el peregringo

Scott Anguish is an old friend, and I’m damn proud to be able to say so. I met Scott online through Stepwise right after the Apple /NeXT merger. I was working at Middlebury College at the time and we were in the process of moving our development over to OpenStep. He was a major help early on, and we were fortunate enough to entice him to actually come to work for our project for a few years until the College got a new President and systematically dismantled the team, replacing it with charlatans and idiots. (but I digress)

I helped Scott move to the US. He lives just up the road a few miles from our Vermont house now. I don’t see him much anymore since I’m no longer working in tech and we’ve been out of the country for over a year, but I still read his stuff and I’m proud of the relationship we’ve had.

It’s funny, a couple of weeks back I followed a link from somewhere to the Rixstep site. I poked around and tried to figure out who the hell this guy was. He had an attitude that didn’t seem to make much sense to me. Most of the posts at his site smelled holier-than-thou, “I’m a unix guru and everyone else is moron.” I looked at a few of the utilities available and even downloaded one. As near as I could tell, virtually everything at his site already existed in some other, easier to use format. Most of it was fugly (much like the site itself). He had some asinine comment about how content was king at his site and that they wouldn’t mess up their content with unnecessary crap.

But it turns out, it isn’t his content. He’s stolen significant portions of it from Stepwise. Except for my own site, Stepwise is the only place where I’ve ever published anything. My content (First Year / 3400 Install) is on Stepwise (it’s pretty darn old–kind of like me–but it’s still there). The First Year piece was borrowed (with permission) by Apple to use as an introduction OpenStep technologies for pre-NeXT Apple engineers. Scott is thus my publisher, and now this asswipe at Rixstep is ripping off Scott, my publisher. Will my stuff be next?

I can assure you I will not ever be buying anything from Rixstep. Aside from the fact that most of it is useless, fugly reinterpretation of stuff that already exists, the guy is a thief (oh, and an asswipe, as I’ve already mentioned).

I’ve just spent an hour trying to buy a train ticket with Renfe, the Spanish rail company. I simply cannot understand how a company, in this day and age, can get away with such an awful mess as their online system. Even using a Spanish credit card, it was virtually impossible to actually buy my ticket.

Things were looking good until I got to the point of actually charging the card. Renfe includes a disclaimer saying that the window that was going to open was from the bank and that if the user had trouble, that it wasn’t Renfe’s fault. I did have trouble, and I still blame Renfe for not having a better system.

Part of the problem may be with the Caja Navarra bank. They have the single WORST online banking I have ever seen. They don’t even include a valid doc type or encoding method in their html, and then once connected, they use frames in places they’re unnecessary and have spurious scroll bars in unlikely places. The National Bank of Middlebury has an online banking and bill paying experience that is orders of magnitude superior to the Caja Navarra.

I am a teacher. If I look back at my life, I’ve always been a teacher even when I wasn’t actually working as a teacher. For the past four years I’ve been dealing (off and on) with becoming a licensed teacher in the State of Vermont. This is not hard, but it sure is tedious. I opted for the peer review route to licensing since it’s a reasonable way to avoid going back to undergraduate school to get an education degree. For the most part, this has been a valuable experience.

Creating my portfolio was frustrating at times. One is expected to document things in a brief summary that have been the subjects of dissertations and much argumentation over the years. I think I did a decent job of it, but boy were there moments when I wondered if it was worth it. In retrospect, it forced me to think about and to “verbalize” in writing my thoughts on education. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be granted a license, but I think I learned something in preparing the portfolio (my portfolio is entirely electronic and online, but I’m hesitant to link to it because many of the people who wrote letters or provided other documentation of my teaching did so with the understanding that it wasn’t a public document–if you really want to see it, write to me privately and I’ll see about giving you access). My good friend Debbie Hadeka thinks I won’t have any difficulties with getting my portfolio approved. I hope she’s right…

Anyway, as for the rant portion of this post… OK, so I applied to peer review in 2004 and was to have submitted my portfolio in 2005. Ana was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2005 and all life went to hell. It essentially took me 2 years to get myself sufficiently organized again to finish and submit the darn portfolio–complete with a check for $1200. So I just got a letter that from the State letting me know I screwed up and didn’t ask for an extension. The woman with whom I’ve been dealing, Linda, is truly helpful, and, like most Vermont State employees I have dealt with over the years, defies the otherwise universal norm of state employee who exists only to screw with you. Linda has been terrific.

Still, the “law” requires that I submit yet another check for $35.00 to apply for peer review–the same peer review that I am already scheduled to have on June 13th. So, my licensing expenses to date are:

If I didn’t love teaching, I’m not sure I could have justified the expense.