Philip Weiss

Weisses in New Mexico

I have a great great uncle, Frank Weiss, who moved from the family home in Cassville Wisconsin to Pukwana South Dakota. He married Nannie Conaway in 1890, and they had 4 children. Robert died young, and the other three were Marion, Theodore, and Agnes.

I think I just solved some puzzles that in retrospect shouldn’t have been all that difficult to figure out.

The first is that I found a census entry for Nannie Weiss living with Agnes Weiss in Carlsbad, New Mexico in 1920. Nannie and Agnes were also listed in Pukwana in 1920. I found the New Mexico entry several years ago and wondered what that was about. Vacation?

The next part of the mystery is the 1915 South Dakota state census. The only member of the family I could find was Frank Weiss.

1915 South Dakota state census card for Frank Weiss

I figured Marion being missing was because she was attending the University of Illinois, as she graduated in 1917. And maybe Theodore was off working somewhere. And not finding someone in the records in a place I know they should be is very common. Records are spotty. I got a letter just yesterday from the Social Security Administration saying they had no record of my grandfather’s death, so they could not release information about him to me. Missing records are a common problem. I didn’t think too much of the missing members of the Weiss family.

The last puzzle was Agnes’ obituary. It mentioned that Agnes finished 8th grade in Wisconsin and then moved with the family to New Mexico for a few years. For some reason, I never connected that with the other pieces of information. The obituaries for Nannie and the other children never mentioned anything about New Mexico. In fact, Theodore’s said he lived in Pukwana his entire life save for the time he spent in the military.

It appears now that Nannie moved with the kids who were still at home. In 1915, the county assessor who conducted the census didn’t include them because he knew they didn’t live there. But the US Census in 1920 asks who normally lived in the domicile. And to Frank, Nannie and his children normally lived there, so he included them in his responses. At the same time, Nannie also answered the queries as if she normally lived on her own with Agnes in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The questions the records don’t answer is why Nannie took the kids and moved out for a time? There’s all sorts of possibilities, from domestic trouble to plans for the whole family to move to New Mexico that fell through. Perhaps the family fell on harder times and Nannie took several teaching positions. And why New Mexico?

The last grandchild of Frank and Nannie died last September. A number of great grandchildren are still alive, but none of them were older than 4 years when Nannie died in 1959. Unless Frank or Nannie wrote it down somewhere, I won’t get a chance to hear the story from someone who heard it directly from one of the participants.

That’s why when I meet distant relatives, I don’t ask them about names and dates. I ask them to tell me stories.

Costco detergents

I have bad luck with Costco detergent and cars. Two years ago I had a sweet smell coming from the back of my car that turned out to be one of those big Costco laundry detergent containers having popped open and poured liquid detergent all over the back of my station wagon. Had to pay to have car detailed. Extra even, cause the battery is back there.

Unloaded my car last night and saw a smear of white stuff in the back. I thought it was potato salad. Then I got inside and saw the container of liquid dishwasher detergent which I had unloaded from the car earlier in the day and left on my counter. A large portion of the detergent was in a giant puddle on the counter and a smaller portion dripped over the side onto the floor, all having leaked from a nail sized hole in the side of the container. I’m afraid to go back out to check my car because I don’t want to have to get it detailed again.

2013 Seattle Mayoral Race: Against Kate Martin

Kate Martin’s top priority for transportation is the following: Decongest bus and street car routes to improve reliability. The following blog post talks about how she intends to do that: Congestion Rx

Do you see any solutions in that? I don’t. What I see is a cranky neighbor who’s mad that bus drivers are getting overtime. Please explain to me how reducing overtime will materially improve bus service.

She’s got a few other blog posts on transportation as well.

Less Road Rage, More Comprehensive Transportation Planning

Her solution to road rage? Take bikes off the roads and put them on “Greenways.” I love the idea in theory. In practice, this isn’t going to work for a number of reasons. First, Seattle’s geography means that there are number of choke points where bicycles and vehicles will have to share space. Second, given the realities of cranky car people, bicycle roads are going to be shunted to corridors that are a pain in the ass for bicyclists. Is she going to push to turn Roosevelt way or 15th Northwest from a car through-way to a bicycle through-way? I doubt it. Is she going to make it so that bicycle crossings have equal or higher priority at crossings with cars, or will it be like the Burke Gilman trail where every crossing means bicycles have to stop and wait for a cross-walk light? It’s going to be the latter, and that will make it impractical for bicyclists to commute on a greenway.

Regarding Sound Transit Planning for Lightrail to Ballard

Rather than extend Link to Ballard, Kate Martin wants to add a Sounder Commuter stop in West Ballard. Where those tracks go is nowhere near the population centers of Ballard, and people aren’t going to walk that far. This would mean that the station would need a large garage for Park-n-Riders. The train ride would also put commuters at the Amtrak station at the very south end of downtown. That makes sense for people commuting a long distance (the nearest stations are Longacres and Edmonds) where the distance to offices from the station, while a chunky amount, are but a fraction of the total commute. But for commuters from Ballard who need to get to Belltown or north downtown? They’re not going to want a walk that is as long as their train ride to downtown in the first place. A Link route with stops in Interbay, Ballard proper, Loyal Heights and Crown Hill is going to serve commuters a lot better than a Sounder stop.

Or take for instance her priority of “Rebuild the Seattle Police Department”. Here’s how she would do that: SPD: A Path Forward.

Yup, her main idea is to get a strong leader. Duh. Nothing about body cameras, or tracking race to see if the SPD is biased, or getting people who live in Seattle to be officers, or new training programs. Those are ideas from other candidates. They may or may not work, but they are pro-active ideas at least. Kate Martin? In her other blog post on crime wants to target “incivility”: Crime and public safety. What that amounts to is that she wants all the people that annoy and scare her out of downtown, the poor people, the homeless people, the crazy people. Then women will come downtown again!

Sorry Kate Martin, you are a no go for me. A good portion of your policy ideas are dog-whistle items for NIMBYists, not forward-thinking prescriptions for an urban city.

It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a …

It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Geni.com becomes evil

Just under three years ago I started researching genealogy as a hobby. My girlfriend suggested Geni.com, and I signed up without knowing much about it. I kind of liked it at first, and even paid for a year’s worth of Geni Pro rather than their free service.

What Geni is trying to do is create one family tree for the entire world. I like that goal.

I don’t like how they’ve gone about it.

The way it worked when I joined was you entered people and information about them, and you became the manager of a profile for them. If you wished, you could merge that profile with a profile for the same person entered by another user. Then the two of you could collaborate on research about that person, jointly managing the profile. Any relative within 4 generations could be designated private, so that other users couldn’t see the information and it isn’t crawled by Google. This allows people to add close, living relatives to their family tree but keep their life details private.

Then a couple years ago, Geni changed policy. If the profile was for a person more than 4 generations back in time (i.e., your great grandparents or earlier in the tree), any Geni Pro user could edit them. This is a huge issue because there are a lot of really sloppy genealogists. I’ve no problem with sloppy research, but when it affects my research, I get cranky. I stopped using Geni for the most part, though I kept my account and periodically edited a profile or two.

Another aspect of Geni is that they have a class of users called curators. Curators are uber-users. They can manage popular profiles (e.g., Queen Elizabeth, Charlemagne) preventing sloppy genealogy work being done on them. They can approve merges made between abandoned profiles. Those are good things, mostly.

But recently, though I’m not sure when, Geni decided that curators should have unfettered access to private profiles. In other words, random genealogists have access to the private information about living people. Presumably the curators are now the unpaid customer service representatives. This is a huge problem!.

Also, those curators can approve merges and edits for private profiles. I had a first cousin entered, and so did someone else. A curator came along and saw that the information matched and merged the two profiles without the permission of either myself or the other person who had entered my cousin. So now that person can see a whole lot of private information I’ve entered where the 4 generations for both of us intersect. What does it matter, you’d think? They’re probably family. Except there was a divorce and I didn’t know the details. Now I can see some of that. And the other person can see similar pieces of information.

Allowing some random curator to decide on their own to make changes to private profiles, including merges, was the final straw. I sent an angry email to Geni and got back a really condescending response that I should ask the sloppy curator for help in fixing the mess that person caused. I replied back that I would do no such thing, that I wanted it back the way it was prior without me having to ask someone nicely. And then I got back another even more condescending response that I didn’t want to work on a collaborative site.

I never replied again. Had I, I would have pointed out that collaboration does not mean what that C.S.R. thought it meant. It does not mean making changes without telling other people affected. Working together means talking and discussing changes, none of which Geni’s designated curator did. Not to mention they shouldn’t have even been able to see private information in the first place.

I spent the next evening removing as much information as I could from Geni. I know they have logs of all the past information, so it’s futile if they decide to become even more evil than they already are. Rest assured Geni when you read this, if you restore that private information and/or make it available to anyone and I find out about it, I will sue. I don’t put it past them. The company has continually decided to make yet more information available to yet more people when people who entered that information did not expect it.

I will never put new information on Geni again. If you care about your family’s privacy, you won’t either.

Update: I saw that a lot of people visited this post from a curator forum discussion on Geni.com. That prompted me to go take a look at Geni’s privacy policy. And again I see they’ve updated it yet again to make previously private information public. Previously, up to four generations from yourself could be kept private. Now they keep private only information about living people. That would be fine if that’s how they started, but as I noted above, they keep changing it to reveal information that was previously private. Like I said: evil.

Quick reaction – Portland Timbers at Seattle Sounders

Tonight’s game against Portland was very disappointing. We were up one to nil for most of the game, and Portland tied it in the 90th minute to eek out a draw. I looked down and missed that last play. Our own goal was a nice play where Steve Zakuani anticipated a Portland pass, intercepted it, ran the length of the field, then placed a cross perfectly at the feet of Eddie Johnson for the score. I think Zak should have received the Man of the Match award, not Eddie.

Oba Martins entered the game around the 70th minute and played well despite almost no practice with the team. Zakuani is starting to look like the Zakuani of old. Andy Rose had a poor game, giving the ball away a lot and holding onto the ball for too many touches. And for god’s sake Sigi, please please please drill Eddie Johnson on getting his head back into the game quickly after a blown play. Blown plays happen. Eddie laying on the field in frustration or slowing walking back onside when the Sounders are mounting another attack is just not cool.

I had great company for the game too.

Oh hell yeah! Sounders advance over Tigres in Champions League!

Tonight the Sounders played Tigres UANL in the quarterfinals of the CONCACAF Champions League. My team started the game down 1 to 0 after losing the away match in Mexico. Then we went down 2 to 0 when Tigres got an early goal. While the Sounders didn’t play particularly poorly, play was overall pretty sloppy.

And then just before the half one of the Tigres players kicked the ball away to waste time on a Sounders free kick. He got a yellow, his second. Off he went. The Sounders moved to a 3-5-2 after that, and started tearing Tigres apart.

First goal, O’Dea High School graduate, DeAndre Yedlin knocks it in from 20 yards out.

Then new Sounder and former Liverpool defender Djimi Traore nails another long distance goal! Defenders don’t get goals from the run of play all that often, so this was especially awesome.

And then finally, with a shot that didn’t look as impressive, but was an extremely skilled shot from a tight angle to the near post of the keeper, Eddie Johnson scored what was the winner. As Darren put it, we need more skilled goals like that in MLS.

The best part was the Tigres fans sitting behind us. They were talking all sorts of smack when Tigres was up 2 to 0. It was so delicious yelling I can’t hear you now! at them. Well, and a few other things.

Quick reaction – Montreal Impact at Seattle Sounders

Today was the first game of the 2013 season for the Sounders. My team lost, one to nothing. Unlike a lot of my friends, I thought the Sounders played pretty well. They frequently moved the ball forward without resorting to the long ball and did not get stymied in the midfield. They created a lot of chances on goal, and had a lot of corner kicks. Deandre Yedlin showed much promise, though he really needs to work on his crosses. Andy Rose had a great game. The bad though? Sigi Schmidt’s defense was vulnerable to the counter-attack, and I thought Michael Gspurning made a bad call coming off his line and then watching the ball go over where he couldn’t get a hand on it. And the Sounders finishing was awful. Two shots hit the goal posts, and the rest were right at Troy Perkins. I’m generally a fan of peppering the goal with shots and taking advantage of mishandled rebounds. But to work, those shots really can’t be right at the keeper’s torso. It was a good enough showing that I am hopeful for the season.

I was not thrilled with the new operator of stadium services. It certainly wasn’t worse than last year, but it wasn’t any better. The pro shop was closed for something, as they are constructing something in that space. But the substitute locations had undertrained staff and were understaffed as well. After waiting in line for 20 minutes, the woman working the cash register announced they were out of ponchos and we should all go over to the other location, which had an even longer line. I decided to skip it, and was walking back by the other place, and someone had brought them another couple boxes of ponchos, but now we lost our place in line. Thankfully, one of the fellows in line bought ponchos for me and we were on our way. The food vendor didn’t know how to run a credit card that wouldn’t swipe electronically. I think they were attached to a non-profit that gets a cut for providing volunteers. Which I think is a stupid way to operate stadium services. Get people in there, train them, and pay them.

A Good Day To Die Hard The Hobbit

Yesterday I was really in the mood for a bad action movie, so I saw A Good Day To Die Hard. I haven’t seen a movie in the theater since November (I think). But I really wanted some explosions, car chases, and a plot that made almost no sense whatsoever. Die Hard delivered. John McClane (MacClain? I dunno how they spell it and I don’t really care either) heads to Russia where his son he hasn’t seen in years is about to go on trial for some sort of drug charge. Total white knight. But John McClaine Jr. is actually C.I.A. and being in jail is part of their complicated plan to bring down the incoming Russian defense minister. Sr. screws that up by distracting Jr. and then they have to start killing bad guys. Sadly, there’s only one car chase, which occurs near the beginning of the film. Lots of explosions and dodging bullets though, including dodging being shot at by a giant gun on a helicopter that shoots lit up bullets. Very satisfying.

Mind you, it’s really nothing like the original Die Hard, which was a different kind of action movie. A Good Day To Die Hard is really the same old action movie.

Today I went and saw The Hobbit. Bleah. Awful movie. I don’t really remember a lot of the book, but there’s a lot of stuff added in the movie. Most of the added stuff I didn’t like. Where the hell did the pale orc nemesis come from? I don’t remember that in the book. Did the movie really need a nemesis in order to make the show palatable? I don’t think so.

Unlike Die Hard, I wanted these things to make sense, and they just didn’t. Why were the dwarves fighting the orcs, other than the set up the nemesis relationship? No reason. Oh yeah, and the son of the dwarf king goes and fights orc who have nothing to do with Smaug the dragon who took over the dwarf redoubt. Why had the pale orc sworn to end the dwarf king’s line in particular? Why does he care? Just dumb. That’s merely one example.

And oh my god was this movie slow. I don’t mind the flashbacks. That didn’t seem to slow things down. But there were interminable talking and speechifying scenes that added nothing. And unnecessarily long scenic shots. And C.G.I. chase scenes that were just too damn long.

Needless to say, I am extremely unlikely to be catching in the theaters the last 6 fucking hours of this story that will comprise the second and third movies of a series that really shouldn’t have been a series.

The Losers – Stuck On You

Without further ado, here’s the web release of my band’s new album, Stuck On You.

It’s love songs! For Valentine’s Day! Because we love you!