Hi, my name is Curtis Hovey.

Sinzui (shínzùí) is a collection of pages dedicated my interests in hacking, creating, and deliberations upon the world in general. "Sinzui" is also my nick used online and in attribution.

I am a devops engineer working in the cloud. I love working in Python, Ubuntu, containers, and the Cloud. I previously worked for Canonical on the Launchpad and Juju projects, National Geographic, and Time Life.

My wife, Anne Lawrence, is a creative face painter and henna artists. Visit Happy Faces to see her work, and if live in the Washington DC area, hire her for a party. I have 3 children, one of whom needs watching; 6 cats, one of whom needs watching, and numerous koi that don't need watching, but sometimes it helps.

Goals

1. Get new handwriting, and it must be legible when written quickly.
2. Remove the U.S. dollar bill and penny from circulation. Americans are living in denial that their currency is immune to inflation. The dollar is worth only 20% of what it was fifty years ago. You must spend a dollar bill at a vending machine to get the bottle of soda that is only worth $0.20. You can buy something for nickel, but not a penny; why carry a coin that has no practical purchasing power? If Americans wont revalue their currency, then removing the lowest coin and bill will restore some sanity to the monetary system. This wont fix the value of the currency, but it will make it useful, the smallest coin has value, and you can still buy a soda with a coin.
3. Remove the letters 'c', 'j', 'q', 'x', 'y' from the alphabet. None of these letters represent a unique sound in the English language. The letter 'c' is a poor substitute for 'k' or 's'. The letter 'j' is a diphthong of dsh, friend of tsh ('ch'). The letter 'q', is a diphthong representing ''kw', and you cannot write a 'q' without a 'u' anyway. The letters 'x' and 'y' are not simply diphthongs, but represent different diphthongs 'eks' and 'egz' (or 'z') for 'x' and 'y' may represent 'ia', 'ie', 'io' or 'iu'. This non-sense must be stopped.
4. After I've removed the redundant letters from the alphabet, I'll rectify some other letter injustices. The 'sh' and 'zh' sounds that are in the words 'sure' and 'azure' will be represented by the letters 'c' and 'x'. The letters 'y' and 'q' will represent the 'th' and 'th' sounds that are made by the words 'the' and 'that'. This will simply spelling and remove many ambiguities in pronunciation.
5. Start the calendar with the year 0. I don't like taking the side of the mindless masses that celebrated the start of the second millennium a year early when the calendar ticked to 2000. But I don't like siding with an innumerate monk from the backwaters of Europe either. We spent centuries struggling to educate the workers of the world of the value of zero. It's too much for their small intellects to juggle different number systems and arrive at the correct decision. There are many more of them than us, and it's too costly when they make mistakes like going on a boozer a year prematurely. But just because we understand how the calendar works, does not mean we should live with it, particularly if it is clearly wrong. The best thing about fixing the calendar is that we don't have to worry about the masses making more mistakes--they'll never notice we fixed it. There will be a small 'Y0' problem for programmers and historians. A lot of programs and books will inaccurately report the carbon-dated estimate of an artifact from a Egyptian tomb, or the date of when Rome invaded Gaul which should be 54 C.E.. The only acceptable solution is sell replacement data classes for software. and reprint the corrected text books, which is an excellent opportunity for the elite to profit from the ignorant.

Guilty of stealing all that I am, all I have to say is that no matter where you go, there you are.
— Sinzui