keepin up

Well hello. The Chumblog has seen better days, I know, so this post will try to remedy that.

Much has changed since we last left off. In case you haven't heard...

• America has a black President (though whether he is actually that amazing is still up for debate
• I (successfully?) completed the first term of grad school
• the new topical blog has gotten off to a verrrry slow start
• I have struggled to kickstart a new era of ma vie (in more ways than one)
• the ducks beat the oklahoma state cowboys in the 2008 Holiday Bowl!
  

All of these things have combined to create quite a new world for a chumber. Fortunately, each new experience brings excitement. My life has been consumed by equal parts of

• reading; (okay not really, but I gotta pretend)
• class
• rererediscovering that great phenomenon we call "music" via last.fm, as well as other things which shan't be spoken of on the interwebz...
• getting closer to the ideal computing setup via, among other things, rhythmbox to listen to my music and share it with others, dropbox to sync files between my desktop, laptop, and cloudtop, simplifymedia to share my music and listen to that of even more people, and ubuntu to string it all together
• trying to forego eating out for buying groceries and, shocker i know, making meals
• playing pool and, occassionaly, playing pool well
• and becoming friends-bordering-lovers with my roommate (although no one should fret...old roommates have special real estate saved in my heart).

There have been countless news articles and happenings that I've wanted to comment on here, but I never really got around to it. I'll make up for it with two today.

In a great opinion piece for the NYT, the top dog over at Netflix gave his opinion on how President Obama should handle the issue of exorbitant pay to big time CEO's. I'll let you read the article on your own (it's short), but this pretty much sums it up:

Perhaps a starting place for “tax, not shame” would be creating a top federal marginal tax rate of 50 percent on all income above $1 million per year. Some will tell you that would reduce the incentive to earn but I don’t see that as likely. Besides, half of a giant compensation package is still pretty huge, and most of our motivation is the sheer challenge of the job anyway.

If only we had more guys like Reed Hastings...

Completely unrelated but even more interesting to me is the saga of a legal proceeding involving a grad student at Boston University and that evil, silly, asinine, backward consortium of crooks called the RIAA. After doing something that most like every college student has done at one point, Joel Tenenbaum was served by the RIAA and very quickly was facing the difficult choice of settling for $10,000 or going to court against a huge corporate legal machine. That is, until a Harvard Law professor, Charles Nesson, who runs a class on hands-on legal experience and specializes in internet and society, decided to take on the case as one the course's projects. The project has brought on several young law students and has generating quite a following. One early victory was when the students working on the case successfully convinced the judge to allow a pretrial hearing to be streamed over the web (against heavy RIAA complaints of course). For more on the case, see this article over at Ars Technica.

I've always been excited about file sharing and the new (I hope) music discovering paradigm that can be created with things like computers that are linked together over things like the internetz. While plenty of people find this to be highly bad and illegal and maybe even wrong, even calling it 'piracy,' I'm keeping an open mind about it all. The article linked below makes mention of how Radiohead made more money than their all their previous cd sales combined using one simple, seemingly dumb tactic: allow people to choose their own price and download the CD for whatever they wanted. The experiment worked great, and other artists have picked up on it. I just bought my first from Roman Candle...gave $3.50 for their latest. I think it's great. They even had a choice of bitrate and file type. The future is on it's way....For a really long but absolutely exquisite and perfectly informative discussion on the whole debate, read this piece written in the aftermath of the shutdown of OiNK's Pink Palace, a filesharing community that I was a member of and miss everyday.

Okay, well, that's looking like a pretty good post. Hopefully it won't be several months before I find the time to rant again.

And, one more thing. Listen to the everybodyfields. It will sooth your soul.

really Mr. Kristol???

In his New York Times opinion column Monday (see title link), William Kristol opined that the "ignorant masses" are really no problem at all these days. I don't know how I feel about that, but I do know what I think about the following statement made by Kristol

Indeed, as Sept. 11 did not result in a much-feared (by intellectuals) wave of popular Islamophobia or xenophobia, so the market crash has resulted in remarkably little popular hysteria or scapegoating.

The reason he brings this up is, quite honestly, a little mystifying to me. I guess the point is that intellectuals aren't always right, so we should embrace this vulgarization (even though Kristol can't seem to decide on if it exists or not). However, I think it is pretty absurd to argue that the post-9/11 era has been without heightened levels of animosity toward Muslims and those who might look like Muslims. What society is he observing? There are too many accounts of people objecting, with anger, that Barak Obama is a Muslim and/or Ay-rab. There are too many McCain supporters drumming up the non-issue of Barack Obama's middle name. Sure we didn't intern Muslim-Americans, but that is a credit to our moderate progression since earlier times, not evidence of a lack of widespread xenophobia.

Kristol also stipulates that politics in democracy are always "vulgar," pointing out, rather pedantically, that fellow conservative journalist over at the Journal Peggy Noonan was wrong when stating that Sarah Palin's candidacy is symptomatic of a "new vulgarization" of US politics. What Noonan explains, and quite effectively at that, is that Palin represents the final shift to vapid down-homeyness. Beginning with all prestige and no "vulgus" appeal, to a delicate mixture, to Bush (whether he retained any prestige is hard to determine), to finally Palin, the quintessential no experience, plenty of twang candidate.

Noonan is correct in pointing out that Palin brings absolutely nothing to the ticket save for that intriguing one moment disappointing the next colloquilism. Saying "maverick" and "hockey" and "folks" doesn't make you qualified, and that's just about all Palin has. For crying outloud, Sen. McCain, on his awkward Letterman appearance, cited Palin's experience on the PTA when listing off her three life accomplishments. This is laughable: how many presidential and vice-presidential candidates have been on the PTA? I'd be willing to bet lots, but you never heard of it as evidence of experience until 2008. I think that simple fact reveals a lot about just how much Palin is lacking.

just a few short days left..

...that is to say, just a few more days before the excitingly scary world of grad school actually begins, a two-year (at least) commitment to drastically limiting my life to the activities of reading, writing, and gtf'ing. Yes, orientation is, from what I hear, a fairly intense week of meeting, meeting, greeting, and meeting. After that week, it's GER 311 and then the lecture portion of HIST 104, the course I'm GTF'ing for. Tuesday finds me in my seminar on methods and writing...HIST 612. Wednesday is Monday again (both of which days are my office hours...9-10:30), and thursday...dreaded thursday...is the first day of leading the discussion section. Who knows how that will go. Apparently they will mostly be Freshmen, so it's their first time too. I don't really remember if I was scared during my first classes in college. I'll have to come up with an intimidating entrance.

But living in Eugene has been great. The town is fun and beautiful, there are tons of bike trails, great concerts and restaurants, and a lively community in general. Since being in Eugene, I have:

• bought a bike
• seen the Ducks win twice at Autzen, and once on tv in West Lafayette
• picked up keys to my office, the mailroom, and history grad student lounge
• seen the Old 97's at W.O.W. Hall and Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles at Eugene Celebration
• read a bit of historiography
• gotten the idea for a more focused, topical blog
• not started that blog
• become slightly more liberal
• moved in to my first big boy apartment
• setup my new computer to dualboot Vista and Ubuntu
  

All of these things have been fun and exciting. But, this wonderful freedom is soon ending, as mentioned above. Hopefully this will be exciting too, and I'm sure it will. The problem is, it will also be very very very very busy, and probably difficult and perhaps even overwhelming.

Oh, and in addition to my list above (I guess I could just add to it, but why?), I have also experience the high price of West Coast commodities, though some new California friends tell me I ain't seen nothing yet... Hence, my diet has been pretty sparse i.e. ramen, totino's ...mm tasty, and lots of sandwiches, tap water, and pasta roni.

Something else I forgot but definitely deserves its own paragraph is my trip to the coast. Technically it was in celebration of Clayton's birthday, but this is my blog. We went down a super cool trail through old growth forest that ended at a huge secluded beach. Then we left to explore the super cool tidal pools where I saw real life starfish for the first time in my life. For some reason, I was thinking they would be soft, but they are still hard when living. Maybe it's because of Patrick. Who knew?

Anyways, it's taken me about an hour to write this...mostly because I am very easily distracted. I'll have to get some pictures of all these wonderful, new things up here at some point. Of course that will involved a combination of buying a new camera and taking Ali's.

Until next time....listen to the everybodyfields (I'll let you find that one w/o my help of linkage)!!!

http://history.uoregon.edu/faculty/profiles/index.php?name=jarnigan

the life of a chumber, chapter three - 2 (+) years in the emerald city

Well, I know it's been a while, but welcome back to me.

I (we) arrived in Eugene, OR this past Sunday, after an exhausting but fun (at times) trip across the country.  After starting in Oak Ridge, TN, I spent four weeks working in Tulsa, OK, first languishing at landscape work and then standing and sweating over a hot grill at Sonic on 38th and Harvard.  Finally all of that ended and I hit the road, along with my travel companions, the Hilshers - that is Gerald, Vickie, Ali, Wade and Kramer.  We made our first stop after a 13 hour drive in Breckenridge, CO, which happens to be named after Buchanan's VP John C. Breckinridge.  The first "i" was changed to an "e" when Breckinridge sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.

After a short walk through town and breakfast at a sidewalk table with the Krame, we started back out for Ogden, UT, which is just past Salt Lake City.  Along the way, I stopped to snap a picture and grab a genuine Desert Southwest rock.  Then came the last major stretch of our journey, up through Idaho and finally taking us into the Beaver State.  Since we had been driving basically nonstop for days, and it was a good 10 hours anyway, we stopped in Bend instead of trudging on to TrackTown.  The resorty town of Bend was definitely enjoyable and merits a trip back as soon as possible, although we did take time out to ride the ski lift up Mt. Bachelor.

After what felt like a year, we headed for Eugene.  The first few days have been consumed by setting up Ali in her lovely apartment, as well as some funner items such as a daytrip to the coast, where we saw the country's largest sea cave, which just happens to be a haven for hundreds of massive potato-looking sea lions.

Today the rest of the crew leaves and real life begins to set in, though fortunately it doesn't really begin until Sept. 29th for me.  Be on the lookout for trip and Eugene pictures to bring some life to the blog.

Until then, should you want to spend a solid 30 hours driving time jaunting across much of the western United States, here's a custom roadmap of our journey.  I should warn you - most of it is pretty boring, so you'll need a good stack of CD's, including a good themed mix such as this one I came up with.

podtesting

Summer is here and I really haven't done much of anything. My room is hardly walkable due to the mounds of "stuff" and I am yet to find a job. Several things looked promising but fell through for various reasons, but I'm still hopeful. The most stressful thing is just getting to Oregon. The AAA Trip Calculator tells me it will cost a square $550 to take a 1998 4wd 4Runner to Eugene...and I would have a loaded-down 97 model :( I just have about half that in the bank right now, and that's only one expense I face in the months ahead.

One good note is that I did find a place to stay (hopefully) that is just half a mile from campus and fairly reasonable. And thinking about grad school is still exciting. I recently preffed to be a grader in Modern Europe, a section leader in Western Civ, or a grader in War in the Modern World. They all look interesting and have neat professors, so that should be fun. Of course it's very nerve-racking as well, since baby Centenary and it's 800 students didn't exactly prepare me for that inevitably odd TA-student relationship.

Anyways, one thing I wanted to do this summer was keep up the Saturday Morning Blue Plate Special via podcasting. This is a first rough test in that effort; I only dug up an old janky Labtec mic, and I'm not sure if it sounds good enough. But we shall see what Schleuss and the good folks at KSCL think.

i'm alive

So I know I've been neglecting the Chumblog for a bit now, but things have been quite hectic. Let's see, since my last post of the 29th of February, what all has happened in life? Hmmmm

• well, I've received the rest of my rejection letters, as well as some accepts with no funding from Colorado and Tennessee, and one final notification that it isn't happening at Brandeis
  
• I visited the University of Oregon up in Eugene for spring break
• My laptop has been fried, which in turn ...
  
• caused me to discontinue the online portion of my senior seminar project
  
• I recently accepted the offer at Oregon
• And today, my new lcd monitor came in the mail.

So that's a lot of exciting stuff. Add that to the stress and excitement of graduating from college. I really don't know what to think about it all. I'm super stoked about heading to the Northwest for a new adventure, but leaving Centenary will definitely be sad.

After my last major other obligation, my time has been increasingly dedicated to senior sem. Even though I neglected it for a time because I was annoyed with my computer and I just didn't care too much since I was already into school for next year, now I'm a wee concerned that I'm going to be embarrassed about the final project. So we are going to try and make sure that doesn't happen. In related new, the more I work on it the more I think I'd like to be an American historian. Shhh, don't tell that to the good folks at Oregon. I also was really keen on American for a time in the past, but then I really got into European when I was working more in that here at school, so hopefully that will happen again ;)

I mentioned a monitor came in for me. Yes, I don't have a working computer so it may seem weird, but I got it for a good deal on Newegg and the computer I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy this summer doesn't come with a display so I'll need one.

I really didn't have much to say on this blog, but blogger's photo uploader is quite sloow. I added some integrated links to the text to pass the time and help you reader's enjoy my loving contribution to web 2.0.

OKAY, well it looks like it's the slowness of my school's internet connex. Thank you kindly, Apogee.

EDIT: Everything except for google pages and blogspot is running smooth, so maybe this problem is on google's end. I guess that's what you get when one company runs the entire internetz. To Apogee, you don't deserve any apologies because you suck on a regular basis.

So I'll just sign off for now. The image was a screenshot of me running Ubuntu that demonstrated the compiz cube effect and transparent windows, as well as IEs4linux

EDIT: I uploaded it to facebook, but it's smaller res so you'll just have to deal...

Why run IE on any computer, much less a linuxbox, you ask. Well, I read that it helped to get IE up before you tried to fool with using Microsoft Word in Wine. Why not OpenOffice.org Writer you say? Well, frankly, I hate Oo.o so far, and am desperately trying to configure Word 2003 here. That's why.

close-minded professors and open source software

My life has recently been consumed by all things graduate school...last fall it was applying and convincing four professors that 18 schools was not too many and that writing letters for a number of them on my behalf wouldn't be all that time consuming. The first part of Winter, from January 15 to February 1, was a brief respite from all the hubbub. However, the days since then have been even more dreadful than the entire process of filling out applications, printing statements and writing samples, and coordinating it all with professors.

This, my friends, is the season of decision notification. After gleefully reading an acceptance letter from the University of Wisconsin, I have systematically been humbled by some of the finer institutions of America. Part of me thinks there is a History Department Roundtable that convenes and decides to trick students into thinking they are worthy, only to follow up with a plethora of "sorry, but we just had so many applicants this year..." letters. Fortunately, two discoveries have given me a modicum of enjoyment during this apprehensive time: one close-minded professor and an unrelated bit of free software.

My wonderful political science professor, Rodney Grunes, makes our class read the New York Times everyday. I've been following the primary season using precisely that outlet, and in Tuesday's Op-Ed section I found an interesting piece. Apparently they had the neat idea of asking several different experts what questions they thought were being ignored in all the debate. Most of the respondents seemed thoughtful enough, but then I got to the questions of one Ruth Wedgwood, professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University. JHU is one of those schools that, unfortunately, will not be graced with my presence this coming fall, and reading the ridiculously hawkish, narrow-minded, stupid comments of Prof. Wedgwood took most of my rejection pain away. Her first, and, reason leads us to believe, most natural, question, was,

Senator Obama, as commander in chief an American president must understand the sense of honor that motivates his armed forces. Last September, MoveOn.org ran an advertisement in The Times that mocked Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, as "General Betray Us." You chose not to vote on the Senate resolution that condemned the advertisement. Would you still characterize the Senate vote as a "stunt" and "empty politics"?

The fact that this was apparently the most pressing issue on the mind of this well-paid professor at one of the more illustrious institutions of higher learning in our nation is disturbing. With the dire economic situation, millions of Americans without health care and facing home foreclosure, the entire international scientific community talking about environmental tiping points and a climate that is literally on the brink of destruction, Professor Wedgwood is primarily concerned that Senator Obama didn't step up to the plate and censure an organ of the American free press. Apparently honor means never allowing the people to utter a negative syllable about an individual with bars on his shoulder.

Wedgwood also takes a parting shot at Senator Clinton when she says

The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution bars any former president from election to a third term. Is it truly consistent with the spirit of the Constitution to have the same professional couple occupying the White House for 12 years? Isn't this all the more true when Bill Clinton promised that voters would receive, during his first term, "two for the price of one"?

Only finding such absurd and embarrasing comments has made me realize that I could never be happy at an institution that rewards such an obvious lack of scholarship, intelligence, and courtesy. I'm going to go out on a limb, temporarilly ignore my rule gainst generalizing, and possibly even display a tiny bit of animosity, and say that I doubt such statements would ever come from the lips, pen, or keyboard of any professor from any department at the more progressive, prestigious, and higher-ranked-by-US News & World Report University of Wisconsin-Madison, a beacon of learning that provides cultural, intellectual, and practical support to an entire state of cold, loving, Packers-cheering people.

The latter half of the title to this entry refers to my newfound interest in open source software, specifically the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. Some kind soul left an installation CD in the library, and I've since tested it out and fallen in love. It should be noted that I'm writing this blog after booting from the CD. I've decided that the first thing I buy with my next paycheck is going to be an external harddrive, partly so that I can backup my music and other files, partly so that I can install Ubuntu (or possibly Xubuntu) on my laptop. It's very exciting.

To close, I'll give you what Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom would look like if I was writing it this week: Microsoft goes down for not keeping up with the times, the NYT editorial board goes up for providing me with a laugh, Google goes up for making viable server-side solutions to propriety software, dedicated nerds all over the world go way up for slowly paving the way to a post-Microsoft world, the JHU board of trustees drops for hiring Beth Wedgwood, and every citizen of Wisconsin climbs to the top for never allowing such a tragedy to happen.