Brian's World

Writing at an angle

Tonight I’m writing to you from a 40 degree angle. My laptop is off to my left side connected to an external monitor, located at about a 40 degree angle to my right. I’m sitting such that I face the laptop, but my head is turned to view the other monitor, where this composition window sits.

I was primarily wondering how the position in which I sit effects the messages by which I send. We’ll see how this comes out, and throw it in the datapool to be fished out some time later.

Today has been one of those less than moderate kind of days. If someone had asked me how I was doing I would have said “Okay, yourself?” And while I’m actually doing less than Okay (which I equate to around a 60% on the “Day is going good-o-meter”), I would never say that I am having a bad day, because then the other persons feels obligated to listen even though they probably don’t care… and if I don’t share with them I look like a self-centered person too. So I say “Okay”. I’ve also considered saying “I’ve had better”, which would enable me to talk about how I have had really good days without focusing so much on today. A tactic only to be used to avoid talking about the current day. But no one really asked, so it doesn’t really matter.

I got a haircut today from Nick at Nick’s Barbershop. Nick is old, and doesn’t work very often anymore, so I was surprised to see him there. He gave me a nice haircut, and didn’t distract me by talking about baseball or Judge Judy… subjects I only pretend to know about because I am sitting in a chair and someone has the future of my head for the next few weeks in their hands.

Mom is trying to make me get fat again. I really don’t like it when she, or anyone, tries to do this. She has always said to me that once upon a time she was as skinny as I was, and that I will gain weight someday. I don’t recall any point in that story where her mom cooked her 2 times the amount of food she wanted. If I am to gain weight, likely caused by a slowing metabolism, poor nutrition, and lackluster exercise habits… I don’t think the gaining weight beforehand process is going to be a positive contributer. Luckily, returning to college next week will enable me to avoid just enough food to counteract the extra large portions mom has been preparing this week. Hopefully my lack of a scale at RPI will report that I am back at my normal weight in no time.

I was trying to think of things that I would want in my life, and continually coming back to a central theme of desire. I won’t lie to you, I think there is something deeper than desire, or desirability, but I’m not sure what it is yet. I can site many an example where I would like to be desired in some way. Certainly not in the physical sense… I won’t joke around with you. No one swoons when I walk through the door; though I try not to make anyone feel nauseous. Its like hrm, pull out your mobile communication device and look at how many incoming communications you receive where someone actually needs you for something… that would be total # of incoming calls minus # of incoming calls where a parrot could be on the other end of the phone. [There is a story about a parrot I should tell if I haven’t already]. You could measure the same online via email, website, digital message, etc applying a similar heuristic. As one program calculated today, I have roughly a 0.6% desire ranking. I do not know what a 100% desire ranking, but I think that might be for someone like President Obama, an executive at a company, etc. I don’t think that becoming a phone operator or directory assistance person would solve my problems either, I think there is something deeper I should be exploring with the time I don’t have.

I have developed a new theory. Its quite simple, and pretty catchy. There are some days you should build bridges, and others you just need to shoot zombies.

I would explain it now, but my battery is reporting 17 minutes left which is probably inaccurate.

Goodnight Moon.

Right Round

There is this new song out by one ‘FloRida’ entitled… well I don’t know, but there is a stanza in the song that is neat, referencing someones head, presumably metaphorically, spinning “right round, right round.” While I can’t figure out how “going down” can trigger this reaction, the stanza is pretty neat. I guess if you were oriented sideways, like laying down, something could, in theory, push your head right with enough force such that it would rotate right. I guess you’d have to be laying down on your right side for this to actually happen.. but that’s a moot point. The rest of the song makes me want to vomit, but I do a pretty good job at tuning out the junk. If this ‘FloRida’ spoke slower and not in rap, I might be able to understand why someone’s head is spinning around.. actually I think that both parties have their heads spinning around in a clockwise fashion, but whatever.

Sometimes I get really excited when I start to scan through the start of a data set because I am like wow this is super. Being a busy person I don’t get very far into it on the first look over so I stop the scan to review it later when I have more time. I’ve found on more than one occasion, that the data sets tend to go downhill in terms of excitement. I’m not sure if the data is just really exciting at the start, or I have just gotten used to it and am less excited by it.

I get moderately frustrated when people occupy space but not really. If you are going to occupy space than you should be in it, if you are not going to occupy it than you should leave. None of this “I am going to come back in an indeterminate amount of time, at which point I would like this space back.” I could certainly see someone temporarily leaving their space if they were going to the restroom or other short conveniences, but any long departure should trigger some sort of clean up operation such that others could occupy the same space until you return. Additionally, I dislike it when people exceed their space quota. CPanel is pretty good about this, it just shuts them down and prevents them from using more space. Real life is less easy. There is no automatic robot to stop you from taking out more paperwork to spread around, thought that would be really nice. I think that I might just get a keyboard, because keyboards seem to be an appropriate way to mark one’s territory without having to urinate all over the place.

Tomorrow I have a mandatory midterm in Networking Lab 1 here at RPI. That course might be on my top 10 least favorite courses. I think the concept of a course on networking is great, and while I’m not finished with this one yet, I’ve found the implementation this course uses to be pretty useless. For starters, I dislike how Cisco is used at least 12 times in any sentence during lecture, lab, or online material. Sure, while Cisco does control a huge share of the networking market, the probability that I’m going to be in an all Cisco environment is slim.. especially with this economy. Thinking back to previous places I’ve worked, I can’t think of any company that used more Cisco devices than they did HP, Dell, or 3com… Cisco is just too expensive for moderate sized companies I guess. It would be much more useful to me if I was taught how to make a Cisco router and an HP router switch work together, but neither the lab nor the lectures cover anything like that. Additionally, I’m off put by the sliding lab window, where the more labs I do the more labs that seem to be available. When I first signed up for this course you had to do 2 things to get an A: Pass the CCNA and BSCI exams and get complete all labs. Logically, I started to rush through as many labs as possible to knock that requirement out of the way… only to find that I had to attend every lab period [instead of working on lab when its convenient for me… like 9am] and that the faster I completed labs, the higher the probability that another lab would be created. Junk. And then there is this whole mandatory midterm if you haven’t gotten your CCNA yet thing. I’ll be taking the midterm and probably doing moderate to mild on it. I haven’t had time to study much because I have 3 other exams this week and getting my CCNA is something I’ll be doing next week or the next. The instructors like to promote the job that you have a good chance of working at Cisco or something if you do well in the course, which would be cool if I wanted to work there… but it’s not somewhere I am considering.. so please stop pushing it on me. Overall, this course has turned out to be far from what I was told it would be by two of the previous TA’s… not on my todo again list by any means.

There was more I planned on talking about, but I’m feeling like I want a baked good at the moment, like a cookie, brownie, or slice of cake. I have none of the above on stock.

RPI Uprise at 5

I think I would be doing a disservice to the internet if I didn’t write a short post about the uprise at RPI yesterday (02/26/09).  I’ll try and keep this report as non-biased as possible… well maybe I won’t.  I’ll try and tell it to you as I see it, and my involvement in this campaign has been minimal.

Last night a lot of students gathered in the SGS at RPI and decided that something needed to be done address the transparency issues which were aggravated by some stuff Reslife did.  The word on the street is that they hired 0 freshmen, even though they let them go through all the motions and stuff.  I don’t think that makes a lot of sense, so I (and others) expect them to hire some freshmen to avoid looking weird.

The Office of the Grand Marshal, aka Kara Chesal, issued a press release about the event which is completely within her powers, but something I haven’t seen a GM do in the past two years I’ve been following the Senate.  I think its because she, as an RA/RD and someone who is friends with lots of RAs and RDs cares extra.  Past GMs maybe haven’t cared so much, though they both have had background within Reslife and/or FYE.

Additionally, the compensation for RAs has been adjusted significantly.  Again, I have no clue what they are making this year, but I believe next year they are making -$500 – meal plan.  That would be they have to pay $500 for their room ($5500 for room – $5000 stipend) and they are required to have a meal plan.  If I knew what they were making now I would be able to say if that is fair or not.  One thing I found strange is even the RA’s who live in apartment complexes on campus are required to have a meal plan.  Some of these apartments, mind you they have kitchens, are not so close to any dining hall on campus.

If you ask me what I would like some ‘transparency’ about, it would be the increase in room rates.  As I see it, RPI does a pretty good job doing triage on the current dorms here but not much else.  Sure, they have renovated a hotel to turn it into a new dorm to accommodate the sophomores gotta live on campus requirement (SGLOC) but BARH is a decade or two behind the times.   I know the extra money I’ll be paying won’t be going to increase the compensation for my RA/RD staff [nor would I really like that], nor will the money I’ll be paying go to fix up the bathroom, clean up the radiator, or give me new closets.  Maybe they will replace the doorknob next year, because at the current rate it is loose enough to fall off one of these days.  I hypothesize that a broken door knob might catch someone’s attention in the Phys Fac ER… just like my window screen that fell out 3 months ago will catch the attention of the lawmmover guy when he runs it over.

I was up early yesterday and saw some posters for the event on campus.  There was a really eye catching one (possibly designed by Marc Ebuna) posted on the door to get into Commons.  Students were stopping to read what it was about and everything.  Of course they were also getting slammed in the face by the door, as the poster was covering the window that enables you to see if someone is exiting.  It didn’t last very long on the door, torn down by around 8:40am.

So yesterday a little after 5, a lot of students gathered infront of the Sage dining hall to ‘uprise’ about these issues as well as many others.  I think most people were their because they didn’t understand what was going on, and determined that was a reason to uprise.  I guess that idea works.  I can’t throw a guess to the numbers, but some photos might lead me to place a number between 300-400 at the peak.   The part of the rally that I’ve seen was so-so, speeched seemed slightly inspiring but lacked a lot of substance in my book; I’m sure others feel differently.

The follow up is going to be interesting though.  A decent number of students showed up, chanted some stuff as the Trustees walked by, and that was that.  Whats going to happen next?  I can only hope the student leaders driving this movement continue fighting for whatever it is they are fighting for.

One thing I found interesting is how the Times Union report, Marc Parry, was forced to leave the protest by Jason Gorss (RPI Media Relations guy).  Sure, RPI has every right to ask someone to leave their private property but I guess I’m uninformed as to why.  Sure, his work tends to have a slant to it, and some commentary in the S&W indicates he might not get all the facts right, but he still writes for a larger paper in the Albany area.  I wonder if another reporter had come from that paper, if he/she would have been asked to leave?

I’ve decided that RPInsider isn’t as sketchy as I first thought it was, as they don’t have a massive student-slant and their content is pretty timely.  Now to figure out who runs it… lol.  Additionally, RPI TV was out in full force covering the event.  There are some initial clips on the website right now, and I expect more to be up there this weekend.  RPI strategically brought in Larry Wilmore last night to help everyone forget about their uprising and to distract the student media organizations from getting out the ‘breaking story’.  If he wasn’t at EMPAC last night, I’m almost positive that there would be more student discussion about stuff.