Caveat: Venter

Straw Poll

2011-02-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

So once more Ron Paul has won the CPAC Presidential Straw Poll (and before anyone jumps on me for the selection of source, I took the first hit on Google). The most amusing part of this is the quote from David Keene, organizer of the host group, in referring to Congressman Paul (R-TX): "Ron Paul energized kids, and I want those kids."

We've seen that a solid youth vote can move a presidential election (1960 and 2008 are key examples). We have also seen how little such a group did in 1972. The problem here is the dismissive choice of language. Kids? Seriously? You're looking for kids? You don't want educated youth? Young voters eager to make a passionate and reasoned case for your eventual candidate? Wait. Nope. Reasoned arguments have not been winning you any elections lately. Go for the kids.

Defections

2009-06-30T18:38:00.000-07:00

So now that there are 58 Democratic Senators and two Independents who caucus with the Dems, thanks to today's Minnesota Supreme Court ruling (5-0, for those who care), how long do folks think it will take before one of those 60, in a bid to gain power, crosses the aisle?

The Best Show You're Not Watching (and Sue)

2009-05-27T21:01:00.000-07:00

I DVR Breaking Bad on Sundays (the DVR catches the rebroadcast, too) and watch it later in the week, usually on Mondays. This week was different, and I just caught it today. For those unfamiliar with the show, high school chemistry teacher Walter White, working a second job in a car wash, gets diagnosed with cancer and, through happenstance (his brother-in-law is a DEA agent) meets a former student who is cooking meth. Walter decides this is the way to make the money to pay for his treatment and care for his family after he dies, and so he becomes a drug manufacturer, with Jesse, his former student, as the dealer.

In season 2, things have gotten crazier, and among other things, his teenage son decides to help out by making a web site named savewalterwhite.com to raise funds to pay for his father's treatment. This is bad for a man who does not want to keep a high profile. On a lark, I went to the site, and, sure enough, there was exactly what I had seen on the show, including a link to the National Cancer Coalition, where real donations can help fight cancer.

My wife, just over a year ago, lost her aunt Mari to pancreatic cancer, so cancer has had a presence in our household for a couple of years now. I was 53 minutes into the DVRed episode when my phone rang, number blocked, which means my mother is calling. I knew what that meant, though I tried to convince myself it was just another internet connection problem for me to solve.

My neighbor, Sue Smith, a woman who had helped raise me, after a fashion, and whose children I had helped raise (much less significantly) as a babysitter and as a neighbor, had succumbed to lung cancer, a scant six weeks after her initial diagnosis. It hit me hard, and it will continue to have its impact for quite some time. Sue is an irreplaceable light, a woman I never knew to express anger except over conservative politics, and an amazing human being with an inimitable laugh.

I know everyone says things like this about people who have recently died, but I assure you I have thought these things for years. Even now, because wired.com is my homepage, I noticed that a key story today is about cancer. It's funny how things come together, though perhaps it's like the way half the people on the road seem to be driving the same kind of car you just bought.

Anyway, I have been struggling, making headway, and then stumbling—badly—in my fight to quit smoking. I even bought a pack today. I will finish the pack, but when it is done, I am done. Sue, this smoke-free life is dedicated to you. There is no better way I can think to honor you in my life than this. I hope I can succeed now where I have failed before.

Requiescat in pace, Sue. You are missed, but never forgotten.

Two-Part Irony

2009-04-23T20:05:00.000-07:00

Banks have been complaining about the government's decision to alter the terms attached to TARP funds, requiring, after the initial round, that executives accept salary caps and other such outrageous things. This, of course, has much support from the pro-business folks one finds on CNBC and other media outlets (Larry Kudlow is a fine example). Yes, it is a bit sneaky on the government's part, but hardly something to worry multi-millionaires whose own clients are, in too many cases, trying desperately to avoid personal bankruptcy.

Enter today's discussion between President Obama and credit card companies. Kudlow and many of his fellow commentators are crying foul that the government might try limiting the ability of companies issuing consumer credit to change the terms of that credit after it has been granted, even penalizing people who pay on time every time.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that dead companies provide no credit and that increasing those companies' exposure to risk means that fewer consumers will qualify for credit. This last point means that recovery due to consumer spending will be longer in coming. Fewer plasma screen TVs and iPods mean fewer dollars circulating through the economy (I love the way that the same money gets counted every time it is spent, but such are the joys of economics). Still, financial institutions, whether they be banks or other credit-issuing organizations, must expect to play by rules that at least resemble those we consumers deal with, right?

Finally, is it really such a bad thing if we ask that fewer people have free access to easy credit? Isn't loose credit precisely what precipitated this entire mess in the first place? Go back twenty-two years and look at how many high school seniors had credit cards (I was a senior in 1987, so this is easy for me to think about), and for those who did, how many cards they had. Compare that to two years ago. Was the change really that bright? President Obama has declared that he wants have his administration usher in a "new era of responsibility," and both sides of this—consumers and lending institutions—could use a little more of that.

Now if only we could get government on board with this concept.

Poll Session(s)

2009-02-06T17:22:00.000-08:00

Republican Senator Jeff Sessions appeared today on CNBC to discuss the stimulus bill. When asked why, after Republicans claimed that the way to stimulate a growing economy is tax cuts, are Republicans now saying that tax cuts are the way to stimulate this shrinking economy. His answer? Polls show that the American people believe tax cuts are the fastest way to inject money into the economy.

I have two problems with this. First, a very few people in America qualify as economists, so I don't think this is the greatest way of determining economic policy. Second, this is the same party that has spent decades ragging on Democrats for supposedly trying to govern by opinion polls (remember the Clinton years?).

Gotta love hypocrisy, huh?

Mojave? Kinda Dry

2008-10-05T02:02:00.000-07:00

I final decided I would take Microsoft up on visiting the site for the well-advertised "Mojave Experiment" so I could see what they had going on. In case you have missed the ads (oh, to be you who have), Microsoft shows people who were told the latest OS was "Windows Mojave," at which point said people gushed. We are not shown in the ads what these people were shown, and even on the site, the introduction to the OS is kinda lame.

Still, let's try something here. I took a look at one of the videos by the MS guys, and I found the "Instant Search" functionality was, while zippy enough on their 2.2GHz Core2 Duo laptops, no faster than my OS X 10.5 on my 1.2GHz G4. They pointed out that their machines were not top of the line and were one year old. Mine is not top of the line, and it is four years old. Come on, guys. If you want to impress, at least beat out the machine on which I am typing this, and do it using a feature I didn't have for over a year before your not-so-new machines were made.

"World Peace"

2008-10-02T19:19:00.001-07:00

Sandra Bullock is wonderful in this role, but I was surprised to see Joe Biden in the same movie.

Update: Sandra Bullock was victorious in the first two movies. I didn't think they would write such a dark ending for the Gracie Hart character. Looks like an end to the sequels.

Oops!

2008-09-04T20:57:00.000-07:00

Noonan and company on Palin.

McCain

2008-09-04T19:14:00.000-07:00

Last night I sent a note to the McCain campaign through its web site. In that note I asked whether the campaign would repudiate the manner in which former New York Mayor Giulliani mocked and ridiculed the work of Barack Obama as a community organizer. Of course, one cannot expect any reply, particularly when not donating money. Still, as I noted in my earlier post, I have yet to hear one person, whether part of the formal campaign or just a private citizen, give any reason to vote for John McCain without taking shots at Obama or at the Democratic Party. It is true that the Obama campaign has turned more negative lately, but I have seen plenty of campaign ads and spoken to plenty of people meeting those criteria.

As McCain is, at this moment, delivering his acceptance speech, he is claiming to respect Obama and Obama's supporters. Senator, as a voter and as a distant relative, I ask that you demonstrate that respect for a change. I have heard about how McCain is about action and Obama is all about words. Senator, it's time you prove that.

The Race is On

2008-08-27T17:32:00.000-07:00

OK, I have somehow managed to keep from dumping a ton of posts about the presidential race, though there have been multiple causes every day for the last year and a half. Now we are half way through the Democratic National Convention and a mere five days from the Republican National Convention. My challenge to any who may come by here is this: Comment here with an affirmative reason for voting for either Obama or McCain.

Now, I am not that easy to please. In making such a comment, make no reference to the other major candidate and no reference to the other candidate's party. These must be affirmative arguments only.

In case you were wondering why I put this challenge out there, consider negative ads. I have yet to see one ad for McCain that meets these criteria, though I have seen such ads for Obama. Conversely, the DNC has included more than a couple shots at McCain, including Sen. Clinton's (and others') appeals to support Obama because we can't afford McCain, precisely the kind of argument I don't want to get here.

Every. Four. Years.

2008-08-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

The summer games are always entertaining. Even many of those who don't care much for sports find events enthralling. Of course, there are the controversies—stepping on ankles (not so much), smashing of knees, blood in the pool—and who can turn away from such great drama?

This year, of course, we are looking at the age of four Chinese gymnasts, collectively clinging to four individual and team gold medals. Should they be too young to compete (they must be sixteen in the Olympic year), those medals may be stripped, and everyone else will come up a slot in the standings.

We could look at which reporter found what on official sites or which hacker broke into what system to dig up more information, but until this is resolved, that won't do much for anyone. Let's, instead, consider the issues in play if China did cheat:

They are the host country, so cheating looks worse when they do it than when others, like the North Korean shooter, get tossed (fair or otherwise, who really expects North Korea to play by the rules?).

Going into the games, the Chinese were taking a lot of heat for not improving the nation's human rights record, though the IOC admits that part of the reason it awarded the games to Beijing was to get improvements in that area.

Some people think the U.S. is whining or that the U.S. gymnasts will be shamed by losing to girls so much younger, ignoring the fact that youth is an advantage; however, I wonder how bad it looks that a country feels it has to cheat in order to compete against people who are, in terms of the sport, heading out of their prime.

Finally, China's women's gymnastics team might get barred from the London games in 2012.

All of this because of a couple of years? I find it a tragedy that any government would result to such tactics (if in fact China did) to win a competition that purports to be based on the highest values of sportsmanship and honor. I find it worse when the country so doing is hosting the world at a competition lasting more than two weeks.

It truly is a sad day when China is taking morality lessons from our current administration. I had hoped they were better than that.

Georgia on My Mind

2008-08-12T18:10:00.001-07:00

OK, so yesterday we had Dubya come out to condemn Russia for attacking Georgia and disrupting its government, which is, we are supposed to believe, not acceptable in the 21st century. Mind you, it appears such actions are only unacceptable when the country being invaded is a "neighboring" country, so it's OK that we invaded Iraq.

The real kicker, of course, is not our lame-duck President's comments yesterday, but rather the comments of Sen. McCain, who reports that he spoke to the President of Georgia and said that we Americans are, today, all Georgians. This calls to memory the response of the surgeon who was to remove a bullet from Reagan, when Reagan asked if the surgeon was a Republican: "Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans."

There is, of course, the more subtle connection to the state of Georgia, which, despite having given us Jimmy Carter, is not known for its progressive ideals. There is yet another, perhaps even more appropriate read, however: Georgia (the state, not the country) was named for King George III, from whose reign we declared independence as a nation more than two centuries ago and whose tyrannical reign has been echoed for many in our current president's terms in office.

I choose to view this, then, as McCain's reaffirmation of his belief in many of the policies championed by Dubya. While it is true he takes a different approach on some issues, I hold out little hope, under a McCain presidency, for any real movement toward rational governance.

Thank you, Senator. Today, we have once more seen your stripes.

(NB: I am fully aware of the fallacies inherent in much of what I have posted here. If you can't recognize that well enough, especially after reading this disclaimer, to keep you from making an idiotic comment against me or my post, please burn your voter registration card now or find a way to end your life before election day.)

Too Long...Oh, and Food

2008-02-10T15:27:00.001-08:00

I have been prodded, now, for some time to post here again, most recently just over a week ago. Finally, though I have something. It's not just something, but a blog post in (almost) the purest sense. I say this is almost pure because it was not a surfing discovery, but a radio nod from Lynne Rossetto Kasper's Splendid Table.

My wife and I are, like most people, creatures of habit. When we go out to eat, we eat where we always eat. Sure, we have a reasonable variety of restaurants in our repertoire, but finding new places is a real crapshoot (sadly, there is too much crap out there to be shot, so we do not experiment too often).

However, as I sit here completing a reply to Bill over at 12tutufondue, I feel I need to put this one down. Urban Spoon, provided you are in one of the covered cities, is quite a handy little site. I certainly do not agree with the pull quote about how dry Top Pot Doughnuts are, having twice enjoyed perfectly delicious ones at work (for the record, I have eaten Top Pot precisely twice, as I do not yet have a location on them and am better off not bringing them home).

If you find your area covered by the folks at Urban Spoon, take a little time to do some digging. You may well find a few hidden gems that even your more adventuresome might never have found. And oh how jealous that will make them!

Art And Ugliness

2007-06-02T15:24:00.000-07:00

It is a difficult enough task to say what is and what is not art, and Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-born man in Chicago has made that even more difficult. My wife can address this more properly than I can, but let me come at it from the perspective of my training in literature.

Art reflects the world in which is was created, challenging people of that time at later to consider the elements of society highlughted by that art. It may be innocuous or subversive to the casual observer, but it will always be disturbing on some level, if only because it is too terribly comforting. Back to Wafaa Bilal.

Bilal, who lost his brother in Iraq two years ago, is spending six weeks in a room constructed in the basement of a chicago art gallery. The project, originally to be named "Shoot an Iraqi," was renaamed by the gallery "Domestic Tension." People navigate to his site, pan a paintball gun left or right, and fire. Users may also participate in a live chat with one another (IP addresses recorded as identifiers of chatting and firing users).

People are calling him "nigger" and "fag." They are making reference to "09/10/01." Did I hear this on the radio? Some. But everything I am quoting here I have witnessed in the span of about ten minutes. As I have been writing this, one user wrote, "Come on....put an AK up there....." Now, there are others—I am one—who refuse to pull the trigger.

Let's get back to art. Is this art? It is all being recorded, of course, and it does hold a mirror up to the nation and world, but is it art? I argue that it is. The United States is moving away from support for military operations in Iraq (note that much greater support exists for the mission in Afghanistan and for engagement in Sudan), yet here we have people debating not only firing paintballs at a man whose worst crime seems to be the geography of his birth, but the ethics of doing so.

One user I have seen so far has commented on the "video game culture" s/he blames for the bloodlust expressed by many of these people. After all, this is a target on a computer screen, and no one is really dying, right? Never mind that enough shots were fired at the wall above his bed that the paintballs—PAINTBALLS—cut a hole through the dry wall, which had to be repaired.

This is an ugly mirror, and by its nature, it is a bit selective, like the funhouse mirror that never seems to reflect this part or that or that, by its curvature, overemphasizes the other. Here is my question: How accurate is this mirror? Are we really this bad?

Sometimes...

2007-05-23T21:24:00.001-07:00

Sometimes doing nothing is doing the wrong thing. Sometimes, doing something isn't enough after you've done nothing.

My wife and I (I more than she) did hours of nothing late one night last year. Tonight, we did something right, and it wasn't enough.

To the one other person who understands: we're here.

Hallelujah!

2007-04-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

My computer went in for a logic board replacement three weeks ago (I am tough on my electronics). Yesterday the logic board died again (faulty part used in the repair). Today I took it in to the Apple Store in University Village, departing at 10:30. At 12:30 the call came in that the repair was complete. Now, we have a couple of wonderful pieces of symbolism here.

My computer, in keeping with the Lord of the Rings naming system I started in 1995, is named "The White Tree." You see, I had a 800 MHz G3 that had a series of problems and was eventually replaced, free of charge, by the machine I have now. In the Lord of the Rings books, among the things Aragorn must do to prove his lineage is locate the sapling of the White Tree, bring it back to Minas Tirith, and replant it. This is the reborn tree.

Equally ironic/symbolic is that this all took place on Easter morning. Last night (OK, so it wasn't Thursday) my computer died. Today it was reborn. How's that for a two-fer?

Squatters and Pronouns and History (Oh My!)

2007-03-25T04:34:00.000-07:00

I posted quite some time ago that I was looking into getting the domain "wherewereyouwhen.com" for a site I planned to create. A company that seems to buy up lots of domains in order to squat for profit had purchased that name, so rather than suffer the time and expense of getting it that way, I changed the name by using "we" in place of "you."

I am not yet set up for hosting, but that is not an issue since I have yet to finish my dummy pages for testing navigation. Once I have the basic navigation down, I will see if I can scrounge up some coders to help with the back end (probably PHP, but could be PERL) and a few other things (this type of navigation, for instance, is great in Flash, but that does not make it easy to set up an alternate site for text-based and accessible browsers).

The basic premise is simple enough: History, with a capital "H," is easy to find in books and online, but it is not how we know it. I am interested in history with a little "h": those small, personal recollections of important moments. Obvious ones for my generation are the explosion of th Challenger (almost single-handedly responsible for my wanting to create this site) and 9/11 (which is more recent than this concept). I have others: the San Francisco earthquake during the World Series, the opening moments of Operation Desert Storm, the moment Nelson Mandela walked out of prison.

Each of these moments comes back to me, stands as a marker in my life that anchors other memories around it. I want to let everyone share those recollections in one place, but to do it, I need talented people who will donate their time and skills. That's right, this is a zero-profit concept, so all work will have to be volunteer. Any takers?

Placement Tests

2007-02-05T18:59:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that there is an inherent problem in the way community colleges evaluate students for placement in English courses. The tests are, at least in my experience, monolithic beasts that generate aggregate figures. Based on these figures, students are placed in developmental or college-level courses, but the problem is that while many students placed in developmental courses belong there, they should not necessarily have to take every class along the way to college-level composition courses. Similarly, far too many unqualified students make it into college-level courses because they reach some threshold in scoring.

Students are often lacking in fundamentals these days, rarely able to define, much less write, complete sentences. Even these students, however, are frequently able to structure essays with some competence, and between that ability and some knowledge of punctuation they may pass into college-level courses for which they are ill-prepared. Similarly, many students who miss the threshold are competent in certain areas but will be required to repeat those levels because their placement starts them below material they know (and into courses that address areas of weakness).

To be fair, testing takes time and money, and schools are understandably hesitant to make changes without a great deal of evidence suggesting that the change will provide a real benefit. Still, I propose we evaluate students in four areas, testing each upon entry: technical skill (grammar, punctuation, spelling, and mechanics), sentence structure, paragraph building, and essay development. All of these are essential for eventual student success, but are we saving money—and I mean here both in terms of the institution and the students—when we make a student with one problem area take two or three remedial courses instead of the one that would bring the student up to par?

If we create a system in which entry to college-level composition courses (English 100, 101, 1A, or whatever a given school may call such a course) is based upon qualification in a number of areas, we would reduce the number of students not passing these courses, initially reducing the need for as many sections as are usually offered now. Simultaneously, we can offer more targeted assistance to students while offering, for many, a faster track to degree or program completion.

Under such a system, the developmental courses will retain a hierarchy for those students who require more than one, but they would allow students who do not have strengths and weaknesses well suited to the traditional track to get that help they need and move on in a timely fashion, without filling seats in classes that other students need.

The Celluloid Triumvirate

2007-02-03T16:27:00.000-08:00

I recently got a voice mail from a close friend who had to cancel something, but in the message he also noted that he had seen a film I had mentioned in a discussion two weeks prior (and probably other times before that). He went on to say that he was pretty sure he and I would disagree about the film in question. Sadly, such an outcome has become almost predicatable, but I have a few ideas for finding out why.

Let me begin with a distinction that I developed more than a decade ago, a distinction that suggests the title of this post. In Cinema (with a capital C) there are three products, no one inherently better than the other, and each covering its own territory with few skirmishes over possible overlap: Flicks, Movies, and Films. Note that, even as I go through these I recognize that what I place in one category, others may place in a different one (believe me, I know this).

Flicks are those targeted production that look for specific audiences, scripts be damned if it can get the horror fans in or make the 18 to 24 female crowd bring boyfriends. These will usually make their budgets back and have narrow appeal, and you can find them all over. How many are coming for release around Valentine's Day, I wonder. You can find many of these films by looking at the recent careers of the likes of Sandra Bullock, Drew Barrymore, and Matthew McConnaughey.

Movies are another story. These works tend to target a larger audience, seeking broad appeal with big story lines. This does not always lead to quality, but with millions more in the production budget than would be normal in either of the other categories, and often with all but guaranteed paydays for those with points, few care. Production tends toward the slick end of the scale, with quality explosions and improbably sweeping pan shots designed to make people think, "Wow!" while ignoring what may well be a marked lack of quality in other areas. This is not to say that Movies are of low quality, only that they are mass-market vehicles with production values that reflect that status. Pick a summer release with a half-page (or larger) ad in a major-market newspaper, and you've probably found a Movie.

Films are another story altogether. These are those pieces in which story, production values, and acting matter. If you can't, as one filmmaker discovered, get the right special effects in post, drill holes in your cameras to tweak the film as you are shooting; if that's what it takes, that what you do. Big names will often show up in Films, but just as often the credits will be overflowing with accomplished character actors. These are production that are, because of budget, often completed more by force of will than anything else, though some are completed with huge budgets, too (every now and then the studios get it right). These are more often identified by their directors, Kubrik, Scorcese, and Aronofsky (the man with the drill) being fine examples whose work has run the gamut of budgets (and more often than not landed in this category).

All of this leads my back to my friend's voice mail. It seems to me that much of the disagreement he and I feel on so many movies (lowercase "M") stems from disagreements over what qualifies for each category and from how much we value these differences. I'm looking at ways to identify these differences better so we can make more successful recommendations to one another. We shall see how it goes, I guess.

C-Bart And Her Crew

2006-12-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

If you read the two post before this one (yes, I know the publication dates and times are almost identical), you will understand more fully why I am writing this. Let me say, right up front, that I hope you will consider donating to the Red Cross, either money or blood.

It is easy to look at a 9/11 or a Katrina sort of situation and see that the Red Cross does wonderful work, but it is difficult to know, no matter how many shamelessly self-promoting Geraldo interviews air or how many different wind breakers Anderson Cooper wears, just what it really means to the people receiving the aid.

A warm bed, a hot meal, and light are three things we do not have at home right now, and as I write this almost eighty-four hours after we lost power, those are the three things the Red Cross has provided that I most treasure.

When we arrived, we were greeted with a smile and a, "Thank you for coming." It sounded strange at the time, but the volunteers—these are people who, if they work, either take time away from their jobs or volunteer during hours they would normally be relaxing at home—seem genuinely to love these opportunities to assist others. One, Carol, told us that Red Cross volunteers train and then wait all year for the opportunity to put that training to use.

On arriving, I was prepared to offer my assistance. They were, after all, feeding and housing me. They were, after all, letting me feel once more human. But then we got here, and I saw their badges and their coordination. I thought that they probably had it all covered.

After dinner, one volunteer approached me and asked if I might be willing to disinfect some surfaces and door handles; someone sick had been in the shelter, and it was better that the volunteers not risk too much exposure since they would be dealing with everyone in the shelter. I postponed my shower, but I didn't hesitate to agree. I have since helped assemble cots and assisted in unloading a delivery of lunch items.

We don't have the money to make a donation right now, but I have good, clean blood, and the Red Cross is getting some of that when this is over. I am planning to look into volunteer opportunities, too. I could certainly stand a night or twenty doing what these volunteers are doing, and I doubt it would measurably harm me. It doesn't take much to believe in what the Red Cross does.

I hope never again to be in this situation, but I will always remember what it means to a staffed, funded organization there for anyone who needs it. That makes all the difference.

Update

2006-12-19T12:28:00.000-08:00

We are still without power, and the thermostat is proving as unreliable as Tully's wireless of late. Another thermometer in the house—one of far superior quality than the one that regulates the temperature inside—had the temp at a balmy 38 earlier today.

We've managed to get a reservation at an area hotel, and we will be kenneling the cats tonight. They can survive in these temperatures, but it's just not right to leave them there as the mercury drops even further.

Our substation is slated to be up in a couple hours, but we can't have our local lines energized until the local damage is repaired. We may yet see the power up today, but after another two hours, we're not waiting to find out. There's just too much to do, too much at risk, and too little daylight (sunset tonight is at 4:20—no jokes, please).

Homecoming

2006-12-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

When I think of the word "homecoming" I think of my return to the Puget Sound region in July of this year. Sometimes, of course, it conjures memories of October football games and their attendant festivities. I had never, however, thought of it in the terms that this power outage has brought home.

Our power went down somewhere between midnight and 1:10 a.m. Friday (my wife had woken up and seen her clock at midnight, and I woke up to darkness and checked my cell phone at 1:10). For the purposes of counting time, I call it 1:00 a.m.

We ate breakfast in a local restaurant that somehow had power amidst blocks of darkness, including a dark gas station across the street from it. We managed to make a dinner of those staples we could salvage before the food went bad , sleeping that night under much bedding as the temperature dropped into the low 50s inside the house.

Saturday was as dark as Friday, and once more we ate restaurant food in the morning, purchasing dinner at a supermarket that was back up and running. By that point, most of Bellevue had seen power restored, though the suburbs were largely without electricity. By the time we turned in Saturday night, the temperature in the house was below 50.

Sunday saw my wife getting worried. She could see her breath while lying in bed. She could see our cats' breath. She was more concerned for them, in fact, than for us. Assurances that the cats would be fine are, if you will pardon the pun, cold comfort under such conditions. While my wife and I were packing up our computers at the library, she mentioned that she had read about area shelters. We drove to Bellevue High School, my alma mater, and checked out the situation.

The Red Cross volunteer who greeted us explained that she, too, was without power and that she, too, had a cat. The cats would be fine, she told us. My wife teared up, and I was a half step from that stage myself. We were educated. We lived in a good neighborhood. We shouldn't need to stay in a shelter, or at least we shouldn't need to for something as silly as wind. This isn't Katrina, after all. Still, we resolved to stay the night.

We headed home to gather some things, and my mother made it back as we were about ready to head out the door. We passed on the assurance that the cats would be fine and urged her to come with us.

The three of us arrived around 6:30 p.m., in time for dinner with sandwiches, hot soup, and all manner of packaged food. It was the first time in more than two days that we had felt normal. I managed to get a hot shower for the first time since before the shower had gone out (my wife and mother had showered that morning at the YMCA, where they have a joint membership).

We slept a little fitfully on cots. Some of the gymnasium lights power on and off periodically. People snored. Cots squeaked. Infants cried. It was a good night.

This morning my wife and I woke up before 8:00 a.m. and got some breakfast before heading home to check about the power. The cats were fine, but the power situation showed no signs of being worked on. Nearby transmission lines that were down remained in the same state, complete with uprooted trees.

Right now it looks as if we are looking at another night here. Right now it looks as if it will be at least tomorrow before normalcy, rather than the so currently precious sense of normalcy, has any chance of returning to our lives, and even that will be a incomplete, given that almost everything in the refrigerator and the freezer will be stinking up the trash.

No, this is not the kind of homecoming I imagined, here less than a year from my twentieth high school reunion. Maybe, though, this is better than a football game. After all, they won the state championship without my being in the stands.

Just. Plain. Wrong.

2006-12-16T15:11:00.000-08:00

I understand good-natured jests between friends, but in the middle of December, gloating that power has been restored, including in the voice mail a hope that the recipient (me) does not yet have power back, is just wrong. This is not a race. Furthermore, as our refrigerator and freezer slowly allow food to rot, as our cats have to live in temperatures that were down to 50 by mid-day today, as we have to walk around the house in two to three layers, eating food before it goes bad (but not the stuff we cannot cook) or spending extra money to eat at restaurants, such a voice mail message is backward.

Yes, I was pissed. Indeed, I was justifiably pissed, and I let that be known in my own voice mail by which I expressed by shock and disappointment. I think I am done venting now. That's the thing about friends—it's the defining trait, in fact—feet get inserted in mouths, but no one ever gets teeth kicked in over it. Let's hear it for Blake's "A Poison Tree."

Passive Anti-Intellectualism

2006-11-25T00:45:00.000-08:00

I have been hearing, for a few months now, talk of being "open to all possibilities." This comes from a particular quarter that takes a hybrid non-traditional spiritual view of the world, but let's leave religion and 19th-century Transcendentalism out of this for a moment. Claiming that people should be "open to all possibilities" is anti-intellectual.

The moon, we have known for quite some time, is not made of cheese. The Earth is not flat. Ghost hunters have yet to explain why their gear doesn't go crazy in every hospital on the planet. The list of "possibilities" really is not so long as some might like to argue.

You see, the problem here is that I have yet to hear this from someone with the background to discuss the very possibilities being proposed. "A little learning is a dangerous thing" (no, the word "knowledge" is not in the actual quote) is apt here. Sadly, it is wearying to hear arguments made by those who have no evidence and who are not versed enough in the relevant fields to manage the evidence that does exist. This is how cults are born. Go ahead, read some David Koresh at some point. The man was a master of argument because he knew the texts he was citing. Those who followed him, it would appear, lacked that same depth of knowledge.

Now, if only we can get to the point at which being "open to possibilities" need not include being open everything. Maybe we can get past the binary space in which one's not being open to something does not mean being closed to everything that is not what one currently believes.

Minty Fresh

2006-11-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

OK, so Sacajewea was not popular on the dollar coin, so what does the U.S. Mint plan to dostarting next year? Why, Presidents, of course. Fear not, however, while they will begin with Washington and proceed in order, we need not worry about stained dress and Iraqi quagmire debates; the Mint is stopping with Watergate. In a little over nine years we will have a couple more presidential elections and should see numbers 38 and 39 die of old age, clearing the way for at least three more coins (Reagan, of course, is already in the ground, so number 40 is covered).

I suppose this has a certain educational value in that students growing up during that period will learn the order of succession, but here are the highlights.

Grover Cleveland, the only President to serve non-consecutive terms (Teddy Roosevelt failed to get back in as the Bull Moose party candidate after four years of watching veep-turned-prez Taft undo Roosevelt's policies), will get two coins in 2012.

William Henry Harrison will be minted, like the rest, for three months, making the period he gets honored on U.S. currency exceed his term of office by two months. He died of pneumonia after only a month in office, having insisted on giving his excessively long innaugural address, against sound advice, in terrible weather; the resulting pneumonia gave us Tyler, too.

James Garfield will be minted for almost half the period he served in office. As one of the four U.S. Presidents to be assassinated, Garfield served the second shortest period of any, lasting only a little over six months before succumbing to injuries related to a bullet unfound in his body after he was shot in a Washington D.C. train station.

Every U.S. military engagement will be represented, through the Korean Conflict. The fall of Saigon took place during President Ford's tenure, meaning that if the Mint extends its designs to include those former Presidents who die before the completion of the program, we will likely be left with everything through Vietnam, and possibly through Desert Storm (George Herbert Walker Bush is currently 82, and the program will not end before he enters his 90s, assuming he proves as hardy as Carter).

Brutally Bond

2006-11-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

My wife and I just returned from seeing Casino Royale, and here are a few spoiler-free notes and comments.

Let me start off by saying that anyone who knows me is well aware that I am a fan of the James Bond franchise. Furthermore, anyone who knows my wife is aware that she is not a fan. She complained that I was "dragging" her to see it. Her complaints ended before the teaser had ended, and it's easily the shortest teaser in any Bond film (no, a lack of teaser does not qualify).

My two favorite films in the first twenty films are From Russia With Love and For Your Eyes Only. Both are relatively low-gadget, high-espionage films with a minimum of gratuitous scenes (within the context of Bond films, anyway). They now rank #2 and #3. Quite simply, Casino Royale is the best Bond film to date. Why? Because it is a film first and a Bond film second.

Don't get me wrong here: Casino Royale has everything (except the opening credit stylings) we have come to expect, but this one is a story. Better, it is a story about Bond, about M, about getting the job done with often reckless disregard for life and limb. But what is most impressive is that there is not a scene out of place, not a character who isn't right. Everything that is in the film, must be in the film, for all 144 minutes (a Bond record).

Daniel Craig, in case anyone was wondering, has every promise of unseating Connery as the definitive Bond. He already makes Connery, a former Mr. Universe competitor for Scotland, look like a wimp. He takes more of a beating than any Bond before, and he takes more chances with his life than any human ever should, even for Queen and country. He gets cuts, bashed, beaten badly, and tortured. Amid it all, Craig gives his Bond the best dark humor of the series. A couple of the actors have tried to show the nearly sociopathic cruelty of the character. Craig revels in. This ain't your papa's James Bond.

Having just said that, there is more pathos in Casino Royale than even the final scene of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a stronger Bond girl that any except (possibly) Diana Rigg's Tracy, and more powerful fights and chases than, well, most films I have ever seen, even outside of the franchise.

The teaser is tight, essential. The first half hour will make the best Bond action of the past feel like an insufficient warm-up. The poker game is perfect, even thrilling. The ending, which often feels just a few minutes off, is pure Bond. True Bond fans will see it coming when the real finale one arrives, and newcomers will appreciate it.

One last note: Chris Cornell's title song "You Know My Name" may well be near the top of Bond tunes.

I pity those who, by choice or circumstance, do not see this sooner rather than later. As those who know me can attest, I am rarely one to say, "See this in the theatre," even for Bond films.

See Casino Royale in the theatre. Soon.

Reasons I Teach

2006-11-14T12:58:00.000-08:00

Addiction.

OK, a longer post might be necessary.

When I entered Bellevue Community College in 1987, I took Darkroom Lab Techniques and Intro to Shakespeare. I wanted to start out with the easy stuff, and two years of photography made lab techniques no problem. Shakespeare is a given in K-12, so that was in the bag. During the second week of classes, my English instructor wrote a note on the board that the Reading Lab and the Writing Lab each needed tutors. "Great!" I thought, "A job." My mother had drummed into me—her father had done it to her in his day—grammar. I dared not confuse my subjective and objective pronouns for fear of even the most gentle correction.

I was brought on as a tutor in the Writing Lab, where I worked with numerous students who taught me. I helped them with their writing, but they helped me with something more important: They taught me that I had a talent for helping other people understand things, and that is the one true duty of all teachers. There is nothing in my life that compares to the joy of recognizing comprehension, particularly in one who had assumed the material was beyond reach.

Teaching, for those of us who believe passionately in the work, is an addiction. We want to be there for that moment of learning, that simple event more elegant than the best explanation of the Big Bang, and more powerful. We want, quite simply, to bear witness to those great moments that the students generate, godlings making their own universes.

Check It Out

2006-10-31T13:59:00.000-08:00

Down The Road

2006-09-14T05:50:00.000-07:00

I am pulling together a list of topics to address in longish weekly posts. Currently I am planning to cover the reasons I, and people with whom I have spoken about the profession, teach; tenure (expect a little background in this one); and my definition of learning. I would love to get suggestions for other education-related topics from others out there, so feel free to leave them in comments.

More Points

2006-09-03T23:36:00.000-07:00

Well, we hit a sectional down near Olympia this week (we have no more tournaments to play in the area until early December), and in evening sessions last night and tonight snatched up 0.43 Silver and 0.79 Silver respectively. Something happened, and we are not quite sure what it is, but since moving up here we have been on fire at the bridge tables.

The wonderful part about all of this is that we are getting asked by top-placing partnerships if we are available to round out teams. When the afternoon overall winners (claiming a bottle of wine) approach us with interest in having us on their team, it is more than a little flattering. Now, if we could just work out what we were doing properly.

>60% = 2.50 Red

2006-08-26T23:27:00.000-07:00

Sunshine and I headed off to the penultimate day of the Puget Sound regional, up in Lynnwood. My work schedule was not very kind to the rest of the week, and we are taking care of some shopping and laundry tomorrow. Still, we managed the afternoon and evening sessions (1 & 7 leaves time to eat between!). Our evening session was pretty standard for us: a touch over 40% (see the end for a quickie duplicate scoring explanation), which put us 6th of 7 (falling two spots in the last round). It was not a disaster, but nothing great. Still, that was not the cool part.

In the afternoon session, we played well enough to grab better than a 60% game for second in strat A (partnerships in which the higher player has under 200 accumulated masterpoints), and first in strats B and C (under 100 and under 50, respectively). This earned us 2.50 Red masterpoints each (color won't matter to us for years). Oh yeah, this was in a flight of thirteen partnerships.

Sunshine has now reached the first named plateau of the American bridge world: Junior Master. She will be getting a new ACBL membership card to reflect her new status. It's nothing great to look at, but it still feels good to have it. All in all, it was a pretty good day, especially for a couple of out-of-shape bridge players. But that's not all.

Forget that bridge players everywhere we have gone are a pretty cool (if moderately nerdy) lot (doubters should note that the world's richest nerd passed within about two feet of us at one point), and Seattle produced an astoundingly welcome batch. Steve (I commented to Sunshine that he kinda looked like Steve Jobs even before I knew his name was Steve) was talking to someone at the end of round one and mentioned a club in Redmond, near where we now live. I asked him about it and got not only a wealth of information, but also introductions to, well, the entire Eastside bridge community, with a few Seattle folks thrown in. We could not have been made to feel more welcome.

As an added bonus, the newly elected ACBL President Harriet Buckman was in attendance, a fact I learned as both she and I were looking for standard convention cards before the afternoon session. She introduced herself, and I was a little befuddled. It was, after all, a regional. What is the top dog of the sponsoring organization doing in this little corner of the bridge world? Well, she seems a charming woman, and by all accounts she is. We didn't stop to chat, but I was pleased to have met her, however briefly.

Now, for those wondering about scoring . . .
Bridge, in order to eliminate the luck factor, is played as a duplicate game. A fixed number of hands will get played in small batches by different match-ups. The East-West players will play a few and move a table one way, while the hands they just played (called "boards," after the devices that hold them in fixed order so they may travel unmolested) move the other. Then the new match-ups play more boards. The East-West pairs' scores are compared to other East-West scores for the same hands, and the same is done for North-South partnerships. If Pair One plays Board 14, and ten other pairs play the board, there are ten partnerships that Pair One can beat, tie, or lose to. For each one they beat, they get 1 matchpoint; for each tie, they get 0.5 matchpoints, and for each loss, they get 0 matchpoints. This would mean that there are, in the scenario I just described, 10 matchpoints available, and a partnership scoring 4.5 would have 45%. Note that this is, barring special circumstances, a zero-sum arrangment, adjusted to 50%. A partnership over 50% will probably get points, and it is not rare that some under will, too.

Now, don't you just want to go out there and take some lessons to flex that brain of yours? Seriously: nerds can be great fun.

Again?

2006-08-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

I just don't get it. Every time I do a quiz to find out what (enter cult film or TV value here) character I am, I get something quite different than anything I expected going in.

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

I Told You So!

2006-07-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

It takes the world a while, sometimes. A year ago (almost to the day) I wrote an entry here about the repeated delays to Microsoft's new version of Windows, dubbed Vista. I noted the number of (major) consumer OS versions Apple had produced for the Mac before it stalled out between System 7 and MacOS X. MacOS 8 and MacOS 9 were stopgap measures, but both were more about unfulfilled promises than delivered features, much as what we are seeing with Vista.

More recently, the folks over at Mac 360 addressed much the same issue (I like to think that a message I sent to Tera helped inspire the piece, but I can't be sure). The simple fact is that after seven consumer versions of Windows—to review, they are 1, 2, 3, 95, 98/ME, 2K, and XP—Microsoft has stalled, just as Apple did. Now the aggregators over at osViews have picked up on this little gem at ars technica. Guess what: commenters are making the same comparison I made 365 days earlier (I love being right—ask anyone who knows me about that).

Here's the problem: they are misremembering history in a few cases. User "Geg" writes, "it took apple 6 years to make OSX workable." Others hint at that, but the fact is that it did not take six years. Apple did not start working on what became OS X until Jobs returned to Apple, and within two years had the OS working, starting from an entirely different code base. Microsoft is using legacy code as its foundation, and that is causing problems.

It gets worse, however. Microsoft's plan to enter the digital music realm with its Zune (Microsoft, despite publicly naming its product leads and rough release timeframe, has yet to put a page together for Zune), and now there is more chatter out of Redmond that Vista may be delayed . . . again. It may ship in winter 2007, but it is now a little confusing. This article includes a bit from Microsoft VP Kevin Johnson that has Vista on track for "2H 2007" (note that the quote is from the article, not Johnson). Many might hope that "2H" is meant to be "2Q"—second quarter, which could refer to the second quarter of Microsoft's July-to-June fiscal year (coinciding with the proposed November/December release of the corporate version) or to the second quarter of calendar 2007 (a quarter later than the proposed release of the consumer version). If it is "2H," meaning second half, then it might coincide with a first- or second-quarter release in calendar 2007 (second half of fiscal 2007) or already signal a delay to the second half of the calendar year.

Anyone wanna bet on what it means?

Dogpiling Namesakes

2006-07-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

I know—I have known for many years, in fact—that there are a few others out there with my name, and a couple of them are significantly more famous than I am ever likely to be. Just for fun, I have Googled myself, returning pretty much the mix of results I expected, but today, I searched Dogpile. Sadly, the results were as exciting and interesting as, well, paisley window coverings buried in a landfill twenty years ago. Result 41, however, was at least amusing.

I was surprised when I saw the title, so I noted that it came from MSN Search. Replicating the search at MSN showed that the result in question was 11th overall. Now, We are told that Microsoft wants to beat Google at the search game, so can anyone explain how this site has anything to do with me?

This feels like MSN Search has (at least one of) the same problems as Office: it tries to think for the user. After all, what does it matter if we are off by an "s"? In the URL? They make Windows, they make MSN Search, and now they are planning to come out with the Zune? Yeah, that'll fly.

Go With The flOw

2006-07-10T23:45:00.000-07:00

I had read about Jenova Chen before at Wired.com, back when they did a story on some free games, two of which were Chen creations/collaborations. Now he has flOw (link goes directly to Flash game).

Let's be clear on one thing right now: I have not read the directions for flOw. I figured that the name suggested everything I needed to know, and, oddly enough, I was right. The player begins the game as a simple microorganism with a mouth (you'll figure that out easily) and a couple links in its body. Move the mouse, and your little guy swims toward the mouse. Hold the mouse button down, and he swims even faster. Yay! Wait, there's more.

There are two things that show up on every level (well, one is missing from the lightest, and the other from the darkest), but first you need to understand that "level" here is more about depth into some sort of sea, not something you pass and move beyond forever. Eat the one with the red center to go deeper, the cyan center to rise (the periodic colored ripples indicate their direction and distance). At various levels, you may see simple organisms without mouths, and they are good eatin'. They usually make you bigger and/or more complex. Some levels have organisms like the one you control, and they can get a little hungry. Eat their larger circles (whether on a tail or in orbit) without getting too many of your own eaten, and you can break the bad guys, such as they are, into their component parts, which equates to food for you or other nearby bad guys.

Eventually, on the darkest (deepest?) level, where no red-centered thing ever appears, is the big organism. You could call this the "Boss" at the end of the level. Beat that one, and you evolve into another kind of life form and start all over again. No, you can't lose. If they eat everything that is you, you just get sent to shallower waters to build up (unless you really want to go back right away and take on whatever just beat you so handily, which can work too) before returning. Pay attention to the background. As you munch the red-centered doohickeys to move deeper, you may see organism with which you cannot interact, but they are one level deeper. It's a free preview of what is below.

While I can see how very many people would find this game utterly uninteresting, those who are willing to take an hour or two at a stretch to relax—OK, sometimes it is not entirely relaxing, but those are rare—this is a wonderful break from the world of FPSs, turn-based strategy games, MMPORGs, MUDs, and the like. I have yet to get my second life form to evolve, but one day . . .

Moving

2006-06-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning I will leave for work, prepared to deliver a final exam for what is likely to be the last course I will teach in California. I will be leaving behind a home piled high with boxes. After my students have finished their exams, and after I have graded them and submitted the course grades, I will return to a home with a lot of space. No boxes. No furniture. Nothing but a few morsels of food to get through the day and a smattering of essential toiletries. Friday, the drive from Los Angeles to the Seattle area will commence between 7 and 8, altogether too early in the morning for my particular constitution, but we do what we must.

I have been thinking for a couple weeks now how strange it is that we are told to measure our lives in certain ways, yet those ways are rooted in tradition that feels, for me, out of step with modern life in the United States. There are bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. There are confirmations, quinceaneras, and sweet sixteens. There are driver's licenses, graduations, drunken 21s, marriages, careers, and the eventual series of funerals. These are the things we are told make up the milestones in our lives, and, to be fair, I agree that they are milestones. Still, I can't help but see my life principally in other terms.

I was born in Seattle, but before I turned one, I was living in Aalsmeer, Netherlands. By the time I began Kindergarten at age three, I was living in Chalfont St. Peter, near Gerrards Cross, England. I missed the bicentennial celebration here in the U.S. by less than a month and a half, and by the time the school year had started, my family was in the home my parents still own in Bellevue, a short drive from where I was born.

I have lived in the North End, in the South End, and on the Eastside, sometimes for little over a year in a single residence. When I moved to Claremont, California in early 1998, I lived in graduate housing, eventually residing in two different units. My wife and I got a place in Upland, later moving to Ontario (a little farther east) before boomeranging to Los Angeles and our (barely) current residence.

I measure my life more by where I have lived than what I have done, and I wonder now if that is not the legacy of the interstate system that turned 50 just last week. We have gone from a nation in which people lived and died within a 50-mile radius of where they were born. Between freeways and jumbo jets, though, we have become people who mark space rather than time, or so it now seems.

Feel free to point to Einstein and remind me that space and time are, together, space-time (I suppose I needn't be reminded since I have made that comment), but I will turn around and remind you that the reduction in prominence of one yields a corresponding increase in the prominence of the other. When space was less of a factor, we used time. Now that time, with the aid of modern medicine, has become, perhaps, less precious to society (if not always to individuals) than space, space has replaced time as a means of recognizing milestones. (Does that diminish, in a way, the value of "milestone" as a metaphor?) Am I totally off my nut on this one, or have any of you who happen across this too-long blather (and made it this far) felt the same thing?

Number 5,000

2006-06-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

As he five thousandth visitor came and went, I thought to peer into the information of the user. It turns out that it was a Mac user in (or near) Belfast, which is kinda cool. The really fun part was that the user had googled "silly things," which served up one of my posts as the twenty-second result of 65.7 million results. Now I need to see how I feel about this.

Not Sure I Agree . . .

2006-05-30T00:58:00.000-07:00

Your results:
You are James T. Kirk (Captain)

James T. Kirk (Captain)		80%
Jean-Luc Picard		60%
Will Riker		60%
Chekov		55%
Geordi LaForge		50%
Spock		47%
Data		42%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)		40%
Deanna Troi		35%
Mr. Sulu		30%
Uhura		30%
Mr. Scott		30%
Worf		30%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)		25%
Beverly Crusher		15%

You are often exaggerated and over-the-top
in your speech and expressions.
You are a romantic at heart and a natural leader.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Exit Exam, Round 2

2006-05-25T22:37:00.000-07:00

Let's hear it for California's Supreme Court. The justices reversed the decision in an Alameda court thirteen days ago and, in the process, reaffirmed the validity of the state's high school exit exam.

About 47,000 students who failed the exam three times—an exam that tests math and language skills at the 8th grade level—while meeting every other requirement for graduation with a California high school diploma. Those students will be allowed to walk in commencement ceremonies but will not receive diplomas. Instead, they will get additional instruction over the summer and more chances to pass the exam.

It is true that the state—more accurately, the school districts—did, in some cases, fail to provide sufficient remediation after first and second failures, and that is something that must be fixed, ideally before the class of 2007 runs out of time. However, this exam has suffered three years of delays, and a fourth would continue to provide reasons for students and their parents to brush of a failure. No, I do not think that was the main cause, or even a frequent one, for the failures of 47,000 students, but I would be more than a little surprised if some students (thousands?) didn't think it really mattered.

This decision brings its fallout, of course, and that is a problem. There will be years of cases, many of them for individual students who were accepted to four-year schools (if people think that students are smarting, consider the egg on the faces of admissions counselors) that can no longer grant them admission. My own students—the much-maligned community college crowd—have commented on how simple the exam is, yet students admitted to CSUs and UCs fail it? Three times? There is a problem with this picture.

Not all of the fallout will fall under the heading of litigious hell. Indeed, next year California will probably see its highest levels of parent involvement in education in decades. Shaken from the comfortable thought that more delays might be coming, parents are going to have to do more to ensure their children measure up come test day. Districts, too, are going to have to hike up their britches and wade far into the mess of (justified) blame. I'll take this mess over the alternative. Any. Day.

Accountability Delayed

2006-05-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

Judge Robert Freedman of the Alameda County Superior Court suspended the graduation exam requirement (free registration required) for California's high school seniors. Set up in 1999, the exit exam is comprised of math (through basic algebra) and reading comprehension. The lawyer for the 47,000 students who failed the exam—many failed it three times—argued that a number of schools had failed to teach the necessary materials and that those students who did not pass the first time were not given the state-mandated remedial assistance before retaking the exam.

Now, don't think I have no sympathy for these students (they represent roughly 11% of the state's seniors who would graduate if the exam is not factored in). With the suspension of the exam's results, they are headed for the work force, for community colleges, for CSUs, and even for UCs, as well as private colleges and universities around the nation and perhaps the world. Somehow some of these students are heading for a selection of the top regional and national universities, yet they are unable to comprehend what they read and/or handle basic algebra.

We do a disservice when we say that these students, having thrice failed to demonstrate 8th grade reading and math skills, are prepared for UC and CSU admission. Indeed, admission to a university is an argument against today's ruling, not in favor of it. A student who cannot perform at the 8th grade level has no business at CSU Northridge or at UCLA—schools that do not offer the remediation the community college system is prepared to provide. Every year I have students from CSUs (and sometimes UCs). In some cases their writing skills are below college level, even when they have taken the same courses at a university that they are taking from me.

The worst thing that we can do is stall yet again in our enforcement of this exam. We cheapen the degrees of those who did pass, and we are asking students finishing their sophomore and junior years to take a deep breath and relax since there is a greater chance they will not have to meet this measurement either. The best way to get more from students, as educators well know, is to ask more of those students, holding them accountable when they miss the mark. Anything less threatens to return the diploma to an attendance certificate, little more than the worst of social promotion.

Zacarias Massaoui

2006-05-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

Every week more than a couple people find their way here by searching for information about Zacarias Massaoui. It has been just over a year since my original post suggesting we use life in prison as the ultimate punishment. My logic was not the same as the jury's, but that's OK. The jury thought it was giving the lighter sentence, but paradise won't reach inside Massaoui's cell walls, and suicide just won't get him the glory he was promised.

I am pleased about the sentencing for a number of reasons. I don't support the death penalty, so I am always pleased to see another life sentence chosen over that less moral (my perspective) option of execution. I have read, too, enough about some of the drivel poured into the ears of the modern hashishins to understand that life in prison is cruelty on a stick wrapped in razor wired and inserted in, well, it's prison . . . you can work out the rest.

I am keeping my eyes out for the debate about what Massaoui deserved, what is wrong with life in prison, how many people would volunteer to shoot him on the government's behalf, blah, blah, blah. Sadly, many of the supporters of executing Massaoui will claim they want to do it in order to protect the American way of life. Hmmm, so the criminal court system that convicted Massaoui and sentenced him to life in prison would not qualify? Let the selective argumentation begin!

p.s. This post is here and not on Intentional Fallacy because it is a follow-up. Normally, these days, such matters as this would not surface on this site, but I shall not start addressing something of this magnitude in one place and end in another.

New Programming

2006-04-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

Fox has settled on a late addition to the Fall 2006 lineup of shows. Premiering in time for the run-up to the mid-term elections will be El Presidente American. Sources have said that Cheech Marin will be playing the nation's first Hispanic President to last more than an inauguration, beating out Jimmy Smits on The West Wing.

One Fox executive is quoted as saying, "The West Wing was fine for a show born during the Clinton administration, but times have changed. El Presidente American will fill the void left by the departure of The West Wing, but the content will be more realistic, focusing on such matters as the supremacy of trickle-down economics rather than namby pamby issues like health care and the environment."

Industry watcher have yet to learn whether Fox intends to write the show as a drama, playing off of Marin's work on such vehicles as Nash Bridges, or a comedy, harkening back to the actor's days in such films as Up in Smoke. The former would be useful in endearing the network's preferred party to Hispanic voters hungry for respect, particularly given the discussion of immigrant rights. The latter would allow the same organization to rally support in its traditional strongholds throughout the south by subtly mocking the capabilities of Hispanics to lead.

Rupert Murdoch, despite his declining role in the day-to-day operations of the network, is said to be personally involved in both the development of the pilot and weekly briefings at the White House. Regardless of the final decision about the general tone of the program, the casting director is said to be pursuing Rosie Perez to play the first lady.

One Thing I Won't Miss When We Move . . .

2006-04-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

is being along parade routes; practically on top of the finish line for a marathon (that's noisier than you might think); and above an access road that, despite the neighborhood, somehow attracts the same twits who are doing their best to collapse their lungs with their stereo systems.

At this moment, Earth Day has interrupted my sleep via marching bands. Unamplified, these are pretty bad, of course. Bouncing off of mid-rise and high-rise buildings (God only knows the accoustics of the outside of the Disney Concert Hall). Don't get me wrong, I like Earth Day. I love all it represent. I just don't freakin' want it marching through my sleep. Ever. And if everything else can keep right on up with that, well . . .

Silly Things That Piss Me Off

2006-04-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

OK, it is just one thing, though not clearing the darned timer on the microwave can make it two, assuming you really wanna give me some grief here.

Let me just say that people who use Page Layout View in MS Word piss me off. Actually, I don't so much mind that they use it as that they disseminate it as if somehow it is better to look at text that is shrunken so it can fit within the borders of pretend digital pages.

Learn to use the software, people! Galley View (known now as the more mundane Normal View, the name of which should be a frakin' clue) makes it much easier to read multi-page documents. Oh look! There really ISN'T a 2.5" line breaking through that sentence.

Yes, I am fully capable of comprehending how text flows across page breaks. I just don't understand people who use computers in such a way as they reinforce their ideas of how the physical world works. Ya know, the "page" in the computer is the fake part. Check out a text file sometime, folks. And for god's sake, stop sending things that open in Page Layout View.

House Of Leaves

2006-04-10T23:13:00.000-07:00

It took me a couple years to discover Danielewski's novel, and here, on page 35, I feel I am deeply into it, yet I have a good 600-some to go. It already feels like the house of the novel: larger on the inside than the outside. There is, we readers are to believe, a house that harbors something dark, transmitted to those who inhabit it and visited upon those who read about it. Were it not for unusual coincidences, I might not be writing this, but coincidences make me smile.

On our drive up from Los Angeles to San Francisco earlier today, we say a sign mentioning Utica (not New York, of course—a school, I believe, in some town before we got from the 580 to the 80), and then I ran across mention in the novel of a chest made in Utica, NY. Worse, Sunshine was calling out clues to a crossword in People magazine. One was a three-letter word for a wing constructed at right angles to a building, and the novel's house was almost updated in 1981 with an ell.

Now I ask you, how odd is it to encounter two such coincidences in short a space, both physically and temporally? I must confess I am intrigued by Danielewski's novel, and to a degree newer novels rarely achieve. Never mind the humor, he subtle errors, and the author's mastery of differing voices.

The Queen Anne

2006-04-10T22:10:00.000-07:00

Our hotel in San Francisco (guess the name . . . go ahead) is everything it adevertised, plus more and less. We have a refrigerator in the room, but the fridge makes a lot of noise. We have a television (had to get our fix of 24), but it whines most of the time it is on. We have great drapes that don't close all the way. We have windows, but no screens.

All of that may seem a little to the bad, but the Victorian appointments are certainly worthwhile and comfortable. I am in a back parlor right now, where a British man is teaching his son chess. A young girl is using the wireless connection in the next parlor, and a few minutes ago a couple was consulting with the concierge (who has already been immensely helpful to us) about something or another.

Whether or not we are to accept as authentic the little nicknacks and chachkis spread about the place is not really a matter I wish to take up. Indeed, they create a wonderful sense of being someplace other than where we are used to being, and what more can one really ask of a hotel while on vacation?

Most interesting is the liberal use of mirrors. On the secoond floor there are a couple of floor-length mirrors that reflect images almost spectral in their aspect. The deep glass provides not only the expected reflection but a visible ghost, distinct enough from the main image to be unnerving the first few times. If I may paraphrase a paraphrase from within a piece of fiction, mirrors and copulation are abominable: both multiply the numbers of men. How true that seemed earlier as my head floated above the top step of a staircase and looked back down a hallway to my own eyes. Or maybe his.

Production Hurts

2006-04-05T04:24:00.000-07:00

Now, I have not really been involved in music, other than as a listener, since about 1981 (perhaps late 1980) when I quit violin and my voice started to break, forcing my departure from my minor involvement in the Northwest Boychoir. Hand me a violin today, and I might be able to tune in. Ask me to sing, and you will regret it. Nonetheless, my friend Britt asked me to come in as her producer.

It's an odd thing, really, to listen to this part or that of a piece and decide that it needs something more or something less, whether it is only a little panning or volume or something like an entire track. And while Britt is putting down the basic rhythms and beats (it is her music, after all), I find myself nudging her aside every now and then, sometimes with good ideas and sometimes not.

This may all sound relatively pain-free, but believe me it isn't, and I suddenly have a great deal more respect for those people who do this for a living. I have no illusions that I am now or ever will be much more than a pair of ears and a mind, giving voice to personal musical prejudices. Trevor Horn will never fear me, or even hear of me for that matter. Still, I can't help but think that both the process and the product are quite something different than I ever would have expected—and in no small way surprising.

I am not sure when Britt and I will get some final vocals down (I think that what we have is fine for the internet, but it is far from what it could be) and finish tweaking the levels, but one way or another we should be seeing "Unanswerable Questions" up at her MySpace account within a couple weeks. I'll make note of it when that takes place. In the meantime, she has four others up for anyone interested in hearing what she has already got up. Five down, five to go.

Dogma From The Other Side

2006-03-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

I understand the desire on the part of student who have been wronged to support such measures as the so-called "Academic Bill of Rights," but let's be fair. Some of the students who back this measure fail to recognize a few problems. Often they complain that their instructors and professors are grading them down or blocking their voices based solely upon political differences, yet these same students sometimes want their instructors or professors to agree with them. The problem here is not with the bias of the instructor or professor,but with the bias of the student. Is this any less a violation of what SAF proposes?

What we end up with is not the complaint that the person in the front of the class has wasted class time on irrelevant political discussion or that he or she has graded unfairly based upon personal views. What we end up with, sadly, is the claim that the person in the front of the class does not agree with the student. This measure of hostility can end up cloaked in the same dogmatic approach that makes both Fox News and Air America Radio bad choices for real discussion.

The basic problem here is with the refusal to hear any position with which the student disagrees. While the numbers all but guarantee there are instructors and professors who are this way, which is wrong, they also suggest there are students who will bring this low level of thinking into the classroom. I have no problem working through relevant questions in class discussion or assigning low grades to poorly written papers, we are still faced with the core problem in that situation: the person making the claims is a student who is, ostensibly, there to learn.

When such students arrive, is it not my duty to pursue the issue? to introduce reason and structure to the debate? If I throw my hands up and let the student sink, what kind of future has he or she got, provided no one else gets through?

Jazz, Jambalaya, And Tech

2006-03-29T09:36:00.000-08:00

I spent yesterday as a volunteer at Tech Ed 2006. Now, I am a night person, so showing up at the Pasadena Conference Center at 6:15 was hardly an easy task. Add to that the fact that I stuck about until Registration closed at 5:00.

I managed to get a great sense of the venue so I could attend a few sessions today (I am sitting in a session right now, but the introductoory stuff about blogs is not that useful, so I have time). I had not considered, before my first session, the value of a wireless tablet in the classroom. Sadly, I now crave one. Think of being able to send a poem on a projector via your laptop, stap to the back of the class, and make scansion marks on the fly to help students understand the rhythms of the piece. How great must it be for the students to feel as if they are in a minimally-moderated environment? How wonderful must it be to fade into the background and let the content step up?

More coming later...

Forlorn Meatballs

2006-03-27T23:28:00.000-08:00

I would say the title of this was wonderfully original (sadly, I could not properly claim credit for it, even if Google had not returned a result from mid-April, 1999). Such is life. At least there are three of us on the planet who know the story of this evening's use.

It came up late during the reception for the 2006 Kingsley Tufts and Kate Tufts poetry awards (rewards, as was twice said during the ceremony). Once more it was a night that mixed the austerity of an event at which $110,000 is awarded to incredibly deserving poets, the humor that John Maguire and others always bring, and the unsurpassed reverence for the written work given voice.

I am once more in awe of the creativity of others, the anabashed drive to throw together words and images that might be mundane, might be surreal, might be outlandish. If, as Adrienne Rich commented while inaugurating a new degree program at Claremont Graduate University back in the spring of 1998, the poet's job is to reinvigorate language, language has a promising future.

Once more I was pleased to speak with Derick Burleson and Robert Wrigley, two of the eight people involved in the judging of the books submitted for these awards. Once more it was an enjoyable chat. Derick Burleson's name must appear in here at least twice so it will come up higher in searches, and he knows why this is important.

Robert Wrigley pointed out to me that poets, in order to succeed, must have the firm belief that what they are writing is worth someone else's time to read. This led me to thinking, as I sat by myself some while later, that fear is perhaps what defines the difference between the artist and the successful artist. When I mentioned this to Wrigley when he approached to say his farewells, he mentioned a fear of failure, but I think it is something that arrives earlier in the process. Maybe not, though. If failure is measured by the critical or popular success of a work, then fear of failure arrives at the end. Now, though, I wonder if fear of failure is what stops so much from ever being written. Do people fail to write because they fear they will fail to be original? It's true that most of what one finds in the realm of poetry is derivative or worse, but is that a lack of talent? a lack of imagination? perhaps a lack of courage? Well, that is a thought to measure another day.

Finally, a note on Robert Pinsky's comments early in the ceremony. Pinsky, it has struck me for two years now, has not only a great gift for poetry but an immense talent for reminding us of the most basic facts of poetry, of those things we forget because we know them, have known them for too long to recognize their importance. As we sat under the Tiffany dome at the Doheny Mansion, Pinsky commented on the beauty of physical expression all around us, above us, beneath us. Then he said something that is simple enough and that I say, albeit less eloquently, to my students: Poetry is as physical as any other art, and perhaps more durable because, as Pinsky notes, it is made of breath. In this, it is more permanent and more portable than other forms of art. Indeed, even music—let is make it more challenging and say a capella music—is not even as powerful as poetry because it takes a trained voice; poetry takes a voice. Any voice.

How incredible I find it every year to attend this award, only to find myself trolling depths of thought I rarely reach on my own. Such events are more than the words and the people and the books, though all are important. Such events are, if Robert Pinsky will pardon my deliberate choice of words, inspirational.

A Shout Out To Austin

2006-03-27T03:42:00.000-08:00

No, not the city, the person.

I was trying to sleep, but since that was not coming easily, I checked my Site Meter statistics quickly. What did I find, you ask? (OK, soyou didn't ask, but I will tell you anyway.) I found a hit from a Mac user in Hawaii. That alone is not too strange. People find their way to Caveat: Venter through all kinds of searches, but this user had Googled my name.

Now, there are two other people named Andrew Purvis who come up in these searches: one is a restaurant reviewer in England, and the other is the Time magazine Middle East bureau chief (he used to write about medicine for the magazine, so I have yet to work out that change of specialty). Anyone Googling my name could easily be looking for one of those two, though the latter is the more likely. Still, it was Hawaii. This got my brain going.

Back in high school I knew an Austin Sloat. I am not entirely certain why he put up with me back then (I was even more difficult than I am now), but we got along the entire year. He was only there for one academic year while his mother was on sabbatical at the University of Washington. She was a professor in Hawaii.

I put these pieces of information together, along with the fact that many of the people with whom I got along in high school are now Mac users, and Googled '"austin sloat" hawaii.' What did I find? An architect whose years of graduation seemed about right for someone in my high school class and who did his MS in Hawaii. Interesting, if perhaps merely circumstantial. This is all conjecture, but given that we are talking about a Mac user and that I have two widgets out there, perhaps the pieces really fit.

In any case, if it was you, Austin, and if you return, it's good to know you're out there. If it was someone else (someone who returns), leave a message to let me know.

I Can See Clearly . . . To Gloat

2006-03-21T17:31:00.000-08:00

Again.

Yep, Windows Vista is once more delayed. It will ship as an enterprise version in November, but the consumer version won't arrive until January.

Library Patrols

2006-03-21T04:39:00.000-08:00

I just happened to wonder about something a few minutes ago: What would happen if we introduced library patrols where I teach? The name needs some work, I must admit, but here's the basic concept:

Once every week or two, for perhaps thirty minutes or an hour, we faculty (in rotation) could skulk amongst the stacks, watching the students who came by, seeing what titles they perused. Most students, of course, spend time in the library researching projects or papers they would rather not have to complete for classes they would rather not have to take, at least during those first couple years (remember, I teach at a community college). Most. Not all.

Now, let me explain, by way of a story of yesterday, what this might yield. I was in the library grabbing a few additional ideas for my Monday evening class, and a student happened by. I was not conscious beforehand that I was near the litcrit section, but the student was just reading titles as if he had no specific call number in mind. As I finished up, he selected a book on Marxist criticism (co-written by Terry Eagleton, of course), so I thought to note Eagleton's significant role in modern Marxist theory. He seemed pleased that he had selected that title and explained that he had a general interest in theory. That, in turn, led me to recommend Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic and whatever he might find by Derrida, Lacan, and a few others, noting, in general terms, what each brought to the table. After five minutes, he was smiling and visibly pleased by his selection.

Now, how much more could we, as educators, do if only, say, 1 in 3 were to have one (possible) success story like that per term? How many more students could we energize about those topics that they have chosen to explore? How many students on the brink of deciding a major would discover a long-buried passion that much sooner?

It's easy to say that learning doesn't end at the classroom door and that teaching is an ongoing project, but what does it mean? I say we can, and should, create programs that put us into contact with the students who don't even know they are looking for these things. We can go where they seek answers to the questions that most intrigue them, and when we are fortunate enough to find those students pursuing their interests, a little engagement will go a long way toward entending the education of that one student and prolonging, even deepening, that passion we all feel for education. Office hours be damned, or at least shown for what they too often are: a passive tool for engaging the most troubled or the most excited, often leaving out the great swath through the middle.

The Internet Really Works

2006-03-05T23:20:00.000-08:00

I suppose that should not surprise me after I've used it for 13 years, but my earlier post about using the speed dating structure in the classroom has found its way, almost certainly via Teaching Carnival V, over to the University of Virginia's Writing Program, where Greg Colomb combined it with his "elevator stories" concept.

What's cool about this is that I wrote my post on 2 February 2006, Teaching Carnival V went up on 15 February 2006, and I got my first hit from Colomb's lesson plan on 3 March 2006. In a month, the idea went from my reporting something that worked in a classroom to being read by hundred of people to being adapted into a lesson plan by at least one of those people to getting back to me. That may not be zippy in the way that email is, but given that this is pedagogy, it's pretty good.

The best part about this is that it gives me great hope that all of those academic blogs are going to have a real impact on the ways we teach. Until now, it has all seemed like theory, but this is reinvigorating. Pretty soon I will be living in parts far removed from Los Angeles, and it may take me a few months to get into the system at my destination. In the down time, I have a few blogs to mine for ideas.

Who Are These People?

2006-02-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

My latest widget is up on just over a half dozen sites that provide free download figures to developers (and users), and to my surprise in a week and a half, I have managed to garner over 1,000 confirmed downloads. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the idea that people are downloading my game. After all, in almost a decade I have failed completely to market the thing to any kind of game company or agent (OK, I probably could have tried a little harder, but at a great financial burden). Nonetheless, my latest version, which I uploaded a whopping 10 hours ago, accounts for almost 250 downloads already.

I want to know who these people are! Better still, I want to know what they think. So far the only comments I have gotten on any of the sites were a) a response to my plea for critique (thank you, exq) and b) flame from a troll (I am almost certain that his assault on my game has increased its popularity, though that may be nothing more than post hoc thinking).

My wife says I am obsessed, tracking download growth for the last 10 days, and perhaps I am, but I have my reasons. My obsession has been driven by my bewilderment over the relative popularity of the widget. My first widget, which I released in mid-November, is still clawing its way through the mid-900s in download count, but I still have no idea whether people are using/playing my widgets or just downloading and dumping. It really is enough to make a man insane.

New widget!

2006-02-12T00:27:00.000-08:00

OK, I have yet to deliver any real expansion of my BridgeKeeper widget for Dashboard (Mac OS X 10.4), but I have felt a lack of motivation that has mixed well with all I have on my plate (work is about to get busier, both with more papers to grade and committee work to perform). Nonetheless, I have adapted a game I developed ten years ago, and now it's a widget. I was going to post it as a beta release, but the lack of certain standard features forced me to back off of that and make it an alpha. I now have a beta version (standard Dashboard UI elements, complete code, and moderately improved graphics) about ready to go out the door.

In any case, since it is not yet a full 1.0 version, it is only available here at DashboardWidgets.com. The final release will be posted to other sites like Version Tracker, MacUpdate, Widget Developer, and Apple (maybe more, but the other sites have done little for BridgeKeeper and tend to have stiffer requirements for submissions).

This is a reworking of a Javascript version of Shih (yeah, I know what it looks like, but I got the name from Art of War because I liked the meaning), which is pronounced much like "sure," but with the "r" sound clipped. Those readers who have 10.4 (or 10.3.9 running the Amnesty widget browser) can give it a try. It currently has a single starting configuration and only the two-player variant, but then I have not taken a programming class in nigh in 26 years, and that was BASIC on a pre-C64 Commodore (just after the Pet).

Also, those non-Mac users running browsers other than IE should be able to download it (should look like a folder with a .wdgt extension) and run it in the browser. The rules are written in the HTML file. Any feedback would be great. Oh yeah, and if you happen to know how to write computer players for such beasties, we need to talk.

Update:
Apple and MacUpdate now have it for download. A couple more should be coming online soon.

Speed Dating Meets Academia

2006-02-02T03:04:00.000-08:00

OK, so there was no dating involved, but the concept is the same. The students in one of my classes are, as is always the case, a little slow to come out of their shells. This was holding up the development of their papers about fiction (they will have other papers about poetry and drama in this Composition and Literature course). A solution came to me as I was struggling to sleep Sunday night: speed dating.

I took the format of speed dating and changed it a little to fit the material, and if my students feedback (and their continued discussions, even during a break) are any indication, it was a great success. I had them arrange the desks in facing pairs and set a six-minute countdown timer. They then took turns explaining to one another where they were thinking of going with their papers before questioning one another about details and providing their own reactions to the material. At the end of six minutes, the students facing one way each rotated one position around the room and did it again. We had six rounds of this.

By the end, they had each presented their ideas enough times in different ways and gotten such different feedback that they were well on their way to developing ideas. When we took a break, two pairs were still talking, and another two students took the discussion outside. When I returned, three more students were engaged in a new discussion. I had only just dreamed it might go so well, and we got every student talking during that time, instead of one at a time.

While this is not an ideal format for regular classroom discussion—far from it, in fact—it has brought even the most guarded students out to share their ideas. Next week promises to be lively if we can carry this energy forward, and I'll be doing everything I can to ensure it's there.
technorati: teaching carnival

Spielberg Needs Help

2006-01-08T15:28:00.000-08:00

Maybe it was the stress of selling SKG that did it, though that can't explain AI and too many other movies. Who knows? In any case, Spielberg has once more proven that his work these days falls far short of his earlier work: Munich, the film, is a disaster.

In every review I have encountered there is plenty of awareness of Vengeance, the novel on which the film is based, but there is never any mention that Spielberg's is the second adaptation of that novel. While The Sword of Gideon may have been made for TV in 1986, it is a better film. Lynn Cohen's Golda Meir is brilliant in the newer film, but it can't erase from memory Colleen Dewhurst's amazing work. Eric Bana is better than Steven Bauer, and I am pleased to see Daniel Craig get a superb un-Bond performance in before Casino Royale, but I miss someone of Michael York's level in support. In the best casting match-up between the two films, Rod Steiger out-acts (and has better lines than) Geoffrey Rush. That's all well and good, but the real problem is elsewhere: Logan's Run director Michael Anderson is not as capable as Spielberg, but neither is he so full of himself, and that makes a difference here.

It's tough to know why Spielberg made the film. He doesn't spend enough time showing us the care the team takes in isolating its targets. He doesn't give us enough conflict within the team to provide any real character development (Daniel Craig's character ends up being the most fully realized). He seems to want to spend time on the larger issues involved in the right to statehood—one brilliant section in Greece shows how Spielberg could have surpassed the earlier adaptation, had he put the thought into it—but he just won't commit. There is too little about Munich in the beginning for many people to understand it and too much in Avner's head later to be anything but a distraction.

By the time the credits roll, what happened in Munich is not a tragedy, it is something too boring to care about, and that is a shame. The story of the killing of eleven Israeli athletes is tragic, and it needs better care than Spielberg provides (see One Day in Speptember for something that does it justice). Similarly, his treatment of Avner's team as little more than trained butchers makes them expendable not only to Israel but to the audience. I wish I could have cared for more than one supporting character in Munich, but I couldn't: Spielberg just refused to let me.

Doubting The Experts

2005-12-18T23:22:00.000-08:00

When I was a student at Bellevue Community College, I spent three years as an officer in the Student Health Awareness Committee (SHAC). We held four events each year, one being The Great American Smokeout. We SHAC members put together great programs each year, full of assistance and information. Sadly, a decade and a half later, I am questioning the approach that we, taking our lead from the American Cancer Society, took in those years.

Check all the facts and get ready to (p)rattle them off if you like, but is it good? Nicotine goes to the brain twice as quickly as mainlined heroin. Nicotine is twice as addictive as heroin. Cigarette smoke contains, by most counts I have seen, over 60 carcinogens. Smokers are twice as likely as non-smokers to be involved in automobile accidents. There is, of course, much more, but there is a problem with all of it.

Smokers are being bombarded with the message that there is no tougher addiction to break than the addiction to nicotine. Failing to quit, then, becomes almost OK. After all, it's one thing to quit using other drugs, but nicotine is the tough one, right? I spent a little over seven years as a smoker, quitting once for a three-week period. Last week, I quit again. I didn't quit with the idea that nicotine is the most addictive substance out there; rather, I quit in spite of that information.

The quitter, we used to explain, should avoid situations in which he or she was accustomed to smoking, should avoid stress, should go where smoking is prohibited. I went everywhere I smoked and at the times I smoked. I flew up to Seattle on a Saturday and returned on a Monday (connecting through SFO on the return). I dealt with finals in three classes that same afternoon I flew into LAX. I delivered finals again on Friday and Saturday mornings. I got snarky, but I reminded myself why and reined it in. In short, I tossed out the damned quit-smoking guidebook that had failed me numerous times and

just

plain

quit.

I recommend it. Highly.

Anthropomorphized Pets

2005-12-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

A new study conducted by Pertwee University, just outside of London, finds that house pets, once the most anthropomorphized set of living beings on Earth, are now running second. The last time P.U. studied this phenomenon was 1975. At that time, the top three looked like this (figures represent the percentage of 1,050 respondents who admitted to having engaged in at least two act related to the group in the preceding twelve months):

House pets: 67%
Zoo animals: 43%
Genitalia (own): 41%

The past thirty years, however, have seen a shift in these figures, and Dr. Jon McGann, the sociologist in charge of both studies, believes he has an explanation. "Fewer people keep pets in our increasingly urbanized society," he told a reporter from the Daily Mirror Guardian, "and owners are not spaying and neutering as frequently. The increase in wild births among pet breeds is only being kept in check by a corresponding increase in motor vehicles to run the strays over, and no one wants to see 'Fluffy' as anything but a random animal stuck in the roundabout."

The latest numbers show not only a change, but a startling shift:

On-camera talent: 87%
House pets: 34%
Sports figures: 33%

The increase in films such as Bend it Like Beckham and Miracle, many released by Disney, one of the original promoters of anthropomorphized animals in mass media, has contributed to the surge in the third-ranked group. Color commentators, of course, are still more often commenting on what "heart" or "intelligence" sports figures have, leading many unwary viewers to conclude that the comments refer to real people.

More disturbing is the idea that characters such as Tom Cruise, Giovanni Ribisi, Leah Remini, and Jenna Elfman are real people. Critics, in reviewing the film and television products containing these and others, refer to talent (or lack thereof, in some cases), interpretive skill, or other qualities rarely found among Scientologists, or indeed much of any being directly involved in the entertainment industry. McGann finds this disturbing: "Fewer and fewer people are able to distinguish fact from fiction anymore. Coming in a close fourth were Texans with the last name Bush." That's OK, Dr. Pertwee, few have ever claimed that anyone meeting those criteria qualifies as human, but with all the coverage a couple of them have had in the last couple decades, I can understand the confusion.

While I found this study disturbing (my wife and I do, in fact, refer to our cats as our "girls," even attributing human traits to their behavior), I will be interested in the results of the follow-up. McGann is preparing his assistant, Majorie Buckley, to take over care of the project, though he hopes that she will not need 30 years to find 1050 people willing to participate.

The Un-Tech Way

2005-11-06T01:29:00.000-08:00

I love much of what the internet has done for education. We can communicate more easily, which means more frequent (if no more creative) excuses, among other things. We can research more easily, which means both locating resources more quickly and, in the less stellar cases, plagiarizing more efficiently; then again, it also means catching plagiarism with minimal work. We can put together more and more sophisticated mixed-media presentations. Still, sometimes we just have to junk the tech.

I recently had a discussion with a student who performed extensive research on the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima, but she was concerned that she had surrendered control to her sources. It's become, for many, too easy to get information, but the process has multiplied the difficulty associated with filtering it. How, when a student is faced with a deadline and a half dozen resources (for a short paper), can she possibly retain control of the writing process while avoiding unintentional plagiarism?

The answer is simple, and it often means turning the computer off: index cards. Now, some students may roll their eyes at the suggestion that index cards have value, but perhaps they should look again. All of the little tidbits of information get boiled down to isolated nuggets, one to a card. Those cards contain all of the information for the works cited, a slug (usually top right), and a quick reference title. Take all of those cards (computer off), arrange them on the bed or on the floor, stack them, and stick those silly Roman numerals and letters and Arabic numerals and such on them. Suddenly, it's an outline, and the paper practically writes itself, complete with the works cited page.

As I shared this technology with my students recently, I drew a series of incredulous looks from the faces arrayed throughout the room. Have we gone so far in our use of technology that we have ceased teaching even the basics? I must confess that I do most of my work on a computer. Still, when I do sit down to draft early versions of poems (horrid things when I create them) and short stories (probably a little less horrid), I usually begin with a pad and pen. It's amazing what happens when the iBook is closed and on a shelf. Try it sometime.

Bridge Widget!

2005-10-23T01:03:00.000-07:00

I finally have a complete, if not beautiful, version of BridgeKeeper. I released the 1.0 (final) version at DashboardWidgets.com at just after 10 p.m. Pacific on Friday night (replacing the 0.9b version that lacked certain required interface tweaks). Apple's widget doanload site now has a copy, and it should be up there too, provided it passes muster, within a couple days.

I cleaned up the code between 0.9b and 1.0, made the Done button on the back a proper "glass" button (though Apple's code seems to be leaving the left side in "clicked" mode after the first use), and included a lot of comments in the .js file, both for curious coders and for bridge players wanting to decipher the underlying game principles.

What is BridgeKeeper, you ask? Well, it is a little Dashboard widget (you Mac users running Tiger or 10.3.9 with the Amnesty browser will know what that is, though Konfabulator users will also be familiar with the concept) that calculates duplicate bridge scores. While I realize my readers, few as they are, probably count amongst them few, if any, bridge players I do not personally know, there you have it.

This brings up another issue, though. I was considering, before realizing I lacked the proper technical expertise to pull it off, submitting a presentation proposal to next year's Tech Ed conference. I am interested in how Konfabulator widgets, Dashboard widgets, and the upcoming Sidebar gadgets (to be part of Windows Vista when the product ships a few years late in the second half of 2006) can be used as pedagogical aids and student reference tools. Already there are widgets for certain student populations, and some developers have proposed more (for instance, a case law widget). Since the underlying technologies for all three tools are similar, any widget developed by someone willing to grant the rights can be ported pretty quickly to all three forms (Konfabulator runs on Mac and Windows, though not all widgets made for it are cross-platform).

What I need now is suggestions. What kinds of widgets (follow the above links to learn more about these technologies) could we develop for students? What could I be working on for English students? Can we find people to code these little buggers up for Astronomy and philosophy students? How useful, actually, can these things be?

I am no believer in the idea that technology is always good for education, nor am I anything resembling a Luddite stranded in a world that forces technology down his throat. There are proper uses for this technology, but I have yet to settle quite what those uses are. Any suggestions are most welcome.

On Student Evaluations

2005-10-17T19:41:00.000-07:00

Every semester, it seems, my students greet evaluation day with as much glee as I. In three and a half years, my students have never failed to give me the two things I most appreciate in evaluations: generally strong marks and one or two areas that could use some (relative) improvement.

I do my best to indicate to my students my interest in honest, even harsh, evaluations so that I might improve in subsequent semesters, though I sometimes wonder if that does not, by itself, increase their respect for me and thus increase the scores they give. There is no way for me to test that accurately.

Scrivener and his commenters have noted that students are not, perhaps, the most qualified evaluators of educators, and I have to agree. Still, they know whether or not they are improving, and that is what seems to guide my students when they compose their comments at the end. There is, however, one major problem with the evaluation process, and I would love to see them fixed (note that some schools already employ what I am about to suggest, but I do not work for those schools).

The aggregate scores from student evaluations should be made available for student review. While such sites as ratemyprofessors.com exist for students to plug in for public consumption their opinions of faculty, not all students know or care about the site. Worse, the bulk of reviews seem to be, as noted in this piece from Wired News, either rants or raves, entirely missing the middle.

If schools made aggregate information available from mandatory on-campus reviews, everyone, including hiring and tenure review committees, could see what past students have said about instructors and professors. We educators should welcome the exposure, understanding that students may sometimes harbor negative sentiments for, at time, unfair reasons. When we look, however, at those educators who win awards for excellence in the classroom (as determined, ultimately, by faculty and administration), we often find that they are the same ones whose students give high marks. I have no fear of openness, and I should hope none of my colleagues fear it either.

Power Outage

2005-10-11T15:00:00.000-07:00

Our power went out a couple times this morning. I had just reset some clock from the first one when the second outage hit. At first, I thought that the problem was localized in our building, but as I was driving out later, I saw that some street lights we also out. NPR reported that the power was out for a few blocks, causing, yep, traffic snarls (in Los Angeles? Shocking!).

This is not, on its surface, a really big deal. Power outages hit major cities all of the time, but what makes this so horribly serious is that it affected about a two-block radius from the Department of Water and Power. God, I love irony!

L&O:CI Joke

2005-09-28T20:45:00.000-07:00

I am no fan of the Law & Order spin-offs, but I do love the way writers for every L&O series make literary jokes. I can't recall which writer's name was used in the original series (as the name of a false charity) and was the first to make me smile, but today Sunshine chose to pass the time before Lost by watching Criminal Intent.

The criminal mastermind, played by everybody's favorite Cousin Larry (it's a rerun, so I am not spoiling anything,really), identifies another person involved in the plot as having studied in Hartford, CT. The character was an insurance executive. What makes this so much fun? His name is Wally Stevens. Whoda thunk it, huh?

The Classroom From The Freeway

2005-09-21T23:08:00.000-07:00

Adjunct work is a rite of passage for many faculty. We spend years as freeway flyers, often zipping from campus to campus on different days and at different times of day, proving ourselves as part-timers before landing a coveted full-time position. While this is a source of frustration for many, I have come to recognize it as a source of inspiration as well.

We freeway flyers often find ourselves adjusting not only to varied schedules but varied requirements, even when teaching courses that meet the same transfer requirements in the same states. This adds to the stress and confusion as different schools ask us to teach the same material in different ways, sometimes insisting upon specific texts or unusual exam schedules. What, through all of that, can we say is good? Variety.

One reason schools look for that adjunct experience—perhaps only surpassed in some regards by Klingon Pain Sticks—when hiring full-time faculty is, of course, that that experience demonstrates that schools are willing, when afforded a wide variety of qualified adjuncts, to continue providing teaching assignments to candidates. After all, what employer doesn't like to see steady employment on a candidate's application? And there is more.

By teaching at a variety of schools, we freeway flyers see different ways of doing things. Indeed, we often find the weaknesses and blind spots of one school and fill them in with techniques from other schools. This is not to say that full-time faculty are myopic, incapable of finding new pedagogical techniques. They do, after all, bring their own sets of adjunct experiences. What freeway flyers bring to the table, however, is the current state of what's "out there" on other campuses. Necessity puts us in close contact with the tools that build one part of school X and a different part of school Y. We can see from on high, even as we inhabit the low posts where we work.

This realization, however, is not enough. We need to put that information into action. Lesson plans and pedagogical techniques are not national secrets, and departments should not treat them as such. Yes, lesson plans can be protected under copyright laws and sold for profit, but that, if we are being honest about education, is not the best use of such material. We adjuncts need to take from X and give to Y as we take from Y and give to X. We adjuncts need to beat down the doors of department and division chairs (my experiences have allowed me to knock politely) and throw radical ideas into the ring for discussion. We adjuncts need to see what is all around us and share it with those who are not in a position to visit other schools as our positions require.

Likewise, full-time faculty need to listen. My experiences have been fantastic in that I have always found open doors and receptive ears where I have worked (and still work), but those who may find a less receptive audience must strive to be heard so they may share their experiences. Isn't this much like what some parents say happens as their children discover the world? The children, because they are still building the experiences that will shape their lives, teach the parents. We adjuncts can do that, even as we learn from our full-time colleagues, and we should. Always.

Can We Face The Truth?

2005-09-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

I have seen my share of crazy ideas, and the Internet has, of course, accelerated the rate at which those ideas pop into my awareness, but this one may just be too far out there. Then again, maybe not. If you ever say the Travolta/Cage vehicle Face/Off, you've seen faces switched on two men. While John Woo did a fine job hiring the effects team to do the faceless Cage, there is little else to recommend the plot. Now, however, a doctor in Cleveland is going to attempt the first ever face transplant.

Yep, there is indeed a valid medical reason for all this. The patient will be someone horribly disfigured by some fire or dog attack, someone willing to accept having the skin of a cadaver stretched over his or her face in place of extensive scar tissue. Yes, folks, we have reached that frontier. Sadly, it won't be as easy as in the Hollywood version. Thankfully, it shouldn't even approximate the level of changes.

I Really Do Have Things To Say

2005-09-12T22:02:00.000-07:00

I just have been saying a lot of them over at my other blog.

Rice-a-Roni Jingle Singer Dies

2005-09-10T23:06:00.000-07:00

Edith Pilaf, a minor Bay Area singer not to be confused with the significantly more talented and famous Edith Piaf, died yesterday in her Novato apartment. Pilaf, hired by the Golden Grain Macaroni Company to sing the original Rice-a-Roni jingle for 1958 radio and television advertisements, suffered a coronary brought on by a combination of arterial plaque and high blood pressure.

This is a sad footnote to the advertising industry. Apparently, Pilaf opted for a lifetime supply of Golden Grain's signature product in lieu of significant monetary compensation, but her talent was never able to take her far in the entertainment world. With no residuals, she subsisted on Rice-a-Roni and crackers for the bulk of her life, preferring, as she once told her sister (who was also her manager), to stick it out in singing despite a lack of steady work. The results were tragic, and the 66-year-old woman paid dearly over the years for her relatively uniform diet.

Recent calls to extend contracts and payments to jazz musicians taken advatage of through the 1960s have now been extended to include those whose talents help sell billions of dollars of products annually. Producers are, as we might expect, loath to comply, however, and we can expect more such stories in the future. John Gilchrist, the original "Mikey" from the 1971 Life cereal commercial, is said to be living off of breakfast staples and Skippy peanut butter. Luckily, Gilchrist is able to survive because of the compensation provided for his participation in Pepto Bismol commercials. It is a sad that such tales exist, and I am appalled by the general state of advertising.

Strange Hope

2005-09-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

OK, so the title is, once more, a little off. I'll explain.

A couple nights ago I was grabbing some food at a local fast-food chain, and there was no one there in line (it was 2 a.m., for cryin' out loud). I commented to the guy with the headset, and he explained that he loved the shift because he gets to go to school in the mornings.

My food took a while, so the man showed me a picture of his wife and daughter (both lovely, by the way, and his daughter turns four next week). He also told me that he doesn't need to work because he stays rent-free in an apartment building his mother owns. But he does work. Hmm. He has always seemed bright and on top of things when I have driven through for my food, and I expect he does well in his courses, but why, when he doesn't need the money, should he work? Why not just plow through school and get the degree (his wife is a student, too)?

He said he works so that his daughter can see that he's not just a bum. He wants to get his education, have the ability to buy things his wife and daughter want, and show his daughter that work has value beyond a paycheck. Sometimes I agree with Sunshine when she says this is not a great world, and having children may be cruel to those children, but then I find hope in the strangest of places and at the oddest of times.

The world's going to be OK. Whatever one person with a bomb or an airplane can do, a night manager at Jack-in-the-Box, working with his wife and daughter, can undo. And then some.

Poppin' The Tournament Cherry

2005-09-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

A couple hours ago my fiend Britt and I returned from her first venture into competition bridge. While we finished dead last, we were playing in an open game, which means that there was no upper limit on the skill and experience of our opponents. We managed to get 35.08% of the maximum match points, and given that the only way to get 100% is to beat every partnership playing the same hands, it was quite the performance. She made some beginner errors, but that is not to say that my bidding and play were perfect—far from it. With some more practice, she'll be doing even better.

The fin for me, however, was in showing her the room before we started. Even at a small tournament, a room filled with card tables can be daunting for a first-time player. Britt stopped cold and broke into a sweat. I rather wish I had had my camera there to capture the moment. Now, though, she will be prepared for such events, and she is unlikely to find herself swimming with the sharks again anytime soon. It's up from this point, which is the real benefit of being dead last.

New Semester, Old Faces

2005-08-22T19:56:00.000-07:00

I suppose some might object to the word "old," but I don't mean in terms of age. I had little hope this semester of seeing any of my English 20 students from the Spring in my English 52 classes. My hope was matchedby reality. Despite this, two students from earlier semesters are in my courses this semster, and because of production delays with the catalog, my name was printed (instead of the usual "Staff" listing we adjuncts know and hate). I suspect, then, that these students actually took these sections because I am teaching them. That is always satisfying.

And then there is tonight. A former student of mine droppped by. He's not taking any classes. Indeed, the courses I am teaching this semester are below the level of the one he already passed with me as his instructor. But he dropped by, and we walked out to the parking lot at a leisurely pace, chatting and catching up. I was pleased that he'd been enjoying doing a little stand-up at The Comedy Store and a few other venues (he took a course our college offers in stand-up comedy). What surprised me was his statement that he believes he was able to do well in the class in part because he had to write in mine. He had not, he said, tended to write things down before.

I always like to hear what my former students are up to. I rarely get spontaneous comments regarding the value of courses. This, as much as anything, is why I teach, though there is no way to ensure such results will follow.

Back To School

2005-08-14T22:37:00.000-07:00

By this time tomorrow the first day of the new will have ended. Yep, having just turned my grades in on Thursday, I am heading right back in there.

I was looking at tying the readings closely to the assignments, but I backed off, though that was more because of the stress of summer than anything else. Orwell, in any case, will make a fine example for about everything, and I can always redirect my students with an updated syllabus if I feel the need later.

The Deed Is Done

2005-08-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

I did it. This blog is now my happy/silly home. If you want the rude or political stuff, go visit my other blog. I'm still tweaking the colors (no, I don't care, on that one, what anyone thinks of the color scheme). The only crossover may come at those times I find myself a little hotunder the collar about education matters. Those posts, despite their potentially inflammatory nature, will remain within the bounds of this blog.

A Confession

2005-08-11T05:48:00.000-07:00

I suspect that what I am about to write is nothing my colleagues around the world have not felt, and I hope my students this summer (or those who know of this blog, anyway) will forgive me for, well, either what I will say here or possibly the truh of it.

This session has not been my best. Don't get me wrong, I believe that my students walk out of my classes far better writers than when they walk in. It's just that I feel as if I was, in some way, ineffective. OK, perhaps ineffective is the wrong word. I was less effective than usual.

I got addicted (yes, I use that term) to teaching in 1989. It was in that year that I first experienced the rush associated with realizing that someone had understood and internalized what I was explaining. I was a community college student and a tutor in the writing lab at Bellevue Community College at the time. Let me explain:

A student was having trouble with a general punctuation test. He had done well with all of the individual tests (commas, semicolons, etc.), but he couldn't put it all together. I used an explanation I have since learned was one that other had pioneered, though I had never had any exposure to: I explained punctuation as traffic signs. The student understood and scored well over basic mastery levels on the next exam, simply with that.

It wasn't that he got 90-something percent on his test that got me. I expected that, despite his five earlier sub-80 performances. It was that I had seen what I chose at the time to call (andlater learned many others called) "the lightbulb moment." When I gave my traffic sign analogy, something changed. To this day, I could not tell anyone what told me he understood, but I knew it. I knew that he understood and would pass. Something—quite probably it was a mixture of signals too subtle for me to express—told me that he understood. I was hooked. I had moved from reciting information a student could get from a handbook to teaching information in a way that was best for that one person.

Only a month or two later my decision to teach was cemented. A student who had written about her experiences growing up in Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khemer Rouge regime rushed up to me near the theatre building and gushed her thanks. She had received a 3.7 (A-) on her paper,and somehow she attributed that to me. Her paper had been stunning from the first sentence, and my assistance was marginal at best. Still, she was standing there, beaming with pride, and crediting me for her success. I suppose she may have received only a 3.3 without someone's help, but there was something to that. Someone appreciated what I had done. More, someone had appreciated something I was able to do (and could get paid to do). She vanished before I could even tell her that I had done, essentially, nothing and that she had written a compelling personal experience paper. How could I not want to dedicate my life to such an endeavor?

But this summer I feel as if I missed something. True, most of my students are doing acceptably well, and some are even doing better than I initially thought was possible. There are tragedies, to be sure, but there are always tragedies, and such matters are really more relative than absolute (is a B performance from an A student a tragedy?). I just feel as if we spent more time on Y than X. Maybe I feel this way because I have traditionally spent more time on X than Y. Maybe, though, X is more important. Maybe this is how the class should have gone, and everything else was just years of getting me here.

I wish I knew how this all fit together. Other instructors tell me that I do my job well, based on what my former students say and how they perform. Even my students will tell me I do my job well. I guess I just wish I had done it better than it feels I did this summer.

BS From Every Side

2005-08-10T02:45:00.000-07:00

It seems that a lawyer and future Republican candidate for the Illinois governorship, thinks Microsoft's Windows operating system is so bad, the company should be legally barred from selling it unless the operating systems come with a full warranty against security flaws.

Get real. No OS is 100% secure, nor will one ever be. While I expect I will never have a reason to buy Windows, unless it is part of an emulation package, I can't see where Andy Martin is getting his ideas. He claims that MS pushes a shoddier product onto the market than any other company in the U.S. could, but whether or not that is true, suing to block the release of the next generation of Windows is assinine.

Now, I did say "from every side," so let me quote here the MS response, as it appears in the above linked article:

Building confidence and trust in computing continues to be one of Microsoft's top priorities and is crucial to the success of the technology industry as a whole. Over the past three years, Microsoft has implemented a range of new security programs, including the Security Development Lifecycle, which has resulted in measurable improvements in the security of Microsoft's software."

Huh? That's a response? That's a promo for a program with more glittering generality than apparent substance to its name. That's a 15-second spot on a third-rate cable network, and one that is only to be aired between 2 and 5 a.m., along with infomercials and Hardy Boys rerun.

I'll keep my eyes on this case, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will (rightly, in my view) get thrown out. Somehow, though, I don't think that winning the case is what Martin and The Committee to Fight Microsoft are all about on this point.

Two Of Me

2005-08-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

I originally set up Caveat: Venter as a place to unburden myself of the little things. It has morphed into a sometimes too contentious place. I enjoy sparring over issues, especially when I know I can sit down and have a beer with my adversaries. Indeed, my primary "enemy combatant" and I met in grad school as he was reading a flame war I had joined with a Chinese national at our university, so I can hardly be surprised that my friend would challenge me here (or that he and I would revel in it).

What has happened, however, has been a shift in focus. My content has moved to these issues and away from the original purpose. I find myself fighting to defend the soul of Caveat: Venter more than spend energy on building its body (of posts). I feel a little guilty, therefore, about taking what was a genial, sometimes jovial, blog and allowing it to become a place for long rows that draw my focus to comments instead of posts.

The best solution I can find is to create a new blog in which I can take the serious issues (Bolton, SCotUS, terrorism, etc.) and return to the the venting here about my life and work. I haven't yet decided on a name, but I am certain, now, that I need to do this. Actually, if we could work out the technical side of things, I'd be willing to do a side-by-side single-page blog in conjunction with Anton (it really comes down to how much we could tweak the CSS of each post). It could be Crossfire, only without the bowties and cameras.

Left Field Seems Popular

2005-08-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

I remain puzzled by a trend, and I think it is time I make a quick note at this level. For some reason, readers seem to wander into deep left when commenting here. This is not always true, but if you read the exchange of comments attached to the post just prior to this one, you may, as I have, wonder how the heck it got from a silly little joke about stalled OS development to the comment that reads, "Main point --> Microsoft Sucks."

I entreat you who may read these posts to stay on topic, or at least reasonably close. Prior to that comment, nothing I had written in the post or a comment had consituted either an implicit or explicit value judgement between the two operating systems or the companies that make them.

Fair warning, however: future flame bait (defined locally as those that are both inflammatory and clearly off the topic of the specific post to which they are attached) will get round-filed. I will not post any replies to them, and any third-party replies to such comments will also get nuked.

I'm tired of going around with people when there is nothing to be had but senseless wrangling on side issues.

Operating System Stagnation

2005-07-28T23:02:00.000-07:00

Let's take a look at Windows for a moment. It began with 1.X, 2.X, and 3.X versions. Then came Windows 95, Windows 98/ME, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. That's seven versions of the consumer product, by my count.

Now, Windows Vista (the upgrade to XP announced in late 2002) has shed key features and will be more than two years late, leaving no shortage of businesses out in the cold on guaranteed upgrade contracts. This, in itself, is not anything terribly interesting, but let's look at the #2 commercial OS.

The Macintosh ran System 1 through System 7 before charting an aggressive course with Copland (that's a long "o," people), which was to be an OS with what would have been a stunning feature set for its time. It was even to have Yellow Box and Blue Box, two distinct hardware compatibility layers that would have allowed the operating system cross-platform compatibility.

Copland, running far behind schedule, was scrapped, and only a few of the GUI features saw the light of day in MacOS 8. Though 8 was a tremendous improvement over 7.5.3, much of that was due to the perception of users who had waited years past the original due date of the upgrade.

Here's the connection: both operating systems had seven clean upgrades. The eighth was the killer and ran into technical difficulties that resulted in dropped features and lost time. This in-between time (the System 7/MacOS 8 trasnitional era) was also the period in which Apple's market share plummeted from the 20% mark to the sub-5% mark.

Now we are seeing a similar effect. After seven versions of the operating system, Windows is dropping features and running years behind schedule.

I can see no reason that, given the differences in the times and the technology, this should happen, but it is there: seven version and trouble. Apple didn't fully recover until it's tenth version. In Apple's case, the change required a complete reworking of the OS because the underlying technology had reached its limits. This may well be part of the problem MS is facing. We'll see with Vista and its next two successors.

Not A Pretty Vista

2005-07-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

I just tracked down a PC Magazine piece about Windows Vista, the next-generation OS from Redmond. The details about the features (both ppresent and absent) were incredible. Here's a little preview:

You'll be able to create virtual folders based on a searches (already in Tiger).

You can store metadata with files (in the MacOS since the word "go").

IE7 will have tabbed browsing and RSS support (yeah, I'm down with that while using Safari).

The new graphics system will allow 3D effects and transparencies (stunningly like those in Tiger, though not available on all Vista-capable machines, unlike with Tiger).

It won't crash as much. Well, we've heard that before, and to some extent it has been true. Still, I've never had my system completely hand under any version of OS X, so I remain unimpressed.

There will be a command-line scripting environment. *Yawn* Been there, done that. System-level scripting is not new. In fact, before the effective destruction of the DOS prompt, it was available in Windows. It's rather sad that they have to bring it back, having axed it once before. This new version, though, should be better. Still, it won't make it into the initial 2006 release.

There are more, but after about 30 pages, I had lost track of most of the features. The one I am curious about is the Trusted Computing thing, but I don't want encryption hardware (yes, hardware) bolted onto my machine . . . under ANY operating system.

Despite everything, it looks as if this will indeed be the best version of Windows ever. I'm curious to see it next year, but by then I will be a short bike ride from Redmond, and I know people on the inside who can probably get me early looks.

p.s. No, Anton, this is not the same as saying that Apple can do no wrong. It's not even close. This is, however, evidence of how far behind the curve MS is.

Back To Scratch (Please Comment)

2005-07-27T23:40:00.000-07:00

OK, because of longstanding rendering problems with IE, I have returned to my original choice of the "Son of Moto" template. I will, as I indicted, be testing all changes in IE (as a callback to an earlier post, you'll note that the ONLY current-version browser with a problem was made by Microsoft). I may, however, decide to trash 800x600 compatibility. I still need to decide on that.

Here's where I need your feedback, people:

What kind of look works here? The "Son of Moto" look is a little too reminiscent of Father Karras' frock for my taste.

More Dashboard

2005-07-27T03:39:00.000-07:00

I thought I would try out DashBlog to see how it worked. I may never again open my browser to post here, assuming this delivers things as well as the usual interface.

Dashboard, Baby! Oh Yeah, and Bridge!

2005-07-27T00:02:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not talking about the Blogger "Dashboard" through which I passed on my way to making this post. I'm talking about the Tiger (that's MacOS X 10.4, for those out there with the misfortune not to have experienced it yet) widget execution environment.

To clarify, widgets look like miniature applications—think of the little things like clocks and calculators that have been bundled with every GUI OS for decades—but which are made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Other technologies, including those that are based on UNIX command-line code and MacOS system-level programs and protocols, as well as anything almost else one might dump into a web page, may also be used, but economies of file size and function are both goals when designing these things.

Widgets, however, unlike web pages, do not (though they may in most cases) execute in a browser. They execute in the Dashboard environment, which users can show and hide with hot keys or activation corners. Yeah, there are over 800 widgets we Tiger users can download via Apple's web site, and a few more kicking around the internet and on private machines. However, that's not the fun part.

Since widgets can be used for almost any little task out there, the possibilities are fairly extensive (if it weren't for copyright issues, I would make a widget of Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, though perhaps I can look into that). Anyone with a little web design background—or willing to take a couple days to learn the basics—can design widgets. In light of that fact, I took my (limited) background and put it to the test.

I have now almost completed my first widget. I wrote the bulk of the code on Sunday, polished it Monday, and am tweaking the interface now. I'm going to need some help with that last part, but I already put out the call. What, you may ask (shyeah, as if I haven't bored the poor Windows and *NIX users yet) did I do? I made a widget to calculate duplicate bridge scores, of course. Yeah, it's useless to most people. Oh well. It was fun. I learned more about bridge scoring. I'm happy. When the interface is finished, we'll see if Apple will host downloads. Fingers crossed.

*UPDATE*
Apple's site has the Oblique Strategies widget already. See? I have good ideas. Of course, the sad part is that I missed the fact it was there for three weeks, which is longer than I have had Tiger.

Falling In Love For The Xth Time

2005-07-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

It's chance, really, that it should be this one, but here it is. I first fell in love with the Macintosh under System 6. I renewed that love of the OS for System 7, System 7.5, MacOS 8, MacOS 9, X, X 10.1, X 10.2, X 10.3, and now 10.4. Yep, I've fallen in love with the beauty of an OS yet again, and it hasn't even been that long since the last time.

Spotlight makes searching my hard drive as easy as searching my iTunes library. Dashboard is both fun and useful (and for the record, I am looking at making a Library-of-Babel style text generator, a globe that will take latitude and longitude to search and provide data on that area, and something else that has slipped my mind for the moment but seemed really cool as I was falling asleep last night). Automator? Oh hell, I haven't even gotten around to that one yet.

I'm a touch miffed that my machine does not appear to support 2-finger scrolling. I suppose I could have checked that out BEFORE uninstalling my copy of iScroll2, but nooOOoo.

Mail? Everything the Six-Million Dollar Man had without the 70s cheese.

Safari? A little zippier, but the built-in RSS and PDF capabilities have brought it in line with such competition as Netscape and Firefox. It remains ahead of IE.

I know, as do any of you using Tiger, that there are many more things to say here, but if I keep telling you all the reasons I am just in awe of this version of the OS, I can't go play with all the reasons I am just in awe of this version of the OS.

Too Much

2005-07-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

As those of you who have lived the adjunct life know, working at two or three schools is not much more difficult than working at one. Adjuncts teach the same limited courses everywhere, so the prep tends to be minimal, and the material is already familiar. This does not apply when mixing levels.

I love teaching, so I look for some education work I could perform during the first six-week summer session, when I had no college courses. Right before my second-session courses started up, one of the places to which I had applied offered me a tutoring job. I said that I love teaching, right? I had done SAT prep before, and it was not too bad. This place was willing to pay me on a W-2 instead of the usual (illegal) 1099, and the people who run it are good folks.

I got a Saturday-only schedule to teach an eight-week English class to 8th and 9th graders (three whole students!) and two students for four weeks of private tutoring. The day was 9-5 with an hour for lunch, and the pay was not bad, though at the low end of the scale. No prep, I was told. I would not need to do anything outside of my class time. Dubious, I still took the company at its word. That was a mistake. The one day there was causing more stress and requiring more of my time than my college work. Once the private tutoring was done, I was to lead a pair of reading groups (6/7 and 8/9 for grade levels) that were to last eight weeks. That sounded fantastic—and still does, truth be told—but the time commitment was immense. I would have to prep diverse readings, which I had a free hand in selecting, for two groups each week, and that was just burying me.

I quit after two Saturdays.

The greatest good that came from my quitting involved stepping far out on a limb. One of my students was reading words incorrectly, so I asked him if the letters sometimes seemed out of order. They do. Oh my! Here was a boy getting ready for his junior year in high school, and he may have dyslexia or a similar, quite treatable, reading problem, yet I, someone untrained (and I was clear about this not only with him but with his mother) to diagnose or treat such a problem, was the first to ask whether any problem might exist. I suppose I was emboldened by knowing it was my last day, as sad as it may be to admit that. At least, and this is to the students great credit, he asked what he could do. Now I just hope his mother will follow through.

Staying On Task

2005-07-07T22:07:00.000-07:00

In order that it be clear, I will restate simply here what I said indirectly before about the London bombings.

This is NOT justification for invading Tehran or Pyongyang. The people who are responsible for the bombings in London are almost certainly spread out. They are not going to make themselves easy to find. This was the case after 9/11. When the job of finding Osama bin Laden got tough, we shifted targets. That was a mistake.

Now we are hearing rhetoric that is almost verbatim what we heard in late 2001 and early 2002, before prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. I was dubious that it was real then, and the military action in Iraq, passed off as somehow connected to 9/11. I am dubious now. I hope now, as I hoped then, that I am merely expressing a healthy scepticism, as it is known. We'll see. The side benefit of the war in Iraq, combined with dismal recruiting numbers (for many months now the Army has missed goals by at least 40%), is that the United States has not the military reserves to do much of anything anywhere else. Sometimes it can be good to be tired.

London

2005-07-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

I grieve for those injured and killed in the London bombings. I grieve for the families and the friends of those injured and killed in the London bombings. We should "find [the terrorists . . . ] and bring them to justice," if I may use President Bush's statement from Gleneagle.

But this must be different. This must not be the charge we took up in 2002 when Bush said, in the State of the Union Address, "Our nation will continue to be steadfast and patient and persistent in the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world."

At this rate, it may be a good thing for the people of the U.S. and England that Bush is term limited and Blair has already declared that he will not run again. Three and a half years between essentially identical sentiments has produced a red herring mission in Iraq. Who knows? Maybe London will give the world focus on the stated goal of this "war on terror." Then again, I would hate to have my face turn blue while I waited.

I grieve for those injured and killed in the London bombings. I grieve for the families and the friends of those injured and killed in the London bombings. I hope now that at least their suffering can serve a purpose untainted by the politics of Democrats, Republicans, New Labor, or any other political group.

O'Connor

2005-07-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

Last week's "Friday dump" included Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's resignation. That such news breaks on Fridays is par for the course, and that O'Connor, whose husband is not in good health, should retire is really no surprise. If we want surprises, we may have to wait for Bush to put a name forward. Still, let's consider a few things that the spin machines have already been throwing out.

From the left:
Bush should take this opportunity to name a jurist who will replace O'Connor ideologically. OK, so "should take this opportunity to" tends to be phrased as "has an opportunity to" and gets coupled with Bush's 2000 campaign pledge (as yet unfulfilled, truth be told) to be "a uniter, not a divider."

Bush has no obligation to appoint anyone of any kind. Heck, he can appoint Martha Stewart if he wants. The problem is that that he has to remember Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution. Before the word "consent" are the words "advice and." If he wants a strict interpretation of "advice and consent of the Senate," he had best remember that the Senate is more than just Republicans.

From the right:
Bush doesn't need to worry about the Democrats, so he may as well appoint a staunch and loyal conservative. Um, no. He won't get a hardliner to a committee vote, much less to the floor of the Senate. Why do I say this? Arlen Specter has even come out with an admonition that the President should consult broadly with the Senate and name a concensus justice. Since Specter runs the Senate Judiciary Committee, he can take any name he wants and refuse to bring it up for vote. It's one thing to be opposed by the opposition party, but when members of one's own party—especially those with the power to stop you dead in your tracks—tell you to behave yourself, you had better listen, Mr. President.

The Senate is divided 55-44-1, though on a hardline candidate, Vermont's independent will almost certainly count as a Democrat. Some observers think that this is going to be easy for Bush. All he needs to do is dash off whomever he wishes, Specter's committee will push it through on a party line vote, and the floor will go from there. Sadly, Fox "News" tried making this case with half of their memory erased.

The Fox people talked about the "Gang of 7" in the Senate—seven Democrats who struck a deal to avoid a filibuster on judicial nominees earlier this year. What they seemto have forgotten was that this was the "Gang of 14" and included seven Republicans. If that cabal holds (and assuming the I becomes a D for these purposes), the Senate will be 48-52 against a hardline candidate—never allowing a vote, yet avoiding the so-called "nuclear option" to remove the filibuster on judicial nominees.

The Senate has the power of the middle, and the President will have to accept that. We won't see another Scalia or Thomas in this appointment. While 41% of Americans want a more conservative justice and 30% want a more liberal justice, 61% of Americans want a justice who will (as O'Connor did) uphold Roe v. Wade. Moderation.

This brings up a red herring we are likely to have visited upon us by the White House: abortion. Will someone, probably on the left, ask how a potential justice will vote on abortion? Probably. It will almot certainly be Kennedy. Does this mean it is a "litmus test" for the candidate? No. It can sway public opinion, perhaps, but almost any major issue can be put in its place. Consider this hypothetical exchange:

Senator: How would you vote on gun control?
Nominee: I fully support any law that allows private citizens access to firearms.

Feel free to change "support" to "oppose." Regardless, the nominee should be trashed. Heck, turn the issue and response to abortion, the death penalty, or anything else that often drives single-issue voters. The simple fact remains that anyone—ANYONE—who is willing to state unequivocally before the Senate how he or she will vote on any issue is not someone that either side should want on the bench. Supreme Court Justices need to possess wisdom and intelligence. Dogma, however, is antithetical to the job description.

And now we come back to our original problem: Whom should Bush appoint? Can so dogmatic a president accept someone who is not dogmatic? Will Bush demonstrate that wisdom is, over the long term, more valuable than a few political points? I hope so. I doubt it.

Airplanes And Ashes

2005-07-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

It seems to me I've written something about this before, but perhaps it wasn't here (I won't go back to check). I took my first ride on an airplane before I turned one, and my parents, in moving the family across the Atlantic, made it a big flight, though given my age, not a memorable one.

Over the years, we flew across the Atlantic man times, spending over half a decade in Europe. I can't say whether it was something about me, something about my father's working for Boeing, or something else altogether, but I always loved flying. Flying meant chewing gum and ginger ale. It meant Tic Tacs and that rush of being pressed into the seats as the engines roared for takeoff. It meant the odor of stale ashes and the mint of other people's stale chewing gum stuck into the ash trays.

Yes, I loved those odd odors, too. They meant travel and adventure. They were part of the multitude of signs that we were going somewhere. We might be seeing family I barely knew or returning home to the neighborhood I knew well in England. Airplanes—we flew on more than a couple 747s—were great moving castles in the sky, countries, almost, with their own atmospheres high above in the atmospheres of real countries. It didn't matter that stale cigarette ashes produced an unpleasant odor most times: on airplanes, it blended as part of the magic.

What Month Is It?

2005-07-05T06:38:00.000-07:00

I only got a few hour's sleep last night, and just now I had the oddest impression that it was Christmas morning. Walking by the cats' food bowl, and with one nostril feeling a little stuffed up, I caught the scent of something that I decided was pine. It wasn't just any kind of pine, though, but the kind that says it is cut and indoors, slowly dying because water and packets of dissolved food aren't enough for a real tree. And then there was the sound of Sunshine walking, half awake, past a door. I don't know why that makes me think of Christmas, too. But it is July now, and all of this was just an illusion.

2,000!

2005-07-01T18:56:00.000-07:00

As I slog my way through the numbers with relative slowness, I managed my second thousand visitors in about half the time as the first thousand. This time, however, it seems I was visited by someone who already knew I was there. That's much better.

My Stone Tablets

2005-07-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

Since there seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding this issue, it will get its own space.

I have never stated that anyone was against the posting of the Ten Commandments on the basis of its being unprotected speech under the First Amendment. Never. Not one time in my life. That said, I oppose the posting of the Ten Commandments on public land, and most notably on those lands used for the administration of justice.

I ask you this: If I were to get the money together to have a 10.5-ton monument built and given to the state of Alabama, would they put it in front of the courthouse? They did with the Ten Commandments, but what about the Code of Hammurabi or law excerpts from the Koran or the Zend Avesta?

You see, the problem with posting the Ten Commandments is not free speech. The problem is exclusion of expression. Remember, if you wish to debate this on freedom of speech grounds, that the Supreme Court has ruled, in effect, that the listener has as much freedom from speech as the speaker has to deliver it.

This means that anyone who does not wish to experience the Ten Commandments simply has to avoid places of religious expression, but jurors, criminals, lawyers, and judges who must go to such a place cannot avoid it. That is unfair. It is not enough to say that these are Ten rules by which people can lead better lives, but that they can be divorced of their religious value. Take out the first four if that's what you want, but "I am the lord thy God" is not a terribly secular start.

We can debate until we are blue in the face which of the founding fathers are Christian and which are deists or agnostics or atheists, but the fact remains that this is a secular nation by definition. We have no national religion, just as we have no national language. Saying that we support freedom of expression with regard to all religions does not make sense if we only support, with our deeds, freedom of expression of one religion (two, since this is from the boook of Exodus).

Ann Coulter (for Anton)

2005-06-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

This idea was suggested, if inadvertently, by my friend Anton's comments on my (now second) most recent post. In a recent (at this writing, current) piece on Ann Coulter's web site, we can read a list of things that she apparently feels are unworthy of government money, all in order to put the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Ten Commandements in "perspective." Let me address a couple of the more heavily spun pieces and present a brief list of my own.

— Korans distributed to aspiring terrorists at Guantanamo. — U.S. military
This is an interesting idea. Apparently we only gave these holy books to some of the prisoners, since not even the U.S. government has managed to prove that all of the people currently being held at Gitmo are now aspiring or ever did aspire to be terrorists. We can forget about those who have already been released. History is written by the victors, indeed.

— "Anglos consolidated their control of New Mexico, acquiring huge holdings from the original owners through fraud and manipulation." — Smithsonian exhibit
Yeah, too bad we paid for a history lesson here. Were eminent domain and violence never used in land grabs while building railroads, too? Some of this nation's history is offensive. Deal with it. Maybe, though, it was the use of "Anglos" in this context. I'm still puzzled by why this is a misuse of taxpayer dollars.

— Christ submerged in a jar of urine. — NEA-funded exhibit
I'm sorry, but we paid the salaries of troops who have done much worse over the decades, though perhaps Coulter only finds desecration of Christian symbols unfair or offensive. I really should get back into teaching Sunday School.

— A play titled "Sincerity Forever," depicting Christ using obscenities and endorsing any and all types of sexual activities as consistent with Biblical teaching. — NEA-funded exhibit
And it is OK for the U.S. military to supply aircraft for movies like Executive Decision? After all, that film only portrays the followers of Allah as hellbent on harming others. Good Christians and evil Others does not fairness make.

She goes on to write that the United States was "founded on a compact with God, forged from the idea that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Hmm. Let's review the two core documents of this nation: The Declaration of Independence and The United States Constitution. The word "God" appears precisely once between the two documents (in the Declaration of Independence), and that is in the following sentence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Note that there is no specification of which God, and despite attempts some continue to make that it is the God of the Christian Bible (is that Catholic or Protestant, by the way?), there is, in the end, not merely a dearth but a complete lack of evidence to suppport any such definitive claim. Heck, "the Laws of Nature" get top billing; "Nature's God," which sounds incredibly druidic to me, comes in second.

"Creator," which also appears but once, and in the same document as "God," is no clearer. Indeed, if person X believes that god A is her creator, and person Y believes that god B is his creator, what distinction does this document make?

Better still, of these two documents, only the Constitution has any legal or governmental value. The Declaration—important and historic though it is—does not establish this nation's government, yet it is the only one to mention "God" or a "Creator."

Coulter eventually comes to her (apparent) point, which is to mention the possible horror of banning the Pledge of Allegiance. I suppose there are those who want to ban it, but most cases ask the Court to rule on the "under God" portion, which was addedonly during the Cold War so that we might distinguish ourselves from those "godless" Communists (note the use of a capital C, indicating the party, not the people who espouse Marx and Engel's economic theory—there is a difference).

In any case, here is my mercifully short (though why I should make it short after this long of a post is beyond me) list of questionable taxpayer-funded boondogles:

The "Star Wars" missile defense shield. We have yet to have one fully functional test on a system that has been twenty years in development. Worse, not a one of our serious enemies has ICBM capabilities, though commercial aircraft, a poisoned milk supply, or a few X-ray-activated explosive devices could cause more economic havoc, if not exactly as much loss of life, as one nuke.

$200,000 in 2000 for one city in Pennsylvania to get all of its streets re-paved with sparkling asphalt. Yeah, because the driveways at theatres aren't bad enough that we have to put this into a federal highway spending bill? If this post has already pissed you off, you really don't want to know which elephantine party claims the offending Senator.

Franking privileges that may be used to run political campaigns. 'Nuff said.

Ann Coulter's law school education. Yes, that was a silly one, but given the level of pointlessness of some of Coulter's listed items, maybe this should be a serious entry.

Iran-Contra. Let me see, we paid people to use backdoor methods to deal with people we didn't like but were allowed to deal with so they could deal with people we didn't like and we were banned from dealing with. This was done so that we could achieve an end that was not achieved by these means, and now a member of the so-called "Axis of Evil" has weapons we supplied via this mess. Oh yeah. That's a promotional bell ringer!

I think that's enough for now. I'm sure I will hear something about this, despite the dedication of the post to my friend. Honestly, had he not mentioned Ann Coulter, I would not have thought to go to her site. It was only once I was there and reading her list, however, that I felt the need to write something about it here.

Bush On Iraq

2005-06-29T04:59:00.000-07:00

In a speech (NY Times, login required: see page 6) last night, Bush said that "setting an artificial timetable [for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq] would send the wrong message to the enemy, who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out."

What? Let me rephrase this: If we say that we will leave on a given date, the terrorists will know that they can wait us out, but if we simply say we will, as Bush put it, that "we will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed and not a day longer," they can't wait us out. The only way that this can be true is if do not leave until all of the terrorists are wiped out. Yeah, that will happen soon.

So that my reading this week of 1984 may be seen as having more value than mere academic prep—a worthy reason in its own right—let me bring in this justification from early in Bush's speech:

"The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. The war reached our shores on September 11, 2001."

OK, so if the "global war on terror" finally reached this country, that means it was raging beforehand, right? But the term "war on terror" is a post-9/11 creation. That's OK, maybe we can just collect all of the offending copies of newspapers and such, rewrite them, and toss the old ones down a "memory hole" (all the more amusing a term in this digital age) to be consigned to fire.

This is our chief executive? our commander in chief? He should not have ended the speech "May God bless you all," but "May God save you all."

Puzzle-Solver Crack

2005-06-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

Six days ago, as I was driving home, I saw a bench ad for Sudoku in the Los Angeles Times. The ad asked simply, "Do you Sudoku?" I can say that I had no idea whether or not I did, but if I did, I knew it by some other less Asian name. Later that evening (more properly, early the next morning) I wandered down to the lobby, intent on polluting my lungs, and our desk attendant had the puzzles page open. Seeing something different, I asked if it was the new puzzle (and thereupon butchered the name of it).

Sam replied that it was, so I looked at the simple grid as he explained how it worked. It seemed horribly obvious, and I gave a shrug, regarding it as little more than a distraction. Later, out of curiosity, I copied the grid down and transferred it to a spreadsheet that allowed me to work with it. I failed miserably. Repeatedly. It was not just a distraction. Here's how it works:

You are presented with a 9x9 grid, itself composed of nine 3x3 grids (arranged, of course, in their own 3x3 grid). Some numbers appear in various squares throughout the puzzle, and it is the solver's job to get the digits 1 through 9 arranged in each 3x3 grid in such a way as no column or row duplicates any digit.

That may sound simple, but visit The Daily Sudoku, which presents just what its name advertises. Most are actually quite easy, as Sudoku puzzles go, and can be worked out in 15 to 30 minutes by someone who knows the tricks. Expect to surrender a little more of your time, though, on the first couple tries.

Oh yes. If you like these kinds of puzzles, you are doomed. One day I will have caught up with everything on the site linked above, and then I will have to get a fix elsewhere. Thankfully, there are many sites that supply Sudoku puzzles. I'll get by, I think.

Income Tax Fix

2005-06-27T21:47:00.000-07:00

If the government employs someone, why does that employee pay income tax to the very government that issues the paychecks? Republicans and other conservatives routinely argue that the more money people have in their hands, the more money people will spend, which in turn will cause the economy to grow. So if you lower my pay, eliminating what I would otherwise pay in taxes (assuming that were my only income), you would have less money going out (my paycheck is smaller) and less money coming in (my tax burden is eliminated), but the numbers are a wash. Of course, if I were to have two part-time government jobs, I would end up coming out marginally ahead, but it would probably be more trouble than it would be worth.

Now, you may be wondering about what this does for married couples and charitable giving. After all, if I have no tax burden at all, I have no incentive to itemize my returns, which gives me no incentive to give money to charity, donate a used car, or, well, do much else that might come off as greed-motivated magnanimity. That's OK, though, because I am a magnanimous person already.

As for married couples (who may file jointly), let's go back to the example of $100,000, but divide it evenly this time between two people. The government employee would get a 10% reduction in pay (to use the dream rate from above) and earn $45,000, bringing the household income to $95,000. Of that, only $50,000 would then be taxable, reducing the tax bracket for the family. Once more, this puts more money in the hands of the people, though it does not radically alter the tax calculation.

Government, with a smaller pie to slice up, would have to shrink, and its employees would not only have to be the best and the brightest in order to get the jobs, but they would have an advantage in the dating pool. After all, who would not want to be married to that kind of tax benefit? Bring in $95,000 and get taxed as if you brought in $50,000? Think of the possibilities!

But wait, there's more. Since the number of government jobs would necessarily shrink with the budget, the requirements for those jobs could increase. Since many people would want those jobs, education would have to improve at all levels. This would, of course, force real reform, not more NCLB crap. This would move us ahead of other nations in education and allow us to move more toward isolationism in our trade policies, though we could, with all of the people who wanted those military (government) jobs, still project our will wherever we wished.

Simply by reducing my tax burden (and that of others employed by governments that charge income tax), we can solve all of the nation's problems.

Fox "News"

2005-06-25T03:56:00.000-07:00

I was just checking to see what was on TV, and my channel surfing brought my through Fox "News." What were they discussing? Why the "failure" of the media to report on the success in Iraq. Senator Chuck Hegel (R-NE) apparently says that we are losing in Iraq. Clearly, that is not news, yet one of the commentators (I refuse to say "reporter") said that we were winning.

The insurgents, he explained, don't have the capacity to mount a large offensive (Tet was his counter-example to the failed attack on Abu-Ghraib) and don't have a leader from Iraq. Furthermore, he hastened to add, "it's just terrorism." Um, yeah. We got that part.

Correct me if I am wrong, but Bin-Laden is not from New York, never set foot on, much less controlled, U.S. soil, yet 9/11 happened. Don't worry, folks. Fox has just broken the big secret: it's "just" terrorism. Never mind that one of the four reasons given (each with its own month, at that) for using military force in Iraq was to combat terrorism (the "War on Terror"). It's "just" terrorism. Never mind that Bin-Laden is still free, and that worldwide efforts to capture him show less commitment than Elizabeth Taylor at a wedding, we are in Iraq to prosecute this war on "just" terrorists.

Wow. And they have the gall to use the word "News" outside of quotes?

Update On The Neighbors

2005-06-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

Last night one of the birds fell (again) from the nest and was left too weak to survive. The two had grown so much that the nest was barely big enough for one, and while the fall is perhaps two feet to soft planting soil, this may well have been the same one who took a tumble a few days back.

It's sad, but then animals tend to reproduce like dust bowl farmers: have enough children that some are certain to make it. Requiescat in pace.

Professors, Please Read!

2005-06-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

I am developing something for the English department at my school (it could be used by other departments, but I am working with my department chair on this right now). I am curious what you folks out there in the blogosphere think of my idea, keeping in mind that I work at a community college, where such a plan as I will lay out below may have more value than at a university.

I am putting together a textbook review system that will allow instructors—at least those with new preps or changing texts—to see what other people think of the texts out there. Since every course has a course outline that spells out what the goals and requirements are, the textbooks we use should support us in helping the students meet the goals for a given course, but it is not easy to skim, much less read, every viable book on the market. This is where my idea comes in.

An administrator (the Department Chair or designee) assigns a text-course combination to a reviewer, who grades (using a 4-point system, just like letter grades) how well the textbook meets each of the requirements for the course. An end user can then look up a course and see all of the textbooks that have been reviewed, what their overall scores are, and what their individual scores are.

From a technological standpoint, this is easy. I had a false start late last night, and today I have gone from scratch to almost full functionality. The cost is minimal ($299, without educational discount, for the software if we only need to support up to five web users at a time), and the security is solid. Here's the question:

Would you find any value in something of this nature?

Flickr

2005-06-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

I finally did the obvious and got a Flickr address. Now all of you who wanna see my silly pictures (the ones worth sharing, anyway) can just go there and peek. You don't get stupid drunk pics, though.