You're Damn Right I Will, Takahashi-sensei

Francis Takahashi-sensei is the chief instructor at my aikido dojo. A physically imposing yet charmingly grandfatherly figure, he's one of the kindest and most patient men I've ever met. He has infinite patience for newcomers -- if he didn't, I'd never have lasted there -- and he sets an inspiring example. Despite advancing age and a couple of nearly crippling injuries, he's never given up. He's found ways -- made ways -- to continue to lead and teach, and to practice and develop his own art. Thanks to his example, I've always come back to aikido despite my own injuries. If Francis can do it, I can do it.

Today, after practice, I left the dojo and started to drive home -- and thought a little, and turned around and went back. When I got there, Francis was just leaving the building. He held the door for me.

"Did you forget something?" he asked.

"Not exactly," I said. I took off my sunglasses. Almost without choking up, I said, "I've had a couple of reminders lately that you should tell the people in your life who are important to you how much they mean to you before you lose the opportunity."

He picked up on my demeanor before my words, and before I could finish the sentence, he'd already dropped his bag and was giving me a big hug.

"So," I continued, "just in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I wanted to say thank you."

"You're always welcome," he said. "You're always welcome."

That was about it. I started to walk back to my car; he picked up his bag and shuffled on toward his. Then he stopped and called to me.

"If that bus hits you," he said, "hit 'em back."

Lord of the Flies

I wasn't at the absolute bottom of the social ladder when I was in middle school, but I was close. The kid at the bottom, just a rung or two below me, was named Paul Rooney. Paul was a lanky, goofy-looking kid, with dark curly hair and a complete inability to successfully resist the horrors inflicted on him daily by his monstrous peers.

I was among the worst of these monsters, because I was supposedly his friend. When it was convenient, when I needed a friend, I was friendly with him. But I was as nasty to him as anyone else when it meant keeping him down -- you know, so he wouldn't climb past me. So I'd be nice to him one minute -- usually when nobody was looking -- and vicious the next. Paul was bullied, teased, picked on, and continually betrayed.

Thanks in no small part to false friends like me, Paul was utterly bewildered by his world, perfectly conscious of the injustices he faced but unable to rectify them. He tried, it was just that nothing worked. He'd fight back against the bullies, but he was pathetically ineffectual; they brushed him aside with a dark laugh and punched harder. He knew better than to go to the school authorities; we'd have just teased him that much worse for showing weakness, and anyway they might as well have been stone giants for all the help they'd offer a kid like him. Why should they bother? It was just kids picking on each other -- kids do that. They had real problems to worry about, like keeping the football field green.

From what little I saw, his parents were worse. I vividly remember going to Paul's house for his birthday party one year. About half a dozen of us showed up, and we mainly sat around playing his Atari. Paul left the room; we kept playing. In the next room, Paul's dad told him sternly to go back into the den and hang out with us. "Your friends are here!" his dad growled, and Paul replied in high-pitched anguish, more than loud enough for us to hear, "They're not my friends! They're not here for me! They're only here to play my video games!" The thing is, he was right. I think we were making fun of him.

The next year, Paul's parents did absolutely the worst thing, the stupidest possible thing anybody could do to a kid like that: they sent him to a military school. (Admiral Farragut Academy, if you want to know.) I imagine that his dad thought Paul just needed some discipline, or something. Possibly, they thought the environment would be better there, that kids would be protected from teasing. Or they thought it would toughen him up. Who knows.

We didn't hear anything about Paul for a year. I went away that summer to visit my dad and stepmother in North Carolina, and when I came back, there was a newspaper article waiting for me.

Paul Rooney had had enough at last. He shot his dad, his mom, and his younger brother with his dad's revolver. They all died. (Only Paul's younger sister, who was spending the night with relatives, was unharmed.) Then he drove the family van across the causeway from St. Petersburg to Tampa, pulled over, and shot himself in the head.

He left a note in the van. The note read, simply, "I'm sorry."

That was it. That was the end of Paul's torment.

The newspaper called it a suicide. We never talked about it, but we all knew that wasn't the truth. The truth was, we had teased him to death.

So I'm Jewish, Apparently

My wife is well along in the process of converting to Judaism. I was raised Presbyterian, she was raised Catholic; I've been a devout atheist since I was about 10, and she's agnostic. But she likes the traditions of Judaism, its questioning nature, the community and history around it. So she's taking conversion classes.

About a month ago, she tells my brother about it, and he says, "Oh, yeah -- you know, we're a quarter Jewish."

We're what again?

Turns out, eight or ten years back, he went to my grandmother's funeral. My grandfather's relatives were all there, and since many of them seemed to have stereotypically New York Jewish accents and mannerisms, he asked about it.

This is the story. My grandfather was born in the Bronx to a family of Russian (by way of England) Jews. He grew up and fell in love with my grandmother, but his mother insisted he couldn't marry a shiksa. He converted to Christianity, married her anyway, and nobody bothered to mention any of this for more than 30 years. (And my brother didn't mention it to me for another decade after he found out. I asked him, "Are we anything else I should know about? Were we raised by wolves until we were ten?")

So I'm Jewish, apparently -- a quarter Jewish, at least. But in a funny way. I'm not Jewish in the right way for Jews to consider me Jewish (because my mother wasn't Jewish, because her mother wasn't), yet I'm Jewish enough for the Nazis to have killed me. Perfect.

I have zero emotional attachment to the religion and culture, since it wasn't part of my world growing up. I consider the superstitious aspect of Judaism silly, same as any other religion. Yet there are aspects of Judaism I respect and relate to -- its emphasis on trying to be a good person, on learning, on questioning, on doing good in the world, on freedom and human rights -- and I suspect that's because these were family values, though never explicitly connected to Judaism.

So I'm a little Jewish, maybe. But not very.

And I'm sorry, but I love, love, love bacon.

Dude, I Got a Dell!

I've been saying for years that if someone would just sell a Linux laptop with full hardware support out of the box, and no Windows tax, I'd buy it. I can't believe it was Dell that called my bluff, but there you are. Now I'm the proud owner of a Dell E1505N, and to my surprise, I really like the thing.

It's not particularly heavy. (It's heavy compared to my snow-white G3 iBook, with which I have a love/hate relationship, but that's an unusually light laptop. By normal laptop standards, the Dell is not heavy at all.) It runs a shade warm, but not hot. It's zippy, it's quiet, and the 3-D graphics run smoothly. (And that's with the Intel 950 GMA; I skipped the NVIDIA option to save money and so that I could stick with free drivers as much as possible. I use 3-D only for screen savers anyhow.)

The screen is big, bright, and gorgeous -- razor-sharp. I sprung for the 1440x900 display, and I'm glad I did. And I got the upgraded, 9-cell battery, which seems to be giving me at least 4 or 5 hours of battery life when sitting on the couch and surfing the Web. They managed not to make it feel or look cheap, and, importantly to me, the keyboard is spacious and has a nice clicky feel.

The nice part is how everything Just Works. The 3-D acceleration, the little scroll-bar areas on the trackpad, the volume and brightness keys, you name it. It even ships with some goodies I didn't expect -- FireWire and an integrated flash card reader.

For some reason, though, even though I got the 1440x900 display, the screen resolution is set to 1280x768 out of the box, and you can't simply increase it. Still, it was easy to find the fix on the Web, so I had that taken care of in minutes. (To save you the Googling, just "sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel", then restart the X server.)

The only other thing that didn't Just Work was connecting to my wireless network, and that's not really Dell's fault. The wireless card works perfectly -- I mean, the drivers do -- but connecting it to my WPA2-protected wireless network was a bit of a pain, because WPA2 isn't supported by GNOME's network GUI tools. (Nor by KDE's, as I discovered when I installed the Kubuntu packages.) I don't mind that terribly; it was a fun learning experience for me, but it might be too much hassle for some people. If I'd had a WEP-protected or unsecured wireless network (not that there's much difference, given WEP's weaknesses), the wireless configuration would have been as easy as everything else.

And it cost me only about $1100, including tax and shipping. Displaying my usual flair for good timing, I dithered over buying it just long enough to miss the $200 introductory discount. But it was well worth it at full price; I'm very happy with my purchase. Dell more than earned their money.

The laptop comes pretty close to being a Grandma Experience -- that is, something you could buy for your grandma and expect her to get along without much help. At least, without needing more help than she'd need for another OS. The screen resolution and wireless issues I mentioned above are the only things I've found that don't make the cut, and even those might not be showstoppers. The stereotypical grandma doesn't know from screen resolution and isn't likely to have a particularly advanced wireless network setup -- and if she does, she's likely to be able to find and apply the fixes as well as I did.

My only other gripe is that you must manually restart wireless networking when you wake it back up from Suspend or Hibernate. Presumably, that will get fixed at some point, and it's not hard to work around it in the meantime. But, being used to Mac laptops, which get this (and so much else) right, it is a bit annoying. To be fair, I expect this isn't Dell's fault so much as it is Linux's -- and maybe there's an easy workaround; I haven't had the laptop long enough to go looking.

I won't quite say Dell knocked one out of the park with this system, but it's at least an inside-the-park home run. Despite a few quibbles, I really love the box and consider myself a very happy customer. Well done, Dell!

Alas, the E1505N apparently is no more; they seem to have replaced it with the Inspiron 1420N, which looks even better. Yep, I've got good timing, all right. Well, I might just have to buy that one next.