So I am home today due to a doctor visit for little Aisling. Don’t worry she’ll be alright. I am talking to the boys about history and since we are unschooling we sort of jump around a bit and this morning’s lesson came about because I am diggin’ on some Tim Barry. “Gabriel’s Prosser” came up and prompted a short discussion about slavery, the US, and the Civil War. It was a short lesson but that’s what I love about unschooling everything is curriculum!
Tim Barry – “Prosser’s Gabriel” from TCSG on Vimeo.
Gabriel Prosser
Tim Barry
Does anyone know the name Gabriel Prosser?
My conscience says he’s the one that history missed.
A blacksmith by trade up at Brookfield Plantation,
A Henrico County slave born of owner Thomas.
If you listen closely you’ll hear the words perfect,
The Caribbean uprising caught fire in this land.
Up and down the James River, Pamunky and Appomattox,
Tobacco soil gone bad afforded movement for the blacks.
Nine years before, down in Santo Domingo,
Slaves refused to submit and took the right of all men.
Virginia whites got nervous and hired more militias,
As blacks, inspired, plotted and passed on their plans.
Mister Prosser’s Gabriel was smart as he was strong,
A head of keloid scars and a mind of knowing right and wrong.
Voted general at twenty-four in the year of eighteen-hundred,
Haunted by the hymns and wailing of his fellow slaves.
Now does anyone know the name Gabriel Prosser?
My conscience says he’s the one that history missed.
A blacksmith by trade up at Brookfield Plantation,
A Henrico County slave born of owner Thomas.
It was on an August night just North of Richmond, Virginia,
Gabriel’s men gathered as their owners they slept.
Some would burn city streets to attract residents and masters,
While others took the capital and freed the convicts.
Well the whites they knew nothing, never seen what could hit ‘em,
Nothing like this could happen to their carefree black men.
But think about freedom, now think about slavery.
Blacks armed themselves with muskets and homemade bayonets.
With a white flag on the Capital, all blacks they would rise.
Whites spared, would all lose an arm.
You’re a coward if you own men for profit and greed,
You’re the coward of all and for all you must bleed.
Now does anyone know the name Gabriel Prosser?
My conscience says he’s the one that history missed.
A blacksmith by trade up at Brookfield Plantation,
A Henrico County slave born of owner Thomas.
Pharaoh and Tom ratted out Gabriel Prosser,
Their owner was Mosby, a neighbor of him.
They say the sky seemed seized with rain and lightning,
On the night of August thirtieth one couldn’t see nor stand.
The militias let loose to hunt Gabriel Prosser,
Who took to the swamps as they imprisoned his men.
Flagged a boat whose captain was a Methodist preacher,
But a traitor slave turned him in in the end.
They hung Gabriel down at Broad and 15th Street,
Lord he would not give a word up on his men.
But he took that noose and he took it with honor,
He’s buried beneath a lot of parked cars, now, and pavement.
There’s no monument, there’s no stone here to see him,
Just black asphalt planked by high-rise hospital chains.
If I had it my way we’d see memorials climbin’,
To a true and honest hero, Prosser’s Gabriel.
Now does anyone know the name Gabriel Prosser?
My conscience says he’s the one that history missed.
A blacksmith by trade up at Brookfield Plantation,
A Henrico County slave born of owner Thomas.
UPDATE: I think we’ll use the Dropkick Murphys “Fields of Athenry” one day soon and talk about some Irish history. I need to develop a musical history curriculum.
GEEK ALERT: This article is about nerd stuff!
A good friend of mine has, for a long time, stated “free software is only free if your time has no value.” I was reminded of this today while reading reviews for commercial implementations of Wine (this is a geek piece so if you don’t know what something is follow the link). In the comments on these pieces the usual suspects were in attendance: “Why pay for something you can get for free”, “They are taking mind-share away from Wine so they suck”, “You should never run anything that’s not completely Free”, “Running windows software on Linux is stupid” and so on and so forth. But one comment caught my eye. It was in reference to Bordeaux, which is a commercial implementation of Wine that runs about 20.00 USD. I am paraphrasing but the gist of the comment was “It’s only $20.00 and the time I would spend configuring wine is worth a lot more than that to me so it’s an easy decision.” I completely agree with the commenter on this point. My time is valuable and if you offer me something at a price point that makes me realize that the time to do it for free is more valuable I’lll buy it.
This, of course, means I am not an OSS purist but then again I never claimed to be one in the first place. I take the Linux Torvalds view on that little piece of OSS piety: “anybody who tells me I can’t use a program because it’s not open source, go suck on rms (Richard M. Stallman). I’m not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that’s my choice, dammit.” I use Ubuntu on my desktops and laptops for a majority of the things I do because it’s simply more stable, less prone to malware, and faster. Everyone else’s mileage may vary. The only time I even try to get other people to use Linux is when they need a server or they call me way too often for tech support. I figure if I am their line of support then they need to be running what I know how to support. Outside of that I couldn’t care less what my friends run on their systems. I will admit to feeling mildly superior to those running windows but that could merely be an artifact of me feeling mildly superior to most of humanity most of the time. But I digress…
Back to the point at hand. My company is looking at replacing an aging hardware/network monitoring system and the first place we looked, being a Linux based company, was the OSS solutions. All of the solutions that are completely free could do what we want, eventually, if we hacked it, and maintained it, and spent countless hours tweaking it and therein lies the rub. While the decision is not final it looks like we have chosen and OSS solution with a commercial/enterprise edition, for which we will pay, to get all the features and the workflow that we need. The upfront cost will be close to 40,000 USD and dropping to half of that the following years. While the difference between 40k and free seems like a lot, especially for a small company like ours, the fact of the matter is that it would cost well more than 40k a year to take a fully OSS monitoring system and make it do what we need it to do. The initial cost of development coupled with the cost of maintaining the solution over years is extremely high. I would have loved to have found a system that does what we need it to do and is fully OSS but it didn’t exist.
This is a problem with the OSS community as a whole. I see articles every week opining on things whether there is too much choice available in Linux or whether the KDE vs Gnome wars are keeping Linux off the desktop and so on ad nauseum. At some point those debates may actually be on point but right now they aren’t. For the average used Windows is still the easiest choice and until the folks that do the coding realize that then OSS will remain an anemic sibling to Windows. Ubuntu works, out of the box, on every system I have dropped in on the past five years. It boots, it runs, and on a wired connection it hits the intertubes without a hitch however my desktop distro of choice doesn’t let me play MP3s without having to either search for the packages to support it or manually adding some GStreamer codec pack and honestly that’s a complete deal-breaker for the average user. Furthermore there is absolutely no functionality for hardware profiles like there is in Windows. You want to see frustration in a geek do the following: Hand him a laptop with the latest Ubuntu, a docking station with two monitors attached, and ask him to setup a workspace. Come back two hours later and ask him to do a presentation on the overhead monitor in the the conference room. Hint: On Windows you plug the laptop into the docking station, configure the monitors, un-dock it, plug in the projector and configure it and never have to do it again. On our venerable OSS OS you have to configure each of these things each time you use it. And don’t get me started on trying to run three monitors. I am nearing the rant phase at this point so I will wrap this up. For anyone who has cure suggestions to cure my hardware profile woes: I don’t want a package like whereami that will copy Xorg configurations into place based on some network/arbitrary hardware detection script that I have to write by hand. If I wanted to deal with that I’d code it myself. I want standard things to work. I have it down to a science and the scenario described above doesn’t much phase me however the average user isn’t me.
The point to this whole article is that I can do everything with OSS that I can do with closed source software (I am referring to myself and my job functions not some specialty software package required for a job a I don’t do and never will) but it’s simply not worth my time in many cases. I even run a VirtualBox VM so I can use Visio because the OSS alternatives suck. If someone coded a working display profiler that would save hardware profiles like Windows does, and has for years and years, and charged 20 or so bucks for it they’d get my money. Sure I can write a completely free thing that kind of does the same thing and would work for just me but it’s frankly not worth my time. Just like it’s not worth my time to learn a new set of scripts, like whereami, to accomplish something so simple that Windows users can do it without even clicking a damn button! Linux isn’t making inroads in the desktop arena because it can’t compete with the basic feature set available in the competition. I am not referring to Visio or anything else software package related, that’s another rant completely, I am referring to things Windows can do out-of-the-box with nothing else even installed that no Linux distribution can do. Until that’s fixed the Linux desktop will be relegated to nerds like me. I love Linux and I will never stop running it but I am not going to kid myself and say it’s a viable alternative for the every day user because it’s just not. And don’t get me started on the state of e-mail clients in the OSS world…
13
Sep
I Haven’t done much commenting on the current US political miasma because even if the Dems suffer the November bloodbath the media is predicting the current Republican party isn’t any better so there hasn’t been much to say about this either way. However there are a couple of non-government semi-political things I want to get my thoughts out on…
Some group is planning to build an Islamic center, that includes a mosque, on a site mere blocks from Ground Zero in a building that was, in fact, damaged during the 9/11 attacks. I am wholly opposed to this being built. I highly approve the union workers who have said they won’t build it, I approve of a lot of the folks speaking out against it. I think that building any Islamic center, of any sort, on that site is a show of complete disrespect for the pain this nation endured on that horrific day. I don’t care if the center is built by forward thinking imams or liberal Muslims it is what it is and a majority of people in this country would really like them to stop pushing the issue. If you ignore the fact the folks who want to build the mosque may not have enough of a stake in the property to do so and ignore that they have been involved in shady real estate deals before it looks like this could go ahead and that is painful for me to think about. However with all that said if the government tried to stop them by passing laws or underhanded tricks I would stand shoulder to shoulder with the Muslims and draw a bead on the government for violating their freedom of religion. I hate the fact they want to build this center where they want to build it but the fact is that if they have all their ducks in a row, and it looks like they might not, then they have every right to do so and all I and others who feel like me can do is plead with them not to do it. The government has no right to step in here and should they choose to do so the people should rise up against the government and resist. In short: Please don’t build it there but if the government tells you that you can’t give me a call and you’ll have my hands for your defense.
On that same front some pastor, and I use that term loosely, down in Florida is threatening to burn Qurans unless the imam involved in building this center changes its location. And again we have much the same situation. I am ashamed that this pastor claims to follow the same God I follow. I am horrified by his lack of understanding of scriptures that command us to turn the other cheek, to do good to those that harm us, pray for those that hate us, love our enemies and so many more that completely say to do the opposite of what this so called pastor is doing. This man in Florida is a total fool and I don’t mind saying it. His congregation should rise up and tell him that he’s insane. If we look to Paul’s example he preached to non-believers using their literature as well as their God’s in his “sermons” and this pastor is doing nothing more than trying to incite hatred on both sides of the issue. It appears, if you believe the hype, that his actions here on US soil may even endanger our troops overseas and that alone should be enough for a sane person to stay their hand. This man is obviously not sane and that’s easily seen by his ties to the Westboro Baptist church, who are also threatening to burn Qurans but considering no-one really takes them seriously I don’t know how much their threat endangers anyone. However the situation is the same as above in that if the government passed laws forbidding this pastor to carry out his threats or acted against the laws we have in place and tried to stop him from doing so I would defend him until the last cinder of the Quran had gone out and would do so with my life.
That’s about it for the current quasi-political/pseudo-religious goings on in the US at the moment. I wish they would all just friggin’ stop but, much like our current political miasma, there are idiots and morons everywhere you look and it ain’t getting any better. So instead of concentrating on the idiocy being foisted on us why not just watch the videos I took at a recent concert: http://www.youtube.com/user/mobilersv
7
Sep
I spent today thinking it was Monday. This means the project I agreed to present on Thursday really only has one day for me to be ready. This makes me less than happy on a couple of levels but not nearly enough to abate the excitement left over from last Thursday. I have two posts on 9B out of it and a ton if video! And to top it off some great plans for this coming weekend. I wish I wasn’t posting from my phone so I could toss you some video love but woe and alas you will have to wait for that.
We started school today but there’s not a lot to report. The clan is going to take time to get used to being able to learn and explore their freedom. I am excited about the process and think that soon I will be posting a lot of “check out how cool my kid is” posts.
I am optimistic about everything at the moment and for no good reason. It’s actually kind of neat.
