ChapterZero

Kill 9, my school webpage, is finally up! There’s nothing on it but the bare design, but it’s up. Major triumph for me. I blame the lack of content solely on UH– all my [engineering/math/science]classes are ridiculously not-engaging. And I reserve that page for engaging school content; at least for now. So, I blame that lack of content on UH. You should too.

I’m looking at a clever piece of trash here, a hazardous material mock dossier on women, which lists their ‘properties’ and propensities for reaction. I’m not female [really, I’m male :)], and *I* find it offensive. My guess is that is because of three things: one of my [male] professors at school is always pontificating on how gender bias in communication is harmful to both the speaker and the listener, an article I read by Douglas Hofstadler equating in a fictional manner, gender bias to racial bias (not a pretty picture), and a book I started to read by a lesbian feminist (!) which, among worst trues, referred to the Universe of Discourse as the paternal universal of discourse. Hmmm… *pud*, I wonder what she was trying to say. Lately, I’ve been trying to censor myself; when I’m in a car and a driver in an adjacent car does something stupid, for instance, I try to think in terms of a female, rather than male, driver. Surprising how ingrained assumptions can be.

Anyway, visit my website. I have two articles for the blog which I did last night, so I’ll upload them sometime soon. One is relatively long and passionate :). Visit the school site

I’m thinking of mass spamming all the people on the hsep01 mailing list. Just because they never post anything…

I hear some people off in the background talking about Lyndon LaRouche. Interesting, they –just college students — seem to have more knowledge *and* sense about the issues than my venerable parents. One of the guys is in my History class, where he continually shows himself to be a fount of historical facts. Maybe I’ll go over and insinuate myself into their conversation. Nah, on second thought, I’ll just sit here and eavesdrop… excuse me, continue eavesdropping.

Netscape on all platforms seems to be the crappiest passable browser. For instance, it renders my blog completely without formatting. Hello, it’s called CSS! Whatever happened to the Mozilla promise? I’ve Mozilla running on Linux– actually, I have it installed on my system, which unfortunately isn’t hooked up to the net– and it looks pretty darn good. Why hasn’t it been released for production-quality use yet? How long can it take to get the bugs out of an *open source* code base? Why am I asking all these rhetorical questions?

I just started reading another book on UNIX, in this case, on the implementation of System V Release 4(?). It (the book) seems like the perfect admixture of an intro to OS concepts textbook, and a hacker’s purview of the actual code and design behind the OS. Maybe I’ll actually finish this one…

School is turning out to be boring, as expected. I might even end up a year behind in my degree-plan. Hopefully I’ll only be a semester behind, if they would just accept my I-thought-this-meant-something-and-it-should-at-this-crappy-school AP physics score!

In related news, the Honors College has been funding a radio program. Of course, they require the program draw a little attention to them; an excerpt: “over the past 30 yrs, … [students have attended] including hundreds of National Merit Scholars.” Hmmm… what a scam. I came here because I was misled into thinking I would recieve the National Merit Scholarship; when I was ineluctably in UH’s grasp, they withdrew the carrot. And now, I find they’re using me and my kind in an ad (ok, so I have no right to control the label National Merit Scholar, but still). I wonder, where does all the money *I pay* because they denied me my scholarship go to? Paying for those ads?

I suck at chess (just in case you didn’t deduce that from the *big title* !). I was playing for about two minutes when, bam! checkmate. Very embarassing, especially when there were two chess aficionados watching on while talking about Kasparov(?) and Big Blue. They must have been thinking, big loser. Oh well… That’s the last time I play chess, at least until I master it :).

I was thinking about our educational system earlier. What is its purpose, and does it meet it? I think that was an example of the answer in general, no. Not that I think the system needs to teach us how to play chess per se. But I have learned absolutely nothing that I found useful in those few moments. No strategies came to mind on how to even approach the problem. And *that* is what life will be like; I won’t be thrown problems I already know the answer to. That only happens in our crappy school system.

I would much rather be learning general thinking and problem solving strategies than the specific applications of them I’m being exposed to now. Take for instance something like Tom Paine’s Common Sense; currently we’re told ‘it was a polemic that contributed towards the revolutionary spirit of the times.’ Really? And what was the reasoning behind it? Can we break it down and see how it was written to address the problems of the times? Admittedly that wasn’t a premo example, but there are many more instances where it would have been more beneficial for our classes to focus on the motivation behind, and the problem solving process involved in, lots of the works we study. It seems as though in an attempt to give us a broad knowledge base, the designers of the educational system cheapened the courses. What use is it for us to know of the Republic, or even the ideas represented in the Republic, if we can’t reproduce them for our own edification, and know them indepth enough to construct truly searching commentary on it?

In short, I think college has been drastically cheapened in terms of the impact it was to have on students’ thinking. Now, it is merely a preparation for specialized careers, not life.

I was upstairs ironing my clothes for today (last night), when I heard some people on the news talking about how NYC is trying to decide whether to rebuild the World Trade Center disaster area, or build a monument. I would have posted my thoughts last night, but my dad wanted to use the computer. So here goes…

Why is there even any doubt as to what is right here? I am not a sentimental person, and even I can see that it would be irresponsible and careless of the government to ignore the fact that so many *innocent* people died there– innocent, being an often misused word, meaning civilian and therefore not expected to die during ordinary military encounters. Can you truly think anyone but heartless businesses actually want to ‘rebuild to show the terrorists life goes on’? The fact is, life doesn’t go on for hundreds of people. They died only a few months ago, and now these folk are conniving a means of reconstruction, heedless of the fact that would leave these people buried under concrete and steel, an ignomious death. In two hundred years, would our descendants be able to look at a business center and even imagine the greatest act of terroristm perpetrated in this century had occured there? No, I say we *aren’t* obligated to send a message of any kind to the terrorists, the only message they need is the one being delivered by the army: we won’t stand for these kinds of aggression. Instead, the site of the disaster should be full of meaning for us as Americans; when we go there, whether today when we can see the tragic debris, or hundreds of years in the future when it will be cleared, we need to be reminded of what occurred, a national tragedy. I say, level the land and construct a memorial park on that 16 acres of land. What greater message can we send to our prosterity: after disaster, we can rise again from the ashes, in a manner respectful and mournful for those who lost their lives. Imagine the emotional and even spiritual significance of such a park springing out of the middle of one of the most urban areas of the US. That is the only memorial I can think would come even close to being worthy of the 9/11 victims.

I have to say, I never expected l33t.ca to come through on their promise of upping their serving speed. But thankfully, I was wrong: now I can actually say I am using the best free service on the Web. It only takes a few seconds for my site to load up. And the restrictions, while increased, are very minimal. I still have PHP, CGI, MySQL, etc. Gotta love it.

And apparently, not living on campus has significant perks: I’ll be getting back at least $1250, and if all goes well closer to around $5000. Subtract the cost of the TNRCC truck, and I still have some money left over. I was thinking about starting a comp business of some kind. But what?

My friend J has persuaded me to apply for transfer to Cornell. It sounded both feasible and desirable at the time, but now I’m wondering. If I go to Cornell, there is no way I’ll be getting scholarship money back, whereas if I stay at UH, if I recieve any more scholarship money, I’ll be living on campus, and getting money back. So, this weekend I’ll be doing a cost-benefit analysis. At the least, I was in a self-piteous slump when he convinced me to start applying for a transfer, so thinking about it helped me out. That’s what friends are for.

Speaking of, I have a tendency to meet the most singularly interesting people. I say singularly interesting people to imply strange, but worth knowing. Like this week, I started talking to a guy in my Cal class who was in my ECE 1100 class last semester– his claim to strangeness: reminds me of Clark Kent in a way. Anyway, turns out he’s a pretty good webdeveloper (responsible for chrisbellforcongress.com, and he claims to know all the useful programming languages under the Sun^h^h^hsun :). How do you argue with that? ;]

Anyway, I was supposed to have made some evangelical business(?) cards for this guy at my church a *really* long time ago, maybe a year now. The problem was, there was this piece of art he wanted on it– reads “the gift of God is eternal life” one way, and “the wages of sin is death” the other way– that I would have to scan in, and my scanner has been defunct for a long time now. So I was planning on going to Kinko’s to scan it, but then I found out our school provides free use of scanners; I went to the ECC and scanned it and should have the cards done, and be rid of his pestering, by the end of the week. So that near $200 I’m paying UH in technology fees starts working for itself…

I have more to say, but my CTS is acting up like a witch, so adios amigos.

This not living on campus thing decidedly sucks. I hate not being able to go to sleep @ 1am. Now I have to go to sleep @ 10pm– that’s 3 whole hours that I could be being productive in ;). And the library.. how I miss the long hours spent there. Chalk it all up as impetus for me to apply for scholarships. And they’re raising tuition too…

I think part of my wishlist might come to fruition: my dad is supposedly arranging for me to get a car. Actually more of a truck, but it’s a vehicle! The TNRCC, which he works for and therefore supposedly has an inside track on, buys trucks every couple of years and then auctions them off in like 5 years. So for about $2000, I should have a decent vehicle. Now insurance…

I’m currently blogging from a Sun Solaris workstation @ UH. Cool ain’t it. Well I had to register at the Engineering Computing Center for one of my classes. That provides access to an NT account *yeak* and a Solaris account. Amazing OS really, it has it’s own world: everything from monitor to keyboard to mouse to CPU is SUN stamped. I love it though it will take some getting used to after Linux. Wonder if there’s a CLI. All I would need now is unlimited space… Although you know, I could setup something allowing me to mount a remount drive, like a free shell account from somewhere, under this system. The pleasures of UNIX spring anew. Notice how no one is using these, they all migrated to the NT crapchines instead. Their loss, my gain. Now I have foot room *sigh*

Can’t speak for all guys by a long shot, but I know what I want: a job and a car. The way I see it, I could then start to have a life. As it is, I have virtually no social existence outside of my house and church. And I don’t even like my church. I say all of that is because I have no means of transportation and, even if I did, I have no money to spend on gas or recreation. Obviously the remedy to this situation would be to get a job and buy a car. Well it’s my fault I don’t have a job and have never had one. I’ll try to get an on-campus job working at the bookstore this semester though. As for the car, the only way I can get one is to buy it myself. What a crock- they had enough money to give a car to my sister and buy one for themselves, but when it comes to my turn. That’s the way I’d like to think it was, but fact is, my parents have no money right now. Any way I look at it, I don’t see myself having much of a life until I at least get a job. Because then I could take the bus, go downtown or something; I’d have money to spend.