They found a rat in the jungles of Brazil!

I know, who would have thought it was possible?

Yes, yes, I know, it’s a rare rat, and no-one has seen one in years.  And the more varied and bountiful nature is, the more beautiful and resilient she will be.  But come on.  It’s a bloody tree rat.  Here’s a hint: if there’s one rat, there’s a million of them.  They literally breed like rats.  I’ve been in rain forests.  There is no shortage in the number and variety of creepy crawlies, snakes and rodents.  Calm down and have another mojito.

This reminds me of the people who spend whole summers in the swamps of the American Southeast looking for a woodpecker that’s supposed to be extinct, but may have some vestigial populations.  The question that ran through my head while I listened to the breathless reporting on NPR was “Don’t these people have something better to do?”.

If a species that’s supposed to be extinct still survives in some small niche, then they’re best left alone.  They’ve been able to survive whatever it was that wiped out their brethren.  We just need to make sure we don’t do anything that will upset whatever balance allowed them to survive.  We certainly shouldn’t be spending time and money searching them out and researching them.

This is National Police Week.  I know that a lot of people have a problem with police in general, but we have to recognize that police fulfill a necessary function in our society.  Yes, there are bad cops, just like there are bad accountants, bad lawyers, bad doctors, and bad systems administrators.  The “Wars on Icky Stuff” has done a lot to drive a wedge between law enforcement and the populace they are charged to serve, but that is not the fault of the policeman.  It is the fault of the politicians who put personal power and meddling in others’ lives ahead of keeping the peace and punishing wrongdoers.

But the small minority of cops who forget their oaths to protect and serve are massivly outnumbered by good cops that get up every day, put on their uniform, and do their best to fairly enforce our laws and investigate when the laws are broken.  Just like most soldiers could make a lot more money working at a job that’s a lot easier, most police could have chosen different paths and increased their pay by several orders while reducing their workload.  We need to recognize that even a cop who never draws his gun or is injured on the job is still making a sacrifice for the good of us all.

Yes, they’re not everywhere, and you’re responsible for your own safety, but until men are angels, we will need police.  I’ll be keeping our police force here in Louisville and Kentucky in my thoughts this week.

A burglar used a brick to break a window and crawled into a home in North Carolina.  While walking around the home, with the residents still asleep, he tripped over something and his gun went off.  Said burglar then thought better of sticking around and headed for the hills.  The residents, upon waking from the sound of the shot, called police who were unable to find the intruder.

So we have an armed criminal, breaking into a home with a gun in his hand, and only left when his gun went off.  If he was just there to grab the stereo and run, why have the gun in his hand?  My guess is he was up to something more than collecting Grandma’s silver tea set. 

If this had gone further, my fear is that either we’d be adding to JayG‘s Dead Goblin Count, or even worse, the residents, who slumbered deeply enough to not hear a window breaking, would have been attacked in their home, with whatever worst case scenario that could bring.  If the burglar hadn’t broken rule 3 (Thou shalt keep thy booger hook off of thine bang switch), someone would have become a statistic that night.

So now the fragrance is wafting
Into my cube of real estate
Don’t mind the incessant coughing
While in your scent, you marinate

An excerpt from a poem “Ode to the Office Perfumer” by Jennifer.  RTWT

Can’t be done. The Internet, due to its openness and ease of search and navigation, is by nature not kid friendly.

Let’s face it, when you let your kids get on the Internet, you may think you’re dropping them off at Disneyland to play or at the library to do homework.  But one block north is the Gay Pride Parade, one block south is Mardi Gras complete with Girls Gone Wild, one block west is a meeting of NAMBLA, and to the east is a Hitler Youth rally.  And let’s not even talk about the sky-writing advertising every bad habit on Earth above them. 
 
A few recent studies highlighted the increasing number of minors who are going on-line and accessing inappropriate content.  They suggest such things as making robust age verification using such information as credit card numbers mandatory.  Good luck with that.  The Internet is truly global, and as soon as you make site owners in the United States pay to use credit cards to verify identity, they’ll move offshore faster than you can say ‘pr0n’ and little to nothing to keep young eyeballs off of their sites.

Folks, there is no magic bullet to keeping your kids away from inappropriate content.  Parents need to use technology as a tool to monitor and control their kids’ use of the Internet at home, but they cannot abandon their responsibilities by installing a piece of software and walking away.

What we do in our home is this:

• The kids cannot use a computer while we are not at home.  Most modern OS’s have parental controls that can limit when a given user can use the computer.
• All computer use by the kids must be done in the dining room or the living room.
• Girlie Bear’s cell phone has an internet browser, but I’ve worked with the phone company to not allow her to send or receive data or text messages.
• Her netbook runs Ubuntu, which not only negates the risk from a lot  of the malware out there, but also makes it harder for her to get advice from her friends on how to thwart my efforts.
• I’ve installed Dans Guardian on her computer, and regularly check the logs of where she’s been.
• I have every password she uses, and check her email and such regularly for hints that anything wrong is happening with her.
• Our library has a librarian sitting at a raised desk that looks out over the screens of all of the computers.  This discourages most people from looking at whatever it is that tickles their fancy in the library.
• I’m raising my child to not disobey me.

That last one is the most important.  I know kids are going to be curious, and I know they’re going to push limits.  And I’m well aware that she can get onto the Internet when she’s at her mother’s house or over at a friend’s home.  But Girlie Bear knows how I expect her to act, especially when I’m not around. Even as she goes through the rebellious teen years, I will work to make sure she knows how a good person acts, including what they do on-line.

Now, if a child decides to be sneaky, they make all of this work useless, or at least more difficult.  Junior Bear found a chink in my Internet armor almost as soon as he moved to Kentucky from California.  He was freely surfing the net after ‘going to bed’ for about 6 months before I stumbled on what he was doing.  I set up filtering and logging, and after a couple of weeks, called Junior into the dining room.  To his surprise, his systems adminstrator dad handed him logs of everywhere he’d been going on the Internet for about two weeks, including passwords, emails, and pictures.  Thus began a multi-year jousting match between us, as I found and cut off ways he was abusing his priveleges to use our network, and he got more and more creative in ways of circumventing me during the brief times he wasn’t on complete blackout from Internet access at home.  On the plus side, he knows how to make directional wifi antennas so he could tap into a neighboring friend’s wireless signal from his bedroom.  On the down side, we fought an exhausting battle of wits during what could have been our best years as father and son.

But the key is that I never gave up, and I never made it easy for him to do things online that I didn’t approve of.  Once a child, even a teenager who’s almost an adult, figures out that you’ve grown tired of the struggle, their behavior will become even more reckless and dangerous.  We kept our technological guerilla warfare up until the night before he left for college. 

Luckily for me, I have the experience of bringing a stubborn, willful teenage boy through those years now that I’m embarking on going through them with Girlie Bear.  Hopefully between raising her to not violate some basic rules, monitoring her activities, and having this experience, her time as a teenager on the Internet will be less stressful to her dad.  I’ll have other aspects of raising a teenage girl to stress me.