Sarah ate my blog!

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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!

Hey everyone!! Nelson and I are sitting here in the CS lab, after (semi-) finishing this week’s assignment in the NIC of time. Nelson spells that NICK. But that is just silly. Anyway, I think we may have had 2 or 3 seconds left when we hit that final “turn-in” key. It was, as Nelson would say “intense, dude.” Even more so because the scraping was mainly his fault, namely, that he showed up, by consensus, approximately 1 hour LATE for our scheduled meeting today. Consensus is an ornery term indeed that is by no means universal. Nelson and I agreed on this particular amount by considering his lateness compared to the original time he said he would come, and the time he sheepishly emailed me later in the evening after an incredibly important movie committment came up. (“For class!! It really is for class!” he says unconvincingly…)
So anyway, after a few hours of frenzied programming, which I thought went relatively well considering our combined cluelessness, we turned it in and began making bad puns, z.B.:

(z.B. is German. If you can figure out what it means, Sarah will give you a candy bar. If you’re allergic to peanuts, too bad, it has peanuts in it.)

1. What does DNA stand for? / National Dyslexic Association! :::evil grin:::
… and a few others… mainly though, is the way I make fun of Nelson for being an idiosyncratic Quaker, however the only aspect I can readily recall is his Pyromaniac tendencies. “Pyro Quaker” one says coloquially. There are several others; they come up from time to time and I always berate him to no end, but somehow, as soon as they are out of my mouth, they dissolve into… nothingness… as all good insults should…
Oh my god, it is so late and that neither makes sense nor is particularly enteraining or funny. I suppose I am not an experienced blogger, and will have to redeem myself later.
((which means I am coming back…))
(((and I KNOW where you live…)))
:::evil laugh:::

—Oh my god, that was Sarah’s entry. What have I done? I’ve created a monster!

Sarah Owocki

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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.

Hurricane Isabel is coming

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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.

Water Damage, Jenn

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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 🙂

Joining Debate, not going to WTO protest, and being a Quaker

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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~

ilyAIMY

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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!

Frosh are cool

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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…

Help stop software patents in Europe (and, less urgently, in the US)

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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/

Just relaxing in the dorm today

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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 🙂

Open mike night in Philly

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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!