Kids Ask Dr. Phil

My wife, Beth Osthimer, was on The Dr. Phil show on December 7th. The episode is called "Kids Ask Dr. Phil" and some information can be found here:

http://www.drphil.com/show/show.jhtml?contentId=3051_kidsask.xml

The last item about the girl named "Luz Ricardo". If you click on Luz's face, it brings up a slideshow. On the second page of the slideshow, you'll find a picture with four women sitting in the front row. My wife is second from the left in that picture.

"In the audience are some of Luz's supporters from the CDF and the Children's Law Center: Carol Biondi, Beth Osthimer, Lisa Mandel and Victoria Ramirez Ballesteros."

Beth had to spend alot of time putting together the cdfca.org website in order to prepare it for the incomiing deluge of hits. In the end, the site was "phildotted" and received 118,000 hits on the day the show aired.

This came after a long effort whereby Dr. Phil was a speaker at CDF-California's Beat The Odds awards dinner and fund raiser, where 5 kids are honored for being successful students and role models, despite very difficult odds. To make a long story short, Beth became director of Children's Defense Fund in California, which helped get Dr. Phil to be the keynote speaker at the Beat The Odds dinner. Dr. Phil was so moved by Luz's story that he wanted to do a show about her. And what he did for her... is teriffic.

Did you read the slide-show text yet?

I have attended three or four of these events so far, and they're all fantastic.

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In fairness, I wrote this posting on Dec 23, but the show was aired on Dec 7.

Impromptu fireworks display

I was sitting at my desk this evening and fireworks started shooting out of the Grove. So I called Beth and we watched, then I grabbed my camera and took what photos I could. You can see the Christmas tree in the middle left of the picture.

Teddy: Jan 29, 1926 - Oct 30, 2004

My stepfather died two weeks ago due to complications from a stroke. He was 79. I knew him for about ten years and I miss him terribly.
Teddy was a WWII veteran. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge. We arrived at the cemetary and the rabbi said, "I haven't seen that in 15 years." He was referring to the color guard. Two soldiers took a flag which was sitting over his coffin during the funeral, and there at the cemetary, draped it once more over Teddy's coffin and presented it to my mother. Then a third soldier played taps. I cried, not out of grief, but because I was so moved.

I never expected to see that in my lifetime, let alone with my mother as the primary participant. I also had never wanted to bring a camera to a burial. I wish I had. I, and I suspect other people, would have liked to have had it. Mostly I think Teddy would have liked it.

We climbed back into the limousine and we laughed. Not because we were inappropriate, but because the last few months of the war, Teddy and his comrades came across a cache of wine in the Black Forest. They dumped their water, dumped their tents, and "didn't drink water for the rest of the war." So we were laughing that if the Army knew that was how they spent their time during the endgame, they'd knock on my mother's door to ask for the flag back. :)

She is considering what to do with the flag. I think when the time comes she should consider giving it to one of his four grandchildren.

Bad choice for Enumerations in J2SE 5.0

Once again, I can't tell too much here, but I'm very unhappy with the implementation of enumerated types for J2SE 5.0.

If I have an enumeration such as


public enum Weekdays {
SUNDAY,
MONDAY,
...
SATURDAY,
SUNDAY};

I cannot choose to disallow this:

Weekday weekday = null;

Now all my code still requires if(blah == null). Not very happy.

Generics in J2SE 5.0

It sounds like I'm not the first person to recognize that in J2SE 5.0, the following causes a compiler error:
public void arrayTest(List<T> list) {
T[] array = new T[list.size()];
}

because you're not allowed to create generic arrays. This has to do with the way Sun implemented Generics by preserving a significant amount of backward compatibility and by dropping the type safety once the source is compiled. In other words, these two statements generate the same bytecode:

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
List list = new ArrayList();

I have a way to go before I can make any determinations, but I'm not particularly pleased with this.

The Democratic Manifesto?

Well written. I suspect this page will be archived soon, and I'm not going to archive it just yet.
http://www.thestranger.com/current/feature.html