the outdated Latin-text-only character set which no one on the internet should be using anymore (it’s 2011; global village; internet should be in all languages, etc etc). So I ran the SQL command to convert all my posts to ASCII, then into binary, and then into UTF-8 and bam…it was solved. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I backed up the fresh MySQL 5 database and the WordPress 2.8.6 files, and while holding my breath, clicked the update button that I hadn’t clicked in over a year. No halt this time…”Update has completed successfully” greeted me within 30 seconds.

So there’s a bit of a load off my shoulders. It’s past midnight now, and I’m writing this entry after spending a couple hours going through some of my favorite old entries from Jordan, like biking in the Dead 2 Red, visiting Sheikh Suliman in Ghor Safi, and of course hiking the amazing wadis with my friends. Heck, I even read through the entry I wrote right after I had reformatted this computer and put Windows 7 on it after getting infected by the W32/Sality malware. It was a well-written article.

As a final note, I did notice that although the Arabic in my posts themselves was spared – thank goodness – after updating from 2.8.6 to 3.1.3 the non-Latin characters in comments vanished, and I had to go through and correct them by hand. Thankfully there hasn’t been many, but if you happen to see anything on the site that looks like ???? ???? please let me know – that probably used to be العربية – Arabic text.

*Why didn’t I use that page back in February 2010? If you scroll down on that page, you’ll notice an author comments that the page was completely revamped in October 2010 because it had gotten so out of date. The information that could have helped me probably did not exist when I was searching right after 2.9 was released.

Here’s the original photo below (and here’s a link to the entire original story of “what is the Dead 2 Red race and what was I doing in it?”

Just looking at this photo now, two years later, gives me a longing to be back on that dusty highway with robed men shouting encouraging (hopefully) things at me as I biked through their villages

And here’s the poster art that Leanna made for her sporting organization for her university. I look good in muted earth tones! Thanks for sharing it back with me, Leanna, and I hope that it increases interest in the Outdoor Recreational Club! You can see more of her artwork at her Tumblr webpage.

This might just be my new Facebook photo for awhile

Click to enlarge

It all really comes down to The Taskbar. This mighty bar of information has been a part of Windows since the 95 days, and it is the key visual difference between Windows and OSX to the regular user. I have equally not made a secret of the fact that I detest the OSX dock. This is the OSX dock (photo is taken from flickr; even though I have a macbook pro now, I only run Windows 7 on it and I don’t want to restart it into OSX mode just to take an original screenshot). I purposely chose a flickr photo with the dock turned to left-side, for reasons you’ll see a few paragraphs down.

Click to go to original flickr page with large sizes

What makes the dock so distasteful? It doesn’t tell me anything about a program except that it’s open. Let’s say that you’ve selected System Preferences in OSX (in that screenshot, system preferences is the 4th icon from the bottom). The icon there in the dock doesn’t change when the shortcut is clicked. It just sits there, with a bland glowing dot to its left (you can see that with the Finder window, the first icon on top), and if you start working on something else and came back to System Preferences later, you’ll need to manually click that stupid icon again and check the contents of the particular window to see what it is you had opened up. So, you have to move the mouse back to that icon, click the icon, and then wait for the screen to redraw the window. Arguably no more than 2-3 seconds – but it adds up. Mac users have to do this dozens or hundreds of times a day. That comes to minutes per day, hours per month of just time spent fighting your computer for information. The Windows taskbar, however, does not fight you. It passively and constantly displays exactly what you have open and tells you the name of the window is for that program.

Now that I have an Apple computer, when I first got it I made a conscious effort to try to stay in OSX and use it. I made a serious attempt to be an OSX user. The paragraph above describes the sole reason why I no longer bother. I even tried writing in on a few Mac-users forums to see if there was a way to add an informational taskbar to OSX. I asked very politely, but the replies were “why would you want that; that’s like Windows” and even “just get used to the OSX way of doing things.” I never went back. OSX is simply a waste of my time.

See there in that first screenshot of the Windows 7 taskbar? In a fraction of a second glance, I can see that I have Ars Technica open in a Firefox window, Pandora open in Chrome, and three system management windows open – Services, Device Manager, and Disk Management. If I know I don’t want one open, I can then choose to move my mouse, right click on it and click close. I don’t even need to look at that window again; it doesn’t redraw itself if I only right click on it. Information management, accomplished, with minimal mouse/keyboard movement.

However, Microsoft is moving backwards. What you saw above is a customized Windows 7 taskbar (as those of you who already use Windows 7 probably guessed). Microsoft no longer shows you this sort of wonderful taskbar by default. No, the Windows 7 taskbar by default looks like this.

Click to enlarge

Yes…looks kind of familiar, doesn’t it? A big, bulky taskbar that takes up more of your screen real estate vs the classic, thin variety. Large, gaudy icons that have no text on them. I took these two screenshots mere seconds apart; those are the exact same programs and windows open here as in the first picture above. But where is the information? Why, Microsoft, am I forced to look at an OSX dock when I first install Windows 7? I can see I have Chrome, Firefox, and three other weird nameless windows open (and without text, I certainly have no idea what they could be; they’re generic system management windows with no brand recognition like Chrome and Firefox).

As an I.T. admin, I work with middle-aged professors that probably started with DOS and Unix when they first began doing statistical calculations, then moved to XP, and then moved to Windows 7 when we told them their new computer was capable of it. Without fail, I always tell every single user – as they stare blankly at the oversized, pictograph taskbar on their new Windows 7 desktop – “don’t worry; if you’d like, I can change it back to the way that Windows XP arranged the taskbar.” With two exceptions out of dozens, every person has been grateful to me for showing them how to do this, and several have asked me to write it down so that they can do it to their own personal Windows 7 computers.

Right click the taskbar, click properties. Change to these settings. Fixed!

The new Windows 7 default taskbar has the exact same problem as OSX’s dock. It causes you to do more work, more mouse movement, more thinking, to merely see what’s open or running on your computer. Over the past few years, there has apparently been an outcry for “simplified” computing. Graphical User Interface (GUI) designers have responded in a lazy fashion – merely subtract information from the screen, and voila, your experience is simplified. But is it? Users of desktop and laptop computers still compute the same way. Most regular users have at least 3-4 programs open at once, and power users like myself might have 15 to 20 open. You can’t “simplify” away the fact that we need to be able to quickly navigate and filter that information, and pictures/icons simply cannot communicate details as effectively as text.

“A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words” is true if you want to pass on the information of a painting, a movie, or a vista (pun intended). But when you’re an office worker with 4 open Word documents, 3 open emails-in-progress, a web browser, and possibly a chat program (for business or pleasure) open, seeing 4 identical Word icons, 3 identical email icons, and then two other icons for your browser and chat, is not useful simplification. Microsoft, you’ve forced that user to move the mouse over and click each icon individually to see which document is which. At least Microsoft’s implementation is better than the OSX dock, because moving your mouse over each icon in Windows will then show a popup (with text, fortunately!) of open windows/tabs/sub folders for that program, and right-clicking even gives you access to special commands and functions (called Jumplists). Here’s an example of Internet Explorer 9, with six tabs open, spread between two windows, while using the informationless-taskbar. Although better than OSX, this still requires moving your mouse over from whatever you were doing before and hovering it over the IE button to see what windows/tabs are open.

None of this is new information, though. OSX has been out for a decade and Windows 7 for about two years. I’d long since come to terms with what I thought was a mere fad of hiding information from users by the two mainstream operating systems.

What pushed me to write this blog entry was the fact that now, even the stalwart, information-packed consumer Linux is losing control of its information management capabilities. The newest version of Ubuntu now comes with its taskbars turned off and a new, Ubuntu-made custom GUI called “Unity” turned on. Here’s a screenshot taken from Ars Technica’s review of Ubuntu 11.04. Not to sound like a broken record, but does that look familiar to you?

Ubuntu's Unity: Click to enlarge

Of course it does. It’s the Mac user interface all over again, and a bottom taskbar that has been an everpresent part of Ubuntu and other Linux GUIs like GNOME and KDE is now gone. The top taskbar that you can see in that screenshot that merely says “Firefox Web Browser” can no longer be edited with Unity to add customizable widgets and information panels like with GNOME 2.0. The worst thing is that this massive user interface change is now the default.

Speaking of GNOME – a separate team of Linux programmers and developers who have been developing the default interface for Ubuntu and other Linux version for years – last month, GNOME version 3.0 was just released. Ars Technica’s article on it is filled with commentary on how closely it resembles a certain other operating system. Once again – here’s a screenshot of it! Does this look familiar to you!?!?

GNOME version 3.0: Click to enlarge (and weep)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are witnessing the death of the taskbar and the rise of the i-Interface. The rise of OSX’s marketshare has caused not only Microsoft to reel back with fright (expected) and duplicate the useless dock, but in a completely unexpected twist, even Linux – two separate developer groups, for that matter! – have released new versions of GUIs that look identical to OSX with the left-mounted dock turned on. GUIs based on textual information are dying out. The success of OSX has apparently whipped GUI programmers into a fear that users no longer want information, they want pretty pictures; and actual convenience be damned. I place the blame squarely on the OSX dock for Microsoft’s parody (yet with thankful improvements, as mentioned) in the Win7 taskbar and even worse, for the utter maiming of the most popular consumer version of Linux, and separately, the most popular standalone GUI for numerous versions of Linux.

I forsee the rise of three varieties of computer users. First, there is and at least for a few decades more will be the command line users. It goes without saying that there are still computer users who are more comfortable getting their work done on a black screen with a single glowing cursor and an encyclopedic knowledge of text commands. More power to them! Until now, there has only been a second category – people who use a GUI of any kind. This is now splitting into people who want “i-Interfaces” like the iPhone/Android “tap for program” pictograph GUI’s I’ve just shown you, and people like myself who will continue to use classic, useful, information-heavy interfaces.

My greatest fear for the future of computing? That Microsoft will continue down this troublesome path and make it harder and harder to get to a text-based, information-centric taskbar that puts control of my computer not just at my fingertips – anyone has that already – but in my line of sight. Who knows what Windows 8 and 9 might bear as options and default settings, but after this unfortunate Linux debacle, I’m inclined to think that it’s already too late for power users. Just look at how the Internet Explorer taskbar has morphed from text-based in IE6 to a bare sliver in IE9. That’s all well and good for a browser…but I don’t want an OS like that.

It was a pain to find computers still running IE6 and IE8 to make this screenshot! Click to enlarge.

I was really blessed to find a new job relatively quickly after I returned to America from the Middle East last September. Only three months of job searching, combined with supportive parents and friends (and their couches and extra beds) seems downright easy compared to the overall job market around America. I feel lucky that Madison, Wisconsin has such a relatively stable job market, and I like working with smart people in the academic circles of the public sector. It’s really a perfect match for me.

I made a short how-to video and posted it on youtube a few days ago. My department does consulting and computer management for 5-6 other departments in our building, and we had a lot of a particular type of system, the Dell Optiplex GX620 small form factor, left over from a bulk purchase order several years ago. Unfortunately, Dell didn’t design the system so well, so that the hard drive enclosure inside the system blocks the only exhaust vents in the entire case and heat generated by the CPU just sits inside the case and slowly fries all the components.

After noticing these fifty computers stacked up forlornly in a corner of an office, I asked to be given the assignment of figuring out something to do with them. I politely requested more motherboards from Dell’s support people (these systems had already gone through 2 or 3 each from previous fry-ups, but of course a replacement motherboard doesn’t resolve the underlying heat issue and they’d just burn up again after a few months), and after I casually reminded Dell about “how similar this seemed, in my mind” to the Optiplex capacitor debacle from several years ago, they were more than happy to send me 50 free motherboards. I didn’t even have to send the old ones back!

As my colleagues and I were determining what we could do now that we had these motherboards, we had a few brainstorming sessions. Could we drill through the case and add an extra fan and vent? Could we move the hard drive outside the case with a long data cable running back inside? That’s not even getting into my original, pre-contacting-Dell plan of actually physically removing the blown out capacitors (you’ll see those in the video below) and soldering new ones into place. We actually got as far as ordering 10 new capacitors for the systems, but discarded that idea after we discovered how insanely difficult it was to melt through Dell’s soldering connections. I practically burned a hole straight through one board before we decided to just try calling Dell. No one expected me to be able to convince them to send us a 4th set of motherboards but there was much jubilation when I was successful.

Anyway, my coworkers finally hit on the idea of just getting rid of the 3.5″ hard drive that was the cause of all this blockage and just tear out the 3.5″ floppy disk drive, hollow it out, and slide a little 2.5″ laptop hard drive into the shell. Our users haven’t used floppy drives in years (we hope) so this sweet fix would not only maintain the physical integrity and ‘look’ of the system, but also allow for good heat exhaust.

As I got started with the fixing process, I figured it might be nice to make a video documenting what I was doing, and how. Who knows; there’s a very good chance that our department wasn’t the only ones frustrated with a constantly-failing batch of a few dozen GX620′s, and they might be doing internet searches for possible fixes. I hope this video gives them some hope!

As for us, we’re going to be using these newly refurbished and upgraded systems as terminals for Citrix. They’ll be locked down so that users don’t try to put video editing software on them or something else which is going to heat them up. I have confidence that our trick will work so these computers won’t kill themselves again in three months, but I’d rather not test that. As terminal workstations, CPU usage shouldn’t go above 40-60% of maximum, therefore keeping heat way down. Just as a further test, though, I put Prime95 as a stress-tester on the first system I completed, and then ran the CPU at full 100% load for 3 straight weeks. No problems at all!

Heh, I meant for this article to be about 200 words or so as an intro to the video, but as usual, I got ahead of myself. I was going to put the video right below this blob of text, but I think I’ll put it on top instead. Thanks for reading, in any case! Sorry I don’t have any more adventures in the Arab world to write about…yet.

For anyone who’s read my blog for awhile, my Iraqi translator in Jordan, Wamidh, will be a familiar name. He was successfully relocated to America with his wife Hanan in early 2011 and my parents and I were looking forward to taking a trip to meet them – and to enjoy the warmer “southern” weather after surviving yet another Wisconsin winter. In my case, after so many months spent in the always-balmy Jordan, this winter seemed particularly unfriendly – although I’m sure it was just me.

Between visits, I took my first steps onto a tiny segment of the famous Appalachian Trail - sometime I'll do the whole thing!

I can only hope that everyone in the world can someday get a chance to experience real Arab hospitality. Although neither of my parents and certainly myself are strangers to it, it was humbling to once again be treated with such absolute kindness and friendliness that you can only get from Eastern cultures. We had brought some Amish Friendship Bread along too, and after we explained what “Amish” meant to the two Iraqis, they were overjoyed to be able to add it to their piles of sweets that they already had been planning to serve us.

Eating can become an all-day affair when confronted with an Arab banquet meal like the ones Hanan had prepared for us. A trip from our hotel to their apartment on our first night, which had been intended just for some coffee, turned into a 4 hour gathering with a beaming Hanan bringing us four or five platters of sweets and drinks out of the kitchen for us. My parents and I were happy to see that they were settling in well in their new country, and Hanan’s English was coming along quite well. In fact, I had to mentally stop myself from speaking in Arabic to the two of them several times throughout our visits, reminding myself that I was no longer a stranger on their side of the world, but it was the other way around and I needed to be helping them gain more and more experience and immersion in the peculiar American way of speaking.

Wamidh had to chuckle as he told us of his experiences understanding the “southern” accent. Throughout his work with EGT and his hundreds of hours working with me as my translator, he’d become used to a midwestern dialect, or an east coast accent like what some of our other coworkers had. The drawl or twang of Virginians was like starting over again, and he admitted having to ask several people to repeat themselves when he first arrived.

I was interested to notice that Hanan no longer wore her hijab hair covering anymore, something which I had been telling my parents before we arrived I was sure wasn’t going to change. When I commented on it, and being able to see her hair, she told me with quiet determination that she wanted Americans to feel comfortable around her and want to talk with her, and learn more about her. Someday I might wear the hijab again, she told me. But first, I want others to learn about the “real Hanan.” She felt – probably with good reason – that other women in the neighborhood might be shy or unlikely to engage her in conversation if she was dressed in more stereotypical Muslim women garb, and she was willing and determined to not let that happen by being proactive with a large personal and religious choice like this.

For our final dinner with our friends, Hanan pulled out all the stops and made a meal so large that it took us almost 7 straight ours of eating and chatting to work our way through all the courses she had made. She sat across the table from my mother and jokingly wagged her finger at all of us if we ever paused for longer than a minute in our quest to reach the bottom of our bowls. “Eat…you need to be eating more!” she would cluck at us. We asked Wamidh how on earth he ever managed to ever leave the table while married to such a dynamic chef. “I don’t give her a chance to refill my plate when I’m finished!” he exclaimed with a serene smile. “I just grab my plate and run to put it in the sink before she can!” By the time we left, filled with food and delicious Turkish coffee, my mother commented that we could probably be rolled up the interstate back to Wisconsin like little barrels. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so full in my life.

Goal: to eat our way to the bottom of all those bowls and pans!

Besides our visits, we had time for a few other things while in Roanoke. The city had a thriving little farmer’s market on Saturday morning, similar in style to Madison’s, and we bought some local pottery, baked goods, and heard some local lore. I can’t speak for my parents, but like Wamidh, I found myself wishing that I had a small box that would generate small subtitles to help me understand what the old Virginian farmers were saying.

We drove up to Roanoke’s Mill Mountain to see the local treasure, a huge metal frame star that was built several decades ago to commemorate the city’s nickname, the “Star City of the South.” The views of the surrounding mountains north of the city were impressive on the clear Sunday morning, and we could see little plumes of stone being thrown high into the air many miles away, in what must have been some West Virginian coal mines. There’s a website that utilizes a small camera that they mounted on the star; it takes a little low-res snapshot every 15 seconds of the observation deck below.

In order to prove that we were indeed there! (I'm looking at the starcam website on my phone, as my parents watch me)

I think our favorite non-Arab part of our trip was visiting the Mill Mountain Zoo, another attraction only a few hundred meters away from the star. The little zoo was affordably priced and had a good selection of animals to view, and a well-trained staff of young keepers that all looked around college age and had a friendly relationship with their four-legged charges, many of whom would literally do a happy dance of joy at the sight of the staff’s green polo shirts. Although it would have been easy to see the entire park from end to end in less than hour, we stayed closer to 3, chatting with the keepers and watching the animals get fed.

A mere couple weeks later, I joined the Wisconsin 4-H Extension office as a chaperone on my first visit to NASA’s Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I have dozens of fond memories from my own childhood in 4-H. I’ve done everything from small county-level trips to Chicago and around northern Wisconsin, to state-authorized trips to Washington D.C. and New York. As far as I know, the Space Camp trip must have been added sometime after I had already graduated from the organization, otherwise I surely would have gone.

Although my only other chaperoning experience was several years ago for the 4-H show choir in Milwaukee, I enjoyed it and thought a shorter, but much more distant trip might be a lot of fun. Interestingly enough, several other chaperones had even been chaperones on my own childhood trips, which they enjoyed pointing out to my young charges.

My group, “Casper” – so named after the Apollo 14 command module – was led by a big friendly guy from Florida named Mark, or “Ox” as he was known by the Space Camp group. We had a fun three days wandering around the museums and exhibits of the Space Camp grounds, building our own model rockets – something which might be completely new and exciting to other groups of kids, but I was proud when in response to Ox’s question of ‘has anyone built a model rocket before?’ all but one hand went up into the air. 4-Her’s are smart kids!

One of the first things we did was get divided into our “mission roles” – probably one of the most famous parts of Space Camp, made so by the 1986 movie of the same name. Although we didn’t get blasted up into space by an insane anthropomorphic robot, we were divided into three teams – one for Mission Control, one for the space station, and one for the shuttle control team. Although my team of mission control kids didn’t get the cool orange (and poorly-fitting) jumpsuits like the other two groups did, we did get to stare at computer screens a lot! Almost like real life for one person on their team…

There weren't enough kids for a full team, so Ox had me playing both the Mission Scientist and the Propulsion Officer at the same time: having two scripts to have to pay close attention to was tough!

Besides the full size exhibits of historical rockets and engines, there were the rides, which of course I think the kids might have enjoyed even more. Everyone had heard of the moon jump, which simulates the 1/6th gravity conditions of the moon, and the space shot, and the G-Force, but then there was also the Multi Axis Spinner, which was created solely to screw with astronauts as kind of an engineer’s prank at NASA.

Okay, fine, its original purpose was to help train Apollo astronauts what to do in case their command modules started to uncontrollably spin about during the re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Since those old-style command modules only had their incredibly heat resistive layers on one side, and required precise angular placement, astronauts in one of these uncontrolled spins would have had only minutes to figure out how to right themselves again. We were dealing with a “modified” one, obviously – an actual trainer would have also had a control stick in front of me, and I would have been placed into it with the purpose of seeing how long it took me to stop the rotations. We were told that Apollo astronauts were put into this thing for hours at a time to make sure they were completely immune to sickness caused by the violent movements. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

I was very pleased with how well behaved both the small group of kids in my Casper group were, and the boys in our large, barracks-style sleeping room both were. Although I never worried about not enjoying the trip and my time as a chaperone, I came in expecting to have to be shushing kids all the time, especially when it was supposed to be sleeping time (the Space Camp administrators and Ox enforced strict rules for all attendees; kids were sent to bed at 9:30 and roused at 6:30 or so, without exception) but I was pleased to be wrong. Either the kids were just really well behaved, or exhausted each night, or they were secretly using electronic games under their sleeping bags – a problem that didn’t exist back when when I went to 4-H camp in the Wisconsin Dells area! (Game Boys existed, but they certainly didn’t have any sort of backlight on them).

Team Casper, posing in front of the Apollo 14 "Casper" command module

I had a lot of fun on both trips, and I can’t wait to see both Wamidh and Hanan and Space Camp again sometime soon, I hope!

During February 26th's march, there were reports of as many as 100,000 people jammed onto the square, marching around the capitol like it was Jericho

What does it look like to have 100,000 people chanting and circling around a state capitol building? When it’s Wisconsin’s capitol, it looks a lot like a national protest against the troop surge in Washington D.C. Sure, our square is smaller than theirs, but it sure was heartening to see so many thousands of people from all different walks of life out on the square, marching with printed signs, unique hand-written signs, flags, and bullhorns as we braved the massive snowflakes that were rapidly filling up the square and causing us all to slide up and down the road. My friends and I briefly made a sliding competition out of it, skating wildly through the protesters on grayish slush that was being pummeled by new feet every few seconds.

We saw union dogs (with adorable cardboard sandwich board signs on them) and a band of roving vuvuezela marchers. We saw the Fox News truck and laughed at it. There apparently has been thousands and thousands of dollars donated to Ian’s Pizza (a Madison institution) from all 50 states and over 60 nations around the world, and so I waited in line to get a delicious slice of spicy cheesesteak pizza, gratis thanks to a donor that could live in New Hampshire, Florida, Antarctica, or even Jordan (I hope it was the latter). There was another line for coffee as well, but I was set for now.

Michaelangelo's had this great sign in front of their little table at the capitol (click to embiggen)

We stopped by the Irish bar, Brocach on the square, and everyone in there was linking arms, singing “Solidarity Forever,” the union song, and shouting “Recall Walker” and “Kill the Bill.” The only time I’ve seen this much camaraderie in Wisconsin before is before, during, or after a football game, but it brings joy to my heart that it’s social justice and politics that are doing it this time. I thought that Wisconsin as a state had signed its progressive death knell in November of 2010 when the GOP took over in droves, but seeing all of these union members, public employees, students (Midwesterners and Coasties alike!) and seniors all out to put an end to this bill is incredible. I hope that regardless of how this turns out, that Wisconsin never forgets that we are a progressive, activist state, even if that has lain dormant since the Vietnam days, and we never let Republicans take our great state away from us again as they’re attempting to now, at this very moment as I’m typing these words, behind closed, locked doors in our closed, locked capitol.

A closed and locked capitol? How can this be? Aren’t law-abiding, peaceful taxpayers allowed to access “The People’s House” at all times, whenever they want? Yes! Or at least, that’s how it’s always been in our state. Walker has some new ideas. He’s obviously not very pleased by the fact that we’ve undermined a bill that he assumed he could ramrod through in 4 business days (Debuted on February 11th, was hoping for a vote to pass by February 17th). He doesn’t like that we know all about his connection to the billionaire Koch Bros; professional corporate dictators. He doesn’t like that every day the capitol building is surrounded by usually thousands, at least hundreds of activists at all times. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t like being booed out of Madison restaurants and refused service – that last one is just hearsay from a friend of a friend who works at a restaurant that Walker and his wife apparently tried to visit a few weeks ago. They told him to get out.

This statue of Liberty (or Democracy, or whomever) stands at the corner of the square facing State St. Over the past three weeks she's worn blindfolds, sad faces, and even Anonymous' Guy Fawkes masks

So what’s a frustrated failure of a new GOP governor to do? Easy! Violate Wisconsin constitutional law and prevent citizens from accessing the capitol in order to make the TV viewers think that during your speech there are no protesters around! I guess they gave up and went home, you can picture him chuckling to Bill O’RLY. Yes, as of Sunday, the governor started bringing in busloads of rural Wisconsin’s village police officers to seal off the capitol, and emptied out all but 60-100 of the protesters in the guise of “we need to clean the capitol [because you hippies smell of freedom and democracy]” (emphasis added). Protesters who left were told that they could re-enter later, but were barred when they returned. This has been going on for the past three days now.

Many of us believe that the reason behind the clear-out was for Walker’s televised budget announcement from the capitol building yesterday. He didn’t want all of the noise that angry activists tend to generate to come with him on the camera, so he illegally has barred entry to peaceful activists. Lawyer groups in Wisconsin have asked for a restraining order to be put on the executive branch to prevent the police from cutting Capitol access, but one of Walker’s mouthpieces has said, “we’re in complete compliance with the law!” and has continued to operate on a 1-out-1-in idea. The line to get into the capitol stretches around the entire square. I’ve looked up the facts; the occupant capacity of the Wisconsin capitol is 9,000 people. There’s barely 100 in now, if that. Obviously, Walker might (briefly) succeed in getting Fox News watchers to believe that the relative quiet during his speech is because we now support him, but anyone who follows real news (or reads the blogs of activists, like this one!) will know that this is far, far from the truth.

Other amusing videos include this one, From Fox News and Bill O’RLY, overtly insinuating (falsely) that protests and personal confrontations here in Madison have been violent. Yes Bill, and we’re still waiting for that shipment of palm trees in the background to arrive, too. Apparently, Fox got footage of a union rally in California, played it as Bill talked about Wisconsin, and then put the bland subtitle of “union protest” under it. And this is a network that calls itself “Fair and Balanced.” Just remembering that Obama allowed this cretin to interview him before the Super Bowl fills me with disgust. Obama and anyone with a brain should not be justifying Fox’s existence; it should be treated with the same level of dignity and respect as is given to the National Enquirer.

See if you can spot the four separate squadrons of police officers in this picture. Now multiple this by 8 to get the full number in the "outer ring" around the capitol

I walked around the capitol after work yesterday, had a slice of pizza, and watched the police watch the protesters. There’s so many of them now, compared to what there were a few weeks ago. Around the square itself there are groups of 2 or 3 every few meters, all clad in yellow jackets. Around the capitol building itself it’s even tighter. I asked some of the Dane county troopers in the outer ring “are these Madison police working with you?” They chuckled dryly and told me that Walker was bringing them in from everywhere and that the whole thing was a giant cock-up (yes, one of them actually said cock-up). “They’re all from in-state though, right?” I confirmed. “He doesn’t have the ability to request out-of-state troopers, right?” They grinned and one said, “Heck no. He barely has the authority to tell Wisconsin cops what to do.” OH SNAP GOVERNOR.

So where does this leave us? The “Fab 14,” the fourteen Democratic senators who fled the state a week ago to avoid creating a quorum in the Senate and therefore preventing the doomed vote from occurring in the Republican-controlled senate, are still “on the run” even though Walker has been sending troopers and cops to hunt for them wherever he has authority. The Democratic assembly is fighting another doomed battle by trying to weigh down the bill with amendments. Walker has cut requirements for corporations to need to recycle (what?) and also ordered that any new wind turbine generators must be over 1,800 feet tall (effectively creating massive new barriers to entry for clean-energy startup companies, since turbines are usually built at 400-500 feet for cost reasons). We’d like to point out that Walker’s corporate leash-holders do not own wind-turbine companies, and therefore are quite interested in making sure that customers will be forced to continue to use fossil fuels. Watch this space for more information when Walker rolls out inevitable tax hikes for companies that create solar power panels, as well.

Most importantly, if you are a Wisconsinite, vote in the April 5th supreme court election. We need to get progressives back in our government and therefore electing the liberal frontrunner JoAnne Kloppenburg to our highest court is imperative. The republicans currently control the Wisconsin court, 4-3. Obviously, if we can gain JoAnne to our side in April, the balance will swing 3-4 to the Democrats’ favor. This will make a judicial decision on the legality of the executive branch’s decision to close off the capitol to the public likely an important win to begin putting stops to the train wreck that is Walker’s brief term in office.

This could be the most important election in Wisconsin’s history. After failing to stand up for humanity and civil rights in the devastating election of November 2010, this could be our chance to get back on the right path again. Indeed, this might be Wisconsin’s last chance to save itself.

P.S. Please be one of the chain-letter sending thousands who support the Fab 14, too. Signing this simple letter for MoveOn will hopefully continue to galvanize their resolve to stand up to Walker on Wisconsin’s behalf even as they’re forced to be separated from their friends and families.