When I was in second grade a parent who was a nurse came to school to teach my class about some health concepts. We spent a lot of time on proper hand-washing and germs. One of the things she had us do was rub our palms together so that the dirt and such became visible as little black spots. She said, “look at all those germs and microorganisms!”

I came home and repeated this experiment for my father, who then asked me, “if they are microorganisms, why can we see them?” I puzzled over this question for a long time, trying to determine the amazing procedure by which microscopic specks can grow large enough to be visible to the human eye.

Eventually I realized that the nurse had lied to me, and I found this highly disturbing.

I finished my Cyberlaw paper and it ended up at 24 pages, which, if pasted into MS Word at standard settings (double spaced, 12pt Times, 1.25″ margins) would end up at something like 40 pages. So yeah, that’s exciting.

In celebration I went with Kevin, Marli, Amy, and Dave to Jillians for some bowling and pool. Wish Adam Batkin could have come, but it was still fun. This is what I’ve missed over the last semester, just going out and hanging with people, having fun. I want to do more of it.

Looks like I have housing from the 24th to the 1st, so I don’t have to find some overpriced hotel! Woo-hoo!

Clearly, the gods are conspiring against me. I set an internal deadline of 5:00pm for my cyberlaw paper, and, even though this deadline does not correspond to anything in the real world, fate has conspired to ensure that I miss it. The supermarket checkout lane that I choose is the slowest of all. The car in front of me on Bear Hill Road insists on going 20 when everyone else goes 35. I miss every single light. And children are crossing the street at various crosswalks.

It’s 3:11, I have another 10 pages to write before 5:00. Heh. Well, here goes.

I’ve wondered for quite a long time why MA doesn’t have those nice reflectors in the road that allow cars to see lane markings at night. Apparently they are called “road studs” and the reason why we don’t have them is pretty simple…snow plows.

A shame, cause it can get awfully foggy, rainy, and dangerous around here, and those things would save many many lives. An answer?

I’ve added a new sidebox called “Currently” which says what I’m up to (generally, no good). I’m going to upgrade to WordPress 1.2 soon (as soon as it is released) and make the changes I’ve been meaning to make so that remaindered links work better and can be commented upon, and if I like this “currently” bit I’ll turn that into a blog category as well, and add a link to “previous activity”.

Oh, hopefully the upgrade will fix the problems with links in comments and some strangeness with the mini calendar. Anything else I should fix/update/change? I really do need to get the “Writings” section back online…

Oh yeah, I did end up getting a Gmail account. It’s actually a pretty rockin setup. I have about a dozen peeves, and I’ve dutifuly reported all of them via the “Submit A Bug” link. I even got a response for one of them, saying that they would look into implementing a feature I suggested. Gmail has compatibility problems with Safari that are annoying, but since I’m using Firefox most of the time anyway, it’s all good. I’m not gonna switch to it, though, until I can do more procmail-like things, and I can get the email out of it somehow if I ever want to. IMAP access would be nice…

Oh, by the time I got an invite code, dsilverman and silverman were both already taken, and they don’t allow names < 6 characters, so zeno is right out 🙁 . I'm not going to publicize my Gmail address (although it's no secret) just because I have procmail bouncing all my Brandeis mail there and @brandeis is still the best way to reach me.

I’m feeling elated.

Life consists of forward progress and backward progress. When I’m getting more and more homework, that’s backward progress. When we get in fights with administrators about things students have that are being taken away, that’s backward progress. When I’m locked away in my room, mindlessly watching TV because I just don’t want to comprehend all of the work ahead of me, that’s backward progress.

But today, a few really nice things happened. Some keys that I was waiting for came in earlier then expected. I turned in two homework assignments — one of them even on time! We picked up some cubicle walls and set one up in the office. Perry emailed to tell us that Matt’s quest for a new space for the COG servers is successful — he’s going to give us a room in Feldberg. Awesome.

One of my big goals is to professionalize the Student Union and student organizations. We continue to move into a world of decreased student autonomy and increased administrative control. This isn’t just a Brandeis phenomenom, and we’re probably a lot better off then most small colleges. But it is absolutely important to the Brandeis mission to keep student autonomy in all of it’s forms. And it’s painful when administrators and staff and even students themselves want others to step in, to run things, to control student organizations and take care of student problems. College is about learning and growing and experiencing, preparing for the world, finding one’s self. Allowing students to assume leadership roles, to make real decisions, to solve real problems, to make mistakes and fix them, is an incredibly powerful and wonderful thing.

The Union office is starting to look better. Many of my improvements in workflow and information flow have been successful. The year is over, and people are filled with promise and new ideas for next year. Another administrator today expressed commitment to reinvigorating student leadership training on this campus. We’re going to get our SAF organizations onto QuickBooks so that they can be more accoutable and manage their money better, and more transparently. And the COG reorganization looks like it will be wildly successful. We’re getting all of our servers straighened out, we’ve got a new space for them, we’re working on projects and ideas for next year. Finnegan, the wake up call service, is finally done, and just about to launch. We’re becoming a professional, powerful, useful force on campus. We’re filling a niche that ITS doesn’t have the resources or desire to fill, and we’re working cooperatively to do good things for students. As it should be.

Now if only I could turn around the Justice and WBRS, I’d feel a lot better. I think this leadership thing is really, really important. I kinda wish I could be here for another two or three years to try and guide these organizations, to make sure that things are working as they should, that strong student leaders are found and cultivated at Brandeis, instead of ignored. A lot of people have a lot of potential, and, hey, they might just find their calling in the process. I know that I have.

I find it surprising that all the media attention and discussion about Gmail deals almost exclusively with the email service, the threading, the text ads, the labeling, and basically ignores the search. Google’s big thing was that you would be able to use a powerful and proven search engine to search your mail, and I, personally, would love this ability with my current 200MB mailbox.

But will Google’s email search be as good as it’s web search? Google web results are based on hugely complicated algorithms that began with PageRank, basically an innovative system of ranking results based on who else has linked to them. If CNN links to your site, and lots of people link to CNN, then your site is probably somewhat relevent. Of course Google is constantly fighting with people who manipulate their rankings by making all kinds of fake links. And the blogging phenomenom also chhanged some of the “standards” of linking.

But email, where does email link? I don’t think that the few links I send and receive through email are going to be very useful for the GoogleBot. I don’t think that email really works the same way. The labelling ability (as opposed to folders) might help with searches, but I don’t know how much. What has been lacking in every single review of Gmail, however, has been any talk about the search function, and if it’s any good. Especially since it doesn’t really support any kind of advance search features, such as regular expressions, which are very useful when you have a set of data that you have a pretty good understanding of (seeing as you’ve read it all at one time or another).