AgPerson

A quick status update on me. I’ve taken my two finals, so that is done with. I’ve turned in my LGLS final exam and reviews, so that is done with, but I might be doing another test for her class (yeah, strange story) to be turned in next week. Done with Socolow (analyzed Farscape, have to go read it and decide if it is good enough to post online). Done with civil liberties test, and there is actually a chance I might get an A in that class, although I wouldn’t really count on it. All that is left is my (late) Whitfield paper and my Hickey paper (eek! need to write that!). My parents always want to know my grades even though I have no idea, so here are my predictions:
Socolow: B
Kramer: B
Abramson: B
Whitfield: B
Hickey: A
Yeah, not very promising, is it? I wanted all As! Well, guess I should have woken up in the mornings then…

Salon writes about a new kind of advice column:

Tom, a 62-year-old semiretired contractor who answers letters from his home in Michigan, agrees that feeling involved is what makes the biggest difference. “You get older and you think, After everything I’ve done, is that all there is? Am I just going to get put on the back shelf? With the site, I can apply all of my knowledge and experience, pain and joy. I’ve laughed and cried and raised a family, what am I supposed to do, just carve some wooden ducks, or pick up knitting?”

Check out Elder Wisdom Circle.

I most certainly understand that we are at war. I also understand that the freedoms afforded to all of us in the Constitution were meant specifically for times like these. Our freedoms were carved out during times of strife by people who were facing brutal injustices, and were intended specifically so that this nation would behave differently in such times. If our freedoms crumble exactly when they are needed most, then they were really never freedoms at all.

Isn’t it fun what happens when you go out for dinner and a show? And I hear the USA PATRIOT Act is going to become permanent. Hooray! We are at war, after all.

Apple just released iTunes 4 along with their new online music service, the first one (besides eMusic, which I love) that really makes sense – 99 cents a song and DRM that isn’t totally evil. The problem is, it is Mac only.

iTunes is the best music program I’ve seen, and it fits my needs perfectly, and I used to use it on my Mac desktop to catalog all of my music and play it, and all was well. But iTunes, of course, doesn’t work on my relatively new Linux desktop, and ever since I’ve gotten this box, I’ve had to struggle to find my music and listen to it.

Now this new service makes me want a Mac desktop even more…

I really like Linux, but music is a deal-breaker. But buying a new Mac desktop so recently after buying a new computer? That doesn’t really work either.

Argh!

From Esther Dyson’s new Release 4.0. She was talking with David Weinberger.

DW: Explicitness is an act of violence. You think it’s archeological: You take something and dust it off, but in fact explicitness reduces things; it destroys…That’s why groups stay away from constitution writing.

ED: But they don’t stay away from constitution-writing. It’s more like moths to a flame. They can’t stop it. But they can’t handle the explicitness. It’s like pre-nuptial agreements.

I’ve been seeing lots and lots of problems with the constitution and bylaws of the Brandeis Student Union. People don’t really want to hear them though…”this is how we do it.”

Yesterday it was sunny, and today rains pours down.

“It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.” – Robert E. Lee

Phil Greenspun (wait, my philg?) suggests that the demise of the Media Lab at MIT is imminent. He sheds some light on management that explains things a lot more to an outsider. It is a sad day though…I don’t know what the ML has been doing lately, but their groundbreaking work ten years ago on wearable computers has been a great inspiration for me, and reading about all of their Big Ideas in Wired and other places has made me feel a lot better about life and the future.

Media Lab…*sigh*, that’s where I wanted to work! 🙁

Clay Shirky’s talk at ETCON, blogged by Cory Doctorow, was about social structure is collaborative software. He gives a cool example of group dynamics:

You were at a party and you got bored. They you don’t leave. Why don’t you leave? But 20 min later, someone gets his coat and everyone leaves. Everyone else was bored too, but the triggering event let the air out of the group.

This is called “the paradox of groups.” There are no groups w/o members, but there are also no members w/o groups.

I’m reading about the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference and its just the coolest thing ever. I so wish I could have been there, and the timing actually worked out, but the whole $1500 registration fee is what hurts. What about normal people who want to go to these things? 🙁

I need some good music to study to and work to. I used to have a bunch of great iTunes playlists, only there is no such thing as iTunes on Linux, and all my moving music around has resulted in my Mac playlists being dismantled. 🙁 Music is an important and integral part of my life, part of the tapestry of thought, and I almost always need it playing…only now I have no idea what to listen to. I want things that are uplifting and instrumental without being too strong. I can’t really describe it. Melanie Doane has a great song called “Mel’s Rock Pile” that I really like, I have some songs from movie scores that are great, but I can’t find enough to keep it going. The thing is, I probably have a bunch, just no good way to rediscover it. Add on the fact that I constantly find corrupted audio files and destroyed music, and I continually wonder what I’ve lost or am missing that I used to love to listen to. Dave says EMusic is great for jazz…maybe I need some jazz. When I listen to Kenny G, which is somewhere around what I’m looking for for study music, everyone laughs at me. 🙁 I have 5,000 songs, and I don’t know where to start!

This article is deep and thought-provoking. So, of course, the radical right has called for the author to leave the country. Listen to Rush? Watch The Factor? Maybe you should read it yourself.

So apparently Bechtel is the recipient of the first contract to rebuild Iraq, starting at $680 million dollars over 18 months. Wait, that name is familiar…aren’t they the people in charge of this? Why yes, yes they are. This is the same company whose construction gaffes have cost taxpayers over $1 billion.

The Globe article, with a year of research, is scattered with such words as, “overrun,” “errors,” “failure,” “deficiencies,” and “serious flaws.” Sound encouraging?

On more than 3,200 occasions since 1991, the state paid extra money to contractors to compensate for design flaws, some big, some small.

For example, the drawings for the Ted Williams Tunnel left a 4-foot gap between tunnel sections, which was discovered by perplexed workers only after the massive tunnel tubes were eased into position, records show. The problem caused at least $307,000 in new work.

The time to pack up my things for shipment home is fast approaching. This is probably the case for many people. Said people (and anyone who ships things) will probably find this article enlightening.

I worked as a package handler for roughly ten months, and in that time I handled many packages. I couldn’t even hazard a guess at the number, as I moved several thousand some nights. The point being: I’ve seen a lot of packages. From this I’ve learned something: Most people have no idea how to pack cargo. Not only do they not know, they don’t even try. In fact, I believe most of them to be under the delusion that I, the Package Handler who was paid but a pittance for hours of physical labor, was in some way concerned with the welfare of their package(s).

Read up to find out how to correctly pack a package. Good stuff.

Jon Lee Anderson’s segment in the New Yorker this week weave an amazing tapestry of Iraqi life. I really love stories like these — raw experience put elegantly in words, not to shove a political ideology down our throats, but just to tell what someone is seeing. Very poignant, and very important.

Dr. Saleh said that the hospital had taken in about three hundred people who had been injured by the bombing. The doctors had managed to save everyone so far, although twenty people were already dead when they arrived. “War always brings tragedy, fear, pain, and psychological trauma,” he said. “Personally, I feel that problems can be solved by discussion and negotiation and collaboration. When you use military power, it means your brain has stopped. As an Iraqi, I feel that this is my country, and that I should work to maintain it and protect it from invasion, whatever invasion it is. I think any person would take this position when his country is attacked.”

Probably true.

It has been a few days, but nothing has changed.

Looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted Iraq’s National Library, leaving a smoldering shell Tuesday of precious books turned to ash and a nation’s intellectual legacy gone up in smoke.

They also looted and burned Iraq’s principal Islamic library nearby, home to priceless old Qurans; last week, thieves swept through the National Museum and stole or smashed treasures that chronicled this region’s role as the “cradle of civilization.”

US response?

“I don’t think anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the people of Iraq,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said at a U.S. Central Command briefing in Qatar.

Well, no one except the UN, aid workers, Iraqis, pundits, and even US officials…

From Bloghdad:

Simply put, the number of innocent people who are dead because we ousted Saddam is dwarfed by the number of innocent people who are dead because we didn’t. The use of American force is on one side of the ledger, and mass killing is on the other. Trends in military and media technology make this dilemma increasingly likely where belligerent murderers rule. You can keep your hands clean, or you can keep many more people alive. It’s up to you.

Hmm.

The news organizations seem to think the Apple/Vivendi talks for Univeral Music are real. Yay, Apple! And they are still saying things like this:

Vivendi had been leaning towards holding on to its music arm until the industry emerged from a slump brought on by rampant piracy, economic uncertainties and competition from other entertainment media.

Excuses, excuses for not giving people what they want, not expanding their markets by embracing technology. Excuses for terrible license agreements that hurt artists. And yet, at the same time, independent record labels are doing great, or so says the Christian Science Monitor:

At a major label, most artists are unlikely to earn anything unless they sell at least 1 million albums, and even then, they could wind up in debt. Everything from studio time to limo rides are charged against their royalties, which might be only $1 per disc sold. That compares with an indie artist, who can sell a disc for $15 at a concert. If they make $5 profit a disc on 5,000 discs, they pocket $25,000.

“That’s the difference between us and them,” Mr. Strang says. “Artists on our label who sell 200,000 copies make a very good living.”

Of course, this might help:

But perhaps the biggest difference is that they let artists keep the rights to their work.

Goodbye, RIAA. And good riddance.

I’m making up for missing the TMBG concert by listening to their music today. Sigh. I wanted to participate in Union government and all, but only maybe half of the people to be transitioned actually showed up, and not a single member of the old executive board who was not re-elected showed up :(. I didn’t have much to add, although I learned a bit…but maybe I should have gone to the concert instead…

I have really loved the last few days. Hanging out with good people doing good things — it is Bronstein weekend and so far I’ve gone to a bounce house/ball dance, watched some great fireworks, eaten barbecue, and made brownies in the East Quad office with Dave, Adam, and people who randomly showed up.

I agree with Adam now that people who aren’t in East don’t like it because of the architecture, but there is something about that quad — a sense of community that is lacking in other, more spread out and private quads. By virtue of having to be in everyone’s face every day, people are forced to learn to get along.

It gives me a lot of hope for the new quad. I am very very excited about getting to live there next year.

A week ago my mom asked me if maybe I wanted to come home for my last two years in school. Ha!