Sun 25 Jan 2004
Hey folks, I'm going to be discontinuing this blog for the near future, until I can get some good blogging software installed (the new version of PHPosxom didn't work for me). Please refer to my homepage for updates. I've embedded my livejournal in my website, so it's one-stop shopping for info on Nelson :-)
Before I sign off here though, I do have a few things to say.
First of all, you're going to need a resume sooner or later, so start working on it now so that you just have to update it and submit it when the time comes to apply for internships or jobs. Don't procrastinate on that, because missing out on an internship because you missed the deadline would be dumb. I now have to write my resume STAT!
Second of all, don't try to put your gloves in your pockets if there isn't any room for them because you've already filled your pockets with fruit. If you do, your gloves fall out, and then you're left with only one glove, like me, or like Michael Jackson. If you see a black biking glove that says "Trek" on it and has little silver reflecty pieces of fabric, please return to me, this is seriously my favorite pair of gloves and I am quite distraught!
Finally, stand up for yourself and your ideals, and there's no telling what you may accomplish :-)
Wed 07 Jan 2004
For all my readers who use LiveJournal, I have syndicated this blog using its built in RSS feed at lj user nelson_blog. There's also my LJ account skyfaller, as I mentioned before.
I'm also very happy, because while I was complaining about how PHPosxom, which I use for this blog, is a dead project that isn't updated anymore, I visited the sourceforge website and discovered that a third party had actually done a major update! It implements comments and XHTML compliance, which makes me very happy :-) I'm going to test it out, and if it works correctly I will then update my blog to this new version. Wish me luck!
As I mentioned on the SCDC LiveJournal community, we weren't able to come to a settlement with Diebold in mediation, which wasn't really a huge surprise, given our idealistic reasons for taking the case. It was kind of a shame though, free money from Diebold would have been nice :-)
In other news, I've got an interview with a Dutch reporter this weekend... she writes for this magazine Vrij Nederland, and apparently she's writing a large article on voting in America. We keep getting all of this press from Europeans, and it really bugs me how, aside from the NY Times article, the mainstream American media has pretty much ignored this rather scandalous case. The only reason I haven't decided that this is some sort of massive conspiracy to cover up the Diebold affair is that nobody has tried to kill me yet. At least, nobody competent...
Finally, I've done a bit of an update on my homepage, so check it out yo.
Mon 15 Dec 2003
Alright Swatties, and all my other elitist friends from around the world, take a look at this 8th grade final exam from 1895 and tell me how you would have done. In fact, how would you do now even with a partial college education?
That's what I thought :-D
OK, so it's not really fair because we don't learn the 3 R's in the same rote-learning way that they did back then, and some of these questions do strike me as useless and arbitrary. For instance, "Give the epochs into which US History is divided"? You can divide US History up any way you please, I'm sure modern history teachers do it differently from those of 1895. Knowing how your teacher divides up history doesn't give you any useful information for use in the real world. It's also interesting that we no longer have to have in-depth knowledge of battles in history... they specifically said in US History AP that we wouldn't have to know the details of how battles went, just what their results and effects were. I liked that, since I'm a Quaker, and having to have in-depth knowledge of military technology and strategy in order to pass 8th grade would annoy me, but I'm not actually certain whether such knowledge is important or not. Knowing about guerilla warfare, for instance, is useful for understanding the current situation in Iraq. Understanding "principles" of history rather than arcane details is more useful (as the AP testers tell us). You're going to forget the arcane details anyway.
Well, heck, learning how language "ought" to be written isn't necessarily useful, since language evolves, and language that is effective for communicating meaning is well-crafted language, no matter whether it agrees with the grammar book. There is, of course, a good argument for standardizing language so that, no matter who you try to speak English with, you can always communicate. But one reason why English is a great language is that, unlike the French, we don't have an official body that decides what words are in our language. Our dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, that is they report how we speak instead of telling us how we ought to speak. The language evolves on its own to fit our needs, and is often useful and efficient in a way that a language imposed from above could never be.
Sat 13 Dec 2003
The Cluetrain Manifesto is one of the coolest pieces of literature I've stumbled across in a long time. It's a website, and it's a book. You can read the full text online, but I think I might actually buy this one, because I want it on my bookshelf.
The basic idea of this document is that corporations are really good at dehumanizing business, which is going to be BAD for their business in the networked market of the internet. People want real communication with real people, and the artificial sales pitch just isn't going to cut it, because when "consumers" can communicate amongst themselves, they become smarter than the corporations, and they can see right through the BS.
And that's what the SCDC is about, people communicating person to person without a middleman, without an intermediary, because with the internet and modern networking technology, a middleman is no longer necessary. It is more possible than ever before to just be human with one another, because communication has become so much easier. If we can make business human, if workers can blog and speak their mind, if they can honestly try to help customers instead of toeing the company line, then maybe capitalism isn't such a bad idea after all.
But don't rely on my crappy summary, read it yourself! And if your employer is against blogging, if your boss wants the company to present a "professional" face, then buy him a copy of this book, and he'll understand why that is a bad business decision.
Well, it's official, I have now joined the army of Swarthmore students who has a LiveJournal. I don't really intend to post anything on my livejournal, however, because I prefer to keep control over my own blog. This may seem a bit paranoid, but who ever thought those lamers at mp3.com would go and delete all of the mp3s on their website? If livejournal.com suddenly vanished without a trace, I'd be shafted along with all their other users. On the other hand, with my SCCS webpage, if SCCS suddenly upchucks and dies, I can go wail on the sysadmins, or bribe them to fix it, or become one myself and get the job done.
So yeah, if you have a livejournal, you can add me to your friends, or leave me messages on the page, or anything else that livejournal users tend to do :-) I got curious about livejournals for many reasons, one being the apparently huge number of Swatties who have them. I stumbled across one group of people who lived in Mertz with me last year who all had blogs, and were engaging in intense blogcest. I also wanted to try out the Mozilla extension for making entries in livejournals, Deepest Sender, which actually works very well indeed! I even got it to detect my currently playing music in XMMS, as documented on their help page.
All of this livejournal happiness can get a bit creepy though, so maybe I should get a DeadJournal instead. But then again, how cool is it to be dark and depressing anyhow? And annoyingly you have to be invited by someone with an existing account or shell out money. The thing is, they're trying to limit growth, presumably because of server costs, and this is a good strategy for that... it can't jump to unconnected communities of people. So much for DeadJournals. They're dead. Ha, ha! I crack myself up.
Wed 10 Dec 2003
Well, the moment of truth has finally arrived! Yesterday was the last day of classes, and now we get "reading week", which at Swarthmore is actually only a "reading two days", because we're just that masochistic. Good grief, I'm screwed.
I've been riding my bike around campus despite the ice and snow, because I need to get wherever I'm going stat! This is a dumb idea, because my bike has these smooth shiny road tires, which do a lousy job of gripping on ice, not that any tires do a fantastic job. So I've taken to riding around with my feet out to the sides, so that when the bike falls over, I just land on my feet instead of on my butt. Surprisingly, I've only sustained one minor injury, where the gears on my bike tore a hole in my sock when I fell over. Hey, I'm a teenager, I'm invincible. Of course, this brings up the issue of what I'm going to say to myself when I turn 20...
Finally, in an exquisitely ironic turn of events, I left my last fork in the dining hall the other day, so now I can go back and steal one of theirs without remorse :-) The girls across the hall were nice enough to lend me one of theirs so that I could snack in my room and get some work done. A big thank you to Miriam, Jean, and Cynthia!
Mon 08 Dec 2003
It was bound to happen sooner or later... the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization said IP piracy is like terrorism. Presumably this applies to "music piracy". This seems like a pretty innocuous early occurance of the phrase, but it might just be the beginning of a McCarthyite witch hunt for P2P users. Just wait until Bush starts saying it. Next thing you know, they'll be locking up filesharers without a trial in some hole in Cuba.
Wed 26 Nov 2003
So it seems we actually don't have to be afraid of Diebold coming after us for reposting the memos after all. Diebold has completely backed down, they're withdrawing all of the existing DMCA notices and they've promised to stop sending new ones out. They hope to get the judge to put this through mediation instead of making a ruling. It may be too much to hope for, but I'd prefer it if we had a ruling that states unequivocally that we are right and Diebold is wrong.
Tue 25 Nov 2003
And at long last the timer has run out on our counternotification to Diebold! Finally, we can link and post the infamous memos without the college cutting off our internet connection; it's just between us and Diebold now. Go get the memos from the SCDC website :-)
It's nice to be able to rejoin the ranks of the brave individuals across the country hosting the memos. When you look at that page of college students who were willing to risk the wrath of a billion-dollar multi-national corporation to do their part in preserving our freedom, you are seeing the core of what may be the beginnings of a new student movement. What will they be called twenty years down the road? Are we just good, upstanding citizens? Are we hacktivists? Are we advocates for free culture? Or has the phrase that best defines our cause yet to arise?
Only time will tell.
Sat 22 Nov 2003
There's been a lot of great stuff happening with Creative Commons licensing recently! First of all, my copy of Jim's Big Ego's latest CD arrived in the mail today, and I've been playing its "Some rights reserved" vibes for my Dad :-)
Second of all, I recently installed the awesomest plugin for Mozilla, called Mozcc. It scans the webpage for Creative Commons RDF Metadata, and if it finds any it displays the licensing info icons in the corner of your screen. You can then click the icons to read any information that the author included with the document. This is an answer to one of Creative Commons's Tech Challenges, which is basically a wish list of software that the folks Creative Commons want to exist. One SCDC project that I'd like to get moving soon is Code for Social Change, and one of our first projects would be to respond to some of these tech challenges in order to get our name out there. Unfortunately, the free software community works too fast, they're answering all of the challenges before we can do it :-) Slow down, guys! Wait for us!
Finally, while surfing the Creative Commons website, I happened upon this great "Open Source Movie", called Nothing So Strange. Basically, the final cut of the movie is under a normal copyright, but all of the raw footage is released under an extremely liberal, BSD-Style Creative Commons license (specifically, the Attribution license)! I think it's a good idea, and I fully intend to buy it. It's not available on DVD yet, it's only available in Quicktime MPEG4 format, but that's fine because I can still play that on Linux in Mplayer, no problem :-)
Wed 19 Nov 2003
If my dad likes cigars, but I know they're not good for him, should I give him cigars as presents anyway? I mean, on one hand, I want him to be healthy. On the other hand, I want him to be happy, and who am I to say "I know what's good for you better than you do?" Then again, what if you are REALLY sure that it's bad for him, say for instance he was smoking crack? Where do you draw the line between big-brother paternalism and necessary action to protect your friend's health?
When we're talking about government, I usually consider myself to be a libertarian. I think that if I don't want to wear a seatbelt, and the only person that is hurt by that decision is myself, the government shouldn't force me to wear it. However, there is a difference between the government and your friends and family. Can I condone action among my friends and family that I would not want the government to take?
Usually when I think of something that I believe to be bad but I can't conclusively prove its evilness, I am in favor of educating people about the issues that make me think it's bad, but not forcing them into my worldview. In general, I would rather have an education campaign than outlaw any particular behavior, if it does not infringe on the rights of others.
Actually, the cigar case is a little bit weird. My dad is a doctor, he knows as well as I do that cigars are bad for him. I guess he's decided that they can't do enough damage to him at this time in his life to make it worth abstaining. Actually, I don't even know if that's a reasonable decision, I'm not a doctor... but I suspect not. Cigars are even less healthy than cigarettes if I understand correctly, they don't have filters on them or anything.
So should I give him the cigars if he wants him, and trust that he knows himself best? Is it meddling in his life if I don't give him the cigars and try to stop him from smoking? Should I protect his health if he doesn't want to protect it? Or if I think he's acting stupid, is it necessary to at least not do anything to support that, if not to actually try to stop him in his course of action?
Dammit, I need to get comments installed somehow... e-mail if you feel like it :-)
Sun 16 Nov 2003
Today wasn't terribly exciting, but rewarding nevertheless. I've started work on a little movie for Chinese class with my partners Andrew and Jonathan, and so far it's been going great. We're using my JVC MiniDV camcorder, plugging it into Andrew's Mac with Firewire, and editing it with iMovie (and possibly FinalCut Express if necessary). It's amazingly easy to write Chinese characters in Mac OSX, and I'm extremely jealous, because I haven't found a simple way to do it in Linux yet (probably because I haven't looked very hard).
It was cool, we worked on the closing credits, and our closing song will be "They're Everywhere", by Jim's Big Ego, which is an insanely cool band from Massachusetts. They released their last album, also titled "They're Everywhere", under a Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike Creative Commons license, which happens to be the same license that my website is released under. You can't tell from my blog pages (I'll put the license on here too eventually), but if you go to my home page and scroll to the bottom you can see my license tag.
Incidentally, we also used that song to close Andrew's radio show tonight on WSRN, the college radio station. Andrew's normal partner is Dana, and their show is Sunday 6-7 PM every weekend, you should check it out. Tonight, however, it was me, Brian, and Andrew, and we discussed Captain Planet, and played music with the underlying theme of Evil Robots. Yes, we managed to come up with many songs about evil robots, which probably proves that we are dorks, but you knew that already because we go to Swarthmore.
My friends and I have determined that everyone who goes to Swarthmore is by definition a dork. Dorks who know computers are Geeks, and Geeks who have no social skills are Nerds. Just wanted to clear that up for y'all.
I had a really fascinating IM conversation with Sasha a few days ago, which has been resurfacing everywhere I go, so I figured I'd paste it in here:
(14:46:33) Nelson: we get wrapped up in stupid petty stuff and we miss the big picture
(14:46:42) Sasha: right
(14:46:52) Nelson: people always have tunnel vision and they don't see what's going on around them
(14:46:56) Nelson: things like this are a distraction
(14:47:05) Sasha: that's true
(14:47:22) Nelson: if we want our lives to have a purpose, we have to make everything we do purposeful
(14:47:43) Nelson: just as if we want a peaceful society, we have to make every action peaceable
(14:48:15) Nelson: that's kind of the Quaker ethos I suppose, that spirituality is 24/7, not just in church on Sunday
(14:48:31) Nelson: that the mundane stuff is holy if you make it so
(14:48:43) Nelson: and anyplace is a place of worship
(14:49:03) Sasha: but if everything is holy, then doesn't holiness lose its meaning?
(14:49:11) Sasha: (devil's advocate here)
(14:49:25) Nelson: perhaps... but it makes everything else meaningful
(14:49:32) Sasha: by contrast
(14:49:43) Nelson: as in, yeah, I don't really feel very excited upon walking into a church
(14:50:05) Nelson: that is, more than I do when sitting under a tree
(14:50:10) Nelson: or looking at the stars
(14:50:24) Sasha: sorry, which is more what?
(14:50:51) Nelson: I don't find a church more exciting than the God in the grass or the "inner light" in the people around me
(14:51:17) Sasha: I feel the same way, except that I have all sorts of problems with spirituality nowadays
(14:51:29) Sasha: I also totally agree with you about purpose
(14:51:32) Nelson: "holiness" does kind of lose a certain kind of meaning, but that's a good thing. We can't have an aritificial separation between spirituality and the rest of life
To crystallize that, I think that humans are here to create meaning in the world, and that if we want to have meaningful lives, everything we do must have meaning, every action must be meaningful. We can't waste time doing things that don't have meaning, or alternately if we are to do them we must find a way to give them meaning. Hm... but do I really know what I mean by that?
Fri 14 Nov 2003
Kathy Hamlin at Amherst wrote an excellent article for the Amherst Student that mentions our activities as well as those of David Schaich, an Amherst student who also bravely hosted the Diebold memos until the college removed them.
Thu 13 Nov 2003
The SCDC has begun work on writing a play, loosely based upon the science fiction story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. The plot of the short story is that Congress is about to pass a bill that would make copyright last forever, and this woman has to convince a powerful senator that he must kill the bill (Kill Bill! hardy har har). Considering that this story was written sometime before 1983, when it won the 1983 Hugo for Short Story, it was an amazingly insightful story. Spider shows an imperfect understanding of the issues surrounding intellectual property, but the fact that he was writing about it like a decade before anybody else was thinking about it excuses any logic holes. It does, however require updating, to account for both new facts and new understanding of IP issues. The goal is to eventually produce this play at Swarthmore College. Wish us luck!
Mon 10 Nov 2003
Hey folks, so in case you haven't heard our next court date is November 17th, so that's probably when you'll be hearing from us again. Incidentally, we filed our counternotification a few days ago, so the 10-14 day timer will run out about then as well. Theoretically, we will then be able to put the Diebold documents back online, because Swarthmore will no longer be liable for our actions. So as usual, all of the excitement comes in bursts :-) That's life, right? Long boring stretches interspersed with overly interesting times...
Sun 09 Nov 2003
Around 8 PM last night, there was a total lunar eclipse, so Brian and Andrew and I went and hung out under the stars for a while, freezing our butts off. If I understand it right, a lunar eclipse means that the Earth came between the Sun and the Moon, so that the Earth's shadow completely covered the moon. On a clear day, this would have meant some interesting optical effects. Unfortunately, that night was moderately cloudy, and although we could see the Earth's shadow covering the moon, we couldn't really see it in detail.
As usual, however, we managed to entertain ourselves despite adverse conditions. While waiting for the moon to eclipse, we sang "Jailhouse Rock" with the lyrics from "All Your Base Are Belong To Us", as the Evolution Control Committee did when they had too much time on their hands. Fortunately they recorded the results for posterity, so that we didn't have to :-) The best part is how they actually made All Your Base rhyme! The first verse and chorus goes, "In AD twenty-one-oh-one/war was beginning, what happen?/somebody set us up the bomb/we get signal, main screen turn on! Chorus: It's you! How are you gentlemen? All Your Base... Are Belong to Us." All you Elvis fans, go and download the mp3 right now! This also resulted in an in-depth discussion of Zigs, and taking off every last one of them. Brian: "I'd like to let you know that I'm not wearing any Zigs today..."
We also discussed at length how the moon is getting like 3 inches closer to the Earth every year. How freaking cool will it be when the moon is orbiting at GROUND LEVEL? "Oh sh*t! Here comes the moon! Duck!" WHOOMPH! Andrew said that he remembers a kid's story where the moon was close enough to the Earth that people could get there just by jumping high enough, and they could all go hang out there until they got tired of lunar life, and then jump back down again. Does anybody know what this story was? E-mail me if you do! Someday I really have to install blogging software that allows for comments... I installed PHPosxom because it's just a single PHP script that's simple enough for me to understand and hack around with. Heck, maybe I could implement comments myself! That would be mad phatty, yo.
Fri 07 Nov 2003
I just run across this really cute site, www.wipout.net, which has a bunch of essays on why the current intellectual property regime is dumb. It was a response to an international student essay contest that the WIPO sponsored in 2001 about, like, "What does intellectual property mean to me?" Which sounds like something that would make any decent student barf. So this collection of essays says stuff like, "I can't purchase anti-HIV drugs because of patent law" instead. The site is cobwebby and not terribly standards compliant, but people were less conscious of standards back then (yes, a matter of a couple of years has made a difference). The essays don't have airtight arguments, but it's nice to see the perspectives of ordinary people on the subject.
In other news, I went into Philly today with my main man Steve Bhardwaj and Ivan Boothe of Why-War, to be interviewed by Lynn Landes for DUTV. While we were there we met Rebecca Mercuri in person for the first time, and we chilled and talked about all that good ol' voting stuff. That was pretty cool, but the best part was driving there in Steve's car listening to Simon and Garfunkel! Steve and I were singing "Keep the Customer Satisfied" all day, in harmony :-) That is, he harmonized, and I just blundered along, but trust me, it was cool.
Thu 06 Nov 2003
This is the funniest article I've read in a LONG time, it had me in stitches for 10 minutes when I should have been doing my Chinese homework. I found it on a random Swat alumn's blog, continuing in the tradition that Swarthmore students pioneered.
The thing is, just think about how hard it would be to play old games if we didn't have emulators. Most of us can't play these old games and laugh at them anymore, because unlike the staff of a gaming magazine, we don't have every piece of the history of gaming at our disposal. Unless you're uber-careful with your equipment, your old gaming consoles are probably dead or dying, and what use will all of your game cartridges be without the machine that plays them? Sure, Space Invaders and other really popular games have survived to some degree in commercial form, but the more obscure games become completely unavailable as it becomes more difficult to find the old, proprietary hardware needed to play them. Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir if you got here from the SCDC's website, but we need the freedom to format-shift our old games to our new computers, so that all of this wonderful (and not-so-wonderful) creativity and entertainment isn't lost forever.
Wed 05 Nov 2003
Stop! Instead of reading this, go do something about the FTAA!
If you don't know what the FTAA is, or why you should oppose it, read on.
To borrow from globalexchange.org, the FTAA is essentially an expansion of NAFTA, both into new geographic areas such as Central America, South America and the Caribbean, and into new areas of the economy and the law that NAFTA didn't cover.
Even if you're not opposed to NAFTA (and if don't know enough about it to make a judgement, you really ought to research it more), you should be strongly opposed to the FTAA. As reported by IP Justice, the FTAA has a truly horrifying chapter on intellectual property rights. Basically it exports our poorly conceived copyright regime to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and adds on even more autocratic provisions. Among other things, it mandates imprisonment (!) for P2P filesharing for signatory nations, and destroys many of our remaining "fair use" rights. To see for yourself, try searching the chapter for "prison"... then read the whole thing, if you have a legal bent. Otherwise just visit IP Justice's page.
I just love how the government talks in Newspeak: Free Trade here means "we throw you in jail for trading files". Are they going to arrest people for making mix CDs for one another? I thought it was bad enough with the RIAA's frivolous lawsuits; now we really may get the police spiriting you away in the night for using Kazaa, no joke.
Tue 04 Nov 2003
So, in case you haven't heard, my friend Luke Smith and I are suing Diebold for trying to use copyright law to suppress their internal company memos that expose questionable business practices. We are being represented pro bono by lawyers from Stanford's Cyberlaw clinic.
Today the judge set an accelerated schedule for our case, which seems like a good thing, since we would like to have free speech again as soon as possible :-)
I asked the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to link to the website for our club, the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, and they said they would... which would rock! It'll be like a permanent Slashdotting! Ooh, Branen and all the other SCCS sysadmins are going to kick my butt for this one...
Sun 02 Nov 2003
Last night I got a flat tire on my bike while riding past the construction around the new science center. I was very annoyed, because since I live in Woolman, slightly uphill from campus, biking to class and stuff is very convenient, and I save a good deal of time. I also enjoy leaving skid marks on the pavement and playing around with my 21 gears. I was quite dismayed at the prospect of having to actually walk around. However, a while back I was telling Blake how wonderful it was to save time with my bike, and he said, "So what do you do with all of the time you save?" I didn't have a good answer. Where does the time go that I save in transit?
I guess it probably goes towards checking my e-mail or reading Slashdot; it doesn't really help get me to class on time.
Today as I was walking back to my dorm, I noticed for the first time that the leaves were changing, and many of them had fallen to the ground already. In retrospect I remember that there had been leaves on the ground before; I like to step on the leaves and hear them crinkle and crackle, and I recall crinkling leaves several times in the last few weeks. However, it hadn't really computed that, "Oh, fall is here, the leaves are pretty!" I'm glad that I took the time to look at all the colors, and check out the big picture, of the greenery of Swarthmore preparing for winter.
Sat 01 Nov 2003
My parents are probably going to kick my butt next time they see me, because I keep forgetting to eat, and I've definitely gotten thinner. There are several reasons this happens:(1)I get wrapped up in homework or SCDC business, and never make it to the dining hall or my room to eat (2)I make it to the dining hall, but something terribly exciting comes up and I drop my food and run off, or an interesting topic of conversation comes up and I neglect my dinner (3)I make it back to my room, but instead of cooking something, I just nibble on a snack.
The positive side of all this is that I've become so insubstantial that I can sneak around like Frodo Baggins with the One Ring, and nobody can catch me! Whee!
Wed 29 Oct 2003
Hey folks, thanks to friendly nagging from Maggie, I'm going to try to keep my blog updated again, although it's going to be terribly difficult because of all of the developments occurring with the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons. Swarthmore College has been in the news a lot lately because of the Diebold voting machine memos, and if you haven't heard about it, I recommend that you check out our website.
In other news, my roommate Jerome recently mistook my electric toothbrush for a vibrator. He walked into the room the other day, and exclaimed, "You know somebody has been keeping a vibrator in our bathroom?" This would indeed have been odd, since we two are the only people who use our bathroom regularly. However, my Periobrush is probably not suitable for this purpose, despite its vaguely phallic shape. I can't say that I'm disappointed about that...
Wed 08 Oct 2003
A failure of your will is a failure of rationality. If you can will that you accomplish something (such as cleaning your room), that means that you have done the necessary calculations and decided that this course of action will be best for you in the long run. If, despite this knowledge, you persist in a different course of action (i.e. you lack the willpower to do what you have decided upon), this means that you have failed to keep your eye on your rational, long term self-interest. Instead you have conceded the field to short-sightedness, you have given into the pleasures of the moment. A person who cannot act in their own self-interest is by definition incompetent and weak. Also, failing to stand by your rational self reeks of hypocrisy, of lying to oneself. The more frequently you are able to adhere to your own decisions, the more effective and admirable you will be.
Fri 03 Oct 2003
I'm so excited about how the SCDC is doing! We've been getting press from all over the place: the two Swarthmore College newspapers, the Phoenix and the Daily Gazette, Lawrence Lessig's site, Boing Boing ("a directory of wonderful things"), boycott-riaa.com, a random personal blog... All of these people from across the country are e-mailing and IMing us, wanting to work with us or start their own similar campus groups!
The most interesting conversation I've had today was with a grad student from UTexas at Austin, about the licensing practices of Role-Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons. He had a lot of interesting things to say about the Open Gaming License, which is essentially like the GPL, and the more restrictive license D20, which lets you use the D&D brand name but doesn't let you change the game in certain basic ways. Unfortunately it seems that the D20 license is taking over the industry, which reduces the diversity of games. I honestly don't know much about the topic, but I expect to learn more about a lot of interesting topics like this through my work with the SCDC. These are certainly amazing times!
It's really strange to realize that the SCDC is the first organization of its kind; that over all these years, there hasn't been a student anywhere in the nation who cared enough about these issues to build a club to promote them. Swarthmore does have a somewhat radical, avant garde history though, which is easy to forget when we're looking at it from the inside. Did you know that a Swattie may have been the first blogger? Here's the article that says so, and here's what the first blog looked like. I guess it just looks like a really basic webpage, kind of boring, but the bloggy content and the extremely early date (January 27, 1994!) is what sets it apart. Go Swat!
Tue 30 Sep 2003
For some reason, I let Sarah write this week's blog entry. I'm sure this is a bad idea, but here we go... Sarah, tell everyone about my life!
Tue 23 Sep 2003
Sarah is my CS partner. She doesn't like the way I say "dude" all the time. She beats me up because I'm a Quaker and I can't hit back. She's laughing now, about how she beats me up. OK, maybe she's not laughing about that, but I'm sure it's SOME joke at my expense. What an abusive girl. God, why do I hang out with her? Visit her website, because. Just because. Thanks.
So we're planning to get all of the CS done before the weekend, so that we can party hard as we are wont to do here at Swat. Right.... Actually, I'm straightedge, and Sarah wishes she was European. Which means that she doesn't drink the way Americans drink (usually). Those uncultured swine. Sarah's not coming across very well in this entry, is she? Oh well, I guess I'm biased, I'm her CS partner.
Other than Sarah, my life is dull. Dull. DULL!!!! Good thing I have Sarah for a CS partner. This entry was written specifically to annoy Sarah. Did it work? Cool. Evidently it did. Sarah is calling it creative non-violence. Yeah, peace.
Tue 16 Sep 2003
Whoa, shit, my friend Zeke who goes to William and Mary says they're evacuating the school. He's about to start driving home to New Jersey from southeast Virginia, because according to this NOAA map his school is going to be right in the middle of the hurricane. Looks like we're probably going to get hit here in Swarthmore as well. Knowing Swarthmore, we'll probably have classes during the hurricane, just to prove how hard core we are. So batten down the hatches me hearties, we may be in for a wild ride!
For further updates, check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's website.
Update: The hurricane did nothing to Swarthmore. We have had much worse storms this year without there being a hurricane. It was a disappointment, overall.
Fri 12 Sep 2003
Yesterday and today the plumber people are working on the water damage on our dorm room wall. Apparently it's due to a leaky pipe, so they ripped out all the pipes and left this massive vertical gash in the wall. The pipe should be replaced tomorrow, but the wall might not be back to normal for another week, I didn't really follow their explanation, because I have a short attention span like that sometimes.
I enjoyed talking to my friend Jenn today on the phone, she lives in Massachusetts and is probably moving to Arizona in a couple of months. So hopefully we'll figure out a way to see each other before she goes, otherwise it could be a really LONG time before we meet again. I trust in our combined resourcefulness :-)
Thu 11 Sep 2003
I'm joining the debate team here, I'm pretty excited. I've got a cool freshman named Peter Holm as my partner, who lives in my room from last year on Mertz 1st South. We have some really cool ideas for cases, I can't wait to try them out. He's going to be a tough debater and a good partner I think.
The practice novice tournament is this Saturday, so I'm going to have to say definitely no to the people who want me to go to the WTO protest in NYC. It's not clear to me that I ought to go to protests in general anyway, more specifically a WTO protest. I haven't done enough research into it to be worried about the issue yet. And I question protesting as a strategy.
It seems to me that putting people in the streets is not an effective method of social change until most of the people in the area want to join you. Putting people in the streets has accomplished things in the past, but first the majority of people must agree with your cause. Fringe groups protesting have little effect, and the mainstream will generally brand protesters as useless radicals and ignore them. I think that going out and starting some sort of project to further your cause is much more productive than parading around with signs and complaining.
Then again, if there are no visible critics of something bad, then the politicians and the public will think that there is no opposition, that everything is fine. Protesting is vital to keep issues in the public eye. People don't do enough to educate themselves about the world, and they have a short attention span.
I have mixed feelings I guess. Protesting is Quakerly in some ways, unQuakerly in others. On one hand, we don't proselytize, we don't try to force our opinions on others. On the other hand, we're supposed to bear witness against injustice, that's the principle that Greenpeace was founded on, and my family has been donating to Greenpeace regularly for a while, although we may have to stop because we're pretty short on money with sending me to Swarthmore and all. I dunno.
I am a Quaker by the way folks, so feel free to hate me if you don't dig hippie peaceniks. Yes, Quakers still exist, especially here in the Philadelphia area, and no, most of them don't dress like the dude on the Quaker Oats box. In fact, I met this awesome Quaker chick a while back, she was a punk rocker and made her own clothes, and she had this awesome red trenchcoat type thing, it really stood out in Meeting. Too bad she's two years younger than me, lives on the other side of Philadelphia, and has a boyfriend.
"Life is hard... and so am I"
~The Eels~
Sat 06 Sep 2003
Friday night I went to an open mike night in Media. It was a nice little coffeehouse, nobody was there except for performers pretty much, but that seems to be a normal state of affairs more or less. I was originally kind of bummed because I didn't come with anybody, but it was all worthwhile because I met the most intense band I've met at an open mike night yet. They were ilyAIMY, (stands for i love you And I Miss You) and they are really enthusiastic and energetic, they had my feet tapping the entire time. They have this very fun and fast acoustic guitar style, where they both strum insanely while harmonizing urgently (ok, this is a 5 AM article, but that's seriously what they were doing). It wasn't the full band, it was the two guitarists/singers, Rob and Heather, and they just quit their jobs to live their dreams. Hell yeah! They're touring the country and really living, and they're doing a good job of documenting what it's all about and how it's working.
I really like their Mission, too, read that on their site. It's all about bringing people together... Which is really what the SCDC is all about, too. Seriously, get ilyAIMY's CD, I did. Support true independent artists, they've organized all of this themselves, I'm permanently impressed by their professionalism and organizational skills. And they're really nice, intelligent people, very accessible and easy to talk to. Mad props!
Tue 02 Sep 2003
A couple of days ago I ran into this really cool freshman here, Evan Greer. He's a talented singer/songwriter/guitar-player, and he writes great stuff about fighting the Man. One of my favorite lyrics comes from "Daddy's Song", track 4 off his album:
you told me
i'll understand when i'm older
but you can't see
since the cold war it's gotten colder
and maybe
i've still got a thing or two to learn
or maybe
you'll understand when you're younger
So check out his site. Remember: when he gets famous, you heard about him here...
Sun 31 Aug 2003
So in case you haven't heard, some really evil laws are on the verge of passing across the Atlantic in the European Union, see FFII's page on Software Patents in Europe. Basically, there is a push to increase regulation of software patents, which could conceivably destroy Open Source software such as Linux. Software patents are inherently bad, because in practice software patents are never for a specific implementation of a concept. Software patents are generally for such sweeping concepts such as Amazon's one-click shopping, or right-clicking to get a menu. What happens from an economic standpoint is that this reduces competition in a ridiculous fashion. Here's my question: who should make a product? The person who implements an idea best, or the person who thinks of it first? Clearly it is in society's interest for the first person to produce the good. However, it is also important for there to be people to produce ideas, and people may not bother inventing things if they cannot get compensation for their time and energy. So clearly we must allow the inventors to capture enough of the value of their idea to make it worth their while to create. On the other hand, the inventors have to earn their keep. They shouldn't just be able to sit back in a comfy chair and extort money from people who are actually creating things. And they definitely shouldn't be able to patent things that are obvious to anyone who works in the field. Patents are necessary to some extent, but some things do not deserve patents, and patent powers must be limited if we are to have a free market instead of a monopoly-dominated corporate aristocracy.
This is terribly relevant to the open source movement, because since many programs are created through volunteer work, and given away for free, it would be ridiculous to ask free software programmers to pay off patent holders. Most projects could not afford this extortion. There are also many side issues that I could remember for you if it wasn't 1:47 AM. Maybe I'll put in an update later, but for now, yeah, read http://swpat.ffii.org/
Sat 30 Aug 2003
I'm finally getting settled in here at college. Classes start on Monday, so I'm working on getting everything ready for the schoolyear. My computer has not been cooperating in my drive to get organized: the college network has gone down multiple times because of all of the Windows worms. Now our technicians won't let anyone back on the network until their computer has been given a clean bill of health by the dorm tech. This horde of viruses demonstrates yet another reason Microsoft is bad for our country: as any good farmer knows, a monoculture is bad, because it is vulnerable to disease. This remains true whether the monoculture is an entire state sown with a single strain of corn, or an entire nation's computers running on a single, monolithic operating system. If we allow Microsoft to hold a complete monopoly, every time a virus appears, the whole internet will crash. This is entirely unacceptable in the era of e-commerce, and I hope that businessmen will begin to understand the danger of losing diversity in our computing environments.
In other news, there was an incredible thunderstorm here right before I was about to take a shower, so I jumped around out in the rain with a bunch of my hallmates while wearing just my towel, and then I ran upstairs and got nice and hot and steamy in the shower. I really wish I could have just gone out naked, so that my towel wouldn't get prematurely wet, but that might have been impolite.
Big shoutout to Andrew Abdalian! Andrew, my former quadmate, just moved in down the street from me, so I'm sure I'll be dropping in on him on my way to and from campus, whether he likes it or not :-) I am in Woolman, by the way, which is up the hill from campus, and it is therefore very convenient for riding to class on my bike. Andrew is in Whittier, one of the new dorms that has spontaneously appeared as a result of the housing crunch. So yeah, come visit me folks, Woolman is fun! I'm here! And so is Kermit :-)
Tue 26 Aug 2003
Well, so I decided to go to an open mike night at The Fire bar and grill in Philadelphia. I asked everyone from the play if they wanted to come along, but despite some apparent enthusiasm everyone canceled. So I went anyway. It was pretty cool, I met some girls on the train on the way there. There was a freshman here and her friend from Bryn Mawr, and a random high schooler from Morton, who was especially cool because she happened to be on the train back home as well, so I didn't get bored and fall asleep and miss my stop. Thanks Kat, I owe you one. Yeah, any night in which I meet girls is not wasted :-) Aside from my raging hormones, I also had a good time playing at The Fire. There were some really amazing musicians there, I bought a CD and I intend to buy more. The first person I ran into there was Ben Garvey, who hosts an open mike night somewhere in South Jersey and is also a computer geek, which makes him extra cool. Basically I hung out with him and some random girl because the 3 of us hadn't been there before, and we were super-early, as in about an hour early. Ben has finally convinced me that it is a good idea to buy a guitar tuner. I've always thought that it would be really hard core if I could tune my guitar by ear, but I think I need to train my ear more, because my 2nd string always sounds out of tune either on the open string or higher up the fretboard. I had thought that that must mean that my guitar needs servicing. I was of course incorrectly attributing my mistakes to my equipment. Ben whipped out his electric tuner and had my guitar tuned perfect in seconds, it sounded better than it had in a while. I also saw Birdie, who really impressed me. And now I'm really bloody tired, so I'll hit the sack. Gnnight!
Sun 17 Aug 2003
Well, it's 11:47 on a Sunday night, and mostly today I just worked on my website. This blog is most of what I have to show for it.
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