- I just had a 2+ week vacation where I planned on getting a lot of things done. I got a lot of things done but not everything I needed. My failure to complete my list of tasks largely has to do with my laptop biting the dust on me halfway through. I didn't realize how much of a slave I am to that thing until it went down. For ten years I have owned nothing but Thinkpad laptops (this is my 4th) and this is the first major hardware failure I've had. Fortunately the machine is still under warranty (didn't know what to expect there since I bought it from somebody on Craigslist) so this will only be equivalent to a temporary lobotomy and I'll get these monkeys off my back soon enough.

- One of the things I got done was migrating the RZMCOM codebase to .NET 3.5 and xNET 3.0. This was the first step I needed to take before revamping the site interface and took way more time than I thought as the xNET 3 API still needed a few small tweaks to accommodate my needs here. Unfortunately, the laptop - which contained all of the up-to-date source code (and the source code repository) - died before I could finish everything. Currently the site performs marginally better than before but I have finally figured out the bottlenecks and expect things to speed up considerably once I get my environment back up and implement the optimizations I was working on the second it went down.

A few things here are broken but if they are broken they will probably go away in the next UI refresh. I hadn't worked on the site in a while and it was fun to get under the hood and play around. You might also notice that my Twitter status is now on the main weblog page. The plan going forward is to create a superfeed that puts my status updates, weblog posts, and image uploads inline. The key here is that RZMCOM becomes authoritative for all of this stuff. My statuses, posts, and images are very important chronicles of my life and I don't like the idea of Twitter or Facebook or Flickr or whatever being the primary source. Now that I have the integrations figured out, I'll just syndicate this stuff out and remove dependencies to the social networking app du jour.

- So a couple of months ago I had a recurrence of an excruciating problem that hit me five years ago. While getting tended to, I found out that either the initial problem never properly healed or I had a particularly ugly form of cancer. In order to answer that question I had to have a colonoscopy - an experience that, for the sake of separating out the gross stuff, will get its own post. I scheduled it during my time off so I would have adequate recovery time before the grind machine of my job fired up again.

I'm pleased to report that it was the former scenario and - outside of that - my colon came back A OK. The treatment I got causes a lot of discomfort and will likely be with me for another week or so, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.

- For the final part of the break I went to Chicago to see my good friend Rene. Nene and her wonderful family were so gracious putting me up for the weekend and going out of their way to ensure my comfort. Between reattaching my frozen toes every few steps, I learned a bit of Chicago history, did some dancing, saw a bit of Theatre and hung out at the top of the Hancock Building. I also learned a couple of new card games: Tripoley and Mafia. Even my supreme post-banding discomfort couldn't sour an excellent weekend and start to the New Year.

After the -14 wind chill up there, the mid teens temperatures we're going through here in Atlanta are downright cozy.

- Happy New Year all...

I keep getting pinged about my thoughts on a recent ABC News story regarding black women and marriage. I get tired of repeating myself so here are some quick thoughts in one place. To make my points I am going to touch a lot of subjects that won't be given anything near the time that they deserve so I apologize in advance. Here we go.

The story is what I generally expect from the media: sloppily over-pursuing tangents to the point where the real issues are obfuscated beyond recognition. My biggest problem with it was the poor - almost negligent - use of statistical data in the early parts of the presentation.

Staggering fact:

"Black women outnumber black men by 1.8 million"

Women always outnumber men as they live significantly longer - no doubt because they do much less stupid crap when they are young - so just throwing this number out there with no context whatsoever is irresponsible. White women outnumber white men by 2 million, does that mean white women are worse off? No, because 2 million makes up a lower percentage of the white population. White men are 49.59% of the white population while black men are 47.98% of the black population. Going by the widely used but, in my opinion, very flawed idea that what's white statistically is right statistically, that's a pretty significant deviance over millions of people.

So you might say: "Ok, Rashid, so they didn't get into as much detail as your geeky ass would like. Regardless, all you just did was prove their base point that the 1.8 million man deficit is significant." Good point, but one thing they leave out is the fact that roughly 25% of black people live in poverty. This is a very important statistic in the context of the article.

Let's start at 1:32 where they take 100 black men and then subtract the number with no high school diploma (21%), no job (17%), or incarcerated (8%*).

I have the asterisk by the 8% because, for some inexplicable reason, they only included incarcerated black men between 25 and 34. Apparently getting locked up only counts you out of dating eligibility for 9 special years where having no job or high school diploma constitutes permanently elimination. Seriously, what group are we talking about here? a) all black men b) black men between the ages or 25 and 34 or c) some completely arbitrary mix of the two? If we're talking c here (and we are), this data is pretty much useless.

It gets worse.

The real problem with the data in the story is this: the women being profiled are professional, middle class women yet the data they present applies to the entire spectrum of black men. Doing this assumes that every black man is in the dating pool of these women. While black women might be more likely to date somebody from a lower social class than other races of women, this is absolutely not the norm. I don't think these "MBAs, MDs, and JDs" are giving much play to dudes who are only bringing the letters "E&J."

This is extremely important, because when you start looking at those outcomes listed earlier, particularly high school dropouts - an activity that correlates very highly with incarceration (I wonder if they accounted for that overlap in their statistics, for some reason I doubt it) - you'll find that most of the black men who fell into that trap came from impoverished surroundings and these ladies most likely did not. That means that while Nichole quite rightly laments the fate of the gentlemen she processes and prosecutes in the legal system (1:49), had they not been arrested she probably wouldn't have given them the time of day anyway.

According to census data from 2002 (old yes, but I think it makes the point) there were 3.3 million black men living below the poverty level against 4.8 million black women. When this data was gathered, there were 36 million black people in America 16.6 million men and 19.2 million women. That is a 2.6 million person disparity(!!!!) of which over half (1.5 million) is accounted for in the bottom 22.7% of the population.

In other words, the majority (58%) of the male "shortage" - much of which is natural to begin with - is accounted for in 22.7% of the population. A group which is pretty much 100% likely to not be dating the women being interviewed. This strongly repaints the picture presented by the story.

The real note of concern is that there is an alarmingly serious numbers problem with black men in this country, but it is decidedly not with the men who the women being profiled would date. It is with the poor black men vastly outnumbered by women in their social class. The problems that these women have, unlike the women being interviewed, are exacerbated by their considerably lower probability of out marriage due to highly segregated living and lower levels of socialization. This is a huge problem with far reaching implications through all of America and is much more deserving of highlighting - particularly how "War on Drugs" has and does impact this situation.

Back to the subjects of the story. These women do face real issues pertaining to their standards, upper middle class "desirability" of black women, interracial dating, changing gender roles, and general gender politics which are worth their own analysis (and, to be fair, some were covered but just not covered all that well), but the "shock and awe" type numbers presented to make a case of slim pickings were specious to say the least.

Random Data Notes:

- I find it remarkable that there is a male deficit of just 1.8 million against 2.6 million nine years ago. I'd like to look deeper into it but, on top of a 5+ million population gain, that sounds like progress. However, it could just mean that there are a lot of black male babies, which could be all the more reason to worry.

- I was crunching some numbers comparing white male/female ratio to black male/female ratio and the black ratio just falls like a rock at age 24. From age 24 to 44 the percentage of men drops from 50.5% to 46.9 percent. White men fall 1 percent in that interval and take FIFTY YEARS to make a 4% drop. Wow.

Here's the table I built (2008 data) I am scared to see how this looks broken out by income (T = Total, M = Male, F = Female):

As the newly-elected VP of Community Relations for the Atlanta Downtown Neighborhood Association, one of the principal functions I will serve is that of public safety liaison for the neighborhood. In ramping up to fulfill this duty when my term begins in January, I attended my first NPU-M public safety committee meeting last week (more info on NPUs can be obtained from the City of Atlanta website).

The meeting was a fairly small gathering of community representatives along with one officer from the Atlanta Police Department and one from the MARTA police. The representatives discussed initiatives to address localized matters of public safety and the police officers gave data on crime trends and recent arrests in the NPU. The APD - and particularly the outgoing chief - has caught a lot of heat for being too numbers-oriented but I personally appreciate it. Even if the numbers are flawed, if they are flawed in a consistent manner they have value. One of the more fascinating tidbits of data was that there had been 118 arrests for car break ins in the last month and, collectively, the perpetrators has been arrested a total of more than 2200 times. On the list were guys that had been arrested 60 to 70 times individually - it's like these guys are playing Grand theft Auto.

The most thought provoking item was the story of a busted fencing operation. If you've spent any time downtown you've probably been told to make sure all things are hidden from view in your car - you've perhaps even been told not to lock your car doors. This is because there is a lot of opportunistic crime in the area along the lines of car break-ins. The logic behind keeping your doors unlocked is that fixing your broken window will probably be much more of a hassle than replacing anything that gets stolen. That is, unless your gun is stolen: the officers reported an astounding 129 guns lifted from cars Downtown. We really appreciate that influx of crime-ready guns in our hood.

So once your gun, iPod, laptop, GPS or whatever is stolen, chances are the thief will immediately try to sell it. Since most reputable Pawn Shops won't buy hot merchandise, the enterprising thief that doesn't want to hawk goods on the street has to find a fence to help them offload the goods. As you might expect, you don't just waltz into these kind of spots and do business - they need to know who you are and that you're a proven member of the underground community before they will even look you in the eye. This posed a problem for the police who knew about the operation but had a hard time infiltrating it.

That all changed when a certain business owner was robbed and a homeless guy who apparently was on good terms with this proprietor happened to recognize the stolen goods at the fencing front. An ensuing sequence of events kicked off that allowed the cops to make their move and recover tens of thousands of dollars in stolen goods. In addition, the lack of a place to sell stolen goods has caused a dramatic drop-off of break-ins in the area. Perhaps this can also serve as a reminder to not treat the homeless like criminals or aliens.

I also attended a Five Points Task Force meeting where much of the same was discussed but there was one notable tidbit that I wasn't privy to before. The Atlanta Police Department has a group of officers called the H.O.P.E. team that is specifically trained to deal with matters concerning the homeless - particularly the mentally ill. I'm trying to get more information on them, from what I've come across so far they seem to act as a conduit between these ill people and the various homeless services in the city. Good stuff.

In honor of my friends Christopher, Jennifer, and their beautiful son Cameron moving Downtown today, I have decided to dig deep into my archives of unpublished writings and publish this account of my last moving day which - interestingly enough - details my move from the very building they are moving into. This is a 5 year old post so it might be a bit different in style from how I write today, but I think it's a fun read. Hopefully Jen and Chris will be able to look at it and be thankful that their day wasn't this much of an adventure.

Welcome to the 'hood homies...

Moving Day

There are days in every individual’s life that act to sum up the totality of all that have preceded them and all that will come afterward. For me, one of those days was May 15, 2003. This would be the day that I vacated my loft in the William Oliver Building for an apartment a few blocks away – my last moving day. Just like my personal belongings, I felt my understanding of the place that I hold in this world to have moved forward. My ideas of power and destiny were simultaneously – and significantly – shaken and reinforced.

I did not want to leave the William Oliver Building. When I was twenty years old, I used to come visit my friends who worked in the RadioShack that once took up one of the commercial slots of the seventy-year-old building. Pedro, the manager of the store, had a loft on the fifteenth floor. Since I’m an IT guy by profession, the guys at RadioShack were always asking me computer questions and one day Pedro took me up to his loft to check out a problem that he was having. Most of my checking out that day, however, would be the examining of his ultra-cool apartment. All that my eyes could focus on were its hardwood floors, high ceilings, and the large open layout. It was then that I made the decision to move into the William Oliver before all was said and done.

Three years later, I made good on my word. I would spend two years in the William Oliver and enjoyed every second. I started out on the second floor, but eventually ended up on the top floor of the building with a minimal increase in rent. I had the ultimate bachelor pad: a nice open layout, brand new furniture, large skylights over my dining room table and my bed, and easy access to the roof of the building with one of the best city views available. In this life, things like that do not last, and my time in the William Oliver was no exception.

Instead of maintaining the marginally profitable loft-for-rent model at the building, the owner of the William Oliver had other plans. He decided to turn the building into condos and sell it off. He offered me $1000 to vacate my loft and, I agreed. Since I was getting $1000 to move out, I could have just hired some movers and been done with it. On the other hand, I could execute my larger plan of paying off my furniture and reducing my overall debt load. Being very debt conscious, I was looking for every way to maximize the positive impact on my net worth that this move could offer. I settled on renting a moving van and having my two friends JB and OJ come over to help me move. Net cost? $150. I did not seem to have a whole lot to move, so I figured that it would not be much of a hassle. In the end it was a small hassle in the way that envelopes containing white powder are a small hassle these days.

I was up bright and early that morning – 8 AM. Since my reservation for the moving truck called for me to pick it up at 9:30 AM I wanted to make sure that everything was in place. By the time 9:30 rolled by, I was beginning to get a handle on how large a task this move really was. The top level of the William Oliver Building is only accessible by one of the three building elevators, and that one elevator was being serviced due to the ongoing condo renovations. I worked out a deal with the construction chief to borrow a couple of his workers to help me move everything down to the sixteenth floor and then use the other elevators from there.

My friends did not arrive until 11:30 AM. By that time I was convinced that the U-Haul people had given my truck away but as it turned out, it was still ready for me. They made it clear that the truck was to be back no later than 5:30 PM or I would be charged $50 an hour for every hour thereafter until the next morning. I was not overly concerned because I was sure that six hours was more than enough time to empty a 797 square foot loft.

The first truck load was a serious pain, mainly because it had all of my expensive belongings in it. My computers, printers, televisions, stereo equipment, bed, recliner, everything that I really valued was the first to go. The two building workers that assisted my two friends and myself were hard workers who got everything down to the sixteenth floor in no time. We were able to move practically everything down into the building lobby and then move to load the truck. It was a cinch. The plan was simply to unload this equipment at the new place, come back and get more of my belongings, lather, rinse, and repeat. I should know by now that my life is /never/ that simple.

It is while we were putting the last of the things into the truck that both of my friends decided to notify me of appointments that they had, immediately. As in, when we get the truck to the new place they were leaving. This news hit me like a ton of bricks as there was no possible way that I was going to be able to get these things off the truck and into my new place alone. The problem is that I was not paying them so I did not really have the right to call them out. As we pulled up on my new building, JB told me that he would be back in an hour and a half. On cue, it promptly started raining.

Words cannot describe the immense depression taking over my body as I struggled to open the soaking lock on the back of the truck only to have the doors slowly swing open and reveal the truly impossible mission ahead of me. Standing alone and staring through a solid curtain of rain, I gazed at the back of a truck full of heavy and expensive equipment that I had absolutely no means to move. Just to blow off some steam I called one of my co-workers at GSU to explain my situation. He said that he would try to get a couple of student assistants to help me out but, of course, time was of the essence. It was about 3:00 by now, and I still had at least another two loads after this one. I silently asked God to cut me a little slack and not one nanosecond later I heard a voice say: "Hey man! You need some help over there?"

I turned around and saw three clearly homeless - and clearly high - guys standing beside each other smiling at me. As somebody who has worked in the downtown area for the better part of the last six years, I had developed the normal callousness toward people off the street soliciting me for change or “services.” However, in this case I had no choice but to do a cost-benefit analysis on the decision to let them help.

The worst-case would be that they stole everything from me which was actually impossible as the worst that they could do is steal three medium sized items, then I would lock the truck up, call the cops, and kick at least one ass. Next, they could steal numerous smaller items. I had nothing that was irreplaceable that fit that description in this load, and even if they did, I would not be out of any more money replacing it than I would be paying for movers. The major advantage was that there were three of them, they seemed to be in pretty decent shape, and at least two of them were high, which meant that the pain of carrying my 150 pound printer would not register for another few hours. I decided to take them up on their offer.

Next came the negotiation phase. One thing that I have learned about addicts is that they will do a large amount of work for a little amount of money. This worked out perfectly because I only had a little. After weathering numerous unforeseen charges with respect to my motorcycle, even though it was payday, my check was already spent. All that I had were credit cards that all raped me on cash advances. How much disposable cash did I have? Five dollars. How much of that did I offer my three new friends? Five dollars. How much would you have had to pay to get the hugely excited rise out of me that I got out of them for five bucks? Try five thousand. I know that sounds like exploitation, and that is because it was, but if I had it to do all over again… I would stick with the actions that I chose the first time.

It turns out that my gamble paid off in a major way. Not only did the contents of the truck get carried into my new apartment in better time than I would have if my friends had not jumped ship on me, but as soon as they finished, JB showed up just in time to drive the truck back up to the William Oliver Building where two work study students from the School of Music were waiting for us. All four of us worked, clearing my remaining stuff out of the lobby of the building and we got the truck back to the new apartment by 5:10. We made a mad dash to unload the truck onto the sidewalk before JB drove the truck back to the U-Haul rental facility, which was only about a mile away. His plan was to get it up there before 5:30 and just walk back.

While JB executed his plan, I was sitting on the curb in front of my building with a ton of my junk. The raining stopped as soon as my three helpers finished helping me move but in true Rashid’s Life fashion I heard a thunder clap and felt a few scattered raindrops. The new problem was that I could not start taking this stuff upstairs to my new unit and just leave the remainder on the curb for the pillaging. JB was going to be taking at least an hour to get back and the rain was coming. I pulled out my cell phone and called my good friend Trenee, explained the situation, and asked her if she could come sit with my stuff as I started to move it inside. In true Rashid’s Life fashion, she bailed me out and said yes.

The plan was simple from there on. Since she was only a few minutes away, I could move stuff into my new unit as she watched what was remaining and when JB got back we could do it in double time. While I waited on Trenee I called my other friend Lola for help. She worked in Midtown and got off around 6:30 so she and JB could be arriving at around the same time. She said that she would help and fifteen minutes later, Trenee was there and I was ready to get moving.

But of course, if you have been paying any attention thus far, you know that it was not going to be that simple. As I took the first box up to my apartment I realized that I did not have my keys on me. I went back and looked through all of the stuff on the curb. No Keys. I traced every step that I had taken since we had unloaded the truck - then I thought about the truck. They were probably in the truck.

Of course JB and Lola are showing up right about now and I am ringing the U-Haul phones off the hook but keep getting transferred to their headquarters in South Carolina. It is here that I am informed that the store is closed. My heart collapsed. Thankfully it blew back out when I was told that there was a way that they could contact the people in the store who had not gone home yet. A few minutes later I was talking to one of the U-Haul employees who told me that there were no keys in the van. She also told me that she had to get home to her kids and was not going to double check. I was upset but I understood. Though I would have looked, my absent mindedness is not a reason to demand her inconvenience.

Now I had to proceed as if I did not have a key. The only thing that I could think to do was talk to the security guard and see if a custodian was around. The security guard told us that the custodian had gone home for the day and that it may take him a few hours to get here if he even decided to come when called. I asked if there was any other way and got a hesitant no.

Luckily I had an extraordinarily attractive woman with me who immediately picked up on that hesitation and turned on the charm - or maybe she just looked like she was. Whatever the case, that "no" turned into a “meet me in front of your unit.” The security guard knew where the custodian kept his keys, but this was supposed to be a secret. After swearing to secrecy on this, he let me into the unit.

Trenee went into the apartment as sat down as she had been outside this whole time in the drizzle and was undoubtedly getting harassed by the passers by. JB, Lola, and I formed an assembly line type setup where JB took the stuff from the curb to the elevator. Lola took it up the elevator to me, and I put it in the apartment. This went on for about an hour but FINALLY I got all of my stuff in. Well most of it. I still had a few small items back at the William Oliver that I needed to get and after that I promised everyone dinner.

When Lola and I get to the William Oliver I immediately notice two things. 1) The door to my apartment is wide open… and 2) the keys are inside! After getting smacked upside the head by Lola a few times, I was allowed to breathe a sigh of relief. I got the rest of my things. Dropped them off at my place and treated everyone to a dinner at Sylvia’s, a soul food restaurant that is connected to my apartment.

When I studied Astronomy a few years ago, my belief in a higher power was reinforced. There is such a delicate balance that allows us to exist on this planet that I could only call it immaculate. Even if the keeper of the balance is not a conscious human-like deity that watches over us constantly, but just an omni-present non-sentient force that keeps everything in place, it deserves respect. My moving day gave me a microcosmic view of that balance. Fifteen hours and eleven helpers later, it allowed me to see how things may shift to at one time and fro at the next, but it the end it is all one entity and we all play a part in keeping it steady.

- For the last few months I had been in a kind of strange situation where I was employed but didn't have a job. I got caught in the middle of a reorganization by my employer that directly conflicted with a major project that I was involved with and that mixture of circumstances put me in a position where I had to compete for the privilege to keep my position. I am pleased to report that I was successful and, as of November 1st 2009, am officially Manager of Grants and Compliance Systems at Georgia State University with copious amounts of privileges and headaches to compliment the new title.

In competing for the job I had a number of things going for me but anything can happen - especially in a job market where there is 10 percent unemployment. Fortunately I was blessed with the opportunity to continue my work at the University and finish implementing the vision I've been fleshing out for years. Even better, I get to do it with a group of very talented and experienced individuals on my team.

- I've been spending a lot of years waxing eloquent online and off about my feelings for Downtown Atlanta and its development. As of late, I have decided to take a more pro-active role in affecting the destiny of my neighborhood. Today I'm up for election to the board of directors for the Atlanta Downtown Neighborhood Association. This represents the second time I've been up for an election of any sort but definitely the first one of any real consequence.

- Given these developments I guess I might need to be a little more judgmental in what I write on these pages - or at least what I expose publicly. Honestly, after reading the last couple years of posts I feel like I can stand behind pretty much everything I've written here though I think my style of delivery can rub people the wrong way or, even worse, leave way too much room for misinterpretation. I'll be a little more careful going forward, but if I just have to get it out I'll put it behind the curtains.

I will not hide my old posts though. They are me - or at least they were me at some point - and as such are an important part of my evolution as a human being. They are what they are, I was what I was, I am what I am. I have no problem sharing portions of my personal development with the world.