It reads:

African-Americans have created technologies, philosophies, religions, political movements and artistic expressions that have helped shape every culture in the Americas. By doing so, they’ve made all our lives much richer. This list of African-American innovators and innovations, as well as African-American contributions to our shared history, is far from complete. It’s merely a sampling of African-American genius.

This seems completely benign and appropriate at first glance, but please note the entry in the far bottom left of the picture as well as second from the top at far right. Find it here.

One day in 2002, my father started to feel dizzy and disoriented at work. He felt as if he had the flu and had a hard time with balance, so he went to the doctor. His condition started to rapidly decline and he ended up being admitted to the hospital. The medical staff surmised that he was dealing with the repercussions of a brain infection and the swelling was causing the symptoms. They gave him a CT scan to confirm the diagnosis and ended up finding three very large, but fortunately benign, brain tumors… one of which was the size of an orange. These, coupled with an unknown infection (results came in later that he was also suffering from the West Nile virus), were causing his symptoms.

It was a hard diagnosis and my father needed to have brain surgery to remove as much of the tumors as possible. It was only moderately successful. They removed the one larger tumor, but there was too much bleeding and too high of a risk to remove the other two.

While in the hospital recovering from this surgery, head shaved with staples holding his skull together, my dad received a letter from Ethan Allen, his long term employer. This letter stated that they were eliminating my father’s position and that they would no longer need his services. Not only did this leave my father in a panic, but it also left him with no job, no money, no health insurance, and no possible recourse from the intensive care unit. Ethan Allen fired my father, for no cause, while he was devastatingly ill, after a decade of undeniably devoted service.

I hope you’ve found this page while searching for Ethan Allen furniture. I hope you read this story. I hope you decide to avoid giving Ethan Allen any of your money. Try Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, or Room and Board. They all have better furniture anyway. Send the message that character counts.

Beth’s wallet was stolen a few weeks ago, and the credit card we had associated with the Comcast auto-deduct was replaced with a new card. For some reason, Comcast cannot set up automatic payments over the phone, so they supplied us with our username and password to login to the site to update the card information. Seems easy enough.

We log in to comcast.net, go to My Account, and then View/Pay our Bill. And here’s where everything falls apart.

Clicking that link tells me that I need a Comcast account. Which, of course, we already logged in with, but it asks us to recreate our account. Attempting to recreate the account, tells me there is already an account with our associated information, so it cannot recreate it.

So we call support. Comcast Customer Support literally cannot tell you how to login to your account. I am not kidding, we have been working on this for 45 minutes with a customer support agent, and she cannot figure out what account we login to, how to reset the password, or even which domain (comcast.com or comcast.net, which use different credentials, both of which are required apparently) to log into.

30 minutes into the call, we’re finally transferred to another support person. That person transfers us to another person, who then says we need to supply her with a PIN to continue. Our response… what PIN? And why the hell would we have to give you a PIN 45 minutes into this god damn support call? Finally, this representative tells us that everything that every other rep has told us so far was incorrect, and then gave us the proper credentials to log in. To simply setup automatic payments with Comcast, prepare for a 45 minute conversation with 3 customer service idiots.

I’m currently looking for viable broadband options, if anyone has a good suggestion in the Chicago area. The sad thing is that I know, no matter who we end up with, this is going to remain a problem. It is easier to ditch your service provider and pick up a new one every time there is a problem rather than try to talk to support.

A few months ago, I got an email from someone named Vicki, whom I did not know, regarding the declining health of Terry, another person I did not know. I ignored the first one, but then other people on the email started replying to it and thus to me. Eventually, I asked that they group please remove me from the list. Most complied, some did not. Eventually the mail stopped coming in about 2 weeks later.

On and off, I would continue to get updates from Vicki about Terry’s health. I would, now and then, email her and tell her that she had the wrong address and she would mail me back and apologize. One day, I got another update from Vicki that Terry had taken a turn for the worse and she was sending out a schedule for friends who were interested in helping to care for Terry at home. I didn’t reply to that one.

Last week, Vicki sent along an email about Terry coming home from the hospital to go into Hospice care. She will be taking FMLA leave for the next 3 months, and said “All of you have been so helpful the last 2.5 months. It is hard to ask for more. However, I would not bring Terry home if I did not know we had so many close friends and family to help out.”

I haven’t replied to this email either.

Earlier this summer, our friend’s father passed away abruptly. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew his son very well. It was sad. Very sad. He was a well known and well liked man, and had adopted 4 children of mixed race (including our friend) and before he died he had setup a scholarship fund to help minority students. His funeral was incredibly sad and moving, and I still think about it everyday.

This is different though, and I feel strange. I have watched this from afar as if it was some sort of soap opera, involving real life and death. It doesn’t make me feel sad. I just feel guilty, as if accidentally peering into their lives is invasive and robbing them of something from their last moments with Terry.

Well, Vicki, good luck with Terry. I am sorry for all you have been through.

What a cute commercial. From what I understand though, the proper ending should have been one baby stuffing the gas pump down another baby’s throat and pumping toxic sludge and ammonia into his stomach.

I read from the Tribune.

The massive BP oil refinery in Whiting, Ind., is planning to dump significantly more ammonia and industrial sludge into Lake Michigan, running counter to years of efforts to clean up the Great Lakes.

Indiana regulators exempted BP from state environmental laws to clear the way for a $3.8 billion expansion that will allow the company to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. They justified the move in part by noting the project will create 80 new jobs.

Under BP’s new state water permit, the refinery — already one of the largest polluters along the Great Lakes — can release 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more sludge into Lake Michigan each day. Ammonia promotes algae blooms that can kill fish, while sludge is full of concentrated heavy metals.

BP is now allowed to dump 4,925 pounds of industrial sludge into the lake PER DAY the very maximum amount allowed under federal guidelines. That is nearly 1.8 MILLION pounds of sludge per year, into my drinking water.

The request to dump more chemicals into the lake ran counter to a provision of the Clean Water Act that prohibits any downgrade in water quality near a pollution source even if discharge limits are met. To get around that rule, state regulators are allowing BP to install equipment that mixes its toxic waste with clean lake water about 200 feet offshore.

Actively diluting pollution this way by creating what is known as a mixing zone is banned in Lake Michigan under Indiana law. Regulators granted BP the first-ever exemption.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been pushing to eliminate mixing zones around the Great Lakes on the grounds that they threaten humans, fish and wildlife. Yet EPA officials did not object to Indiana’s decision, agreeing with the state that BP’s project would not harm the environment.

Ok, so not only is BP dumping an increased amount of ammonia and the maximum amount of industrial sludge allowed by law into the lake, but in order to do so, they are now exempt from Indiana environmental regulations? Is this that progressive environmentally friendly oil company I have been seeing commercials for? What next, you’re going to tell me that there actually is no human element?

So this morning, I am reading this article on CIO.com. It is close to being the biggest piece of trash I have ever read. I will save you some time, here are the main points:

1. Sell the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 to management.
2. Understand how IT can benefit from Enterprise 2.0.
3. Do your homework on tools and platforms.
4. Make sure you’ve covered your bases.
5. Find (or be) an Enterprise 2.0 champion.
6. Keep tools simple, and allow openness.
7. Realize the world of Enterprise 2.0 is the world of perpetual beta.

First off, I would like to point out to all of you budding CIO’s out there… for any project you ever do, I think it is safe to say that you have to make sure that management is on board, understand the benefits, know the tools and platform, cover your bases (?), market it, keep things simple, and know that the project lives. THIS IS NOT WEB 2.0! This is simple common sense. Honestly, I could not have written a more generic article if I had tried. I want my 8 minutes back.

Here are the points Diann seems to be missing. Wiki does not mean web 2.0. Collaborative documentation has existed in the enterprise since before Wordperfect. Wikis are just a great, newer way to write things down. That is it. We have all sorts of legacy collaboration utilities in the enterprise, most specifically groupware like Exchange and Groupwise. Simple collaboration is not web 2.0. I despise the term Enterprise 2.0. I am pretty sure that the same guy that came up with synergy and productized is behind that phrase.

So here is my advice on the world of Web 2.0. It is not about blogs and wikis. It is not about collaboration inside of your company. This has been happening for 15 years in some way or another. It is about taking the risk of opening up internal resources for global community gain in order to see a net result. It is about rewriting the corporate hierarchy and creating an environment that values data and gives status based on contribution.

A great example is IBM adopting Linux. They had to join the community, just as anyone else does, through contribution. They gained status by doing the things that no one else wanted to do, they gave up sensitive hierarchies, and communicated directly to the community. They gave up control, and that is the risk of the REAL web 2.0 technologies.

Adopting blogs and wikis is lame and easy. How about opening up some of your own intellectual property and talent so the rest of the world can contribute? You can take Diann’s recommendations, but they aren’t going to do anything for you. If you want to jump ahead, tear down some walls. That is the collaborative world, and it is likely that your company just does not fit into it.

It just stabbed me in the heart, but this is just twisting the knife.