Parks are closed and that's (sort of) OKAY!

All metaphors have their weaknesses, but let me give this a shot.

YOU own a museum. It has lots of interesting things in it, some of them valuable to the point of being irreplaceable. Many, perhaps most, of the things in the museum are fragile.

You hire people to manage the museum because you don't want to sit there 24/7 and watch it (and who would blanme you?).

You tell the people who manage the museum when you want it to be open, when you want it to be closed, and the security provisions you expect them to maintain.

One night a friend of yours - someone who has visited the museum several times and is known to most of the people who manage the museum - comes around after the museum is closed and asks to be admitted. Your friend has brought a group of people, some of them elderly. Your friend has not called you to arrange this visit.

Do you want your managers to let your friend in, just because?

The nonsense resulting from the government shutdown includes video evidence of a Congressman - one who supported the shutdown - berating a uniformed member of the Federal Park Service, berating her with the ugly words, "You should be ashamed."

I don't think so. She should not be ashamed to be following the policies of the National Park Service directing when the staff who maintain the park are not on duty, the parks should be closed.

Americans can own rifles and hunt. Americans own public parks. Yet, Americans are not allowed to hunt in public parks, for many reasons. Policies exist for a reason. Right now, the policy says, "The parks are closed." People moving barriers and walking around in them are engaged in civil disobedience. I do not recommend you doing this, even with a congressional representative in your party.

Leave the discussion of how well we federal employees do our jobs aside for a moment. The issue is, do you want us doing our jobs according the procedures and policies of our employers (you), or do you want us to just do whatever we think is okay under the immediate circumstances?

The parks are closed because the government is closed. This is not usurpation of public lands, this is STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE for the maintenance and protection of public lands entrusted to the government and the National Park Service. "Essential" personnel maintaining barriers are operating according to standard operating procedure.

Personally, I'm glad the parks are closed, because the last time the government was closed, the national parks were the first bellwether that the government being closed is INCONVENIENT FOR CITIZENS. Or, as then-Speaker Gingrich said, in an admirably honest moment, "We throught if we closed the government, no one would notice. We were wrong."

Many of your friends and neighbors - one out of every five people in the country - work for a local, county, state or federal government. However well or poor we work, my experience in both camps tells me that government workers are no less proud, no less professional, no less skilled at the work they do than people in private sector employment. Some of the work being done right now is being done less effectively because we are not at full staff. Many of the people equipped and trained to do work on specific activities are not coming back when the budget issues are resolved, because they will have moved on to other jobs in order to feed their families. And many other people are being harmed by the interruption of government services in the process.

We are not ashamed to be federal employees. We are not ashamed to be doing our jobs. We hope that the amateur theatrics will stop and that agreement can be reached. In the meantime, if you can't get into a federal park, please understand that the uniformed person preventing your entry is doing their job. The parks will be open again; the public land will not disappear in the interim.

So far, how good?

Having started at 6, at 7:40 I was ready to execute the "5-minute install" WordPress so famously claims.

Well, it may be installed but there are still some configuration issues that shall have to wait until tomorrow. MySQL has a database and there's even a user configured. Which I presume means that both PHP and Apache are running fine below MySQL. Tomorrow night, we'll see whether we can get WordPress to notice.

I am starting to realize a) my friend was truly dedicated to WordPress to install a complete server environment onto a laptop just to run a couple of demo sessions and b) he was even more "dedicated" (or perhaps another word is more appropriate) to do it on his wife's laptop.

Happy Easter, 2013, from an old dog not so much learning new things as devotedly following the wonderful instructions of the anonymous, amazing people at WebDevelopersNotes.Com - thanks, folks, for startlingly clear and easy instructions.

Tomorrow never knows, but the future is unwritten. Rest in peace, George and Joe and Phil Ramone.

Fear and Trepidation, 2013

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," as the title slide says in the infamous '60s film, "Lord Love a Duck." "Go to school - get a little knowledge, live dangerously" is the way that advice goes on.

A well-meaning friend gave me an introduction to WebPress last weekend, and so here I am on an Easter evening with a brand new Apache server sitting on my antique-but-beloved Windows 7 beast. Several steps to go in my pursuit of dangerous living (or at least, further knowledge), but this is my progress report for the moment.