We need your time, and your effort... and your money

I made the mistake of signing a petition for an environmental organization a few months ago. They were petitioning a specific issue before the municipal government at the time, and I basically supported it, and so signing didn't seem like an issue. After hearing the whole spiel about their organization, they asked for my email address, and so I gave them one that I use only for spam-risky signups.

As I was still writing down my contact information, they told me how happy I was that I had joined their organization, and asked if I would be giving them a check for the membership fee (not previously discussed) or credit. I told them that I was not in a position to donate financially to their organization. They insisted that as little as $50 would help to ensure the quality of the environment for generations to come.

I told them that they were lucky to have my signature on their petition, and that if they didn't want it, I would be happy to remove it. They then insisted that $20 was the minimum contribution, and that they would be perfectly happy to send me a bill so I could pay it at my discretion.

I hadn't heard from them again until tonight when a woman from the organization called me on my way home to discuss a bill before the state legislature that they opposed. I told her that I was not well educated on the bill, but she promised to mail me a form letter I could sign and forward to my representative expressing my concern about the bill. I told her I would review the letter and the bill and consider sending it on.

At that point, she informed me that my membership in the organization was expiring and that I could pay the quarterly fee of $90 by credit card over the phone right away. I told her that I was not interested in contributing financially to the organization, nor was I in any position to do so. She asked if I didn't care about the quality of the environment, and I told her that I was an student with no income to donate. She then offered to let me pay $10 per month until I got back on my feet. I told her that if I had $10 a month, I'd buy health insurance, and maybe some new socks.

She made another plea to save the earth for my children, and accused me of only paying the environment lip service, which might be true, but it was rude to mention it. I hung up, convinced that this is why so many people hate environmentalists.

Only In Texas...

From the National Weather Service:

SEVERE WEATHER ALERT
615 AM CDT MON OCT 24 2005

...AUTUMN LIKE CONDITIONS THROUGH TUESDAY...

Moving On

Chris Mortensen of ESPN is reporting today that the Saints have played their last game in New Orleans. According to league sources, the Saints will return to San Antonio for the 2006 season, with a preferred permanent relocation to Los Angeles after that. New Orleans is unlikely to get a guaranteed expansion team, such as the promise made to Cleveland when the Browns became the Baltimore Ravens in 1996. A sports consultant claims that New Orleans is unlikely to ever be awarded an expansion team, and anyway Mortensen's report says that the league wouldn't consider expansion for another 10 to 15 years.

Clearly, Tom Benson, the owner, wants to move the team, and has tried to in the past. The league has now had ample time to extend the city of New Orleans a vote of confidence, and has failed to do so. I am officially done with them. Unless and until the Saints return to New Orleans as the home team, I won't be following them.

On the one hand, the whole thing just makes me sad, but on the other, I'm happy to have my Sunday afternoons back.

It's Always in the Last Place You Look

...because after you find whatever it was you were looking for, you stop looking. However, what about if you had given up looking and just find it accidentally? Yesterday, I found a USB drive I had lost over the summer while doing laundry. (No, it wasn't in the lint trap.) In this case, I guess it technically wasn't in the last place I looked, if you restrict me to only counting places I looked for it. This has the feeling of one of those deep philosophical questions like, "Is the thumb a finger?" or "Is a tomato a fruit?"

(The answer to both questions is "yes," of course.)

The Colbert Report Report

Watching The Colbert Report I am most reminded of Mel Brooks's 1993 movie Robin Hood: Men in Tights. That movie is a scene-by-scene spoof of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner, which was so wretched as to be unintentionally funny. Mel Brooks's spoof merely articulates all the criticisms you already had about the Costner flick in a ham-fisted style, rendering it both superfluous, and a little dull. The target for Brooks was a little too easy, and a little too obvious. Far more entertaining would be to watch the original and heckle it MST:3K style yourself.

Now, I don't mean to say that there's nothing to like about The Colbert Report. It certainly has it's moments, but making fun of Bill O'Reilly is simply too easy and too obvious to warrant half an hour, four times a week. By the third show, they're already repeating jokes and I find myself fidgeting for want of something as brilliant as in the first episode, when Colbert, promoting the use of the word "truthiness" promised to "feel the news at you."

Part of the problem is Colbert's character. He's pompous, arrogant, self-righteous, and always willing to put himself at the center of attention. (Particularly brilliant are monologues by Colbert standing in front of a portrait of himself standing by a portrait of himself.) However, it gets monotone after a while, and lacks the excitement of the real jerkalists he's imitating because, clearly, Colbert doesn't believe any of this. He's forced to harass guests who were nice enough to come on his show because that's what the bristly O'Reilly would do. So far, they're on to his game. Stone Phillips and Colbert engage in a contest of gravitas, and Fareed Zakaria asks if Colbert is ten times funnier than a comedian in Bangalore who would work for ten times less. Sometimes in the interviews Colbert, with little experience in interviewing guests, seems to be stuck, asking himself, WWBD? (What Would Bill Do?)

The show will have to be retooled. The question is when. Right now, I'm willing to watch it, because I like Colbert as a comedian, but the show is less insightful than the Daily Show, and less informative than Countdown, and less entertaining than either. But I suspect that the Daily Show crowd will slowly start to peel off, and they'll have to come up with a different shtick or fade off into cancellation.

So how do they fix it? One approach is to bring on the kind of crackpot pundits that Scarborough and O'Reilly find - the kind of people whose only credentials are that they write a blog and were on the show last week. Let Colbert run the kind of interviews he is famous for on the correspondent bits of Daily Show, but on the set in real time. This approach definitely has the potential for Jerry Springer style meltdowns, but might resurrect the dullest parts of a show without a bite.

Another approach is far more risky. Let Stephen Colbert be Stephen Colbert the man, not Stephen Colbert the character. The man, as revealed during an interview with NPR is likeable, smart, and funny. Colbert's character is only one out of three. Sure the show will probably become more like a basic cable Bill Mahar, but is that really a bad thing?

The choice I think would be the funniest is to let Colbert take on all of the jerkalists, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Matthews, Franken, and so on. He could target different styles and political views on each episode, either creating a character for each, or bringing in a supporting cast. In other words, let the show become a sketch comedy send-up of the whole genre, not just O'Reilly.

For now, I'll keep watching, hoping for something brilliant to happen, but I think in the next two or three months, something is going to have to change on the show to keep it fresh and watchable.

sou iu koto

For a long time, studying Japanese has been a kind of entertainment for me. The whole thing got started at an adult education class which presented a phrase-book introduction to the language. I bought some self-study books and picked up some of the writing system as well as some basic grammar. I wound up enrolling for some formal education at the local community college, and eventually transferred into the lecture sequence here at the university. I knew that if I didn't take the course officially, I wouldn't be able to force myself into the regular pattern of study necessary to improve at the language. In addition to learning about a fascinating language, I met some interesting people and made some good friends.

This semester, I enrolled for what I assumed to be the last course in the Japanese sequence that I was willing to commit to. It's basically the second half of a third or fourth year undergraduate curriculum. The course is taught completely in Japanese, and the new material is largely idiomatic or stylistic, as opposed to the core vocabulary or grammar taught in previous courses.

A strange thing is happening, though. I find that I no longer enjoy studying the language.

Part of me believes that this is a normal thing. It's time to move out of the classroom and do something interesting with what I know. I had to scrap plans to travel to Japan a few years ago due to changes in my project schedules and work responsibilities. At that time, I think taking these classes became a proxy for experiences I knew I would have to postpone for a while. Without a clear goal of how to use or apply the language, my motivation is flagging.

The other part of this is that the class has become difficult. Though I still have deep curiosity about the culture and the language, I struggle to keep abreast of what is going on in the class. I have to admit that I have several times considered withdrawing from the class. The deadline to switch my enrollment to pass/fail (something I have avoided because I know that the grade is a motivator to put in a good effort) is approaching. I have to admit that with each lecture that passes it becomes easier to consider making the switch.

I don't mean to say that I want to quit because the course has become hard. What I mean is that I want to try something else because I don't feel as though I am learning with the current strategy. I think that I have adopted some bad language habits (the details of which would bore you even more than this post already has) which need to be unlearned and reacquired. There are grammatical constructs which are necessary to success in the course and progress with the language in general that I now regularly misuse, as well as idiomatic expressions I no longer understand the meanings for. In other words, as this semester progresses, I think I am getting worse.

So what is the solution? The easiest one, to quit learning a useless language and move on, is unsatisfying. So is the obvious one, to continue to flounder until the end of the semester. If I really want to get some degree of mastery of the language, I feel that I really should go back to some of the basics and relearn some of what I have forgotten or underappreciated over the semesters. I don't know that I have the time for that, nor do I know how far back to go. I confess that re-enrolling at the community college to retake an intermediate-level course has its appeal.

But then it becomes a matter of priority, because I have ongoing problems with putting together my graduate research, which is even more important to my long term goals. The more I think about it, the more likely it will be that I'll have to switch this class to pass/fail, muddle through, and focus on getting through with graduate school. Once I get through this, I may have some chances to actually go to Japan and practice the language on the ground, and getting to the point where I have the chance to do that may be the best motivation yet.

Doing the Math

The computer I built in the summer of 1999 is finally starting to drag when I want to do basic things. Since I initially put it together, I've added 512MB of RAM to bring it up to 640MB, and added hard drives to bring total disk storage to 200GB. At this point, I am trying to decide if it's worth it to try to upgrade it one last time and get another year of service out of it. I have a decent computer in my office and a whiz-bang laptop when I have need for real power, but I'd like for this one to last as long as possible.

To be specific, for around $50, I can buy a new 1GHz processor, which will add about 50% more CPU power to the old girl. I consider this price, and then start thinking about how much it would cost to just install a new motherboard and CPU, but then that price keeps creeping upward because I'd also have to buy new RAM. (The old style isn't compatible anymore.) I think to even get it up to a paltry 1.5 GHz, I would have to spend around $150, and probably closer to $200 for a 2GHz upgrade. And then we're looking at the price range for some cheapo bargain machine that actually has some decent horsepower.

For now, I think it's probably best to try to format the main disk and reinstall the whole system, on the hope that all the detritus of running the machine for the last two and a half years (since my last full reinstall) is what's causing to to perform so badly. If that doesn't work, $50 seems a reasonable price to pay to for a few more months of use.

The High Life

I can't believe I didn't know about this before, but one of the greatest ad campaigns in television history is available, in its entirety, on the web. The Errol Morris directed Miller High Life ads are gorgeous and witty, and available on Morris's Web Site.

The best? "Boat", told almost entirely through sound effects and reaction shots and the poetic lament, "This is enough to put a High Life man off his lunch. Time was, a man knew how to command his own vehicle. Just how far are we willing to fall?" Or perhaps "Scurvy" which explains, "Your British sailor, circa 1740, knew that citrus fruit could prevent scurvy. Now that's gotta be the only conceivable reason a man would put a lime in his beer."

Black and Gold, Black and Blue

The Longhorns finally exorcised their demons against Oklahoma this weekend, defeating the once Big 12 champion at the annual Red River Shootout. Oklahoma is having an off year, and we probably shouldn't take the win as a sign of anything except that we beat a team we should have beaten. They'll still have to win against undefeated Texas Tech and an emotional rival in Texas A&M, as well as possibly two wins against Colorado (one next week, and again in the Big 12 Championship) before being able to reach the national title game at the Rose Bowl.

Tbe news wasn't all good, though. This weekend, I got to see my Vanderbilt Commodores and my New Orleans Saints play on television, and unfortunately, both of them got spanked.

Vandy was off to a great season, going 4-0 before letting one slip away against Middle Tennessee. This weekend, they played LSU, and although the final score of 34-6 doesn't indicate it, they went toe-to-toe with the nationally-raked Tigers. The score was actually 9-6 in the third quarter before the 'Dores defense began to tire and let the Tigers finally muscle in some late scores. Before the Middle Tennesse game, it looked like they might go 5-0, and only need 1 more win to be bowl eligible for the first time in two decades. Now, they face the tough part of their schedule, and they'll need wins against both Kentucky and South Carolina (or possibly against floundering Tennesee) to get there. It was a nice start to the season, but there's little hope right now.

The New Orleans Saints came out on Sunday completely unprepared to play. Against the Green Bay Packers, they looked like the NFL's version of the Washington Generals. It's saying something, I think, when two of the worst teams in the league (Minnesota and Green Bay) both score their only wins of the season against the Saints. Their season is rapidly slipping away, and with Joe Horn out with an injury, and Aaron Brooks's increasingly error-prone play, this is looking very much like the grim season I predicted earlier. It's a good thing we're not buying into the myth that the hopes for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast are riding on this team. Their shoulders aren't strong enough for that.

Tchotchke

Today was a pretty good day, computer problems notwithstanding.

It was First Thursday, which meant a good opportunity to go down to South Congress and hang out. Last time we were down there, one of the shops had a very nice selection of calaveras, and I kind of wanted one to decorate my office. Humorous and dark, and even a nod to Grim Fandango for us computer nerds.

The store didn't have quite the same selection that they had in September, so I didn't get anything there, but I did find a nice painted wooden statue of a boy and girl in summer yukata holding hands. (Dave says they're giving each other dap.) Little by little, I'll get my little corner of campus personalized.

I have some posters I need to bring in as soon as I can find some non-greasy, paint-safe poster putty.

Activate THIS!

I'm still using Microsoft Office 2000, even though at least two major versions of the tool has been released since I originally bought it. I don't really know what the major differences between the versions are, but for most things I've wanted to do, the older version is just fine.

The university has a licensing agreement with Microsoft, which enables mainline MS software to be available to students, faculty and staff for the cost of media (around $5 per disc.) When the program started, the justification was something like wanting to get students into the habit of getting Microsoft software through a legitimate distribution channel. I believe the original licensing terms were for up to two computers per copy, though the software was basically identical to the volume-licensed versions.

Since then, they've changed their licensing agreement to restrict the software to a single computer and added Product Activation to enforce that policy. I have two computers, a desktop and a laptop, and since there is no means to buy a second license under the university licensing agreement, I would have to pay full price for a second license. Alternately, I could just crack the Product Activation.

So you see, Microsoft is basically asking me to pay for less functionality or steal.

I tried using OpenOffice for a while, and it's a fine tool, but it suffers from general compatibility (i.e, nobody else on the planet is using it, so they can't read my files), as well as incomplete functionality for cross-references and endnotes.

What I really needed is for Office 2000 to support ruby text. For some reason, I thought that Office 2000 required an international add-on pack to make ruby (as well as alternate text flow) work properly. Fortunately, I figured out how to turn on the feature in Office 2000 by installing additional language kits from the installation CD. Office 2000 (and Word in particular) still doesn't support a reasonable genkoyoshi format like OpenOffice, but for international word processing, it now does everything I could reasonably hope for.

For now, I've kept from having to upgrade.

I Wonder What I Was Trying to Do

The other day, while trying to finish a paper for the Shanghai conference next year, Thorn asked me what my career plans for after graduation were. Specifically, he was asking what my reasons were for graduate school. The answer I gave him was some variation on the the sunk cost fallacy, but it got me thinking. About three years ago, I actively pursued leaving Austin and the graduate program here. Uncertainty and fear kept me from actually following through with those plans, even though in hindsight, I could have spared myself from a lot of debt and frustration. Now that many of my friends have moved on to other locales, there isn't a lot keeping me here, except for the sunk costs.

Anyway, that ties in directly with one of the shows I've been watching lately, Honey and Clover, a thoughtful Japanese animated program about a group of art college students trying to make the awkward transition from the safety of the post-adolescent world of college into the harshness of the real world. The opening episode features Takemoto reminiscing about his childhood when he once rode his green bicycle as far as he could without looking back. "I wonder what I was trying to do," he explains.

As the story progresses, we see people embrace and abandon their dreams. There's Morita, the intimidatingly brilliant seventh year student who cannot stay focused to finish his graduate thesis. There's Mayama, a serious and responsible industrial artist who is deeply in love with an emotionally and physically scarred young widow. There's Yamada, the beautiful pottery expert who waits for mamma's affections, even as her many jilted admirers move on with their lives and start their own families. There's Hagu, an emotionally immature, but tremendously gifted, painter who does not seem to be able to cope with the stresses brought on by her talent.

But then there's Takemoto. When the show opens, we think that the show will be about him, but he's just another character in a show surpassingly rich with detailed characters. He's not as brilliant as the others, and he seems to have joined art college mostly as an excuse to get away from the small town where he grew up. While he demonstrates flashes of brilliance in his architecture, he always pulls away, perhaps for fear of failing, perhaps for fear of succeeding. The conflict in his character is the tension between his unblinking pursuit of something and the sudden halt, when he asks himself "I wonder what I was trying to do."

These days, I feel a lot like that, and maybe Thorn's question hit me on a particularly sensitive day. In the most recent episode I've seen, Takemoto, having resigned himself to spending a fifth year in college to finish his wrecked thesis, decides to take a journey of self-awareness. For Takemoto, that involves mostly riding around by himself on his bike, sleeping in parks, and generally trying to figure out for himself what he wants to do with his life. A journey of self-awareness sounds so romantic, at least until Takemoto's supervising professor admits he's taken at least seven of them himself. I'm very curious how this story will work out, and rumor has it that the next two episodes are fantastic.

For me, I know my reasons are more than just sunk costs, but expressing them in so many words is difficult. I'm still learning, I have research I'm interested in, and I'm finally on a real path to graduation. What happens next is uncertain, but I think I'm a long way from needing a journey of self-awareness. What I need is more like a vacation.