City of Seattle goes insane

Public information officers for the City of Seattle have been advised they might want to avoid using the terms "brown bag" and "citizen" because some find these words offensive.

KIRO Radio's Dori Monson couldn't figure out why these words were being targeted so he asked the man that drafted the memo to the city's PIO's for an explanation.

Elliott Bronstein, with the Office for Civil Rights, began by addressing the offensiveness of "brown bag."

"For a lot of particularly African American community members, the phrase brown bag does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used, I understand, to determine if people's skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event or to come into a party that was being held in a private home."

Dori, who considers himself a pretty historically and culturally aware person, said he's never heard of this practice or association and wonders how many others have.

Bronstein also hadn't heard of it until recently, but as a white man, he said there are likely a lot of aspects to African American culture he wasn't aware of growing up.

Next, Bronstein had to clue Dori into why "citizen" should be avoided.

"A lot of people who live in Seattle aren't citizens, but they are residents," said Bronstein. "They are legal residents of the United States and they are residents of Seattle. They pay taxes and if we use a term like citizens in common use, then it doesn't include a lot of folks."

While there may have been complaints about the phrasing, Dori thinks they likely came from people who are too easily offended, and questions the city trying to accommodate all the concerns of this small percentage of people.

"I just think that this obsession with sanitizing our language for the easily offended is a silly pursuit," said Dori. "This comes closely on the heels of a law that was just implemented, I believe this last weekend, where we're changing manhole covers to person-hole covers and we can't call a fireman a fireman anymore. There just seems to be this steady trend in our region for doing this to language."

'Brown bag' and 'citizen' too offensive for use in Seattle

Thank You Virtual I/O -1995

Thank you Virtual I/O for not accepting my application sometime in 1995. I answered an ad for a Novell Network Admin because my part time job was coming to an end. I had taken a class for Novell Netware and had worked with it for nearly a year at the Community College. Even upgraded the system from 3 something to 4.11 I think were the versions. (Is Netware still alive?).

This was the beginning of the "Internet thing" and so many things sounded exciting. There weren't that many people around with lots of hands on experience with servers or the latest interface. Internet Browsers were primitive then and Windows was probably 4.11 or '95

Luckily for me I followed one of my instructors advise when asked about my previous 10 years of work experience and proudly told the interviewer (CEO at this point) that I'd been an auto mechanic and completed a 2 year course in CNC machines.

Never heard from them again ... but my part time job suddenly opened up again to full time and that's where I spent the next 10 years

Virtual I/O closed it's doors within two years of my application because the cost of their product was above what the public could afford.  I also doubt the home user or Internet technology was up to the task.  We were still using modems then and DSL was almost unheard of.

Virtual I/O 1000 Lenora Street, Suite 600, Seattle, WA 98121 206.382.7410

Virtual I/O manufactures and sells a line of personal display systems, including the lightweight i-glasses. These head-mounted video systems use see-through optical technology and provide high-quality video and computer images.

I only got thinking about this because Google just won a patent on glasses

Google was awarded design patents on Tuesday for its Project Glass browser glasses. Project Glass is the company’s first venture into wearable computing.

Google Wins Patent for Project Glass

Steve Mulligan - Bull-shit artist

This sad sack of BS came to the College Campus I was the IT manager of in 2002-2003.   He bull shitted his way in with some grand plan for an IT educational department.  Problem is our campus had NO tech savvy and was starving for programs that could bring students in.

I challenged his bullshit ideas at one point and he threatened me with physical harm if I exposed him.   Gladly someone figured something out because he was only there for a little over a year and he accomplished nothing except a paycheck for himself.

Steve's BS BIO - A salesman and nothing more

He was also aided by a misfit named Michael Baker who scammed his way into teaching a computer tech class ... and Mike was only interested in his job.   I'll get back to Michael Baker on a later post.   I just hope these two have found used car salesman jobs somewhere because they don't seem to be able to do anything else.

The long time President of our small technical campus has now retired and I sure hope there is someone that knows something technical ... and/or the Seattle Community College District is overseeing our/my campus

Michael Baker