Fascinating NYTimes Magazine article about virtual high schools.

Lacey doesn’t worry about makeup anymore. She doesn’t have to go shopping for back-to-school clothes or worry that some random girl is going to hate her outfit. She goes to school at a desk in the living room, surrounded by video games, unwashed dishes, her brother’s toy car collections. She copies down lesson goals in a neat looping script in multicolored notebooks. Inside each of them she has written her name and address and her list of classes. She is taking more classes than most kids because she wants to finish soon and be released from high-school limbo. For P.E. credit, Lacey takes long walks around the neighborhood, a run-down area where the streets are named after birds: Finch, Song Sparrow. It seems remarkable that this is actually P.E. — an evening stroll instead of the horror of chin-ups and rope climbs, the locker room where girls calculate who wears the biggest bra.

All of the kids enrolled in these “schools” have left high school because they didn’t fit in for one reason or another. Some have found virtual schooling a more effective remedy for supposed mental health problems then taking lots of pills. But all of them feel cut off from society as a result of taking these online classes, cut off from the critical social interactions that make teenage life so important. What do we need? A new paradigm in schooling. When do we need it? Now! Virtual schools aren’t a very good solution, but, hey, at least someone is trying something.

Good to be home. Had fun at the boat parade party, and then had a lot of fun sleeping, and then some more with a nice brunch. Final bit of fun: getting a new monitor so that I can use my desktop.

I’ve got two Dean-related articles here. Adam sends me a profile of Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, a fascinating guy. And there is this wonderful WashPost piece on Dean’s organizing tactics, using Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase’s theories as a basis. The author, Everett Ehrlich (a former Clinton staffer whose name I recognize from somewhere), claims that Dean is, in effect, taking over the Democratic party “brand” without caring about any of the party’s core assets. Kinda like C|Net bought out the MP3.com domain name from Vivendi, not caring while VUNet deleted the millions of songs that it used to house. They believe they can rebuild a better system and it is only the brand they need. Dean, of course, is starting from the other end — he has created his own party, in effect, by using the power of the internet to make a virtual community. In effect, he is a third party candidate taking over the Democratic party’s brand while doing his own fundraising, information dissemination, and campaign coordination. Smart, smart man. I absolutely love watching the Dean phenomenom play out.

Fascinating Slate story about political maneuvering between the unilaterialist and multilateralist factions within the Bush administration, as evinced by James Baker’s European debt-relief tour. Politics in Washington, as viewers of The West Wing are aware, is a very complicated game. This story pulls back the curtain to reveal a fascinating struggle in Washington that most papers have not caught on to.

On a non-news note, I’m flying back to California tomorrow. I leave around 4:30 and ride to the airport with Alwina and then take a flight to SNA by way of Phoenix. Time to unplug my computer…I’ll see everyone in 3000 miles or so.

I opened up the case again to poke around and determined that the problem seems to be related to the connection that sends the video signal from the logic board to the LCD display. I fiddled with the cable a bit and the signal changed. The two orange (red? can’t remember) wires looked to be a bit pinched, and the tape holding all of the wires together was coming off. I took out the tape and tried to get those two wires a little more inside the case, and then tried booting again. Now the screen doesn’t work at all. So yeah, I suppose the wires and the connector are probably the issue. The problem is, who can fix it without doing something drastic like replacing the whole assembly? It’s silly, but I’ll bet no one has any way to get the wires and connector and properly attach them to the various boards, and the only solution they will think about is just replacing parts. Stupid? Yeah. Typical? You bet.

With how much SciFi generally messes things up, I went into watching Battlestar Galactica with a bit of dread. But having only seen one episode of the original series, I didn’t really have to worry about much in terms of them messing up someone I know and love, I just had to worry about them messing up something new.

Well, I watched the first four hours and it was excellent. Wonderful character development, great special effects that never looked cheap. Excellent storyline, with some great twists. I finished the first four hours and hit the great cliffhanger ending and couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.

Then I found out today that it’s over — the mini-series was four hours long, and it’s done. WHAT??? The…the character development! The time spent on building up the story! The…the goodness of it all! How could it be over? It was just getting to the point of excellence!!!

Sad now.

Offensive to Gypsys? They don’t like that name anyway, since it itself is a racial slur derived from Egyptian, or so I read. And best I can tell “gyp” doesn’t have any connection to gypsy at all.

From the OED: “1805 H. K. WHITE in Rem. (1819) I. 209 My bed-maker, whom we call a gyp, from a Greek word signifying a vulture, runs away with everything he can lay his hands on.” Earliest citation is 1750. The first use in the US sense of ‘thief’ is dated 1889, and in the sense of ‘fraudulent action’ 1914, so it could derive from this UK sense.

Much more here.

A few weeks ago my laptop started displaying strange discoloration and fuzzy vertical lines on the display, and then crashing after a few minutes use. The problem is consistant but occurs differently each time. Every time I turn on the computer it is an adventure…assuming it will even boot, which half the time it won’t.

There is a thread on the Apple support site with over 100 postings by people experiencing similar problems. I’d call this a known problem, but Apple refuses to acknowledge it. My laptop is a little over a year and a half old and thus far past the 1 year warranty period, and I didn’t purchase the $350 AppleCare 3 year extended warranty. The consensus seems to be that to fix this problem requires a replacement logic board and display clamshell, which, with repair costs added in, adds up to around $1,100. Understand that this laptop only cost something like $1,800. I don’t want to pay any money, and I don’t want a new laptop, but for how much these repairs are likely to cost, I don’t really know what to do. It is certainly not worth it to plunk down $1,100 when that is above what my current laptop goes for on eBay. And yet I don’t have $2,000 or so that I want to spend to get a new one. This laptop has served me incredibly well for the 19 months I’ve had it and I’m very happy with it, but this recent turn of events is very disheartening.

One thing is for sure — the next PowerBook I get is going to include that pesky $350 AppleCare service plan.

My AMST 114b final is from 1:30-4:30, then all that remains is to finish this darn paper, and I’m done with this whole, tortured semester. I just returned from a nice quiet lunch of steak tips and a stuffed green pepper at Sherman, with pecan pie for dessert. I’m quickly reading through The Great Gatsby, and remembering why I liked the book so much, and how everyone else in my 10th grade English class didn’t seem to enjoy it so much. Sadly all of the symbolism, motifs, &c. is irrelevent to this test, which has to do with Gatsby’s imperial self-ishness. Time to figure out what the question is going to be.

The second test used a quote from Citizen Kane about living out one’s dreams. The first, I think, had something to do with Sutpen’s “design,” although I can’t quite remember. Obviously the question is going to be about something to do with comparing a few individualists, including Gatsby and Henry Ford. The trick is, how does Walden Two fit into this equation. If we’re talking about ideal societies I can’t really see Gatsby fitting into that, although I know some of Ford’s anti-semitism and dreams of uniformity might fit into that…

Hmm, I dunno.

I should probably make another category for “confusion”. I’d say “stupidity”, but I think my reasoning wasn’t that terrible.

When I lived in Grad for a week before school started I was in a room that had a fire alarm thingy on it. When the door was locked, opening it would trigger the alarm, and closing it would (if I remember correctly) turn it back off. When the door was unlocked but closed, the only way to open it was to push the fire alarm bar, but the alarm wouldn’t go off since the door was unlocked. It is a very strange, stupid system, and every time I opened the door in Grad I braced myself for a loud alarm.

So when I went into the basement of Spingold to meet with my practicum coordinator-person, I assumed the same held true. I came at 1:05 for a 1:00 meeting, knocked on the door, waited a moment, and then…

Yeah.

Tried to open it.

Whoops.

Closing that kind of door does not silence the alarm. And the alarm is much, much loder then the ones in Grad, or at least it sure seemed that way in the narrow cement hallway. And the big guy who came to turn the thing off was just a bit angry with me, and thought I was somewhat out of my mind.

Yeah, anyway, the person I was supposed to meet with wasn’t there. 🙂

I started this day off very, very unhappy. I’ve been starting off most days lately very ambivalent. Ambivalent about my feelings, about my future, about my place in the world. But today I started off very, very unhappy. I spoke in an earlier entry about how much this semester has sucked, and I didn’t then and still don’t want to go through a laundry list of reasons. I don’t think this is something that is quantifiable, it’s just something in the air. Like Matt said in his comment to that last post, my sentiment is in no way unique. So many of my friends in student government, in the Justice, and wherever have just about lost hope. One guy I know used the day before the withdrawal deadline to withdraw from every one of his classes. Many are struggling on in the face of terrible odds. Others are having their worst semesters ever. I am one of them.

Andrew just put up his first big entry on bJournals, the blogging service I helped set up. He says that he’s tired of being tired. He’s not unhappy, he says. He’s not lacking in friends, or in commitment, or in passion. He’s just tired, that’s all.

Today Josh Brandfon gave his “State of the Union” address. Unlike every “real” State of the Union address I’ve ever seen, Josh’s Brandeis version didn’t start off saying that the State of our Union is strong. Far from it. He talked about the many problems we’ve had to face this semester. He talked about some of our failings and misestimations. He talked about how we can do better.

But he also kept it positive. He talked about all that we have achieved, and we have achieved much. He talked about our great promise, and the beauty and wonder and spirit of this school. He talked about how that wonder endures. He talked about a future that is bright and good.

In the grand scheme of things, we’re really not that bad off. Not very bad off at all.

This semester has sucked, it’s possibly been the worst three months of my life. I dunno. I’m glad to see it finally finished But at the same time, I can look back and see all of the wonderful, profoundly good things that have happened. I can see the so many times that I was happy and excited and emotionally fulfilled.

As I sit here writing this entry, I am continuing to neglect a very important essay for one of the few classes that I haven’t yet failed. The essay is about the book The Sea-Wolf, on the character of Wolf Larsen. The class is American Individualism, and the thrust of it is examining American historical figures who, through their inflated sense of worth, through their utter devotion to the ideal of the imperial self, through their lack of knowledge or care about the greater community, achieved greatness, and failed spectacularily.

Wolf Larsen dies a slow, painful death, but it is not a tragic one, for he never realizes the error of his ways, he never sees the truth — that his faith was a delusion. Wolf Larsen dies alone, cut off from the world, with no great legacy, no positive influence. He lived each day for himself, and for no one else. He had no real relationships or lasting influence. He died at sea, and he was not missed.

Wolf is completely assured of the rightness of his ways. He has reasoned it all out, and he knows that he is correct. And yet, with no sense of something bigger then himself, with no conception of the immortal, Wolf never truly lives. About halfway through the novel he says this:

I often doubt the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.

I know, logically, reasonably, that my studies are shot to hell, that I should continue to be upset and angry with myself and keep this feeling of hopelessness inside me. But I refuse to do so. I will heed Wolf’s advice. I can do so much for people, I can achieve such great things, and one crappy semester, one set of failed classes and dashed circumstances will not keep me down. I will be unafraid to move forward, swiftly, into the eye of the storm. I will balance intellect and emotion, take delight in both, and not be caught up in the blues. Jaded senses I have had, but now is the time to recuperate, and swiftly. There is so much more to live for. And there is so much promise in the future. I will learn from the mistakes of the past such that I am not condemned to repeat them. I will call this my early-life crisis, and hope that, through it, I can avoid one in mid-life. Wolf Larsen sees humans as an expendable commodity, available everywhere in great supply. You are not a unique snowflake, he says, except to yourself.

That is not my goal. Wolf Larsen is so very wrong. Our humanity is established through our relationships, through our legacy, through the way that we touch others.

Three students have died this semester. Three. Shot down in the prime of their lives, in this time where they were still trying to establish themselves, to make their mark on the world. I can’t wait to achieve great things. The time to act is not tomorrow, or after all of my studies are complete. The time is now! Right now! And while balance must be achieved, and while I must start small and work towards larger goals, and while I must plan for my future and be logical and conservative, I must also plan for the now, and be emotional, very damn emotional.

Life is that balance, right? Or lack of it? Or pursuit of it? It must be something like that! And it is so very fleeting. Is one ever hopes to seize the day, he must start with today, right? Today. This day. I will start today.

I’m not taking any chances next semester. I want a courseload that is interesting, exciting, fascinating, and all the other -ings. I’m taking courses with professors I like, in things that I’ve heard are good. I want to get back into the academic side in a big way, and this is how I’m going to do it:

• SPAN 10a-1 Beginning Spanish
  For students who have had no previous study of Spanish. A systematic presentation of the basic grammar and vocabulary of the language within the context of Hispanic culture, with focus on all five language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and sociocultural awareness.
  Reasoning: I need a language, I’ve tried German twice and failed, and now it’s time for something new, different, and, since I live in an area where Spanish is a dominant language, practical.
• SOC 181a Quantitative Methods of Social Inquiry
  Introduces students to causal logic and quantitative reasoning and research. Emphasis is on conceptual understanding, not mathematical derivations, with hands-on applications using desktop computers. No statistical or mathematical background is necessary.
  Reasoning: I need to fulfill the quantitative reasoning requirement, I don’t want every class to be reading-intensive, and this one is supposed to be fairly easy and fun.
• PHIL 22a Philosophy of Law
  Examines the nature of criminal responsibility, causation in the law, negligence and liability, omission and the duty to rescue, and the nature and limits of law. Also, is the law more or less like chess or poker, cooking recipes, or the Ten Commandments?
  Reasoning: Teuber rocks and I loved Intro. Philosophy with him, and this class won’t be offered again while I’m at Brandeis.
• LGLS 150a Cyberlaw
  Examines how legal practices expand and restrain the digital revolution, how legal authority itself is challenged by the Internet, forcing new strategies of response, and how social/political forces shape legal policy on copyright, privacy, harassment, libel, and free speech.
  Reasoning: This class’s syllabus is similar to what I did at UCI, in a class that I loved, the guest professor has lots of hands-on experience with internet legal bodies, and this class fulfills like three requirements at once. Score!
• JOUR 125b Journalism of Crisis
  Analyzes the practice of journalism during times of crisis. Topics include the process of news gathering in a breaking news environment, the framing of news as it occurs, and the often conflicting agendas of the journalist and the actor involved in a crisis.
  Reasoning: Socolow cares so much about his subject that his enthusiasm can be contagious, and I like journalism. However, if I end up finding a summer program that fulfills all the rest of my journalism requirements, I might drop this one in favor of finishing another requirement. We’ll see…I’d really like to take another Socolow class, but then again, I’d also like to take Jerry Cohen’s violence class.

At 7 I decided to go out and find some food. I expected that some restaurants would be closed, but what I had not factored into the equation is that this is Massachussettes. Yeah, so every single restaurant was closed, not to mention every single late-night diner (and there aren’t many) and every single fast food joint. Even Friendly’s was closed! Even Walgreens! Sigh. So it’s 8:15, and I’m back without the actual restaurant experience.

CVS/pharmecy was open, and their huge selection of food consisted of crackers and seven different varieties of frozen pizza. I chose DiGiorno’s.

“You have a dollar bill? Take it out, look at the back. The seal, the pyramid, it’s unfinished. With the eye of God looking over it and the words annuit coeptis. “He, God, favors our undertaking.” The seal is meant to be unfinished, because this country is meant to be unfinished. We are meant to keep doing better, we’re meant to keep discussing and debating.”

Like that rhyming title? Yeah, me neither. Anyway, a new AP story talks about an internal Army report that analyzes the US…um…what do we call it…I guess “liberation” is the word…of Iraq. Apparently some higher power did not want the aftermath of the war to be an “occupation,” and because of this military commanders were unclear of their status under international law and confused as to how to proceed with the…um…ah, the hell with it, with the occupation of Iraq. Apparently the looting and civil strife that I complained about was the result of an Army that was told not to secure the streets, force citizens back to work, take over government buildings, or use captured money to hire a new police force, sanitation workers, and the like. The power vacuum was, as suspected, due to poor planning for the time after the war, a lack of planning for which the Army does not feel itself responsible.

Steven Aftergood is the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, and basically what he does all day is look through government documents and web sites, request information under the Freedom of Information Act, and other such acts of what we in this modern age for some reason call unpatriotic activites, or acts of civil disobedience. Basically, he protests government’s love of secrecy by getting as much information online as possible. Government agencies have the nasty habit of classifying previously open documents or yanking things from publically accessible locations that they consider sensitive for whatever reason. Anything that is remotely controversial or potentially the least bit embarassing is removed, as is a lot of other stuff for no readily apparent reason. Aftergood (great last name) simply republishes things that were in the public domain and mysteriously disappeared, with the intention, not of comparmising government secrecy or hurting America, but of making sure that as much information is available for review by the citizenry as possible. His views mirror mine — that information is like oxygen, crucial for life, and that the more information we have, the more informed we can be, and the better decisions we can make:

“What’s important is not access to one particular document or another,” he said. “What’s important is the deliberative process and the health of American democracy when you impede access. Mundane information is the oxygen that permits public participation in political life.”

Here’s a Wash Post article and here’s his website.

To use out of context the words of an unnamed administrator, this entire semester has been one big clusterfuck. I’m fucking sick of it, and I want it to end immediately. I want to go back to being happy. This needs to occur as quickly as possible.

I’ve been watching this TV show called Tru Calling about a girl who is given back the day to save the life of a person who has died unnaturally, be it by murder or fire or whatever. They ask her to save them, then she has the day back to fix things so that their deaths are prevented. Can I do that with this semester, please? Can I not fail a class for the first time ever? Can I not waste two months in an emotionally draining struggle for some undefined ideal of coexistance that we will probably never achieve? Can I just go back to doing whatever it is I used to do? Please?

Apparently the problem resulted from several factors. While the random crashing every day or two has remained unresolved, it may have had to do with the hard drive, which eventually crashed. It was simple coincidence, or at least a seperate set of circumstances, that caused the crashing every few minutes with the new hard drive. The new Debian install’s hotplug and discover components conflicted with the motherboard’s USB controller. Disabiling those two modules and just putting in the correct modules for mouse, etc. manually fixed the problem. Hooray!!! 🙂

I sent my PC back to Shuttle because I was sure that what was happening was a hardware problem. The computer used to randomly reboot every day or two. This went on for almost a year, but I never wanted to send the system in or anything, so I kept running it. I always ran Linux and didn’t like Windows enough to keep it running for days at a time to see the symptoms. I tried Debian, I tried RedHat, I even tried Mandrake, and all of them had this behavior. Eventually something terrible happened (not sure what, could have just been random) and my hard drive crashed, and I lost all my data. Well, a lot of work on Adam Batkin’s part helped me to recover most everything, and I got a replacement from Western Digital, which I put into my box. Got a nice clean Debian install on it, and it ran fine for a few days, very nice, and then bang! Started rebooting every 5 minutes. Couldn’t do anything about it. I (thought I) tested it with Knoppix, which is a bootable Linux CD, and it also crashed, although now I’m not sure. Anyway, I sent the whole SB51G back to Shuttle for repairs. For those who may Google for this problem later (after I resolve it), I’ve got a 180GB hard drive (I thought it could have had something to do with the large hard drive, but nope), a NVidia GeForce4 Ti video card (not a problem either, I don’t think, at this point), and 512MB of Kingston ValuRam.

It looks like the problem does relate to my Linux install after all, and not the processor or RAM as I had finally settled on. I’m able now to boot from Knoppix (and that’s how I’m writing this) with the hard drive plugged in and mounted, and it only does the strange 5 minutes in crashes when running from my Debian install on the HD. It gets all the way through into Gnome and calms down, and then crashes. Very odd. Knoppix 3.3, which is a Debian-based distro, does not crash. Could one of my upgrades given me a bad kernel, one that Knoppix doesn’t have? Maybe. Will fixing that fix the problem of crashes every day or two? Who knows? I’ll post here as I work this one through. And to think, after all that, it wasn’t hardware at all. How strange!

Wow, Jonah of Assyria is real?!?!

Hi Socolow’s class! And to think, I’ve recently been on a very me-focused streak with regard to blog entries…