Posts from — April 2005

I got back from camping with Kappa today. It was a good trip, I think everyone had a good time except maybe those who got sick. A few thoughts:

- Jim Thorpe, PA is completely infested with zombies. If you believe otherwise then you’re just being tricked by zombie propaganda. The only people who aren’t zombies are either camping or running for judge. They also have an insane asylum that they claim is an “old jail”, but last I checked old jails don’t have electroshock treatment, ghosts of insane people, and Chief Bromden, so that’s obviously a lie.

- About half of us had a legitimate discussion and debate about politics around the fire. I really enjoyed this because it was something I used to do a fair amount with my friends in high school, but have done much more rarely at Lehigh. There were certainly disagreements about things, as there should be, but the conversation stayed civil. I know that it got me to consider some issues from a different perspective (maybe I’ll have time to read that book this summer, Kym). If you think that intelligent political debate with peers who don’t agree with you is infeasible and not worthwhile, I think you’re just not trying hard enough. Debate isn’t deceptive word manipulation, it’s discourse and it’s important. Not talking about issues contributes to polarization, in my opinion. Usually you’ll realize that you agree with more people than you expect.

- We went to the Asa Packer mansion before leaving town, it was really interesting (more than I expected, actually). His son Harry went to Lehigh but died of cirrhosis of the liver… go figure.

- The Boss Bar is an effective tool against zombies. It may also be used for roofing.

Today I was in Dr. Levine’s last class at Lehigh. It made me pretty sad… he’s one of my favorite professors and among one of the smartest people I’ve met. I lost ever argument I had with him, but that never stopped me from trying. It was a lot of fun.

(This is a rare political post. It’s probably horribly underinformed, but hopefully it’ll get some people to investigate the issue on their own and get their own opinions. I might make this sort of thing a more regular occurrence since I don’t think enough political discussion goes on. Ask Jon Stewart about it.)

It’s amazing how many people in Washington must be better than John Bolton. What a joke. I read a bunch of different sides of the story (liberal and conservative “news”) from google news, and the conservative news source defending Bolton convinced me that he’s a bad nomination.

link

I’m not going to go line-by-line and debate the article, but a few lines stood out:

“Our U.N. ambassador needs to be someone strong-willed enough to confront the U.N. and help bring the reform it so desperately needs. And that’s exactly why it should be Bolton.”

It took me a second reading to realize how much I don’t like these sentences. The lead-in to this statement is about how the UN didn’t live up to its lofty goals, which is something I don’t necessarily contest (though that doesn’t imply that the UN has not had a positive effect). So, then, it makes sense to reform the UN so that it can have a chance at improving. But what is GWB’s idea of a better UN? Based upon the last 5 years, I’d imagine it’s one that supports the US more closely. War with Iraq would have been much easier politically with support of the UN. I don’t think he has some sort of diabolical scheme to castrate the UN, and I really do believe that the president generally believes what he is doing is best for the country, but I’d rather have a diplomat at the UN than a reformer with questionable motivations.

“If the Bolton nomination fails, an equally clear message will be sent. The message will be that when push comes to shove, Democrats are holding the cards in our nation’s capital.”

No, the message will be that the guy just sucks.

I signed up for Public Speaking for summer session 1. It’s Tuesday/Thursday 4-7PM. I’ll probably be taking it pass/fail, since I’m going to be working full time anyway. It’s not for any requirement, I just think that it’s something I need to get better at regardless if I get a job or keep going to school after next year. I’ve definitely improved in the last few years in this regard, but I can do a lot better. Patrick said it was a good class, so I’m looking forward to it.

I just realized tonight while writing some emails that my sentence structures are very bland and repetitive. Maybe it’s just that I’m really tired, or maybe my sentences are always like that. (The previous sentence is a good example of how I write all the time: two statements separated by some sort of pause. That was one, too.)

Running app work is making progress, I should reach my goal of having something releaseworthy by the weekend. I’m really good at meeting deadlines that I make up and have no real-world consequences. Some people seem to use this app regularly, at least, which is more than I can say for most of my projects. I sure wish I could find a way to legally get the map data, though.. then I’d definitely be looking to make it into a way to subsidize my hosting costs. I’ve easily spent 50 hours on it, for nothing more than a sense of accomplishment.

I made great progress on my running site today. It’s not stuff that you’ll see if you use it right now, but hopefully in a week (or less, depending on how things go) I’ll be ready to call it version 0.3. So many ideas, not enough time. I need to hire an intern.

I’m really tired, too, but I guess that comes with the territory.

For some reason I’ve been in an odd/good mood in the last week. I guess a big part of it is that I have less responsibility than any time in the last two years (maybe longer), and I think I was getting exhausted. Now I don’t sit around and worry about myself and others, I’m just going with the flow and being satisfied with it. I even did an optional homework assignment and made it to Algorithms the next day! (I wasn’t doing this to be a nerd, my homework average is bad in that class)

All of my finals are on the first day of finals, so I should have a lot of free time after that, which I expect will be reasonably productive and fun. I’m working on a bunch of new features for my running site that should be ready in the next week.

Is anyone interested in starting some sort of informal running club? I’ve been running a fair amount lately, and I’d like to be more social about it. Maybe skill levels are too varied for it to work, but I think it’s promising.

We could even adapt to different skill levels by running a short slow loop near campus, then some people can stop running and the rest can go on a longer run at whatever speed.

Running Club was one of my favorite things in high school… I probably can’t do a good job explaining it since it mostly consists of inside jokes and massive/hilarious advertising campaigns.

Maybe some of this, too.

Thoughts?

Oh yeah, I got into grad school today. Ding!