Back when we were securing the old bookstore space in Usdan as a home for our planned new gameroom, I heard about a plan Aramark was proposing to turn at least part of the area into an expanded convenience store to replace the current C-Store. This plan always puzzled me because Aramark generally insists, at least to students, that with a fixed student population and relatively fixed dining services fees (although they do go up every year at a rate that is probably higher then inflation), they are unable to provide additional dining services, or later hours, or more locations, or whatever.

We were able to obtain longer dining hours last year, but that was due, at least in part, to the opening of the Village residence hall, which ensured an additional 220 or so people on meal plans. But with no new residence halls opening in the near future, why would Aramark want a big new space to replace their little C-Store?

This morning several thoughts came together in my mind and a fairly obvious solution presented itself. Let’s see if this makes sense.

Aramark gets Brandeis to shell out a fair amount of money to create and equip the new space according to Aramark design specs. Of course there will be negotiation and mutual cooperation, but generally Brandeis funds all dining facilities, so Aramark gets the new space for free. Aramark can stock more food and have a larger stock room to store it in. Now, C-Store usage will go up. The C-Store is open the longest hours of any dining location, and they will expand the hours, perhaps keeping it open 24/7. Usage will continue to rise. Sherman and Usdan usage will go down accordingly. It is much cheaper for Aramark to sell pre-packaged and unprepared goods then prepared stuff, so this will be desirable for them. Because of lower usage, they will be able to cut down on dining hours in Usdan and Shapiro, and since staffing a convenience store is easier and cheaper then staffing a full-service kitchen, they will save money.

Students will get fewer dining choices, but the C-Store will be open longer hours and be much better stocked. C-Store prices are unlikely to go down, so students will still pay a premium to shop on campus. Will Aramark continue to oppose the “All-Points” meal plan? Probably yes. Students will be “encouraged” through pricing to purchase combo plans that contain some meals and some points, and with less dining available, will miss more meals. Aramark profits, Brandeis has a nice new C-Store to use and show off on tours, and students get more late night food but less choice.

I don’t think its a malicious plan, but I’m not really sure its needed or useful for students. I’m perfectly happy with us controlling the gameroom space, thankyouverymuch, and I think we’ll probably make better use of it. But it is interesting to think about the other forces that were vying for the space, and the fact that we only got it by virtue of occupying it and refusing to move. 🙂 You know what they say about posession being nine-tenths of the law. Posession + $120,000 in renovation gives you a pretty good claim to a space.

A quick recap to bring us all up to date: I had a fairly stable group of friends in elementary school, and a better group in middle school. Come high school, I moved to a different school district where I knew no one. Not being the outgoing type, it pretty much stayed that way, and I had a few fairly good friends but not a large group. Next comes college, a realization that I’m really not leaving anyone behind, and that I at least have a chance to start fresh, do it right.

Of course I still lacked most of the social skills, and took the easy route, bonding and hanging with people in my building and on my floor. No branching out to other cohorts meant that most of the rest of campus remained mysterious to me. Sophomore year or thereabouts I realized that friendship by proximity does not necessarily translate into true friendship, and in response tried to expand my social circles and meet more interesting people. I knew I was behind, but was working on catching up.

End recap. Enter present day. I feel I have a fairly good number of people that I am friendly with and enjoy the company of. A few I will certainly maintain relationships with after college. Some I may talk to occasionally. Many I probably won’t talk to again.

What I don’t have, and envy in other people, is kinda a long-term, close-knit group of good friends. Or, at least, a sort of unified social circle of people who communicate with each other. I’m envious of people who have some good friends from home, people they have known for years. I’m envious of groups formed in college that now have several years of shared history and experience, of bonds and in-jokes and understanding.

Here lies a placeholder for a few paragraphs I wrote about a specific example of this phenomenom. Reading it over, I realize that I do not have the verbal faculty to convey the demonstration I wish to convey, so its better to leave out something that will just cause undue awkwardness.

Breaking into a social circle can be a very difficult task, especially late in the game. I wrote about this in my Cyberlaw paper on trust relationships, but then it was just theoretical. The real thing is so much more complicated. It helps, though, to have a person or two encouraging you along and filling you in on backstory enough that you don’t feel completely alienated everytime someone tells a n amusing antecdote. And don’t get me wrong, it makes me happy, not sad, to see people taking pleasure in each others company. It just makes me envious. And we’re allowed to envy happiness, right?

Longtime readers (err…and friends) probably are aware that one of my favoritest things in the world is fireworks. The fireworks I saw tonight are probably the best I have ever seen. Now, mind you, they weren’t as captivating as seeing fireworks at, oh, lets say seven years old up in Lake Arrowhead, but unfortunately (fortunately?) I’m not longer seven, so it’s gonna be hard to top that.

Tzalli and Adam were tasked with buying us a picnic, so they went to Victory and picked up a bag of tortilla chips and some orange juice. The hell? Last time they do the shopping…

Kelli, Dave, myself, and the two aforementioned bad shoppers then drove to Harvard Ave. and took the T to Copley. We staked out some real estate by the Charles at around 2ish. Dave went and picked up Amy for her day off from camp and they (eventually) returned. We all hung out, talked, read books, commented on the people, etc. until 9 or so, at which time Adam and Tzalli, with another burst of genius, picked us up and moved us down to another spot that was about half the size.

Eh, whatever. It was a better view of the sky. So we played some Taboo until the fireworks started. I don’t really know how to describe fireworks. This was a pretty long show with a lot of neat ones that I’ve never seen before, my favorite being (yeah, watch me try to describe this…) a rocket that launches with no trail, explodes into several large blobs of white specks while launching a bunch of little capsules, and then the capsules ignite into a whole bunch of small clusters of which pinpricks, lighting up the sky with a shower of sparks, kinda what I imagine the sky would look like with no atmosphere. Anyway, the fireworks show was awesome, the company was awesome, and good times were had by all.

Oh, and we celebrated the birth of America from the place where a lot of it happened, and all that. Patriotism, yay!

*Edit (6/15/05):* I am not the author of the above photograph, and do not own the rights to it. I didn’t have the right kind of camera back in July to take that photo, not to mention I’m probably not yet a good enough photographer to do it. Looking around online I cannot seem to find it anywhere, although I have a nagging suspicion that I may have appropriated it from the _Boston Globe_. Sorry for the confusion.

Yesterday I drove Kelli, Tzalli, and Aaron to Newport, Rhode Island, where we met up with Adam Batkin and saw a Ben Folds concert. The concert was in a stuffy tent by the harbor, but Mr. Folds was pretty exciting. Having only heard a few of his songs before, I found the whole thing enjoyable, except for the heat and lack of air. We had a nice Shabbat dinner afterwards and then slept in an equally warm and humid house. Well, basically, the whole area was a little warm and humid, but this is New England, so it’s not unexpected.

This morning I awoke early and after sitting around and then browsing the web for a while decided to go for a wander before breakfast. I took some pictures (hopefully to be posted soon) and saw some sights. Came back for a game of “Apples To Apples” followed by a yummy lunch and some more wandering, this time with ice cream! Newport is a fairly small town, with basically every house marked as a historic landmark, and somewhat too much congestion. The parts we walked through were quaint and old but not necessarily entirely upscale, and the appearance of scantily clad beachgoers and noisy motorcyclists did not do much to help the scene. The narrow streets had too many cars and too many people. This is a town that would work well with Segways.

That said, I enjoyed the experience a lot and had fun in the town and with the people. We didn’t really do much today because of Shabbat but did try to get to a showing of Spider-Man 2 at night, however we didn’t get to the theater in time. Probably for the best, since we have to get up early tomorrow to go have some fun in Boston and find a place for fireworks. Six or eight hours of sitting on the grass would probably work better with a picnic packed, but owing to us having been out of town that might prove difficult. Also, I’m out of clothes and need to do wash, pack for the NY trip, etc., and I’m not sure when that can all happen. So this has been and will continue to be an exciting and eventful weekend. 🙂

I remember back in high school myself and many others would often interrogate our teachers about the applicability of what we were learning to “real life,” meaning our lives after high school. I’ll leave aside many years of English class for this entry and focus on mathematics.

The problem was that some teachers, well, all of them, actually, felt it important to at least try to justify to us the use of math in life, perhaps out of fear that enough of this sort of sentiment would get their budgets cut, or whatever. The examples they and the text books came up with were always highly contrived and not very convincing. Things like, well, one day you might need to build a roof, and then you’ll want to know trigonometry, or whatever. Truth is that, unfortunately, most of us don’t build roofs.

Of course the real reason behind the teaching of math in publich schools, or at least what should be the reason behind it, is twofold:

1. Mathematics teaches critical thinking and reasoning skills that will be useful for our entire lives. Math teaches logic, good decision making, etc. Formal proofs show clearly cause and effect, inferance, etc. Math helps us to understand structure. Math helps us understand rules. And society likes rules.
2. Math is beautiful. There is no getting around this. Math distills down the amazing world around us into something rational and expressable. Math is just a really amazing wonderful thing. Geometry is damn cool. Algebra rocks. Calculus, oh man, what can I say.

Is it so wrong to learn something just so that you know it? Is it so bad to teach people things just because they are interesting, inspiring, powerful?

That said, I’m making no excuses for the public school system. Fact remains that I love Calculus to death but continue to be dreadful at it. I guess some of us just aren’t cut out for that sort of thing.

I guess its the mark of a good writer that, five hundred and eighty odd pages into a book, in the space of about three pages he can turn you from loving a character to loathing him, without changing the nature of the character in any way.

Today at their Worldwide Developers Conference Apple previewed their new version of Mac OS X, named “Tiger”, which will be released in the next 6 or maybe 9 months. It looks pretty spiffy, with a slightly tweaked look, some updates, and some nice new tools. Unfortunately, the two coolest tools introducted in Tiger look to be blatant rip-offs of established 3rd party programs.

Apple’s Dashboard software displays “widgets,” which are basically nifty little utilities written in JavaScript. Included widgets are a datebook, stock ticker, calculator, address book, clock, and a few others. This is pretty cool, unfortunately it is very similar, down to the scripting language and the nomenclature, to the wonderful Konfabulator. Their home page says “Cupertino, start your photocopiers,” and I think they have a right to be angry. Apple didn’t offer to buy their great existing software, but simply stole the concept and re-wrote it without giving them any credit (or money).

The same seems to be true for Apple’s new Spotlight feature, which pops out of the top menu bar and allow for quick and easy searching and, one would assume, program launching, because that’s basically what LaunchBar does, another tool that I love, and that I doubt was given any money (or notice) from Apple.

Really Apple, I expected better from you. If others were to do what you’ve done, you’d take them to court. But when its a little developer, you just steal, steal away. This is pretty sad behavior, more befitting Microsoft then such an innovative computer company.

This morning pilot Mike Melvill, 62 became astronaut Mike Melvill after touching the edge of space in Scaled Composites‘ SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan.

For two generations, the feats of space have been reserved for those test pilots and scientists who passed government muster. Now, the vapor trail of SpaceShipOne’s hurtling ascent hangs in the air, an indelible cosmic path for anyone with the money and moxie to follow.

The Christian Science Monitor has one of the better stories about this remarkable achievement, and NPR has the first of what will be many images. I watched the flight on a BBC internet stream, but if I could have I would have been there.

Like the barnstormers who crossed America in the early years of the 20th century, promising a future when any person could get on a plane and fly across the country, today’s space entrepreneurs speak about space with a sense of manifest destiny. Now, more people might listen.

NASA has held back space exploration long enough. SpaceShipOne and the 26 other entrants in the X-Prize competition are but the leading edge of a huge storm that will make life really exciting in the next few decades.

I decided long ago that my ultimate dream was to reach the Moon, to walk on it, to see its wonder, to look down at Earth with awe. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that it will be possible within my lifetime. And at a time like this, at a time when everyone is so focused on bickering and the on the many ills of the world, good news and optimism and a challenge and hope for the future is most welcomed.

Today’s Sunday Morning featured a lengthy report about men’s health. I’ll try to decode the theme of it, since it is a little difficult to find. Apparently, there is some concern that men see doctors less frequently then women, ignore dangerous symptoms more often than women, and don’t talk about health problems as much as women. And that it is generally women who urge men to go see doctors. No, wait, that wasn’t a difficult theme to discern at all, considering that the viewer is bashed on the head with it over and over throughout the segment. Oh, and the correspondant uses the segment as an opportunity to plug her book — three times.

Putting all this aside, the issues are appear to be real. It does seem, however, that culture is slowly shifting and men’s health is finally getting talked about again. The segment notes a few “celebrity” examples: Mike Wallace talking about his depression, Colin Powell talking about prostate cancer. And it also notes more health services targeted at young males. Perhaps the insurance companies should be getting in on the act (or perhaps they already are). Encouraging young and middle-aged people — both men and women — to get regular checkups, and making it as cheap as possible to do so, will save them money.

I have a Gmail invite. If you want it, post a comment by 5:00pm. I’ll decide who gets it with a (pseudo-) random number generator.

I’m sick of this “daylog” thing and I don’t know low LJers can stand to do what they do. It’s a boring chore that I doubt anyone reads anyway. I’m gonna switch it to “Currently” which is what it was originally going to be, a little blurb about what I’m currently reading, watching, etc. that is updated as the situation warrants.

I’ll move all the current daylog entries into the “personal” section.

Awoke late, got lost looking for a Taco Bell, created the new student forum site, went with Nat and Aaron to Cheesecake Factory (again). Wish there were a few more people around I knew, but it’s not bad.

Down time at work until Monday or so. Left early, sat around in the heat at home in a stupor. Eventually got up to go to Lizzy’s, but the elements worked against me, culminating in pouring rain as I arrived. Cleared up a few hours later and I went home. Chatted with the parents and read about the Tony’s before sleep.

Anyone here an Ender’s fan? So Ender Wiggin’s got this earring thingy with which he communicates to an entity known as Jane, an intelligent being trapped in a computer network, but, for our purposes, just another pseudo-intelligent computer system (today we call them AIs). Ender and Jane have discussions, she pipes in when he needs things — often pre-emptively, performs valuable functions for him like his banking, travel plans, and the like, and is all around a useful thing to have around.

But she isn’t around, is she? She’s off in the ether somewhere, in a computer network. Ender isn’t carrying Jane, he’s carrying a high-tech, always-on, super-sensing cell phone.

I haven’t talked about it lately, but for years I have been looking forward to the day of pervasive computing, generally embodied in the idea of the wearable computer. A completely personalized, customized, always-on, always-there personal agent that knows as much about you as you do yourself, that is completely patterned to your mental process, that senses where you are and what you are doing and why. It records your life, annotates, cross-references, and, just when you most need it (even if you don’t know it), it pops up with a perfectly relevent and important bit of information.

There is more to this vision, but that’s enough for now.

Does the wearable really need to be on your body at all? Do we need to worry about power usage, “personal networks,” distributed processing, and the like? Or does the advent if high-performance packet radio (i.e. cellular phone and data networks), coupled with WiFi, Bluetooth, and all the rest of it, give us an easier solution? Sure I still need the miniature sensor package, the heads-up display embeded in my glasses, the tiny clip-on video camera, and whatever other accessories I choose to use, but I don’t need the central unit to be anywhere near me. As long as I’m in range of some kind of radio network — and the system will be able to sense which, like a tri-band phone — I’m pretty much set.

Let’s make this a reality, folks!

Finished up some new web designs. Read about OpenACS. Spent a couple hours beginning to demolish a wooden kiosk. Ate some great barbecue chicken pizza. Ate some terrible chicken pesto pizza. Finished Cryptonomicon. Reviewed same. Felt very much at peace.

Awoke early and spent time before work visiting with Student Life people, or that was the plan, but they were all out to lunch for Mike McKenna’s going away. Meeting about the web site redesign that was interesting. Fun in the office, followed by dinner at Olive Garden and Shrek 2 with Aaron and Nat.

Hmm…today. Watched the Tony Awards. Yeah, that’s about it.

The Village residence hall houses 220 people for 8 months out of the year. There are eight washing machines for clothing that charge 75¢ per wash. Let us assume each student does one load of wash per week. That works out to $82.50 per machine per month, or $660 per machine for the academic year. Assume that Brandeis gets a cut of that (since they always do). Let’s say 20%. So Conway, the company that provides the machines, makes $528 per machine per year.

Conway has the cost of the machine, let’s estimate that a high-grade vending washing machine costs $3500, just to choose a figure. There is the maintenance cost involved in emptying the machine of quarters every week and performing maintenance. Using these figures, it would take Conway almost 7 years to pay off the machine, not including labor costs and upkeep. I doubt the machines last 7 years, so I guess these numbers are off — people must be doing more loads of wash per week.

We’ve gotten this far, so let’s just assume that our numbers are valid, even though they probably aren’t. The washing machine in my basement serves 16 (I think) people, most of the year. For simplicity we’ll say that everyone does one load of wash a week for all 12 months of the year. The cost per load here is $1.75, so this works out to $1344 for the machine for the year. Wow! To be fair, let’s assume the landlord takes 20%, just like Brandeis. That knocks the revenue down to $1075.

Conway is making $528/year providing a machine to Brandeis, but they are making $1075/year — double — providing the machine in my apartment. Wow. What a rip-off.

I’ll link to Seth’s writeup when he writes it up. Avenue Q won best musical and Idina Menzel got best female lead. Both deserved it. I wanted Wicked to get best musical, but that’s only because I found AQ a bit less exciting the second time through. In contrast, the first and only time I saw Wicked it was in highly obstructed seats that didn’t let me see much of the action, and none of the set. So I’m not sure what that says. That AQ won best musical says many things. One, it’s a wonderful, quirky, completely different kind of show, and in New York that kind of thing can be rewarded, as opposed to Hollywood where it is generally shunned. Two, well, it did make a lot of money. Three, it was kinda the fad. With previous years full of revivals and boring new stuff, something fresh just caused everyone to jump up and shout hooray, even if it isn’t necessarily the best thing out there.

I mean, I think it’s almost the best thing out there. I think Wicked beats it by a hair. But I’m not a theater critic, I know very little about the theater scene, and my opinion is probably wrong. And I’m still very happy. Congratulations to Avenue Q, you all rock. And maybe you’ve finally found your purpose? 😉

Spent most of the day sitting indoors, reading about web design. I’m especially loving Design By Fire. Dinner with Nat was supposed to be at a Chinese place but we didn’t find it, so we ended up at Cheesecake Factory instead. Yum. Then some music library organizing before bedtime. I have about 4000 songs that still need to be tagged and organized…I’ve been holding off on doing that for over a year now. 🙂