On my way back from fencing just now I was thinking about meditation and religion in general, which caused my thoughts to wander to ecology, and furthermore to styrafoam(tm). My question to myself was one of degrees. If I am to say that I follow a spiritual path that reveres the earth (not that I am yet saying such, but if I were), would it be bad that I still consume like every other American, using styrafoam cups and plastic boxes and plasticware and plastic bottles? Most all religions do this to some extent — they sacrifice “raw” religious laws in order to adapt to society. God says don’t wear threads of different animals, but people understand that with today’s manufactured products that is a bit tough. For women to lock themselves away for a week every month during menstruation and not touch or see anyone or anything would be to follow the word of God in the JudeoChristianIslamic doctrine, but it would not be convenient. So I use styrafoam.

All of this made me recall a very interesting thought that I read in something of Neal Stephenson, probably The Diamond Age. The meme was basically that as values shift it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals and societies to agree on what is “right,” and without a common moral ground for everyone to be sufficiently outraged, the only real way to criticize is to expose hypocrisy. I might not believe what you’re saying, but you are the one saying it and for you to act differently then you preach is for you to be bad. That makes it a lot easier.

Every individual, no matter how pure, has some hypocrisy in them, and this is unavoidable. My quest is simply to stay pure enough so that I am satisfied. Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Figure that one out.

…Not Papers

Or so proclaims the banners in our hallways. So I enter the common room because I’d like to ask Kelson about our LGLS assignment. Basically we are trying to take case law circa 1918 and apply it to a modern day terrorism case. Did a security company owe a duty of care to the passengers of a plane onto which a bomb was smuggled? I am finding the cases we are using completely useless in this, because I see a major differentiation between a “service” and a “product” in a contract. Hence the Kelson question asking.

So I enter the common room and am told by Sara as I round the table, “you can’t come this way.” Why not? She is working on her LGLS assignment and doesn’t want me to see the typing on her computer. Why not? Well, probably because she assumes that I will take her ideas at a glance, appropriate them, and use them as my own work. This assumption requires a few others:

1. I am at Brandeis, not to learn, but to get a diploma.
2. I am taking this class, not because I want to do so, but because it is a requirement, and my goal is simply to pass.
3. I will cheat on this easy assignment rather then write my own two page response.
4. I lack basic integrity.

While I admit that I never took COSI 2a seriously, because it was a stupid requirement that I really did not want to take, even in that class I never really cheated, and besides, that is certainly not the norm, and anyone who knows me knows I am interested in the law (hence starting Mock Trial…) and writing. (wow…long run-on there…)

So what makes Sara think that I am going to steal her work? Or is she simply concerned that I might inadvertently catch a glance and be influenced by her superior logic and writing skills to abandon my own ideas and accidentally assimilate hers? I don’t really know, and I’m not sure what made her this paranoid about me, but I do know that it is somewhat startling and upsetting. Ah, well.

A recent article in CounterPunch raises the following intriguing question: who likes Bush? TV tells us that 80% of people like him. Regardless of your political bent, do four of your five friends like Bush, and think he is doing a good job? Hmm…

ARAFAT, SHARON WALK OFF SET OF “ISRAEL”
Temperamental Stars Say They’re Tired of Playing Dogmatic Jerks

“I’m supposed to be the Prime Minister of a country that’s embroiled in this terrible conflict, where diplomacy and tact and wisdom should be important, but you people always have playing this great pompous prat!” Sharon reportedly shouted before throwing his script on the ground and storming off to his trailer.

Please, oh please, read this from SatireWire.

Lots-o-stuff to report. Classes good, Hour of Presence meeting good. I got to talk to Rick Sawyer, Dean of Facilities (I think) about the new dorms, which actually look incredibly cool. The design people there told me that these days its easy to go to reshalls.com or whatever and order a new dorm on the internet for construction in six months, but it will be boring, kinda like the one I’m in right now. This new one is terraced and separated into “communities” and and chock full of “gathering places” &c. In short, it is very well thought out, and I hope to be in the first crop of people living in it! 🙂

Rick also told me that reports to the contrary, the Mods will not be closing down at the completion of this dorm, because they simply don’t have enough beds. Furthermore, it is likely that at least one of the parking lots (T Lot?) will be going in the next decade to make way for more housing, buildings, etc. This means they will be tiering (sp?) another parking lot, making some kind of parking garage thing. So Brandeis is getting big!

DaveW his informed me that, not only do I get a job, I also get back pay for the stuff I’ve already done. Schweet! First, however, I have to fill out some forms and prove to Brandeis once again that I in fact am an upstanding US citizen. Sigh.

About a week ago I put a counter onto AgBlog since I never check the logs and I really have no idea who is visiting. Imagine my surprise when I found that in 8 days or so I had received over 500 hits. Anyway, the counter now displays on the bottom of the page.

Other thoughts: wind is eh. Cold wind is ick.

As of now I can officially say that every entry that can be online is online, meaning everything that I lost and was able to recover thanks to Google, Alexa, and my dad’s browser cache. I lost the comments, but hey, the important part is hearing me speak, right? So anyway, that is that. Now I just have to finish up the navigation,put the darn image map in place on top, and make everything easy to navigate. I’ve also biggened the CSS, so I hope the text is working better for people now. Feel free to use this entry to leave comments on site design and direction. Another important note: I’m backing things up a lot more frequently from now on. I want to discover the wonderful power of the UNIX cron program.

I don’t want to scare anyone off with my crazy new-age practices, but I meditated today and it was quite fulfilling. Plus I have a whole bunch of great new music, which I will list off when I have more time and am not rushing to dinner. Suffice to say, my iPod is full for the first time…cool. 🙂

All of the pagan-bashing Christian fundamentalist propaganda on the net is being served using a computer network named with a technopagan mindset. Sites as varied as Yahoo, the US Military, and my very own AgBlog run using a fun system called httpd, the program name given to Apache, the major web serving system, known as a “HTTP Daemon.” There are demons in the computer!

When people talk of spells and magicks and familiars, I identify with scripts and programs and daemons. In fact, JargonFile calls magic:

1. adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare automagically and (Arthur C.) Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
[…]
4. n. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development, elegance in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke’s Third Law: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced”.

First rule of magickal belief and practice: never take yourself too seriously.

Subscriptions. You know when you haven’t used one for several weeks, in fact you canceled it a little while back, and then, suddenly, you have a thought, and go look, and oh wow, there are four albums by Guided By Voices listed on EMusic, which, with a subscription, you can download all of, free, and then you check your account status and you see, hey look, my subscription ended yesterday? Yeah, that sucks.

Just because I’m writing two entries in a row about television does not mean that is all I do with my life. Ah contraire! I do other stuff…like…read. And make web pages. Okay, I admit it, I am pathetic and I sit around watching TV all day. Well, except for the “pathetic” part. And the “sitting around all day” part. Its just that I don’t get off campus much (if at all). So I’m starting to consider myself (and most of Brandeis) pathetic in that way.

Anyway, just forget that last paragraph. Let us now turn to sleep patterns. Rich Graves suggests to all students the importance of a good nights rest. Well, my body being screwed up as it is, I find it hard to ever get a good night’s rest at night, rather it seems to happen more in the morning. First I tried going to bed earlier and just lying there until I slept, and for a while it was somewhat working, but I always found myself tired in the morning anyway. So then I spent a few nights staying up late, which if course worked out none too good. Anyway, last night I decided that, screw it, it’s Friday, I’ll just go to bed when I get tired. Heh. So I watched Becoming, the 2 part Buffy season 2 finale. Again, ouch. These are the episodes referred to by the MBTV recappers as, “essentially clinical depression in a box set.” In other words, if you want to cry yourself to sleep, this would be your theme song. Or whatever. So at about 6 AM, after having watched Becoming, and having rewatched a few scenes, and having listened 4 times to the Sarah McLachlan song Full of Grace, I decided to go for a walk. After much dressing (remmber, this is the East Coast, and the temp. was 20F with 15MPH winds), I took a walk down by the castle, to the Gosman sports center, around back by the fields, and then back up to Usdan. For some reason the cafeteria wasn’t open for breakfast yet at 7. Pity.

End result was me going to sleep at eight in the AM, and waking up in time for the second half of Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me on NPR. The astute among you will thus realize that I awoke at 12:30ish, making for 4.5 hours of sleep. If I wasn’t screwed up before, I must be now. But geez, that was damn good television. I think I’ll go watch it again, but then I’d better move on to season 3 before any suicide urges come bubbling up. I’m totally getting the sophmore year of high school vibe all over again, and it sucks, but geez, I dunno. Anyway, yeah. That is that. I’ll go eat breakfast now.

We’re through the 8:00 hour of Fox’s television show 24, and I must say that I actually find it quite interesting. I have always been an avid conspiracy nut, and for a good period my favorite show was The X-Files, coincidentally another Fox showing. With X…well…sucking for the past few seasons, I’ve lost all interest in it, and have found my solace primarily in the incredible, oft-dissed, frequently misunderstood Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Basically, I like shows that have over-arching stories that last more than a single episode or two. While the episodic format is fine, I want to see real character development, interaction, and change. Over time in life things do change. Sure it would be great to have Buffy’s gang stay in high school for a few more years and live in that (comparatively) care-free world, but that is not how the real world works. Things change, people change, time marches on.

I like 24 because time marches on in complete context. They can’t pull any of those time tricks, moving events around and letting episodes span multiple days for purposes of the story. Being, as I am, so interested in all things time, I see 24 as a grand experiment in the medium. Like Buffy, 24 is completely implausible and requires a viewer to suspend disbelief. Of course most shows are this way, but the reason I compare these two is because they consciously suspend reality, as opposed to other shows that try to pretend like what happens in their plot lines really occurs in the real world.

Many people found The X-Files grating when it spent too much time delving into the whole big conspiracy thing and not just focusing on individual events. I found it fascinating. I loved the contrast between day-to-day affairs and sinister old men in the background, working slowly to some secret end. After Fight the Future, the X-Files movie, the conspiracy was basically ended in the stupidest way possible. There was literally an episode where every worldwide member of the Syndicate crowded into a warehouse and was exterminated by some evil aliens. Poof! Conspiracy gone! It disgusted me, and that is when I stopped watching the show.

24 gives me the huge conspiracy like I see in Buffy and The X-Files, combined expertly with individual stories, all compressed into one twenty-four hour time frame. The fact that it works is a testament to the brilliance of the story producers and writers.

So it is hour 9. Where are we? We have a blown up plane, a stolen ID card, plastic surgery, computer hacking, lots of shooting, and a few deaths. Kiefer’s wife and kid are kidnapped in the Compound of Terror ™ and he is the puppet of the conspirators. The question up until 7:00am was whether Palmer was the real target of all this, and whether his assassination was really in order. At the end of that ep, we found out that it, in fact, was. I am still convinced, however, that Palmer is only a small pawn in this game. My friends here disagree, so allow me to elaborate.

If you want to kill a president or a presidential candidate, there are many options. There is always shooting, which is generally effective and can be done with one person. Or there is the standard conspiracy theory, with shadowy influences paying off smart people to carry off an expert hit done in just the right way to cause the most damage. So here we have terrorists blowing up airplanes, tapping into sophisticated security systems, planting dozens of agents in the area, all so that one guy can walk in, pull out a gun, shoot Palmer, and hand the gun off to Kiefer? This is completely non-sensical. As mentioned over at Flak, it would be much easier to blow up Palmer than to blow up an entire plane just for purposes of getting an ID card. Especially since it is obvious that Gaines already had several agents in the Palmer breakfast that day.

Furthermore, why all of this obsession with Kiefer? Killing Palmer would be much easier without using him, and much quicker, with far fewer variables. Additionally, why the keycard? What data is stored on it? Jamie says all she did was give Gaines access to CTU’s security camera system. If so, then who was smuggling top-secret information out of the CIA? Obviously this is much bigger than one presidential candidate. After all, if you don’t want him to win, you could always rig the election.

No, this is something big, involving very powerful corporate or military interests, not necessarily America. This is a sophisticated and well-coordinated plan to bring down much more than just one man. Using Kiefer as an inside man is brilliant in that he has a relatively high position in the CIA power structure, he has lots of access, and there is probably reams of psych profile information on him thanks to his well-publicized exploits within the Agency.

I think you can see where I’m coming from when I say Kiefer is no Lee Harvey Oswald. There was a specific reason why they wanted him at that breakfast to hold the gun that shot Palmer, a gun that, we notice, was marked with fingerprints by the assassin, fingerprints of unknown origin. Surely they aren’t Kiefer’s — he is going to hold the gun anyway — so who else are we linking to the gun, and why? What is the ultimate plan here? What are we trying to do? They consistently keep us guessing.

This is the kind of show I like. 🙂

“Although copying all or part of works without obtaining permission is quite easy to do, such unauthorized copying is a violation of the rights of the publisher and the copyright holder. This is in direct contradiction with the values an educational institution attempts to instill.”

Among other lessons this institution attempts to instill: cheating students by charging $25 for a 200 page course packet of all but illegable copies of court briefs, all of which are in the public domain. So what royalties require them to charge the astronnaumical fee of $25? Let us assume 5 cents a page plus a dollar for binding. That would be $11. And I still think that is high. Damn you, XanEdu Publishing! We really need to stop contracting everything out…

Apple’s support page suggests that an LCD display replacement will be about US$675, plus tax. Great. 🙁

My farking VCR apparently hasn’t been recording the last few week days of Buffy, although it does seem to be having fun recording on weekends. I am confuzzled.

My websites are all down and I have no method of posting, but force of habit makes me write. It is 2AM, and I am awake, which shows, obviously, that my whole sleep routine isn’t working out. In fact, nothing seems to be. Not the exercising, not the food conservation, nothing. I’m just back to normal. Today I got really sick of all the sitting around computing and reading and whatever else you do in college so I decided to go for a walk. I got out and started walking, then I realized I needed to check my mail, so I went to Usdan, was briefly distracted by the poster sale, and then went back to my room. Humph.

My computer has been acting up for a while, probably because of the OS X hacks I’ve popped in back at version 10.0.0, and since we’re now at 10.2.1, they are causing a bit of conflict. Also all of my Unix software was messy and conflicting because I hadn’t used Fink from the beginning to manage libraries. So my solution was simple – back everything up, and spend a few hours doing a clean install and putting everything back. Well, a few hitches…

First, doing the terminal “cp” command apparently doesn’t maintain the integrity of Mac OS X applications, so I now have to reinstall a bunch of apps. Second, bugs in NetInfo that make .nibak files impossible to make are bad, and, although it worked with my laptop, copying the local.nib folder manually over and back again did wonders to screwing things up, making yet another reinstall necessary so that I could get a user back, so that I could actually log in. Humph #2.

Although I backed up all of my libraries and important files and etc, including even the hidden web site files (it would have been terrible to lose those!), I realized after the second reinstall that I had forgotten something vital – the MySQL databases!!!. First I smacked myself, then I cursed myself and my computer, then I tried to see if there was any method of recovering them. Well, I don’t think Norton Utilities was built for the task. So the latest AgBlog I have is a backup from 12/18/01, meaning I’ve lost over a month’s worth of entries. Also my other sites, such as boogle, gravmag, and the like, have lost their data. That is not really a big loss though, the thing that really upsets me is my AgBlog. So my next task is to go on Google or wherever and see if there are some HTML backups. So if you’ve recently loaded any of the archives (Dec. or Jan.) and have it in your cache, PLEASE send it to me!!!! I will be eternally greatful!

Well, I’d best go off to bed. The computer is running just dandily now that its all reinstalled in its Aqua-licious glory. As soon as I fix my Apache config and get the DBs imported again, my web sites will be back online, and around that time, this entry will appear. Yay! 😛

Recent studies show that moderate drinking (defined as 1-3 beers or glasses of wine or whatever a day) not only helps prevent heart disease and such, it also works agaisnt dementia. Cool. Maybe I need to reconsider my whole teetotaller policy.

Me being, after all, me, I tend to notice, and in fact did notice when I first arrived on campus, the presence of card readers by doors and such. Just like I inevitably see every possible security camera and alarm sensor, I also am the kind of person who just always sees the keycard readers. For a while on campus I had fun scanning my WhoCard (ie Brandeis ID Card) through every reader I found, and I was inevitably presented with the red light of non-unlockiness. Eventually I learned to simply ignore them, since it seems that they really don’t have a lot of student uses, unless you are in a specific department like computer science where you need to, say, get into a computer cluster.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found the inner doors to the gym locked. They gym guy said to show your ID to the monitor if one was there, but the girl reading a book behind the counter didn’t appear to care. I had never had a problem getting in before. Obviously I found out, when another student walked in, that the keycard scanner is my ticket to access. Idiot me! Don’t I feel stupid. Funny how everyone just seems to pick up on simple things that I completely miss, while I pick up on things that never seem to matter…

Oh, the title is a reference to George Carlin’s rant on airplanes, in which he discusses the safety lecture: “What if I don’t want to put the tab into the buckle? What if I want to put the buckle over and around the tab? Seatbelts. High tech shit!”

Of course, when I found an alternative entrance/exit to the gym that is closer to my dorm and walking path, I scanned my card, supposing it would let me back in, and, of course, I got a red light. Locked out. Sigh. No chance for things to ever, oh, I dunno, MAKE SENSE!!!

I’ve decided conclusively that I am enjoying the television show 24. I was wishy-washy on it for a while, but, once you suspend all of the disbelief, it is quite well acted, written, and shot. I’ve especially enjoyed reading the articles in Flak Magazine about each show — written in the one hour that the show takes to transpire. Good gimmick. 🙂

I thought I had class at 9. But apparently I don’t until 10. Guess I need another class! 🙂

Much to write, little time. The important bits – agblog is back up, my server is back in my room, the DNS seems to be working. I’m doing some stuff for myBrandeis which is neat. My classes all start at 9 am. My days are very busy. I slipped on some ice and got a bit of a pain in the backside plus the early and unfortunate demise of my laptop. I am sad. 🙁 But school is good! 🙂 I am off to bed now, I shall report…well…later.