Author: Paul Tomblin

A tale of two government documents

Spoiler alert: I’ve got a new job. Woo hoo! I start on Monday.

When I got my citizenship, they took away my high security Permanent Resident Card (“green card”) and gave me this fancy paper “Certificate of Naturalization”. At the ceremony, they told us that we should apply for passports immediately because the “Certificate of Naturalization” isn’t good for travel, but you had to send in the “Certificate of Naturalization” with the passport application as proof of citizenship and identity. Well, I had to travel to Ottawa for a kayak race the very next day, and so I kept it. And it worked for a couple of trips to Canada. I was expecting to get a new job any day now, so I kept the document so I’d have proof of citizenship when the time came.

Well, it wasn’t “any day now”, but I eventually got a job, and I had to fill out the I-9, which is your proof of eligibility for employment in the US. And that’s when I discovered that the list of documents that you’re allowed to use for proof of citizenship and/or identity doesn’t include the “Certificate of Naturalization”. I even downloaded the M-274, which is the guide for employers for filling out the I-9, hoping to find they just omitted it for brevity on the I-9 itself. No dice. And searching the Citizenship and Immigration Services web site shows that in 2007 they purposely disqualified this document because it wasn’t secure enough. For some strange reason, older citizenship documents, that unlike mine don’t even include photos and look like they were banged out on a crappy typewriter, are still valid. The document also said that you can use your Social Security card as proof of eligibility, but mine dates back from when I was here on a TN-1 temporary non-resident visa, and so it’s stamped on the front “Not Valid For Work Without INS Authorization”, so I figured it was not valid, and so I thought I was screwed.

After worrying about it all night, I had a meeting with the HR person at the company that placed me, and she basically said that the Social Security card would be valid, because the condition on it was no longer in force. So we filled out the I-9 and she thinks everything will be fine. But just in case, I sent off my passport application the very same day so I’ll have that if any questions are raised.

But here’s the thing that I think is really stupid: the Certificate of Naturalization isn’t a valid document for proving your citizenship to work even in conjunction with other documents, but it is valid for proving your citizenship and identity to get a passport, and a passport is a valid document for proving your citizenship and identity to work. Hopefully the reason is that the passport people do some sort of verification or validation that the people who process I-9s do not or cannot. Otherwise it’s just stupid. Coupled with the fact that a fairly fancy document like the Certificate of Naturalization has been disqualified because it’s not secure enough, while primitive documents like the Social Security card and older citizenship cards are still accepted, smacks of “Security Theatre”.

Compare and contrast backup strategies

On the one hand, you have Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror, a blog about programming read by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people. And by the same guy, blog.stackoverflow.com. His backup strategy was to make copies of both blogs but leave them on his hosting site, and trust that when the ISP said they had it backed up, they really had it backed up. Of course, the ISP had some sort of hardware failure, and when they went to restore their backups, they found that they didn’t work. He’s now trying to reconstruct his articles (but of course not the comments, and some very few of the images that went along with them) from Google’s cache, the Wayback Machine, and the web caches of his readers.

On the other hand, you have this blog, which is about nothing in particular and read by probably 15 people tops. My backup strategy is this:

  1. Daily database dumps, copied to another file system on a different physical volume on the same box. That’s there mostly to quickly respond if I accidentally delete the database or an upgrade goes bad or something. If my blog got more traffic and more comments, I’d do those dumps more frequently.
  2. Another backup and a tar file just before I do an upgrade.
  3. Daily rsyncs back to my Linux server at home. I keep a week’s worth of those.
  4. Daily copies of that local copy to removable hard drives. I keep a month’s worth of those.
  5. Every week or so, I move one of those removable hard drives to a physically remote location.

And I did this when my blog was hosted on a VPS that the ISP claimed had some sort of backups and now when my blog is hosted on a 1u box that I bought on eBay and stuck in a local colo facility. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not backed up until the backup in your pocket.

Oh yeah, did I mention that some of those Coding Horror blog entries that went missing were about backups and how important they are?

I’m sorry, but the idiocy of this just leaves me shaking my head in wonder about why anybody ever believed anything he ever said about computers. On the other hand, it also makes me glad that I don’t have a huge audience hanging on my every word, because someday I might get something wrong (hey, I know, not likely, right?), and schadenfreude’s a bitch.

Editing fail

So I was reading a story in this month’s Analog magazine, and encountered the following paragraph:

“They company wantoffered me a promotions me to learn aboutlead a new technology group, something I saw in the Dakotas a few months ago,” Gus replied. “It’s a nice increase career move if I accept,” Gus offered.

I swear all spelling, punctuation and spacing is exactly as it is in the magazine. It’s almost as if somebody took the blue pencil markup version and put in all the new stuff without taking out the old stuff. And then later in the same story:

His The aesthetic principles approach would disappear be lost when Phil’s new technology was perfectedused.

Doesn’t Analog have proof readers for this sort of thing?

(What does it say about my age and penchant for trivial that I know this much about obsolete book and magazine editing even though I’m not a writer or an editor?)

Still paddling

Last year, my last paddle of the season was on November 30th, and it was extremely cold. Today exactly the same group of people as that time met at Black Creek, which is a few miles upstream from GWC. It was a lot nicer this time – it was in the low to middle 50s instead of the high 30s like that time and the sun was shining, and while there was a slight breeze, I was comfortable with my wet suit and long sleeve shirt. No long underwear, no toque, no pogies.

We did long intervals – 1 mile at about 80% effort, with 8 minutes rest each time. We did four sets at about 8:15 per mile. I rode wash most of the time. Jim was paddling this down river racing boat that threw off a really good wake, and it was easier to ride than Dan’s sprint boat.

Unfortunately there isn’t going to be any more video this year – I dropped my camera in the canal on Sunday and it sunk like a stone. Next year I’m probably going to buy a Flip Ultra HD and a replacement for the mount and the waterproof bag, although I’m going to be a lot more careful about making sure the camera is attached to the boat with a rope in the future.

Update It’s not often I get to update a 13 year old blog post, but somebody wrote me to say that the link to the Flip Ultra HD was dead because Flip went out of business. He sent me a link to his guide talking about what happened to Flip.