Tag Archives: census

April 4, 2012 · 7:03 am

Census Time

I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things around here after a glorious week piloting a 1997 Camry, requisite brown, around the Midwest. Ahh the memories we created and good times, they were a plenty. Any dreams I had about long engaging conversations with the middle son were dashed early on the trip, he likes to travel in suspended animation. He was also suffering with a nasty cold so I wasn’t going to keep him up just to entertain me. Not that it would have worked anyway, he is after all a teen and so prone to one syllable responses, which only sometimes actually form words.

I did get a wee bit miffed on Saturday morning, the day of the big marathon drive home from Cleveland. As I was getting in the car at 6:45 I saw him taking a big swig of Nyquil.  “How the hell are you going to help me drive home when you’re..” he looked over, eyes all red, nose stopped up, hacking green stuff.. “I just want to sleep in the car for a while, I’ll be fine.” He was completely out from Cleveland to the western suburbs of Chicago when he came out of stasis and announced, like a Maslow experiment, that now that his first need, sleep, had been satiated he had moved up the pyramid one level to hunger.

I want to eat.

I spent the day Sunday getting caught up on things around the house. There were some Lodge chores that as Secretary, I had to attend too. Mrs S had a few things on her list which needed to get done, one of which is filling out the annual FAFSA, Federal Student Aid thing, this I did not do, I wasn’t mentally prepared for this, and I got a bye to next weekend.

When I’ve filled this piece of government bureaucracy out in the past it’s taken an hour or more. 15 minutes of actual filling in information, 45 minutes of looking for shit, trying to find forms, re-filling out shit because the screen blanked itself out when the session timed out while I was looking for other shit and finally, waiting for the new password(s) because I forgot the intricate password that was required set up the account, and since it won’t let you use a password you’ve used in the last 3,00 years, and you have to create a new one every time you forget the old one, (no password recovery) it’s a serious pain in the ass.

And for all my work, it was completed with the knowledge and satisfaction that for all our efforts we will receive not one thin dime. We won’t be applying for loans. What we might get out of the deal is a scholarship, and since colleges use the FAFSA worksheets to determine eligibility for scholarships it’s worth it to go through the trouble to do it. So I’m told.

Actually with the oldest kid, the great state of Michigan is paying him to go school there based on his academic performance and boyish good looks. While I hope the same from the great state of Alabama I’m not as hopeful given that Alabama has offered not even the slightest wiff of a grant for out of state or in our case foreign nationals (Minnesota and Alabama are different countries right? Wife thought so). We’ll see. It will be a fun couple hours on Easter when the rest of you are celebrating the Resurrection and promise of Eternal Life you can think about your old pal Sank chomping Matzo’s and cursing at the computer all day. There ain’t even a damned race to watch to distract me.

Big news this week around my house, or should I say in my room, is the much anticipated release of the 1940 Census. For those of obsessed with Genealogy this is huge. The release of census is a big deal, insight into where folks lived, who they lived with, what they did, and how open they were with people asking questions on their front steps. The documents were released online this week, the National Archives partnered with a provider in the silicon valley to put digitized versions of the information online Monday, April 2. Their site was up for about 11 milliseconds and as 2 million people went after the data. It went down the rest of the day. Tuesday morning I woke up 4:45 to get to it before the masses tried again. I found what I was looking for, my grandparent’s house in Fort Worth with my Dad and all my Aunts and Uncles living there.   The data isn’t indexed yet by name so to find it you have to know the address where they lived, I did. You then have to pull up the census maps of the city you’re interested in and find the Census Enumeration District. The entire country was broken up into sections that a Census worker could canvas in about 2 weeks. I was able to find it. Next step is to look for the file from that enumeration district, in my case about 44 pages. Then you can look for the block number, which I would have found on the map, and finally the house numbers and BOOM there they were.

It sounds more complicated than it is. I had what I was looking for in about 5 minutes. If you readers out there are interested in finding your own information and are having trouble doing so, drop me a note. I can help I’ve been at this for a long time. Even if you don’t know the address of your family members I can sometimes figure that out from other documents.

The pursuit of data is more interesting to me than the pursuit of game or fish or good scotch. Not as interesting as the pursuit of my charming bride, but more often than not more fruitful.

The bad news is I was looking for a family member who I’d never heard off. She appeared on immigration records and in the 1930 census as living with my Grandparents and my dad (who was 4 in 1930) but vanishes in the 30’s. No one has ever talked about her so I’m seriously wondering about the deets.

Secrets…

3 Comments

Filed under Life

Tagged as , , ,

March 17, 2010 · 7:30 pm

Census Shmensus

Got our census forms in the mail yesterday. I tossed them in the trash. Mrs S went ballistic. Apparently I’m causing trouble for myself by doing so.. You know, I’m not all that interested in being counted to be honest. In a given day I get prompted for my opinion on stuff hundreds of times; on line, on the phone, at the front door. It has occurred to me that my opinion is being used against me by all marketers and advertisers and government folks. She pointed out that the envelope has printed on it..”By Penalty of Law”.

I missed that part. She fished them out and now the government will be getting our census form back, albeit coffee stained.

Everyone’s interested in learning more and more about me, not because they give a shit about me, but because they want to get a better understanding of what I care about so 1) they can develop a better picture of what old fat ugly guys in mid-life crisis with three kids and a dog react too, thus improving their ability to lie to me about the attributes of products and services they want to push and 2) so they can lump me in with all the other old ugly fat guys and sell other people information about me.

Well, this old ugly fat guy with three kids and dog is not going for it anymore. I’m not giving away anything about what I do with out getting something in return. Turns out, data about me is valuable. Who knew?

Not like I don’t tell someone something about me every time I use a credit card.. but really I’m rebelling where ever I can. I mean come on, it’s everywhere now.  Take OnStar for example, remember OnStar.. that little add on that GM included in their vehicles. For a mere $10.00 a month, think of it as an additional $500.00 added to the price to price of the car if you own it for 5 years, for that additional revenue stream GM would provide you with turn by turn directions and call the cops if you get in an accident. Well, what they didn’t tell you is that they also could track your comings and goings by having installed a two way communication device in a black box in your trunk. Turns out the data they can gather, anonymously of course, is more valuable than the car itself. Don’t believe me? You must have missed that “fun” fact that hit the press this week that Wal-Mart is the #1 destination of GPS units in the United States. This was based on aggregating the entries people made into their GPS units in the their phones and Tom Toms..

Hmmm, sounds like someone is aggregating that data to me. Hence the reason I took back the TomTom device that Mrs S got me for Fathers Day last year and replaced it with a Garmin. Garmin has no subscription fee and isn’t “interactive” meaning they aren’t tracking your use of the device. It also means my maps aren’t as up-to-date as they could be and I don’t have traffic data.. but fair trade for some privacy.

Don’t even get me started on the cell phone. When I finally lose my mind and drop of the grid.. which is sounding better and better every day, cell phone and credit cards are the first thing to go.

My company, the local school district, both political parites and the United States Government have all sent messages to me reiterating the importance of filling out my census form. When groups are all together on something, that sends my spider sense  into tingling I’ll tell you. The company wants accurate census date because they use it to make business decisions on marketing etc. The school district wants to count as many people as it can locally so they can get mo mony mo money mo money mo from the Feds. The Feds want the data to decide, among other things, how many Congressional Districts we need in Minnesota.

Mrs S made that argument that Minnesota is about to lose a congressional seat, so we need to count ourselves accurately. Minnesota has LONG had an overinflated sense of it’s’ worth in the world. I think we’re about 3 congressional delegates heavy if you ask me. When I see the billions in farm subsidies that are going to this state and the blue chip 4 lane highways way up north, highways which see about 10 cars a day I know we’re doing all we can to bring home the pork. Maybe if we cut the delegates and become more like North Dakota, where nothing really happens, but folks are happy and don’t pay for a lot of extras we could address this problem.

Actually, if we could get rid of Michelle Bachmann’s seat that would be fine with me. That woman is such a poor example of an American Politician that it’s embarrassing, 56% of Minnesotans polled believe as I do on this according to polls.  She’s sort of a new McCarthy. Just in case you haven’t been tracking, she calls liberals “Unamerican”, She’s advocated for investigations into the loyalty of US Congressmen, she’s advocated for armed revolution, then backed away, calls Gays and Lesbians “dysfunctional” and “suffering from identity disorders”, and she belongs to a church that advocates that the Pope is the Anti-Christ. Anyway.. losing her would be a good thing.

If not responding to the census helps get rid of her.. so be it.

Well apparently we’re going to get another census document in the mail to replace the one I trashed. And when I trash that one, they’re going send someone around to visit.. persistent moles aren’t they.

Jeez Sank, how did you get so bitter.

BTW on a more interesting note we had the big annual company meeting yesterday. Not every day Pearl Jam entertains at a company function but they did, and it was very cool. The woman next to me was upset about volume. I made the comment, from cyber buddy Eric over at No One Of Consequence that “if its too LOUD, you’re to OLD”. Well… “so you’re calling me old” she remarked, “looks like an HR situation.” Lucky I a great counter. I explained that we wouldn’t be going anywhere. The meeting opened with a few numbers by Michael Buble, and the Canadian Dream hmself had come down into the crowd and shaken her hand. I had spent last three and half hours listening to her remark about how handsome he is and on and on.. We’d be escorting each other out of the building.

Fair enough.

7 Comments

Filed under Life

Tagged as , , , ,