I’ve made no secret of the fact that I really love Windows 7. I’ve almost always been a Microsoft fan; they’ve always just given me the cleanest, most intuitive interfaces out there that show me the information that I need, without compromise. Sure I could get more functionality out of Linux if I cared to dive in deep into the command line, or I could get things more simple with OSX if I wanted to. But I don’t. I like Windows. I like a lot of information on my screen at once, and having it only a glance away.

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.

Continue reading this post…

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.

It’s been a good month for traveling to new places. A year ago if I’d written that here, it would meant that I was biking, hiking, or jetting off to new exotic lands where they put a lot of cumin on the falafel (like the Palestinians in Nazareth). This year it means two separate trips down to the American South, first to Virginia at the beginning of the month, and just this past weekend to Alabama.

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.

Continue reading this post…

After two years of often mind-meltingly hot weather in the Middle East, I never knew how much I could miss leaping into almost-frozen water through a large hole cut through 2 foot thick ice. The Special Olympics Polar Plunge has more or less become an annual tradition for my family, with me starting it back in 2007, my little brother Josh joining me in 2008, and then him taking over in 2009 and 2010 with his own team. It takes a special kind of person to do this jump, which some people might aptly define as “absolutely nuts” or “better you than me, you lunatic.”

Ready for freezing with plastic weaponry for all

In the video above, some interesting things of note are:

• How much farther away from the ice-cut hole the spectators are kept. Is this for safety reasons, or because Special Olympics has acquired a lucrative rights deal for specific corporations to do the video and photo work, and allowing family and friends to do the same (or *cough* better *cough*) would potentially damage this contract?
• Not to complain, because I know she’s working hard, but I really wish that the announcer woman doing the countdown would have stuck to the basics for our jump. She had been saying “3…2…1…Pluuuuuunnge!” for the past hour of us being there waiting, so that’s what we were going to time jump-with-synchronized-punch for. Instead, she mutters something into the microphone along the lines of “3…2…1…*muttermutter* sensei!” Yes, we get it…sensei…we’re ninjas…we know what you were trying to do, but it wasn’t appreciated. This completely threw all of us off and we sprang into the water not with the grace of ferocious deadly ninjas but rather with the comedic value of a bunch of young adults falling into cold water.
• I obviously won a bet with Josh about staying in the water. “I’ve been in the desert for so long, I’ll need to stay in the water extra long to make up for the years I’ve been gone,” I boasted. “You can’t,” he scoffed back. “Your body will make you get out; you won’t be able to help it.” Ha! I said to myself – I’ll prove him wrong! So when I say to my buddy Collin while we’re still in the water “This is just like the Middle East,” what I’m really saying is “In your face, little brother!”
• How quickly most of the girls separate themselves from the men as we’re exiting the water – by the time Collin and I are high-fiving after getting out, four of the five women are practically up the hill in the hot tub by that point. Was it even colder after getting out of the water and into the windy air? Come to think of it, I didn’t notice
• I apologize that some of our jumpers aren’t very well shown off in the video. The Special Olympics people keep so many support, security, and safety personnel standing around the pool that it’s a wonder that anyone is able to get any pictures of anything at all. I chuckle whenever I hear my dad’s voice behind the camcorder muttering “Move your butt!” to the oblivious guy standing right in his line of sight as we line up on the plank. Even better is that I timed the music to it. Move your butt! Hey!

As always, thank you to our donors! As I mention in the video, all nine of us combined raised a whopping $1,888 this year for the Special Olympics. We’re already planning for what the Ninjas might do for 2012! (Possibly front flips)

It seems that when civil unrest hits, it goes global. It was only a little over a week ago that I was writing with admiration about the protests in Egypt that eventually ousted the much-vilified Mubarak, and then, days after he fled the city (or country?) the unrest has spread to the dictatorial countries like Libya, Algeria, and even to some extents Syria, Iran, and probably Saudi (although good luck getting any news out of those last two).

One of my favorite signs: "Walker is a Vikings fan" Yeah Walker, you heard what the sign said!

On a more local level, Wisconsin has suddenly gone activist out of nowhere. National news is following the stories of the rebellion against Scott Walker, the new Republican governor of Wisconsin, and his controversial ideas about how he claims he wants to bring Wisconsin’s budget under control. How does he want to do this? Attack the public sector, i.e. the schools, universities, and everyone that those sectors employ. How? With massive hikes in what they pay for their benefits and pensions. What else does he want to do? Utterly cripple the union system that attempts to defend workers against just this sort of abuse of power. Why? Because unions “take too long and Wisconsin has run out of money now.” He claims that if he doesn’t neuter the unions, they’ll drag out discussions and arguments about how to best take action in their own interests for 15 months, “time Wisconsin just doesn’t have.”

I won’t take up your precious time explaining the hard facts of the matter, when many national news articles have done it already. Nor do I need to go into just how loud and how angry the crowds of thousands and thousands of union members, students, and regular people have been as they flood into the capitol to protest the “Budget Repair Bill,” that’s been done by several different sources. However, I’ll just tell things from my point of view.

This guy is such a hippie he wore a bike helmet to a protest. He's probably a vegan, too.

On February 15th, the first major protests started occurring, starting at about 9 or 10 in the morning. I took a vacation day and biked to the capitol, enjoying the somewhat warmer weather and being back on a bike again after 3 months away from it (the bike in question was less pleased to be ridden after two years of being packed into a storage shed while its owner was off gallivanting in Jordan and creaked angrily at me. Note to self: clean and lubricate bicycle). Even three blocks away from the capitol on a Tuesday morning, the traffic was getting stalled and a cop was barking curt orders at cars that were trying to navigate and weave about him. As I drew closer to the intersection, he leveled a meaty hand at me and bawled “you on the bike. Hold it right there.” Sometimes I miss the ever-present Jordanian cops in Amman. You didn’t want to cross them, certainly, but they were always amazed and amused to see bikers and were pleased to chat with you for as long as you wanted (this was probably because there are far too many officers in Jordan; one of the few jobs that native Jordanians can easily get). Madison cops, on the other hand, aren’t quite so overjoyed with bikers.

I didn’t have a sign or anything with me, but a union member was handing out signs as quickly as he could lay his gloved hands on them from a pile by his feet. He pressed one into my hands with a quick smile as I passed him on the sidewalk, a large white piece of heavy poster with “Wisconsin values Democracy at Work” printed on it in marker. The press of people on the sidewalk got too heavy to move at this point, and as we drew closer to the mouth of the State St intersection – the heart of the protest – I could make out the familiar sound of megaphones, stamping of feet, and sound of the rhythmic chants. Just like at a football game, when you have a crowd as large as the one we were quickly amassing, you can never seem to pull off a completely unified chant. It always ends up rolling across you like waves pounding along a beach; even if you manage to get everyone saying the same chant (good luck) you’ll still have at least a second or two of dissonance if you have a huge crowd. And we did. even half an hour before the protest was supposed to start. It was amazing.

The first day of Capitol protests saw a great turnout

By the time I’d been in the milling, chatting, chanting crowd for an hour, I’d manage to slowly work my way up to the railings and fences around the capitol building itself (not through the human masses shoulder-to-shoulder on the concrete paths, but by shortcutting through the snow-covered lawn instead). I pulled myself up onto the stone railing and finally was able to see just how many people had filled the sidewalks, the snowdrifts, and the streets around the capitol. Official estimates put Tuesday’s crowd at around 15,000-20,000 and I definitely agree with them. I had a perfect view as union-supporting church leaders, veterans, teachers, and healthcare professionals gave short speeches to the throng from a podium a dozen meters away from me, and was almost blasted off of my perch by the strong winter winds and the huge speakers blaring the anthem, “We’re Not Gonna Take it Anymore.”

Continue reading this post…