American “friendly fire” is now responsible for over 15% of our military deaths in Afghanistan since 2002: 5 out of 32, assuming that the rest of the injured from this weekend’s strafing run by an American fighter jet on a Canadian troop survive. You can be sure that if we were killing 15% of the Americans who were dying over there, it would be an international, border-closing incident.
I’m a mid-40’s feminist engineer, living in Toronto with Damir, my slightly eccentric Croatian husband, who is also an engineer. Since I do software and he does hardware, we’re pretty symbiotic, although he hasn’t yet figured out that the vacuum cleaner is, technically, hardware.
Born in Toronto at the very end of the baby boom, I grew up in a time early enough that women still had to fight for equal opportunities, but late enough that we at least had some chance of getting them; these experiences shaped both my career and my outlook on life. I’m the youngest of four siblings, which undoubtedly also shaped my outlook.
I love food, wine, cooking and travel, and it’s my goal to do at least one lengthy (3+ weeks) international trip each year. I’ve become addicted to Flickr, and carry my camera with me all the time to capture the weird things that happen around me every day.
In my day job, I’m an independent business process management (BPM) analyst, consultant and systems architect, specializing in BPM design, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. You can find my business blog here. In the past, I’ve started and run two companies: a desktop workflow and document management product company from 1988-90, and a 40-person BPM and e-commerce systems integrator from 1990-2000. During 2000-2001, I moved to southern California and worked for FileNet as Director of eBusiness Evangelism during the launch of their eProcess BPM product, where I ended up travelling to 14 countries in 16 months and meeting lots of people who I can now visit in other countries. Since 2002, I’ve been back to a one-person private consulting practice.
This blog came about because of all the posts that I was putting on my business blog that had the category “off topic”: rants about poor customer service, business ideas and topics that had nothing to do with BPM, links to my mom’s blog and more. I like to keep the business blog a bit focussed on professional topics, so this is my outlet for everything else in my life that’s not about BPM.
Sandy
Posts
[...] As I pointed out a while back, a huge percentage of Canadian troop deaths in Afghanistan are being caused by American “not-so-friendly” fire, which is a bit ironic considering that we’re only in Afghanistan in order to pander to the Americans — they’re kinda busy in Iraq, so want us to fight some of their other battles. For decades, Canadians have held a peacekeeper role in conflicts abroad, a position that I fully support. Being part of a fighting force in a conflict that we should not be involved with, however, is not something that I can support. [...]