electric counterpoint

Changes coming!

2007-05-19T15:27:00.000-04:00

A Small Orange: my new host

Changes will be coming to this site over the next few weeks. I'm switching my hosting provider for danray.org, and while I'm at it, I think I'll switch this blog over to Wordpress. If everything goes according to plan, the two will become one -- that is, they'll be the same site and in large part the same page. You'll see what I mean.

So what brought this on? Well, with Systech Computers closing this year, I thought now would be a good time to think about migrating off the server space they've so generously provided me over the past few years. At the same time, I've been meaning to work on Wordpress for a while. Blogger's been good to me -- I've been a user in one form or another since 2002 and I like the changes they've made recently -- but I like the idea of having absolute control over not only my visible display but also the whole, murky backend.

Anyway, I decided to go with A Small Orange for hosting. After comparing a lot of smaller hosts with the monolithic Dreamhost, ASO really came out on top. So far, setup has gone smoothly. I'll update this post if my impression changes, of course, but at this point I am very impressed!

DONKEY.BAS

2007-05-16T18:46:00.000-04:00

This really might be one of my earliest computer memories

Coding Horror brings back some nice memories today. I remember my dad's old computer in the basement, maybe around 1990. It was a beastly thing, living its life displaying the command line and only occasionally dropping into a colorful shell manager. In general, I didn't have much more interest in computers, as a five-year old, than simply coming downstairs to see what Dad was up to. But I remember the first time he tried to spark my interest with an honest to goodness computer game. Understand that these were hard to come by in the early 90s in the Ray household, so I didn't really know what I was missing. Three colors? Animation? Donkeys?! I was hooked.

Anyway, as it turns out, DONKEYS.BAS was an early program written to show off Advanced BASIC's capabilities in 1981. Co-authored by Bill Gates himself, in fact. Who knew?

As a postscript, here's the source code. I delved into BASIC myself a little bit a few years down the road, using Q-BASIC (a version of the ancient programming language that had been wrangled into running under Windows 95, and was past its own prime by the time I encountered it). Looking back, I can vaguely trace how the program's meant to run by looking at its code. I regret -- a little -- that my own programming experience never escaped BASIC, or my twelfth birthday.

The graduation post

2007-05-04T09:50:00.000-04:00

Sure enough, I've put my four years in. On Saturday, April 28, Bill Clinton gave his best wishes to the University of Michigan's class of 2007, as well as to probably 50,000 nongraduates crowded into the Big House. He talked about, er, ethical globalization? I think? Y'know how commencement speeches are... Anyway, I laughed out loud at his one sly reference to Hillary (in thanking UM president Mary Sue Coleman for her introduction, he mentioned how "first female president" had a nice ring to it). Oh, and I can't help but mention the student speaker, who happened to be my friend Abdul El Syed. That guy's going places. In the end, the two anarchic hours getting into the stadium and waiting for the entire event to kick off were worth it.

After the university-wide commencement, I had another ceremony put on by the poli sci department to run to. Here I was one of the speakers, and I actually managed to get through forty-five seconds on Sigma Iota Rho relatively unscathed (as it turns out, the trend of apathy towards Sigma on the part of the student body also extends to their parents. This worked in my favor.) I had to run out early from the degree-granting ceremony, though -- sorry, everybody I missed! -- because my sister's College of Engineering graduation was starting at the same time (I should note that, while we liberal artists didn't get our reception running until twenty minutes after schedule, I'm told the engineers began right on time).

Following all the graduating, my entire family was exhausted, and it was all we could do to drive sufficiently far enough from campus to find a restaurant that hadn't been booked solid years in advance. And it was early to bed, since the next morning we had to move Jessica and I out of our old apartment and into a summer sublet, then catch our breath and move my sister out of her coöp. By the time we finished, around ten that night, the family was exhausted anew.

On the whole, graduation was a lot of fun, though, and it's making me reminisce about my time at Michigan and in Ann Arbor. I could definitely say the same about each of these: on the whole, it was a blast. As it hits me now that I'm leaving the institution and town that really did run my life for the past four years, I'm feeling a little more wistful, maybe, than I was even when I moved here from my hometown. It's weird, I guess. Then again, I think I was probably thinking the same thoughts in 2003. A look into my old blog (long since removed from the internet) shows

"... The countdown is just reeling now, with 4 1/2 days left for seniors in high school. I really can't believe that I'm almost out of school. Corunna school has been the unifying factor for just about all my life over which I have recollection, so it's mighty powerful to think of it just ending on Friday. But I'm convinced that it's been great, and I'm just as excited as I am nostalgic about it, even if it doesn't show!"

I guess I don't remember being that enthusiastic, but there it is. I'm in the same boat now. Michigan was fun, but it's very cool to be moving on. I hope the next four years are as good as these last four.

Why it's so easy to waste time online

2007-05-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

As Aaron Schwartz has it:

We need to stop pretending that [the repackaging of internet content into bite-size morsels] is automatically a good thing. Perhaps Procter & Gamble doesn't care of their making us into a nation of fat slobs, but there's no reason why programmers and the rest of the startup world need to be so amoral. And no doubt, as pictures of cats with poor spelling on them become all the rage, people are beginning to wonder about where all this idiocy is leaving us. Which is where apologists like Doctorow and Steven Johnson step in, assuring us that Everything Bad is Good For You.

It isn't. YouTube isn't going to save us from an Idiocracy-style future in which everyone sits at home and watches shows like "Ow! My Balls!" (in which a man is repeatedly hit in the balls) -- YouTube's damn-near creating that future. As I write this, YouTube's #1 featured video is titled "Farting in Public".

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. Nobody prefers farting to thought. It's just that, as David Foster Wallace noted about television, "people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." Similarly, no one (Doctorow included, I suspect), actually prefers blog posts to novels, it's just that people tend to have more short chunks of time to read blog posts than they do long chunks of time to read novels.

To be honest, I guess I do approach my time-wasters (Google Reader, Digg, and Aaron's own Reddit) about the same way I do an untended candy bar. But where candy is shortly consumed and I'd need to run across the street to buy another one if I wanted to continue wrecking my diet, the internet means that you're basically living in the candy store.

On the other hand, if I could consolidate all my free ten minute intervals, maybe I could read more novels...

The thesis post

2007-04-23T12:10:00.000-04:00

Here it is. After a hellish (okay, heckish) March scrambling to put everything together, I turned it in twenty minutes before the buzzer on March 30. I defended it the next week, and it got high honors.

What I've spent the last year on is this, roughly: we know that nations interact outside the bounds of international law sometimes -- they make secret agreements and all that. We also have a lot of ideas about why they do this, but these theories haven't been tested in the real world using a random sample. That's what I tried to do, and it turns out that it's pretty hard to test international relations theories in that way. Nevertheless, within my constraints, I found that a lot of the common wisdom doesn't hold up.

Overall, it's good to be done. The weeks since turning it in have flown by, and I think part of that is simply because I haven't had anything to take the place of the eighteen-hour days I was putting into my thesis before that. At this point, I can hardly recognize it as my own -- the context it was written in was one of basic primal freaking out, and in these sunny late-April days I can hardly even put myself back into that mindset. One symptom of this disconnect is the collection of phrases I find just skimming back through that I'd never use in my usual writing, for instance. But, a quick skim does bring back a lot of the reading that I did over the last fourteen or so months. And really, getting a good grasp of the literature in a field is more important than standing by the conclusions reached in your very first academic paper. At least, that's my take on it.

I wish I could have known what I know now when I was first setting out to design this whole project. For one thing, some of the assumptions I made in operationalizing individual theories are barely justifiable, and if I just had a little more time and a little more data I feel like I might have found support for a lot more of them. That's why, actually, I'm not comfortable saying that actors don't take, for instance, the potential for political embarrassment into account when choosing, say, the form of their agreements (I think the ginger wording of my conclusion in the thesis itself expresses this hesitance). What would really have been interesting is another month or so to fiddle around with regression modeling and figure out what degree of weight each of my independent variables are given under varying circumstances. My gut feeling is that this is closer to the truth -- decision-making really seems expressible (in a none-too-elegant way, sure, but expressible nonetheless) as a weighted model of factors leading to a rational choice of level and a rational negotiation on publicity. But I'm no savant mathematician and this was no open-ended dissertation -- I had limited resources, expertise, and time. So it goes.

Thanks to everybody who helped me out in writing it, and thanks to everybody who put up with me when it was all I could talk about. I really am happy with my finished product!

Updates on the way

2007-04-19T14:26:00.000-04:00

Hey, readership. I've been away since, what, March? I will improve my habits! Now that I've weathered the senior year storm, you can expect a few long-ish updates on my thesis, law school, and graduation coming this week.

Romanticizing RAND

2007-03-18T23:34:00.000-04:00

If I ever follow my dreams and form a instrumental-heavy post rock band, you know I'm naming it the Million Random Digits.

And if I ever find myself playing in the backup band for some pop chanteuse, you know I'm petitioning that we be called "The 100,000 Normal Deviates."

"Left Behind at the Fishbowl" left this behind at ... oh, you know

2007-03-16T18:20:00.000-04:00

The hunter displays his vanquished quarry.

Sweeeet!

I don't know how many of my readers also follow Left Behind at the Fishbowl, the site where a mysterious author picks out the best documents he or she finds left on our many public printers, mocks them viciously, and posts them online, but I'm guessing a fair number do. You'll be as chuffed as I was, then, to see the tantalizing artifact I picked up from a scanner today (with intrepid coworker Amy) while working at the site.

Today's find, pictured at right, went up on AHFB two days ago. I note with satisfaction that apparently Mr. or Ms. Fishbowl scans his or her work right here at Angell Hall, not five feet from the front desk of what is certainly his or her most fanbase. My deducing skills aren't revealing any more clues about the mysterious author, but I'll keep the evidence just in case.

Actually, considering the (more or less) love that we Fishbowl consultants have for AHFB, maybe I'll make a little trophy plaque and hang it in the break room...

EDIT: Immortalized.

The story behind Hendrix's "Sgt. Pepper" cover

2007-03-06T11:02:00.000-05:00

First, if you haven't heard the bootleg of Jimi Hendrix tearing up the title track from the Beatles' opus, do it -- it's all over the interweb. Provided you have, though, you might be at least as interested to hear the timeframe behind Jimi's off-the-cuff rendition. Take it away, Chuck Klosterman:

This is from the Jimi Hendrix box set. Supposedly, according to Paul McCartney, the Beatles record Sgt. Pepper's comes out on Friday, and then [McCartney] goes to see Jimi Hendrix perform on Sunday, and he's performing this song already. So this is very moving to McCartney, and I can see where it would be, but I guess it would mostly serve to indicate that Jimi Hendrix is an extremely fast learner, which may not be that surprising.

Huh, neat.

192 countries in ten minutes

2007-03-05T15:30:00.000-05:00

Speaking of less-remembered nations, Kottke links today to a fun online quiz: of the 192 UN members states, how many can you name in ten minutes?

My score was 95 -- I managed to get both Swaziland and Lestotho while forgetting Cuba. Spelling can be tricky, too -- I know now that plucky Liechtenstein's third letter is an "e".

International Relations story of the year

2007-03-02T17:07:00.000-05:00

Site of the first volley fired in World War III

Today's NYT: "Swiss Accidentally Invaded Lichtenstein." From the comments on the Wonkette post, I'm led to this similar mistake five years ago.

Reminds me of this entertaining Ask.Metafilter thread, too.

This will impress you, too

2007-02-22T23:09:00.000-05:00

It's SCIENCE!

My sister's making me look bad again. She just emailed the graphic to the left, the culmination of her senior design project. The culmination of my four years here, by way of contrast, will be about fifty pages of heavily-footnoted academic detritus (yes, morale is sinking).

Anyway, I know the following about what appears to the right:

It gets etched onto a circuit board.
Electrons seem to do interesting things when funneled into the right spot on such a circuit board.
The image looks a lot like a map of any given Mega Man level.

Anyway, I'm told this is why engineering degrees are worth more than B.A.s.

Proprietary messaging: seriously, guys?

2007-02-10T03:44:00.000-05:00

Dig if you will: I just opened a new checking account last week, after getting a nice offer from the bank in the mail. All's good and my free money has already been credited. So when I finally got around to checking out the bank's online account system, I didn't expect to do an awful lot. The one thing I did enable, though, was the same thing I do on all my financial accounts: paperless statements. After setting it up, I saw a new email in my inbox. Confirmation message, right?

Nope. The subject line read "You have a new message from Chase Online." It's a message, telling me I have a message.

Folks, please. It's the twenty-first century. I don't need to click through to your website, log in, find my proprietary Chase inbox, and click on the little confirmation message you've just sent me. Look, I don't need another inbox! The one I've got works perfectly fine, gives me just over two gigabytes of storage space, and is infused with the magic of Google search. By the mere fact that you've emailed me about this new message, I know that you know how to reach it. So don't tell me that I have a message, tell me the message!

This might annoy you if you've ever thought about it, but if you're like me it's particularly aggravating. I consciously try to run my life through Gmail -- that is, my Gmail inbox is my One True Inbox, through which comes all my email, all my notes and reminders, all my documents and files I might need later. The archive-and-search function is so good, I don't need to use much of a filing system at all to have a pretty reliable filing system. But crappy external "mail" accounts defeat this system: I can't search for something like "from:chase@chase.com january statement" and come up with what I'm looking for. By not following Jakob's Law of the Internet User's Experience ("Users spend most of their time on other websites."), Chase has decided to reinvent the wheel by eluding users' expectations of how messages are transmitted on the internet. An ungainly solution to a problem nobody really has.

Oh, and if only my new bank were the only perpetrator. Facebook and Myspace are infamous for including their own "Personal Messaging" systems that are, again, ugly and ill-functioning proprietary email accounts. Last.fm does it, most every phpBB messageboard has one, and my Flickr loves to send me nugatory little "New message" emails. To this day, I've probably got hundreds of messages from friends and acquaintances dating from Friendster right on up that languish, unindexed, on all sorts of these sites. Guys and girls, if I ever fail to get back to you when you message me on one of these sites, I apologize. Now ferchrissakes, just email me!

Jimi Tenor - Deutsche Grammophon Recomposed

2007-02-04T20:45:00.000-05:00

Deutsche Grammophon Recomposed by Jimi Tenor

I certainly do my fair share of posting on the greatest American composer of the twentieth century on this blog. And here's another one. Readers uninterested in cascading pianos and Finnish soul may happily skip to another post.

... Finnish soul? Oh yes. I just discovered this weekend an awesome album by Finnish producer Jimi Tenor. Mr. Tenor (née Lassi Lehto) has an almost-twenty year history of putting out electro and trip-hop -- decent stuff, I gather, but not really my thing, right? In 2006, though, he partnered with none other than the staid über-imprint Deutsche Grammophon, which has released some of the twentieth century's most vital classical works. The collaboration gave Jimi Tenor access to the label's hundred-and-twenty year old catalog, and his reinterpretations were performed live at Berlin's Deutsche Oper with a full orchestra conducted by Kevin McCutcheon.

Anyway, the record that came out of this collaboration is nothing short of fantastic. I can understand a certain apprehension at the idea of modern electronic remixes of Reich's works -- Nonesuch's much more widely available Reich Remixed is very hit-or-miss -- but this is a thing of beauty. Instead of the usual boom-boom-boom kick drum and synthetic strings, Tenor brings his eponymous voice to Reich's "Six Pianos" in a way that is both unexpected and wonderful. The record also features "Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ" and Satie's "Vexations," as well as lesser-known (to me) works from Salonen, Varèse, and Rimsky-Korsakov. All in all, it's brilliant.

Ic-k

2007-01-31T00:05:00.000-05:00

One of life's simple pleasures is learning. One of my own favorite pastimes is coming to understand an interesting fact or two from a field in which I have no experience at all. So I enjoyed reading Roger Shuy's post, "-ic," on Language Log this evening.

Professor Shuy, a linguistics researcher, here takes up President Bush's much-noticed slip during his State of the Union address, referring to to the Democrats as the "Democrat Party." Nearly anyone who follows American politics recognizes the pejorative connotation that term carries in political debate, so many in the media were caught off-guard that the President would squeeze such a jibe into such a major speech.

As a fairly passive observer of Washington's daily grind, I wasn't surprised to see that Bush tried to wiggle his way out of questions about his word choice Monday on NPR. "I'm not that good at pronouncing words anyway," the president demurred. Well, he's got me there, I thought. I pretty much expected that would be the end of it.

Of course, that's only because I am not a crafty linguist. Roger Shuys, on the other hand, would have none of Bush's linguification. He took the president at his word, and looked at other instances of the "-ic" phoneme in his address.

economic reform

public schools

basic private health insurance plan

basic health care insurance

domestic oil production

Strategic Petroleum Research

Atlantic Ocean

public servants

horrific scale

democratic legislature (of Afghanistan)

democratic constitution (of Afghanistan)

tragic escalation

democratic Iraq

diplomatic strategy

democratic Palestine

Each one pronounced as good as a Connecticut yankee, of course. After running the same test on Bush's speech patterns in an earlier year, Shuy pokes a conclusive hole in the president's excuse.

I'll add another favorite experience to my earlier statement: I love seeing (and I use Harry Frankfurt's exacting definition here) bullshit called for bullshit. It's even more heartening to see a tight argument constructed that throws that bullshit out the window. If the whole thing is written so well that I can find it after a ten-hour day and unwind while reading it, well, that's a feat. If only the world had a few more champion callers-out like Roger Shuy, I might have a lot more good reads.

Dan's First Law of Social Science Research

2007-01-24T17:52:00.000-05:00

Some people, when confronted with a coding problem, say "I know! I'll create an index variable!" Now they have two problems.

(With apologies to John Myers)

Macworld Keynote 2007: Good for Apple, not for Macs

2007-01-09T21:17:00.000-05:00

Beautiful, but expensive and not available until June

I'm always let down by Steve Jobs' announcements at his keynotes, and this year was no exception. Usually, it's a result of "Ooh! Look at the pretty things ... that I can't afford." This year, though, I actually am in the market for a laptop(as is my girlfriend), so I was all hyped up for a round of marginal improvements to the Macbook line. Instead, I get

a phone that won't even exist until June,
an overpriced hi-def video cable,
and a corporate name change that makes me think maybe Steve's just tired of innovating in the computer market in the first place. Great.
(Oh, and blankety-blanking John Mayer. I hate that guy!)

Anyone less grouchy than me after today's news?

These things are making me happy

2006-12-23T00:14:00.000-05:00

Know it, love it.

The Charlie Brown Christmas album. It's held up so well, wouldn't you agree? Isn't this the best kind of schmaltz: that whose fond associations with all of our childhoods allow us to overlook. Wes Anderson knows that "Christmastime is Here," and so should you.
On that note, eggnog. Every year since I discovered its allure (eggnog was never a Ray family staple), I am surprised and elated by eggnog's annual appearance in the dairy section. There's plenty to look forward to around the end of December; eggnog remains a perennial surprise.
Band of Horses' Everything All The Time. I hope it's not a surprise to anyone that I'm really a very poor excuse for a music hipster -- at best, I'll pick up a few new releases between January and November every year as I see them hyped. Mid-December's glut of best-of lists, though, is my chance to catch up on what I've missed. Anyway, these guys are charming. Sure, they sound a lot like My Morning Jacket's slower stuff, but they do their own thing with the soaring guitars and 'verb-splashed vocals.
Gloves! Jessica's parents just got me some for Christmas, and they are wonderful.
Law schools! I've heard back from a few, and I think I'll get some good news in the first few months of 2007.
Free time! Kind of! As everyone finished exams this week, I frequently complained that my hell was just beginning, as I intended to use my break to catch up work on my thesis. Well, I still do, but it's not going as quickly as I had hoped. On the plus side, the free time to think has put me in a better mood about it than I have been recently. High hopes, and all that.

Soviet-era photo editing

2006-12-13T19:53:00.000-05:00

Hint: Take a look on the left side of the table.

While tapping away at a final paper this evening, I had cause to make sure the CMEA stood for what I thought it did. As so often happens, I went straight to Wikipedia. As so often happens, too, I got engrossed in the article. About halfway down the page, something intrigued me about the black-and-white photograph depicting a meeting of the Soviet-dominated economic bloc. I clicked on it to look at a larger version.

There are two things very wrong with that photo. I'll let my readers click on it themselves to find them.

A few hints: one is pretty blatant, and hilarious. The other is just kind of surreal. No, they didn't airbrush Trotsky out of this one. No, this isn't another insane Russian painter hoax, in that a) the "defect" actually exists in this photo, and b) if anyone can't find it, just comment and I'll reveal all.

Still, weird and kinda cool.

Gmail finally renders UMich webmail obsolete!

2006-12-11T00:07:00.000-05:00

See Techcrunch: "Uh-oh, Gmail just got perfect."

It looks like Gmail is finally communicating with outside email addresses both ways using POP. You can now tell Gmail to check and manage any POP-enabled email account within the beautiful Gmail address -- basically, it's an online Outlook or Thunderbird with a nicer UI.

How's this different from your old options? You could forward all your messages to a Gmail address (or anywhere else) from the UMich webmail control panel, but then all your replies come from your Gmail address, which can be off-putting (and, sez my boss, your correspondents sometimes get weird bounce messages from Gmail). You could also tell Gmail to import the messages from your UM account, but messages come from "you@gmail.com [on behalf of you@umich.edu]," which is ridiculous. But no more! Finally, you can customize the "from" address.

I'm setting up my account for this functionality now. Google's features are typically rolled out to a few users at a time, with little apparent rhyme or reason. If you don't have the new feature (check under the "Accounts" page), I'd say look for it within the week. If you do have it, check here for ITCS' instructions on POP settings.

NYT: In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning

2006-11-27T22:33:00.000-05:00

In Sunday's NYT:

"People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?"

It takes a radical shift in the political conversation, I'll tell you what, for me to say Ben Stein is talking sense. I wish I could hear more conservatives hearken back to pre-Goldwater ideology without draping their ideas in big-L Libertarianism. I know they're out there -- I know a few classic conservatives on campus here in Ann Arbor, for goodness sake! -- but my impression is they're being too polite, and in doing so being drowned out by the unruly social conservatives and Libertarians vying for control of the GOP. Speak up, Ben!

"Bus plunge" stories and my thesis

2006-11-14T20:44:00.000-05:00

Slate has a fascinating article on the rise and fall of the "bus plunge" genre in the New York Times. Y'know:

Bus Plunge Kills 37 Sikhs

NEW DELHI, Sept. 18 (Reuters)—At least 37 Sikh pilgrims were killed when a passenger bus fell into a ravine at the foot of the Himalayas, it was reported today.

The story, centering on bus plunge and other "stock" stories' role in plugging gaps in the physical newshole, tickled my abiding interest in typography. I had to do a double-take, though, when I read this passage:

"Solving layout problems with shorts meant newspapers often ran pieces because they fit, not because they burst with 'news value.' How random was the selection of Times shorts? The page from March 6, 1959, featuring the '15 Africans Die in Bus Plunge' story quoted above also harbored six other [filler stories]: 'Queen Sets African Visit,' 'Bourguiba Renamed Head,' 'Inquiry Costs Top 4 Million,' 'Buenos Aires Port Struck,' 'Greece Jails Former Nazi,' and 'Jakarta Accepts Soviet Aid.' How many of those stories ran because they were news, and how many ran because makeup editors were working on a jigsaw puzzle against a deadline?"

If you've met me in real life, or you've been reading my blog for a little while, you'll know that I'm working on my senior honors thesis, explaining why informal international agreements are sometimes legalized into formal treaties. I want to be quantitative about this, so I'm coding a sample of these informal agreements as the first step in the analysis. Since it's hard to track down a representative group of all informal international bargains, I'm using a database.

This database is populated by stories about international agreements from the Times. Stories like "Jakarta Accepts Soviet Aid," for instance.

I guess it's not too late to include a proviso that the realities of the newspaper business prevent my sample from being truly representative, but these are the kinds of things I'm just not thinking about. I'll be sure to show this to my thesis advisor, to say the least.

At any rate, the Slate story is a very good read. And it probably won't screw up your last two months of work.

Democrats take Capitol Hill

2006-11-08T13:55:00.000-05:00

I literally can't remember experiencing a happy election night. I was thirteen in 1998, when the Democrats barely dented the Republicans' lead in Congress, and I'm sure I didn't notice President Clinton cruise to victory over Senator Dole in '96. The first campaign cycle I followed closely was the presidential race of 2000, and we all know how that turned out.

Anyway, I'm sure it's been said more eloquently elsewhere (there's no shortage of bloggers in their early twenties), but I think a lot of people in my generation will look back on aught-six as the good old days. Actually, scratch that -- I hope we'll remember it as the good old days' beginning.

Irony abounds in the new Arthur Miller Theater

2006-11-05T19:09:00.000-05:00

I don't usually post links in this blog, but I thought this was just too good to pass up. I can't even describe the story that Urban Oasis has uncovered about the namesakes of North Campus's new performance space. You'll just have to read about it for yourself.

RSS2HTML on danray.org

2006-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

I've been working for a few hours, literally, at trying to get my most recent blog post displayed on my otherwise static homepage. Y'know, the way it used to be, before the site that hosted the great, simple RSS parsing script that I was using shut down. Anyway, I've got a new PHP script, hosted on my own server, but I still can't replicate the old functionality. I've reached a compromise with it, though, and I now have the seven most recent headlines displayed there. Also, I've at least tripled the depth of my understanding of PHP, which believe me isn't saying much.

I wish I could have found the time this summer to port this blog to Wordpress, because I certainly don't have the time now. Sigh.

Project Wonderful

2006-10-24T11:38:00.000-04:00

The little blue box is me!

Holy crap! I'm an advertiser on Dinosaur Comics! The first, in fact!

Ryan North, the author and a pretty cool dude, has a new project up. Sitting at work, I saw the link in my Dinosaur Comics feed shortly after it was posted. Given my lightning-fast Photoshop and Paypal skills, I thought it seemed neat, and went to designing an ad for this very blog (why not?).

Anyway, it looks like I'm already outbid, about six minutes after the ad went up. But as far as I can tell, I was the first brief advertiser with Project Wonderful. Maybe I'll put up an ad on my own site...

Trip to New York, Redux

2006-10-19T21:47:00.000-04:00

Midtown: the Flatiron Building

It was great!

Finally got a chance to visit Columbia and NYU, first and foremost. Both are beautiful schools, both are overwhelming in the good way, and -- since both admissions offices know how to find my blog -- I liked both exactly equally. *wink* Now that I've seen both schools, it just remains to wait for a decision.

Of course, the four-day trip was about more than visiting law schools. I got to spend my first significant period in the city, and Jessica had never visited before at all! We tried to balance our natural hipster reflexes with eyes-to-the-sky tourist behavior, and pretty much succeeded (sure, I may posing in front of a skyscraper in the picture accompanying this post, but I've also got a few of Banksy's art in Williamsburg! I'm cool, I swear!). We both felt a lot more comfortable with navigating the Metro than I'd expected, so we deviated from the itinerary quite a bit. Unfortunately, this meant missing the UN Headquarters and walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, but we more than made up for it with just walking through several interesting neighborhoods. By serendipitous coincidence, Jessica and I visited the Whitney just as it was beginning a performance of Steve Reich's oeuvre (on the occasion of his seventieth birthday), so I got to see, inter alia, ec favorite Alarm Will Sound play some stunning minimalism. All in all, it was a great way to get away from Ann Arbor for a weekend.

New browsers

2006-10-18T22:31:00.000-04:00

For a magical minute or so, I realized my trusty laptop was busy installing both IE7 and Firefox 2.0. I noticed on Digg that the new Internet Explorer was out in final release, so I dutifully downloaded a copy. My initial reactions:

Like all Microsoft's recent milestone software releases, IE7 takes forever to install. Between validating my copy of Windows and searching for updates to the six-hour old program, I think it clocked in around the ten minute mark.
Like all Microsoft's recent milestone software releases, my first reaction upon launching the new browser was "ooh! shiny!"
I like that most of my unconsciously-wired Firefox keyboard shortcuts work in IE7. Since the browser never had tabs before, it only makes sense to borrow Firefox's ctrl+t, ctrl+tab, etc.
On that note, I'm surprised and distressed to see that ctrl+l still opens a little "Go to" box rather than simply selecting the one that's permanently anchored at the top of the window.
I do hope the shiny, fullscreen hints (literal example: "You've opened a new tab!") are easily excised.

Firefox 2.0 RC3 didn't do much to surprise me, but that's because I've been using successive 2.0 builds since the second Bon Echo alpha popped up. All in all, I imagine I'll keep using Firefox for the immediate future, but I'm glad Microsoft has finally shipped a modern, competitive browser. Let's hope their reëntry to the field sets off some constructive extension development for both browsers!

K.O.T.J.M.F.

2006-10-12T20:44:00.000-04:00

My friend Geoff got to meet the MC5's Dennis Thompson today. Apparently, he lives in the Stooges' old house on Hill St.

Rawk.

Cheney and Rumsfeld: Stealth visit to Ann Arbor?

2006-10-12T13:59:00.000-04:00

The Daily has the scoop.

In case they're right, I'm trying to pass the word along. Myself, I'll be leaving for the airport at about the time they arrive (wait, Weill Hall is a block away from me... this could make a very large problem...), but you should show up!

EDIT: I ran into a friend from the Daily this afternoon, who told me more about the potential visit. I'm not so sure it will happen, but I still do think the chances are good. The lovely Jessica and I are making alternate plans, just in case.

EDIT 2: I've just heard from my sister, who flew out of Detroit this morning (the Ray clan is pretty well-traveled lately), that her plane was delayed -- first for snow, but then for "VIP aircraft." Yikes? Yikes.

New York trip!

2006-10-12T11:44:00.000-04:00

I'm very happy to report I'll be in New York this weekend!

It's Michigan's fall study break, so Monday and Tuesday are holidays and classes are cancelled. My biggest (official) motivation is visiting a few law schools, and the lovely Jessica is interested in pretty much the same. Of course, we both also just want to just visit the city: I've been there twice, for about eight hours each time, and Jessica's never been at all.

We're staying in a hostel, of course, on the Upper West Side. It's had mixed reviews. With taht in mind, we don't intend to spend much time there. With Jessica's input, I put together a nice, basic itinerary this morning, complete with subway directions. Since I'm such a tourist, I then printed out ten copies -- y'know, just in case.

Here's the plan:

Friday night

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

"Michigan Action Party"

2006-10-09T15:19:00.000-04:00

Anyone see the bright pink flyers today, advertising the "Michigan Action Party?" From their Maize Pages entry:

The Michigan Action Party is dedicated to effectuating positive change at the University of Michigan. As a student government party, we do this primarily through our candidates and members who serve on MSA and the LSA student government. We are committed to improving life on our campus and invite anyone and everyone to join us. [emphasis mine]

Between that and this, it's gonna be a long election season...

Seriously, though, this is pretty much what I'd expected, (though I hoped they'd choose a snappier name). With Students 4 Michigan's collapse and subsequent dissolution, the Michigan Action Party is on the scene just in time to serve as the vechicle for Zach Yost's grab at the MSA presidency. Let's see who's in the group. Surprise! I give Ken Baker even odds for setting aside his convictions and joining up as vice president.

Really, though: best wishes to Zach & Co.. Happy effectuating!

Metapost: look better?

2006-10-09T12:23:00.000-04:00

Finally, I had a minute to fix the broken images that resulted when my server went down some time ago. While I was at it, I changed a few visuals on the site. Any problems, let me know.

How much stapling...

2006-10-09T10:41:00.000-04:00

...did the previous resident of my apartment do, that I am still finding, in the bedroom, approximately one bent staple per week? In the carpet, naturally, with my feet.

Gold dollars

2006-10-08T22:53:00.000-04:00

It's been a pretty good week. I got home for a few days, got to visit my best friend at the bar he now tends, and I think I talked him into the trip to Iceland this summer. But what defined the week for me, unfortunately, was money.

Dear, sweet Jessica and I both needed stamps. I was going into work the next day, so we decided I might as well walk to the post office and bring a book back. Sideling up to the vending machine, I discovered something terrifying posted just above the bill receptor:

This machine dispenses US dollar coins in change.

Oh no! There I was with a twenty dollar bill, ready to buy a book of stamps that cost $7.80. I hesitated, thinking how to avoid my onrushing misfortune. I could buy a second book of stamps! Of course, I'd probably lose it before I ever finished the first one. I could wait in line and buy at the counter! Of course, that would mean missing my lunch break. As I removed my booklet from the drawer at the machine's base, I heard the machine spit out two dimes and twelve dollar coins.

Having twelve bucks' worth is awful. It's like having a pouch full of unusually large quarters in your back pocket, and it makes sitting uncomfortable. However, spending twelve gold dollars, if you've never had to, is even worse. No one has ever seen one before, and you are compelled to provide an explanation for why you're wandering in here and depositing foreign scrip on the counter, fast. This happens everywhere.

I was able to drop two of the coins in two successive trips to the corner store, buying a pop. "Just came from the post office...," I explained. "I was buying stamps," I told the woman at Burger King, after handing her five coins. In truth, every transaction I made last week was colored by the horrible, substandard currency jingling in my pocket.

I have no problem accepting the government's ability to improve society through monetary policy. I draw the line, however, at classifying the introduction of nasty, heavy, metal discs that are uniformly despised where they are recognized at all as "improving society." I honestly believe that, valuing them in the real world, gold dollars are worth less than paper ones. Anyone who doubts me (and there are plenty of angry Libertarians who do) ought to take a couple in hand and go out on the street. Go ahead, bud. Buy something. As far as I'm concerned, the government can go forth, tax and spend; just leave our actual currency alone!

At any rate, I spent my last one last night at the Pita Pit. The total came to six bucks and some change, so I gave the girl at the counter a fiver, a dollar coin, and a few quarters. Responding to the now-customary "You're still a dollar short," I told her there was a dollar coin in her hand. "I was just at the post office and got a lot of them..." I trailed off.

The girl looked puzzled. "Awesome," she said, and concluded that I was some kind of numismatist-cum-weirdo. God damn it.

Yo La Tengo at the Michigan Theatre

2006-10-05T21:22:00.000-04:00

As a friend of mine put it, "Yo La Tengo beat my ass severely."

Sure enough, YLT really can put on a good show. Compared to the last time I saw them, this summer, the band was amazing. Ira mentioned during the encore that he wasn't used to playing theaters with seats, but I thought the venue really worked well for them. It's not so much the particular venue (though I'll say I'm a fan of sitting at shows), but just that Yo La Tengo is not an outdoor festival act. Two hundred feet back in ninety-four degree heat, I think some of James' delicate organ work was lost on me.

Last night, though, the band was in top form. In particular, Ira's guitar playing really comes across live. I've said it before: Ira Kaplan is a desperately underrated guitarist, be it on brittle glass slide lines, brilliant hooks, or Thurston Moore-esque freakouts. He's also just a lot of fun to watch.

The setlist was great, too. YLT opened with (let's be honest) all the memorable songs from the new album, then reached way back in the catalog for several crowd-pleasers. We got "Barnaby, Hardly Working" from President Yo La Tengo, fer cryin' out loud. My fervent hope to hear "Cherry Chapstick" was in vain, and I was a bit surprised they didn't dig out "Sugarcube," a song of the variety that got just enough airplay to work itself immovably into every setlist a lesser indie band would ever play. "Autumn Sweater" turned up, of course, and I didn't expect "Big Day Coming." Maybe the most fun, though, was the four minute raw, distorted mess that punctuated the first verse of the band's brilliant cover of "Little Honda."

Oh, covers? Again, Yo La Tengo did not disappoint. The Kinks' "There Is No Life Without Love" was quiet and dreamy, while Alex Chilton's "Can't Seem to Make You Mine" was tasteful, though probably lost on most the audience. Not that I'm in any position to be snarky: I have no idea what their third cover was, and Google isn't helping turn up anything for the few lyrics I remember. Anyone who was there help me out? The comments section awaits you.

Happy birthday, Steve Reich!

2006-10-03T23:18:00.000-04:00

Was just browsing ILX when I saw a thread indicating it's Steve Reich's birthday. Of course, he's the namesake of this blog, so I can't help but wish him a good one.

Hap Hap Hap Hap Hap Hap Happy Happy Happy Happy Happy Happy Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdaytoyou Happybirthdaytou Happybirthdaytou Happybirthdaytou Happybirthdaytou Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthdayto Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirthday Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happybirth Happy Happy Happy Happy Happy Happy Hap Hap Hap Hap Hap Hap

Couldn't have said it better myself. (For confused readers, listen to "Come Out" or "Different Trains." Actually, I'll make that a general imperative: go out and pick up some minimalism, people. It's good for ya.)

Digital satori

2006-09-28T20:45:00.000-04:00

I think I might have finally attained a Ralf Hütter level of man-machine interface. At work, I picked up a copy of today's New York Times, interested in an article on the front page below the fold. As I came to the bottom of the column, I realized that I would rather walk over to my PC and google the headline to finish the article instead of unfolding and opening the paper I already held in my hands.

Maybe it's just a reflection of superb usability displaye by the NYT.com redesign, but I think I'm officially more comfortable with the internet than paper. I feel okay about that, too.

A beard

2006-09-28T20:41:00.000-04:00

Inspired by a friend's success and today's Qwantz, I've decided that it's finally time I grew a beard.

I've got a few weeks. Jessica is on record as saying she doesn't mind if I look terrible during that period, and I'm afraid I'll have to remind her of that statement several times during it, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Someone should take this up

2006-09-24T00:27:00.000-04:00

I recalled tonight a research question I first came up with maybe a week ago, when I was thinking about my own thesis. I wonder if there's anything to be generalized from the disparate cases in which someone who disagrees with the very existence of some body is elected or appointed to it. So far I can think of Euroskeptical MEPs and Spence Abraham, Michigan's own Senator who, after publicly stating the Department of Energy should be abolished and being defeated in 2000, was nominated to run it. Maybe the Nazis of the early thirties would fit?

Anyway, no matter what overarching lessons one could extrapolate from such rare cases as these, they would certainly be useless to the field of political science. Useless, and awesome.

An official language?

2006-09-23T16:10:00.000-04:00

I took a brief, electronic trip home just now, as I made preparations to vote by absentee ballot this November. On Shiawassee County's page for that sort of thing, below the basic information on eligibility and everything, was this little urban legend:

"HOW IMPORTANT IS ONE VOTE?

In 1776, one vote made English the official language in America instead of German.

In 1845, one vote brought Texas into the union.

In 1868, one vote saved President Andrew Johnson from impeachment.

In 1876, one vote gave Rutherford B. Hayes the Presidency of the United States.

In 1933, one vote gave Adolph Hitler leadership of the Nazi Party.

In 1941, one vote saved Selective Service – just weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked.

YOUR VOTE IS YOUR VOICE!"

I'll grant that Snopes, linked above, has done way more research on this issue than I have, and (as usual) their page makes for a fascinating read. I'll just add that I'm not totally comfortable with a government source indicating that the government has an official language. Y'know?

We're not a presumptuous group in Shiawassee County; I'm certain whoever put it up was misled. But when the first page of Google results is full of hits debunking the claim, is there really any excuse for reprinting this silly canard?

How we treat the Europeans

2006-09-17T19:29:00.000-04:00

Amidst all the detailed recollections of the functioning of the European Commission, I ran across this account, in his biography, of Roy Jenkins' day in Ann Arbor on December 17, 1978:

"8.30 plane to Detroit. Drove to Ann Arbor for lunch with the President of the University of Michigan and abou tforty other people at about 12 o'clock. It was a ghastly luncheon, not a drop to drink at tehe long reception beforehand - I hadn't expected anything at lunch - totally inedible food, and speeches, which again I hadn't expeted,k after lunch. Then over to the theatre for the commencement and honorary degree ceremony and my address to an audience of about four thousand. To be honest, I don't think the addres went very well: it was a good speech, but too long, thirty-four minutes, and slightly too elaborately prepared, as well as trying to asy too much. In any event I allways find commencement addresses difficult, and the total absence of alcohol didn't help either."

For you following at home, that president would be Mr. Administration Building himself, Robben Wright Flemming.

MBooks (Google/UM parternship) now online

2006-08-31T13:58:00.000-04:00

The first results from Google's parternship with the UM library system are now online. Scanned results show up on Mirlyn as electronic resources, and a click on the record gives two links: one for Michigan's implementation (example) and one for Google's (example). Google's, of course, uses the Google Books interface we're all familiar with; I'm happy to report, though, that UM's is very usable itself.

Below, the email I received announcing the news, and including a bit more information:

"As of this morning, the University Library version of materials scanned through our partnership with Google has been released to the public. Both the MBook and Google versions are directly accessible from the records found in Mirlyn for particular books and journals.

As you may know, works clearly in the public domain (that is, not or no longer copyright restricted) are fully accessible, while works still under copyright, or with rights remaining to be determined, are viewable either as snippets (Google, based on the first 3 occurrences of search terms in the book), or as a complete index to all occurrences of search terms (MBooks). The initial definition of "public domain" [*****] for this project has been conservative, and includes materials published before 1923 (US) or before 1909 (other countries). Over time, we can
expect restrictions on access to many more materials to be lifted.

The two different interfaces do differ in a variety of other ways. Printing from MBooks, for example, must currently be done one page at a time (We recommend switching to the pdf view), while Google is making entire works available for printing or download. I find that the MBooks version is particularly helpful when looking for a known item, or when trying to locate a particular journal volume.

I am not sure how many volumes are available in this initial release, but it is very large, and growing rapidly. A sample Mirlyn advanced search on keyword=history, format=electronic and dates of publication=1900-1910 just returned 1,480 titles -- many of which are MBooks titles.

Both versions provide links on each page to send in comments. Please help us improve our electronic holdings by making use of the comment links, or contacting me directly (please see below).

Janet Crayne, Head
Slavic and East European Division
University of Michigan Library
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1205
(734) 936-2348 (phone)
(734) 763-6743 (fax)
jcrayne@umich.edu"

Weekend reading: Lakoff on progressive morality and framing

2006-08-26T20:03:00.000-04:00

An oldie but a beautifully written article from an author who always energizes me. George Lakoff, author of Don't Think of an Elephant, wrote a piece in 2003 for the American Prospect summarizing his "Strict Father/Nurturant Parent" model of conservative and liberal conceptions of morality. These, he finds, are inextricably tied to the words conservatives and liberals use to discuss the issues. Of course, for the last forty years, conservatives have been focus-grouping their terminology into a cohesive whole. Individual terms in the Republican's gesamtvokabular spring easily to mind: "partial birth abortion," "death tax," and Lakoff's favorite:

"On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words "tax relief" started appearing in White House communiqués. Think for a minute about the word relief. In order for there to be relief, there has to be a blameless, afflicted person with whom we identify and whose affliction has been imposed by some external cause. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, thanks to some reliever."

"Framing the Dems"

Remainders: Elevator table

2006-08-23T21:23:00.000-04:00

Elevator table
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

The elevator table is built, and looks okay. You can see it there, and there's another photo up on Flickr. For better or worse, I think it's a good reflection of my abilities as a carpenter.

Takeaway life lesson: glass table tops are really expensive. I priced out several glass options, along with Plexiglass (scratches too easily) and poured acrylic (too heavy). In the end, Jessica and I lucked out by finding the pictured sheet of 1/4" glass, 2'x3', at Owosso's Goodwill, for two bucks. That's obscenely fortunate, I realize.

Also lucky: finding a decent pair of speakers (Marantz 900s) nearby. To be clear, the luck didn't come from finding the speakers (like pianos, decent speaker sets from about twenty-five years ago turn up all the time for free on Craigslist), it came in finding the forty-pound pair of speakers two doors down from my apartment. They're beat up, but they sound great!

I finished Dave Eggers' book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius a few days ago. It's uneven, and the author's right when he warns that you should really only read the first hundred-odd pages. Still, it was worth reading.

Yakisoba - Japanese fried noodles

2006-08-14T14:54:00.000-04:00

Beni shoga and new wok
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

Here, in what is quickly becoming a regular feature, is your latest Recipe with a Narrative Structure.

You'll need:

1 lb. bok choy (Napa cabbage), chopped
Several ounces of whatever kind of mushrooms you're always intending to buy but can never justify.
8-12 oz. soba noodles
1 block fried tofu
Handful of green onions, chopped
Small white onion, chopped
Half inch of gingeroot, grated
Beni shoga
Rice wine or sake or, more likely, vinegar
Soy sauce
Sugar

Prep time: 3-5 days, 25 minutes

Google "beni shoga." Ponder it.
Google "Japanese grocery in Ann Arbor, MI." When you come up with nothing, try "Asian," and then settle on Chinese," even while you insist to yourself that you recognize the difference between different Asian cultures and their cuisines, even if Google doesn't.
Try that place up on Broadway. Tell the nice lady at the counter you're looking for beni shoga, then when she doesn't know what you're talking about, say "pickled ginger." A-ha! She'll lead you over to the gari shoga, which is not what you need. Buy it anyway, because you're spineless.
Search the internet for beni shoga retailers. Settle on something from an Amazon seller. Delight in the $2.49 price tag. Heck, order two bottles.
Balk at the $11 shipping fee.
Wait 3 to 5 days.
In the mean time, head down to Meijer for groceries. Decide to check out the international foods aisle that everyone's been saying has just been revamped and expanded. Swallow your pride when you find several bottles of beni shoga on the shelf.
Boil some water, drop the noodles in.
Oil the wok, sautee the onions then add the tofu and mushrooms.
Throw the bok choy into the wok, cook until soft. Pay no attention to the fact that for all outward appearances you are frying up a salad.
Drain the noodles, run them under cold water, then drop them in the wok.
Mix half a cup of soy sauce with a bit of rice wine and a teaspoon of sugar. Drizzle it into the wok and keep everything stirred up.
Set the biggest lid you've got over the wok, and let it cook for eight minutes on low heat. Stir occasionally.
Sprinkle with green onions and garnish with beni shoga, then serve. When your girlfriend tries the pickled ginger and doesn't like it, sigh loudly and take twice as much for yourself.

Elevator table

2006-08-07T21:56:00.000-04:00

Elevator table model
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

About two months ago now, I rescued the control panel from the 1970s elevator that, until that point, had served UM's Hatcher Library. It was lying in the scrap heap near the van I drive for work, so I quickly determined that I'd come back that night with a car and snag it. Despite its weight (the thing is about 6'x2' and dates from that bygone age of fist-size discrete electrical components), Jess and I managed to squeeze it into her Tracer and haul it back to the apartment. It's sat on my floor since then, suffering the occasional indignity when I would gather the energy to pry another heavy chunk of metal from it, hoping that someday it will be light enough to mount on the wall.

I can't help but concede that after two months on our bedroom floor, that hope was becoming dimmer by the day.

But! Something struck me yesterday, as I passed over it, lying on the floor: why not forget the complicated surgery required before sawing off most of the wood, and just turn it into a table more or less as-is? Jessica saw my idea and raised me a sheet of Plexiglass to give the table a useful surface.

So, today, I put my mental model to paper (so to speak) using Google's recently-acquired SketchUp software. I used to be a hobbyist raytracer in my early teens, so I'm familiar with the niche 3D modeling software Moray (and, in digging up that link, I'm happy to see it's hardly changed in the past almost-decade), but this is really easy to use. I mean, forgiving the sins of the beginner (I think my "Plexiglass" surface has a zero depth, f'rinstance), I was up and using keyboard shortcuts after five minutes of toying around. Very fun!

Anyway, a project the size of this table is going to necessitate a weekend back home with the power tools. Jess and I are picking out table legs tonight, and I think my chance to put it all together will come in a few weekends.

Major life progress?

2006-08-06T23:56:00.000-04:00

I didn't get any new work done on my personal statement this weekend. Law school admissions open in three weeks and, as it stands, I wouldn't be admitted to a single one. I did, however:

Do the laundry
Finally buy At Folsom Prison, and listen to it all weekend
Read about a hundred more pages of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Play tennis
Go out for lunch
Buy groceries, and a wallclock
Lounge around
Come up with a flawless plan for turning the elevator door in my bedroom into a kickass table (more to come)
Make sushi
Watch TV and eat ice cream with Jessica and Henry

So it's been a pretty okay weekend, regardless.

Last night's excitement

2006-08-02T10:47:00.000-04:00

In my inbox last night before coming home:

From: Jessica
To: Me
Date: Aug 1, 2006 9:53 PM
Subject: You might be somewhere where you can't check your emails but...

There's another bat in the house!!!!!!!

help.

Yeah, I'm basically up in our room hiding. Of course, I didn't grab my cell phone to call you. I'm a weiner.

Fortunately, after the last bat got into our last apartment, we've had an action plan. In its entirety,

Jessica runs upstairs and slams the bedroom door, while
I deal with the bat.

Last night's encounter was won by human ingenuity, Henry's welcome assistance, and perhaps a nontrivial number of beers consumed beforehand on both our parts. More directly involved with the actual bat removal were an empty trashcan and a towel. I'll let the reader imagine the details

Remainders: several recollections of "The Best 1.7 Weeks Ever"

2006-07-31T21:54:00.000-04:00

This really was a phenomenal 1.7 weeks. So good, really, that I was unable to get around to blogging about its goings on.

The Ann Arbor Art Fair came and went. Sure, it ain't art. You're danged right it ain't fair. I'll say nothing of the prices, the traffic, or the suburbanites-with-strollers theme that the event seems to have adopted for every year I've been part of it. But! the Art Fair does have two good points: sidewalk fairs and concession stands. I picked up a jacket, two shirts, a t-shirt, a pair of pants, Japanese fried noodles, pad thai, chicken on a stick, and probably more over the course of three days for somewhere south of $50. Note to insidious yuppie plotters: fifty bucks to keep me fat 'n' clothed for a year is all it takes to keep me quiet.
Plus, my parents came down for one of the days.
Just returned from Chicago with Jessica, where we attended the Pitchfork Music Festival. My take on it: I always say I'm too old and crabby for live music, and that's largely because the live music I tend to take in considers itself too hip and detached for stage presence. Throw me into a two-day, 95-degree festival, though, and things change, for some reason. I did enjoy it, with special regard to Glenn Kotche, actually. Didn't stick around for Os Mutantes, Sunday's headliners, as I had to wake up at five the next morning to catch my train back home, and I'm just a half-assed music snob in the first place.
Missed the Mountain Goats and Matmos. Crap.
Best part of Yo La Tengo's blah setlist: hearing tiny Ira Kaplan say his band's new album's title out loud.
Okay, and the best news for last: I've got a second job now, tutoring the LSAT. Things are looking good!

"Black Tagliatelle with Squid" (featuring green linguini and shrimp)

2006-07-19T19:42:00.000-04:00

"Black" "Tagliatelle" with "Squid"
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

In this post, I'm going to describe a true-to-life, eminently edible paradox of Italian food. Before I get there, though, let's venture across time and the Ionian Sea to get to ancient Greece. Theseus suffered a famous philosophical paradox in maintaining his favorite ship: as planks weathered and warped, he was forced to replace them. Naturally, this happened to every plank on deck at some point. After what point, though, was Theseus' trireme no longer Theseus' trireme? After what point can it be said that the components of a set have been so fundamentally changed that the set itself is changed?

I encountered my own not-wholly-accurate rendering of this problem tonight in the kitchen. A Mediterranean cookbook Jessica and I purchased a few months back featured a recipe for a black ink tagliatelle with squid sauce which, by joint virtue of its sumptuous illustration and my own recent seafood kick, I felt I must try to recreate.

My problems began at Whole Foods. With one trip, I intended to pick up a pound and a half of salmon for my above-linked lox experiment and the fresh squid I needed for the pasta. I scored on the first count but struck out on the second: Ann Arbor is not the place for exotic seafood. Fine, I resolved; I still had some shrimp in the freezer that I'd been saving for pad thai.

Next, the tagliatelle. Tagliatelle (a word I have learnt to spell reliably only since beginning this blog entry) is a sort of classic, romantic magnum opus that only happens to be executed in the pasta medium. The typically reserved Wikipedia, reading here more like a menu from the Olive Garden, calls it "an expression of the art of hand-made pasta" (one wonders about the NPOV on that!). I was all set to pick up a recipe and get down to business hand-crafting some noodles, but Jessica advised against it. Jessica has experience with these kinds of things. Her advice came as we happened to pass through Meijer's "Ethnic Food" aisle, so I grabbed a bag of store-brand spinance linguine and just sort of teared up a bit.

So, my black tagliatelle was actually green linguine, and the squid meant for its sauce was actually cocktail shrimp. Strangely, Google's never heard of that, and anyway I get sort of headstrong about my impossible recipes, so I decided I would just press on. "Black Tagliatelle with Squid," it was.

The rest of the ingredients, at least, posed no problems. Play along at home:

Begin by heating a generous spill of olive oil for a few moments, then sauteeing two chopped shallots. I left these fairly large, but on my next attempt I think I'll dice them closely. Then come three pressed cloves of garlic and a half-handful of chopped fresh parsley. This can cook for a moment as you turn towards the TV to catch up on the episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which you've just become aware of last night when a friend lent you some episodes, and which is quite good in the Arrested Development vein of comedies.
Focus. Open the bag of shrimp, empty it of water, and drop its contents into the pan. You could probably substitute scallops here, but then you wouldn't be making "Black Tagliatelle with Squid," would you? Pour in about half a cup of white cooking wine as well.
Oh man, so this is the one where Mac and Dennis compete over the dead guy's granddaughter at his funeral, and Charlie discovers the truth about Dennis' grandfather. Hilarity totally ensues.
Focus. If it's been a minute or two, and the shrimp have made the sauce a little darker in color, now's the time to empty a fourteen ounce can of diced tomatoes into it. Otherwise, go back to the TV.
Once that's done, put a lid on. If you're using fresh seafood you should let it simmer for about an hour to cook all the way through, but even with my precooked shrimp I decided to give the sauce some time on low heat while the noodles were cooking.
Boil some water.
Dejected, drop the little curly noodle coils in, about two per diner. Wait for al dente status (and it will take a while, these little guys are thick), then drain. You know what to do.

Seriously, this dish turned out pretty well. I will definitely be making the sauce again, at the very least. Someday I hope to get a line on some fresh squid and some proud, wizened Bolognese to craft me some tagliatelle. Until then, I'm fine with putting the recipe's name in quotation marks, and enjoying it just the same.

More racism in Ann Arbor

2006-07-18T13:33:00.000-04:00

Understandably, the issue of racism makes Ann Arborites uncomfortable. As the defendant in the Supreme Court's 2003 decision upholding affirmative action in law school admissions, the University of Michigan is frequently the canvas for the political opinions and agendas of outsiders — and it's getting messy. In the aftermath of the 2005's most infamous incident — in which two white students were accused of yelling epithets and urinating on a group of Asian students — the debate raged between those who saw the event as a hate crime, and those who, brandishing scare quotes, dismissed it as only a "hate crime."

Even in that debate, however, both sides were able to keep largely civil to one another. Case in point: Nick Cheolas, incoming editor at the conservative Michigan Review and a person with whom I have never agreed, wrote in to the Michigan Daily a few months back. Amidst falling over himself to apologize for the alleged perpetrators, Mr. Cheloas nevertheless managed to write an editorial fit for public consumption.* No matter what side of the political fence you're on, it's possible to appeal to facts [or, in Nick's case, someone's account of the facts] and reason, not racial invective.

Unfortunately, it's not alway that way in practice. I was at a friend's apartment this afternoon, and given the recent heatwave, I cut through the Modern Languages Building on my way home. Halfway through, I passed a bulletin board, full of ads looking for subleasees or experimental participants. One note caught my eye, despite its small size and shoddy photocopying:

"Ralph Nader didn't lose the 2000 election for Al Gore. Instead, it was blacks' hatred for whites that pushed so many white voters to the right." ...

Hooh boy. The flier continued for two more tightly-packed paragraphs, spread over two sheets. I made it far enough to read that "blacks regularly maim white atheletes to win pro sports contracts" and how "blacks commit 10,000,000 hate crimes against whites every year that go unreported" before I grew too disgusted to go on. Automatically, I grabbed the flier and dropped it in a recycling basket nearby.

Walking away, I wasn't sure I did the right thing. I certainly am, as George H. W. Bush would say, "a card-carrying member of the ACLU." That means, among other things, that I value free speech even when it's ugly, vicious speech. I guess to this point, I've never been in a position to actively test that value. Rationally, I don't believe there ought to be a test to determine whether speech is pleasantly expressed before it qualifies as speech. But in the heat of the moment, I wasn't thinking rationally. I mean, as a private citizen, I wasn't in any danger of violating anyone's First Amendment rights (in fact, I suppose I was exercising my own). Further, I don't think that the handbill would have lasted much longer had I not removed it — you would have head to see the thing. At the same time, I'm conflicted

In the meantime, though, there is an ugly current of racism in this town, and it looks like it's expressing itself this summer. I wonder if the poster was trying to get his message out in time for the influx of out-of-towners visiting the Art Fair. I hope I don't see any more around town, but the one I saw today was clearly photocopied, and spread across two quartersheets at that. Come to think of it, maybe they're printed on both sides (I didn't examine it very closely before junking it), which would suggest someone intends to hand them out. I'll be keeping my eyes open, and I hope others will do the same. There's a place for fair and civilized debate about race in America, but the direction this particular screed was going in wasn't a civilized one at all.

Yikes, Ann Arbor. Yikes.

*I don't meant to imply any connection between Nick or anyone else and the flier; just including him as an example.

MP3s from "Pianoless Vexations"

2006-07-15T01:37:00.000-04:00

If you don't share my love of minimalism or early new music, you can skip this post. If you do, you'll be delighted to see that the performances constituting "Pianoless Vexations," the tribute to Erik Satie's eighteen-hour opus held last month in New York, were professionally recorded and made available online.

If my opening conditional applied to you but you're still reading, you're probably thinking that a work stretched into eighteen hours could be nothing short of masturbatory. In today's postmoder, post-prog world, it probably couldn't. But in 1893, it was still something to instruct one's would-be performer to play the same brief theme 840 times in a row. What really makes it work is, of course, that melody is damned good. Sparse, evocative, and all that. To my untrained ear, it anticipates the serialist movement by, what, twenty years? At any rate, this was ambient before Brian Eno was a twinkle in his great-grandfather's eye.

Anyway, the tribute. It's good. The Magnetic Fields' Stephen Merritt plays the marimba, Red Krayola's David Grubbs, plays classical guitar, and author Rick friggin' Moody guests on the last shift. Check it out.

Oops...

2006-07-14T09:45:00.000-04:00

Oops...
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

Mistakes, in the words of Condi Rice, were made.

Last weekend, the onboard speakers on my Toshiba laptop cut out. Being just over a year after I'd purchased it, my warranty wouldn't do me any good. The cause of the problem was evident: my headphone jack was sticking halfway out of the case at some jaunty angle, and using headphones still produced sound. Something had to be done.

With a little help from Ryan, a tech at work, I was able to disassemble the laptop (unexpectedly thorough how-to here) and locate the problem. Indeed, my headphone jack had been twisted just enough to break a solder joint and short out. (aside to manufacturers of any audio equipment: don't solder your sealed jacks directly to your circuit boards!) I brought the computer home, applied some epoxy to the connection, and booted it up. Sure enough, sound was back!

Of course, I wouldn't have titled this post "Ooops..." if everything had gone according to plan. Taking this laptop apart was fairly easy, in part because all the case screw holes were numbered by size, from the smallest (F3) to the largest (F8). This makes it easy to segregate your screws on your workbench, and then put them back into the correct holes on reassembly.

Not easy enough for me, though. I had put my laptop back together, complete with the few "screws left over" that signal to an amateur handyman he's done his job right. Then I tried lifting the lid. Unsuccessfully. I couldn't imagine why it was stuck down or, once I'd pried it up, what the little metal filings where doing on the front of my laptop. Then I noticed the exposed screws. Long story short, an F3 looks a lot like an F8 when you're working late at night.

I took the long screws out, replaced them with the correct size, and filed the burrs down around the holes. I might have taken fifty bucks off the resale of my laptop, but I ~~learned an important lesson~~ ~~gave my laptop a personal touch~~ finally have working speakers, at least. Oops...

Statement of purpose: gravlax

2006-07-10T21:19:00.000-04:00

In the midst of being overwhelmed by the massive, Nordic expanse that is Canton's new IKEA, Jessica and I encountered its second floor cafeteria (!) around lunchtime. I was thrilled immediately, not by the furniture store's more famous Swedish meatballs or cinammon rolls, but by a big sign: "Gravad Lox: $4.99." I hadn't had lox since New York last year, and I paid nearly $10 for it there.

Anyway, it was delicious, and I've still got an appetite for it. Apparently, it's not too tough to make. Expect a post soon regaling my triumph or defeat.

Yearly plug for Gandi.net

2006-07-10T20:56:00.000-04:00

After getting an email reminder, I just renewed my domain name for another year. As I did so, I thought it wouldn't hurt to put up a quick blog post about how much I love my registrar, Gandi.net. I really, really do. I'll say up front, among cheap registrars they're not the cheapest — especially for we Americans, who bear the brunt of the poor exchange rate. Gandi is a French company, and their costs are given in euros (12, to be exact). After VAT, my cost came to about $18.54 for a year's stake.

This is not bad, though, when one considers what one's getting. There is the unquantifiable benefit, for instance, of getting this in your mailbox:

Cher client,

Vous recevez ce message car vous êtes contact de facturation des domaines listés ci-dessous (voir tout en bas du message, après la partie anglaise). ...

(La partie anglaise, of course, comes second, yet is perfectly translated).

What I'm most fond of, though, is how rarely I hear from Gandi at all. This site is the epitome of "file-and-forget" service. Their flawless performance shows in the fact that I have probably visited them six times in the past twelve months. The site's recently gone through a redesign, but even now with its Web 2.0-certified colors, it doesn't hide the key information I'm looking for. I also appreciate the site's dual modes, willing either to walk you through your first domain registration and setup, or step out of the way and present all (all) the technical options you might need. This carries through to the domain itself — unlike some others, Gandi doesn't insist on acting as the steward of your domain, but rather sticks whatever information you give it on whois. It will, however, offer a private email address if you don't want to list yours publicly.

Basically, Gandi is a great, no-nonsense domain registrar. I hope they continue to grow, as I intend to be a longtime customer!

The personal statement

2006-07-07T19:58:00.000-04:00

So, LSAT score in hand and letters of recommendation soon to be, I should need only to wait for September 1 to come around, then mail off all my applications, right? Of course not -- I still need to write my personal statement.

Yuck.

I've got a pretty good idea of what the form's typical approaches -- or at least, I understand that their entire range and scope can be summed up in four bullet points -- but I'm having less success applying my own life's variables to the general formula. I want to "bring my application together as one unit" and "put a face on my numbers" and everything, I just don't know exactly how I'll do that.

I've got a likely theme -- my devotion to international law -- and a number of stories and achievements that relate to it:

My thesis - everyone in the applicant pool writes one, and my advisor is already talking it up (I would imagine) in her letter of recommendation
Some early talks I attended by an ICJ justice, an Amnesty International adminstrator, et al. They put the idea of international law into my head, but do they contribute to a compelling storyline now?
My time abroad - everyone I'm competing against has studied abroad, and I didn't do any particular legal thinking when I was there.
The time a highly-placed law professor telling me the topic of my thesis didn't exist -maybe if I was filming an touching docudrama about a young scholar overcoming the odds instead of writing a two-page admissions essay, and maybe if said scene were followed by a montage of me hitting the books and doing the academic equivalent of weight training...
My internship - I researched a lot of world privacy and technology regulatory regimes... then I threw my notes in a dustbin and cobbled together an unrelated project in two weeks' time for the final.

"Song of Myself," it ain't. What's more, even if there is a storyline hiding somewhere in all that, does it really say anything about me? I'm got more going on in my life than just my senior thesis, but the rest of it doesn't really fit together as aiming toward any single point.

Remainders: LSAT and Large Marge

2006-06-30T16:09:00.000-04:00

LSAT scores are out. I'm happy enough with mine that I'm not retaking it in October. Now comes the scary part: application essays.
My other site is still intermittently down. With LSAT stuff and, to be honest, a rediscovered copy of Diablo II keeping me busy, though, I can't find the time to work much the redesign.
Just bought my train tickets to get to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival in about a month's time. That should be very cool: the Walkmen, Art Brut, Glenn Kotche, Mission of Burma, and Yo La Tengo, for $92 plus two nights sleeping on someone's floor. Can't beat it.
George Bush: expert at cross-cultural displays of gratitude.
So I finally confronted a major fear from my childhood, and one that remained unresolved until this last Tuesday. On that night, Jessica and I went out to the Michigan Theater to see Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. This time, I was ready for Large Marge. Naturally (to anyone who's seen the movie), Marge's highway ghost story terrified me when I first saw the movie. Seriously, how did they sneak in Marge's proto-shock face into a kids movie?
Honestly, I'm not sure if it was the intervening fifteen years that prepared me for Large Marge, or just how ridiculous Claymation looks in 2006.

Server down

2006-06-22T14:11:00.000-04:00

All the graphics on this blog are gone temporarily, as is danray.org in its entirety. Apparently, my server is dead. I think most of it is recoverable from one place or another, but for right now, the server itself is being rebuilt.

I'm going to take this opportunity to rebuild this blog, I think. Aaron, my friend who's working on the problem now, said he corrected my abortive install of WordPress from a few months ago. I can't decide how much I want to change the look and function of the blog when I move it, but I would like to unify the looks of page and my homepage a bit more. I think this layout works, but the source is terrible and far out of standards compliance. And it's certainly not impressive.

As I was going over my old workspaces, checking what old copies of pages and resources I could find, I came across a couple redesign mockups from about six months ago. What do you think of this?

Pad Thai redux

2006-06-21T23:33:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, I never expected that one of my most frequent topics would be Thai cooking. But sure e-nough, it is. My muse works in mysterious ways.

I write tonight, however, with a better outlook on creating Pad Thai than is typical on after I attempt to do so. Tonight, I finally created a decent, edible product. I am damned proud. Jessica, regularly the victim of my less-successful efforts, called it the best I'd ever made.

Anyway, I'm going to post my basic recipe here, in the interest of actually being able to throw it all together again sometime soon. Here it goes:

Dan's Pad Thai for Two, One of Whom is Your Vegetarian Girlfriend

1 1/2 shallots
2/3 c. carrots, thinly sliced
2 eggs
2-3 Thai peppers, chopped
1 can bean sprouts, drained
Cooked shrimp
1 package Thai-marinated tofu, cut into strips
1/2 c. roasted, unsalted peanuts
4 green onions, chopped
1-2 limes, quartered
1 box Thai Kitchen Original Pad Thai kit (noodles and sauce)
Wok oil

Pre-preparation: Convince your girlfriend that you really do need a trip to Whole Foods for ingredients. Grant her that you do have a "meal kit" in the cupboard; argue that a meal-in-a-box is more a fertile springboard for one's own culinary explorations than a meal in itself. Grant her that it is about to rain, and that it's nearly rush hour. Acknowledge that you're saving for a trip to Iceland; nevertheless insist that you can't make Pad Thai without the goddamn peppers, at least, they say "Thai" right on the placard! Promise you'll work the "meal kit" in to your recipe.

1) Drive to Whole Foods for ingredients. Wish that you were in a position to reasonably invest in more than two or three Thai peppers at a time. Recognize and accept that you are not at present in that position. Sample the Roquefort in front of the tofu display, then snag another few cubes on your way out.

2) Get over the shame of starting from a box. Maybe using a "meal kit" you bought from a yuppie supermarket will set for your ingredients a wholesome example on how to resemble Thai food. Maybe your girlfriend will eat it.

3) Boil some water.

4) Chop everything. Just kinda do your own thing here. Do NOT, however, touch the oil from the peppers with bare hands -- it will sting for hours. Your girlfriend was first to discover their capsaicin-derived power, and it put her off from your Pad Thai for weeks.

5) Get your wok out. Oil it, and cook the eggs until scrambled. Pull them out and set them aside.

6) More oil; more vegetables. Throw the peppers, carrots, shallots, and tofu, then stir fry for a few minutes.

7) Realize loudly and profanely that you never put the noodles in the saucepan. Do so, and decide to just stir fry everything else a little bit longer.

8) When the noodles are soft and separated, drain them. Drop them in the wok and drizzle the sauce on top. Stir everything together on reduced heat. Now's a fine time for the bean sprouts, too.

9) Assemble everything: Empty the wok into that big ceramic bowl that never fails to lend your casseroles a subtle sheen of legitimacy. Convince yourself that proper lime wedge-placement is the key to making your presentation look more "Asian"; act on this assumption. Maybe stick some chopsticks in there, too.

10) Drizzle more oil into your wok. Note that your girlfriend is a vegetarian. With her out of the kitchen, revel in your ability to cook tiny representatives of a species one of whose chief badges of merit is the "de-veined" label on its seafood counter coffin. Five minutes in hot oil will cook them from frozen. Amid the pop-poppop-ing of oil and ice crystals, you will feel as though you could justify buying several Thai peppers next time.

Googlepedia

2006-06-15T14:40:00.000-04:00

Googlepedia
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

This is a wonderful new Firefox extension I just installed. When you search Google, from the homepage or Firefox's search bar, it adds the Wikipedia result for your search terms to the right side of the results page.

I frequently find a phrase or reference I just want a little context for, so I'm forever searching Wikipedia. Good as it is, though, I don't use Wikipedia as much as I use Google, so I can't change the search box's default engine. For years now, I've used Searchy to roll my own search shortcuts (the LEO and UMich student directory tools are actually my own creation). This is much more elegant, though -- especially on my widescreen.

(Oh, it only works on Firefox 1.5.x. Unless you get the extension Henry just showed me, Nightly Tester Tools, that allows you to spoof your version number. Once you install, go to Tools -> Nightly Tester Tools -> Install Extension or Theme, and voila! It's running fine for me on Bon Echo 2.0.2a.)

Just finished the LSAT

2006-06-12T23:21:00.000-04:00

Everything's coo'.

We'll find out in 2.5-3 weeks just how cool. Right now, though, I feel like I need a new project. My last month and a half was entirely given over to LSAT prep, and the rest of the admissions process promises to be a lot more low impact. I want to start playing tennis again, and Jessica and I are thinking about learning a language together.

"I think it's a passing fad."

2006-06-09T15:10:00.000-04:00

If you've got a UMich uniqname (login credentials), you owe it to yourself to check out Conferencing on the Web (COW). That's not because it's particularly useful as a way to talk to others, but rather because it's ancient. My ITCS job has a conference set up, where bored consultants semiregularly post links or news.

Browsing it today, however, I got adventurous and climbed up a directory, to the public COW conference, open to all users. It features a wealth of conversation, barely any of it newer than about two years. The real find, though, was this thread, under the title "Is the Web the Future?" It was posted nine and a half years ago, in January 1997. And it's awesome: witness distinguished professors discover HTML, relive your first time "calling up the news on the Web page," and dream about the far-off advent of "Broad Band" connections.

'Round that time, I was reading back issues of PC Magazine and playing checkers on an MIT server. Those were the days.

The summer slowdown

2006-05-31T19:39:00.000-04:00

Just some updates as the temperature settles in on ninety:

Jessica and I are moving again. Madison Property managed, in the confusion while our building was changing hands, to rent out a four-bedroom apartment for a September lease. I imagine that it was sight-unseen for both parties, given that our building doesn't have any four-bedroom apartments. My new apartment, however, and the one next to it, are together one wall shy of making that happen. So, Madison all but begged us to relocate across the hall. I will say, with the amenities we got in return, they've been very accomodating.
Hopefully the new place won't have bats. Oh, right, because apartment 106 does — or did, for one crazy night this weekend. Jessica bolted; I cornered it with a broom and a saucepan. Funny story.
LSAT prep: it's going. I don't want to do this again in ~~October~~ September, so I'm going to stay hard at it for the next week and a half.
...And once that's over, I'll start building websites again. That probably means this one will change over before September, to a new CMS and URL if not a completely new look.
Finally, a brief in memoriam for my hard drive. For the last month or so, I idly (that is, mentally) crafted a post to break down my wunnerful new MythTV box. Running Slackware, it was its own very small, very primitive, very free TiVo, organizing my movies and TV shows even while it streamed MP3s far and wide. All of these things it did, and more, until this afternoon. fsck -a -y tried valiantly to save it, but two reboots later my computer was trying to boot from the CD-ROM. Unless you're installing Windows, that's not a good sign. I've got backups a few months out of date, and I understand the Unix filesystem is more recoverable than others, so I hope I get lucky and can save my stuff.

Graduation and the move

2006-05-08T08:42:00.000-04:00

Jessica's graduation
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

Just a catch-up post. Jessica graduated this Saturday, and we've moved into our new apartment. I'm working 30+ hours a week and studying for the LSAT, so even once our internet connection is hooked up, updates here may be scarce.

The new place
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

Come on over, though, to the party at our place this Saturday! Email me for directions, or call.

Youthful indiscretions

2006-04-25T01:36:00.000-04:00

Now that I'm home and nearly done with the semester, I've got time for something I haven't done since my last visit home: reading for pleasure. Having been put in the mood for him by an interesting conspiracy theory I heard on the radio as I drove up from Ann Arbor, I opened up Thomas Pynchon's volume of short stories recently and had to share this.

From "Entropy," Pynchon's character considers post-war iconography:

"...And the tango. Any tango, but more than any perhaps the sad sick dance in Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. He thought back: what had tango music been for them after the war, what meanings had he missed in all the stately coupled automatons in the cafés-dansants, or in the metronomes which had ticked behind the eyes of his own partners? Not even the clean constant winds of Switzerland could cure the grippe espagnole: Stravinsky had had it; they all had had it. ..."

And, from the author's introduction:

"In the character of Callisto, I was trying for a sort of world-weary Middle European effect, and had put in the phrase grippe espagnole, which I had seen on some liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky's L'Histoire Du Soldat. I must have thought this was some kind of post-World War I spiritual malaise or something. Come to find out it means what it says, Spanish influenza, and the reference I lifted was really to the worldwide flu epidemic that followed the war."

The lesson? Even Thomas Pynhon was a pretentious faker once. Actually, editorially, I might add that he probably still is, but (crucially!) at some later point he mastered the art of letting someone else pick up after him. A great -- and forthright! -- author.

Hey, Dan! What's your thesis about?

2006-04-19T23:20:00.000-04:00

Why, let's ask Mr. Powerpoint! (opens as .htm)

I've got my work cut out for me this summer.

"Do you regularly vote in web polls?"

2006-04-18T18:49:00.000-04:00

Silent Surfer poll
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

You'll have to click through, either on my image or to the original article. But do that, then hazard a guess whether Webuser's poll results may come out biased.
EDIT: Two link posts in a day is gratuitous. So I'm just going to put this here.
I'm about 80% done with my thesis prospectus. Which is good, given that it's to be presented in twelve hours.
Looks like I'm in Ann Arbor until Friday, incidentally, when I can clean up the apartment and head for home. I'll be back the beginning of May.

WCBN's worst and best

2006-04-12T01:37:00.000-04:00

I'm not a radio listener very regularly, but occasionally I do still drive around either on my own time or at work. When I do, I've always got the radio on 88.3, the U of M's own college radio station. The music's good, the DJ interruptions are inept but infrequent, and the commercials...

Well, the commericals aren't always so good. Of course, as a public station, WCBN doesn't air "commercial" spots, but it does promote the hell out of itself. Or so it intends to do. Readers, I present to you the thirty-second spot that has done more to marginalize all the decent stuff the station has to offer than any self-indulgent Wolf Eyes track spun at 4am. I paraphrase:

Mind. Body. Spirit. Action. Reaction. Progression. Regression. Language. Feeling. Culture. [the string of section headings from your Anthro 101 book continues for maybe thirty seconds. Then:] I'm Greg Kress. Join me and ride along side me on the Neon Jazz Train. Mondays from noon to three.

That's all there is. It's too bad, but there's not a trace of irony. Just a really serious hep cat. Fortunately, it's not all bad at WCBN. There's also The Pirate Commercial.

This one is pretty rough too, don't get me wrong. The premise, if you can follow me here, is that a pirate captain and maybe his first mate or something are on a pirate ship. The mate is tuning the ship's radio, trying to find something nice to accompany the filthy-lucre-gathering. Apparently his radio was made in the UK, though, since it only tunes in even-numbered frequencies. "88.2, no... 88.4, no..." This drags out just long enough for the listener to pick up on the fact that never until this very blog post, no not even during its actual filming, was any sort of script ever put to paper.

Finally, though, the pirates settle on 88.3. The one non sequiturs the other, "This music truly soothes th' soul. Mayhaps we should give up our piratin' lives," &c. &c. Cue the voice-over: "If you'd like help abandoning piracy or any other form of antiquated evil, listen to WCBN."

"Antiquated evil!" Love it!

What a silly blog post.

Remainders: 21

2006-04-11T00:18:00.000-04:00

Pad Thai I made a few weeks ago.

Holy crap, I'm 21.
No, you didn't miss the party. It hasn't happened yet, because the second week of April is a shitty time to have a birthday. Wait until Jessica and I move in to our new place -- if you're reading this, you're invited.
On the same note, it turns out ice really is vital to the martini-mixing process.
Also, the jerk at the counter didn't card me. There I am, my first legal alcohol purchase since Ottawa, and the guy just hands me my Rolling Rock and sends me on my way.
No, I'm not saying where this clerk works.
The semester is winding down, but it's still kickin'. I've got a ten-page paper due in a week on the institutional features of the OPEC statute and how they came to be, plus lots of related work yet to be done on my thesis topic before I present my prospectus on the 19th.
I regret that only comparatively little of that work lies in actually writing the prospectus.
I think I'm onto a quantitative method to isolate and test a few conceptualizations of implied agreements and understandings relating to treaty negotiation, though. What's more, if my method is valid, it seems entirely possible that I might finish this thing by March.
Man, it's just about time to get cracking on that LSAT prep.
Had my first editorial board meeting at the Daily today. When you read about the evils of state-level welfare reform on Thursday, you can thank me.

What I just learnt about Hüsker Dü

2006-04-10T13:55:00.000-04:00

So I'm researching my paper on the style and substance of punk, right, for AMCULT 206. Anyway, I get sidetracked on Wikipedia (as is my wont) and wind up at Hüsker Dü's entry. These are the fun facts I learnt thereon:

[The band] owed their new name to a sloppy rehearsal of the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer." Unable to recall the French portions sung in the original ("qu'est-ce que c'est..."), they began shouting any foreign-language terms they could remember, when someone said "Husker Du", a board game from Denmark that had been popular in the 1960s (the phrase means "do you remember?"). The group added heavy metal umlauts, and had their new name. [Bob] Mould reports that they liked Hüsker Dü's somewhat mysterious qualities, which set them apart from other hardcore punk groups with names like "Social Red Youth Dynasty Brigade Distortion" (Azerrad, 162).

and

The newly-monikered group had their first official performance in early 1979. A short way into the show, one of [drummer Grant] Hart's friends unplugged [erstwhile keyboard player Charlie] Pine's keyboards and gave him the finger. The remaining musicians made no objection, and Hüsker Dü formally became a trio.

Finally, Greg Norton had a handlebar mustasche. For real.

(Oh, the "Azerrad" cited above and throughout the article is Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life. I read a review of it four and a half years ago in The Nation of all places, and since then I've seen the book referenced probably more than any other recent musical history. I've gotta pick it up one of these days.)

A glorious intersection

2006-04-03T18:20:00.000-04:00

Windows Vista -- invalid font
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

Among my favorite interests, academic and otherwise:

Typography
the EU
International judiciaries
Hating Microsoft

It's no surprise, then, that I'm posting this story. Microsoft's claims to one of its nice new fonts was today chucked out of the EU internal market's domain. 'Parently, Microsoft lifted the face from another designer. Of course, we didn't see that coming.

It is a nice font, though. For the record, an archive of all the new fonts is still floating around the internet somewhere or other.

My favorite bureaucrat promoted

2006-03-28T09:11:00.000-05:00

Way back in November, I got a chance to talk to Josh Bolten, head of the OMB. I see this morning that that descriptor is no longer accurate: he's just been promoted to fill Andy Card's position as Chief of Staff.

Nice guy, I guess. As soon as he screws up, though, oh man is he in for it.

Illegitimus non carborundum

2006-03-27T11:30:00.000-05:00

My, wasn't that a mess?

MPP didn't do as well as projected in the elections. We only picked up three seats in total. That's bad, but the context makes it worse.

Robbie O'Brien, disgraced S4M chair, admits that his party engaged in a premeditated, coordinated attack on our website, designed to hamper voting among our base.
S4M bosses Stu Wagner, Arielle Linsky, and Alana Kuhn signed an email sent to members of Michigan's Jewish community falsely asserting that the MPP was running only one Jewish candidate, and that we endorsed divestment from Israel.
S4M candidate Nate Fink coöpted the College Dems' email list to send his own Dems endorsements -- conveniently forgetting all the MPP members they had officially endorsed.
Pete Borock, S4M's "communications director" and member of the Dems executive board, sent an email to campus liberals hours before the polls closed, claiming that the Student Conservative Party was leading in the polls, and the only way to prevent another 1994 was a kneejerk vote for S4M. Of course, Ally Jacobs and Brian Steers, S4m candidates both affiliated with the Republican party sent an identical message at the same time, claiming the MPP was ahead and the only way to prevent another 1932 was a kneejerk vote for S4M. (References to American political history, regrettably, did not appear in the emails.)

How is it, then, that I feel fine? Well, it's a sunshiney day. Jessica and I made a great feast last night; that definitely contributes to my mood (a short succession of minor crises prevents the usual Sunday night dinner photos, but be assured that it tasted delightfuly and, depending on how strictly you interpret the teachings of Madhur Jaffrey, may have even qualified as Indian.)

Overall, though, it's refreshing to walk to class over the last few days and have so many people talk to me about the election. People care what happened -- and it's not just my close friends. Especially with today's stories in the Daily, people really are paying attention. I guess what I'm saying is, the bastards have not ground me down. And that's a good feeling.

Look for a step-by-step of what happened the night of the website attack here shortly. Other than that, I promise I'll get back to whatever it was I used to write about a month ago, shortly.

Polls are open.

2006-03-21T00:52:00.000-05:00

It would probably be best if you voted for the Michigan Progressive Party. If you're reading this and you haven't already voted? You're seriously not my friend anymore.

Puh-leeeeeze.

2006-03-19T14:52:00.000-05:00

Up late last night, I noticed that S4M's website had just added a hit counter. Interesting, I thought, that a site that had been up for (at least) two years should have almost exactly the number of hits that the MPP's site had over about a month and a half: just over 12,000.

That was about 3:00 am. Back in Ann Arbor this afternoon, things have changed: now they're up on us by about 8,000 visits. A look at their page's code indicates they're probably using a server-side counter (it's impossible to tell exactly what program). Why are they using a private hit counter that resides on their own webserver? It couldn't be that they want the ability to "add" visitors, is it? Of course not -- I'm sure 8,000 people working the third shift Saturday night have taken a newfound interest in Students 4 Michigan.

Has this campaign strategy become pathetic yet? Do you want to vote for a guy or girl whose response to an unpopular campaign platform is to fake 8,000 new visitors to his or her website?

Bait and switch: the International Relations minor

2006-03-19T02:48:00.000-05:00

Back in '03, I was a bright-eyed young freshman out to get the world by the horns. I remember going to a talk by a judge on the ICJ and resolving all the more that international law was what I wanted to do with my life. Oh, the minutae of NGOs, institutions, and other stuff that -- breathe easy -- this blog post isn't actually about.

This post is about the international relations minor. That very formative first semester, I was promised by LSA-SG the opportunity to minor in international relations. Oh, to be so lucky! Treaties and courts and-- right, focusing on the matter at hand. Anyway, I fully intended to declare myself an international relations minor just as soon as it was ready. For whatever reason, I assumed this would be at some point that December.

Well, I got involved in student government myself, and I found out that some brand-new initiatives just take a little time to work their way through the system. Then, just when you've forgotten about them, they spring up with a tidy write-up in the Daily, newly available to all. This is the experience I expected when I first saw announced on the Sigma Iota Rho the new International Studies minor two and a half years later -- in fact, this very February.

Wait. "International Studies?" Bwah? That's not international relations. International relations is a dreamy discipline full of self defense and extended deterence and... "International Studies," on the other hand, is ... vague, I guess. But what's in a name?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. "International Studies" is not international relations in practice. IS is apparently an umbrella for regional studies -- take six semesters of a language, a few courses on the region that language is spoken, and maybe travel there. Bam -- international studies. No mention of diplomacy, or trafficking in humans, or ... you, know, international relations stuff. In other words, it's a lot like the preëxisting

Asian Studies minor,
Modern West European Studies minor,
Germanic Studies minor,
Scandinavian Studies minor,
East European Studies minor,
Latin American and Carribean Studies minor,
Russian Studies minor,
Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture minor,
French and Francophone Studies minor,
Czech Language, Literature, and Culture minor,
Polish Language, Literature, and Culture minor, and the
Russian Language, Literature, and Culture minor.

In other words, the "International Studies" minor represents a collective freaking-out by LSA-SG, followed by the path-of-least resistance method of simply recreating what's already there. Mediocrity rules.

But wait! Certainly someone with such a specific interest in international relations might have blinders on when it comes to the true breadth of the field, no? Maybe studying a single, discrete region is part of international relations!

Well, actually, that's not the case. At least not according to LSA-SG themselves, whose ballot language on the question read in full:

International relations (IR) is an academic and public policy field, dealing with the foreign policy of states within the international system, including the roles of international organizations, non-governmental organizations(NGOs), and multinational corporations(MNCs).

If an interdisciplinary International Relations concentration or minor were offered, which would you select:
Concentration (440 votes)
Minor (417 votes)
Neither (389 votes)

Yeah, okay, so apparently international relations involves actual relations between nations. Who'dathunkit? Not S4M candidate Justin Benson, apparently:

The MPP candidates, though appreciative of the work done to create the international studies minor, criticized it as a bait and switch, saying that LSA-SG's original plan was to create an international relations minor.

Ray said the International Studies minor is similar to minors that the University already has that study cultures.

Benson responded by saying that the semantic change was because faculty working on the minor thought replacing the word "relations" with "studies" would be more academically sound. He said the minor does not substantially deviate from original expectations [emphasis mine].

Well, Justin, it looks like the "International Studies" minor you deigned to give us does deviate from the original expectations of the 857 voters who pledged personally to take either a concentration or a minor in the subject. Granted, you took so long giving us anything that many of the people who voted in the Fall 2004 elections have graduated by now, but I haven't.

I intend to hold LSA-SG accountable for the bait and switch it tried to pull regarding the international relations minor. I think the first step in doing that is voting against Joanna Slott and Justin Benson, the S4M candidates who lied about it in the Daily. Some of us are paying attention, y'know.

Pitchfork fest in July

2006-03-16T15:19:00.000-05:00

My tickets just came in the mail. Yours?

For reference, the bands so far announced are

Silver Jews
Aesop Rock
Man Man
Spoon
Yo La Tengo
Mission of Burma
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Mountain Goats
The National
Jens Lekman
Tapes 'n Tapes
Hot Machines.

I love it, because now every time I see a band's announced a US tour, I know there's a decent chance I'll see them in Chicago. Yay!

Dan's away

2006-03-15T12:10:00.000-05:00

S4M: sooo last week

2006-03-14T19:52:00.000-05:00

The Daily's surfeit of editorial submissions, and its subsequent decision to let them trickle out a few at a time onto its blog, has exposed the most embarassing of blunders: S4M's newly released viewpoint ends with last week's slogan! Oh, how gauche! Not what a party that's cycled through a few of 'em since the start of the campaign wants to do, I'll wager.

Stay on message, guys! What is it today? Thinking, thinking ... oh!

"...The Ludacris concert was one of the most fiscally efficient MSA huge-scale events."

From the mouths of babes.

Stu Wagner and his Amazing, Immolating Dreampants

2006-03-14T09:40:00.000-05:00

Oh, those troublesome facts, eh?

Stu Wagner, regarded by some as S4M's evil genius, wrote from what one presumes is his secret Egyptian hideout to express his concern about his party's electoral odds in next week's election. Well, okay, he didn't actually say he was terrified that once S4M faced a real opposition party it might not win so handily, but these are the things one surmises when one's opponent resorts to letting its leader in absentia level unfounded claims in the pages of the Michigan Daily.

Under the headline "Pants on Fire," Mr. Wagner accuses the MPP's presidential candidate, Rese Fox, of lying about her work uncovering MSA's waste and risk to its tax status:

"MPP's allegation that Fox exposed a financial tax scandal and subsequently corrected it is patently false. There never was a scandal to expose, let alone correct!"

Well, actually, there seems to have been a financial tax scandal as of last week's College Dems forum, where the crazy talk du jour was that Rese's resolution to address the problem didn't go far enough. But, that's Rese's issue, and I'm not out to steal her thunder. What I am out to do, though, is to draw into question one of Stu's throwaway lines in his editorial. I warn you, though: I may make fun of him in the process. That's just kind of how these things go.

So, we're going along through the editorial, nice and dandy, rehashing talking points left and right. But then! o, but then. In what's quickly becoming S4M's de facto house style, Stu tried to get one more allegation in under his 750-word limit. To wit:

"LSA Student Government vice-presidential candidate Daniel Ray's platform proposes to reduce funding application lengths by 90 percent, which would require budget allocations evaluate applications with essentially no information and likely in violation of federal law. [emphasis mine; spittle his]"

Holy awkward transitions, Batman! I'm at work at 7:00 Tuesday mornings in a building that frowns on food 'n' drinks. Had I been at home, though, I would have spit my coffee at my Toshiba. Federal law! That's serious! The US Tax Code?! That's the federal pen! Shortening the LSA-SG funding app is against federal law? What was I thinking?!

Fortunately, I'm a calm guy. More fortunately still, I've got a good command of Cornell's LII database of the US Code. Browsing through Title 26, the tax code, I was able to turn up a few potential sections of concern. This could get a bit wonky -- I suggest opening a copy of LSA-SG's current funding app for reference. With that, here's what I turned up:

26 § 22: Organizations funding student groups' food and beverages are subject to a penalty not to exceed $500,000 per offense. [This persuant, of course, to 1999's surprisingly effective Student Group Hunger Act, which criminalized serving food at events. That's why you don't see free pizza at events anymore.]

26 § 108: Student Governments shall have no more than one funding period per semester, newly-formed student groups be damned.

26 § 280: Groups whose events occur late in the semester, including those who promote "end of class" events, shall at best be forced to jump through hoops and at worst receive no funding whatsoever [This section comes from the Paperwork Expansion Act of 1995 (aside: if you took Poli Sci 496 last semester, you'd find that joke hilarious.)]

26 § 404: Student Governments' websites must be kept in such a state as to impede the quick and efficient dissemination of information related to funding, and office hours which might serve the same purpose shall not be publicized.

So, uh, clearly, I'm screwed. I'd better just drop the "improve student group funding" plank from my platform entirely. Regardless of the chilling effect to which campus group participation is subject when groups can't easily find out how to receive funds, then actually receive those funds, I now see the error of my ways.You heard it here first, folks: your MPP vice presidential candidate Dan Ray is hereby brought low by Stu Wagner and his overpowering command of federal law. Like Stu himself said,

Charges that MSA's $700,000 budget violates tax law should not be taken lightly.

Charges that LSA-SG's $80,000 in discretionary group funding violates tax law, though? Go hog wild with those.

Yo La Tengo play WFMU benefit tonight

2006-03-08T14:35:00.000-05:00

I'll be otherwise engaged, but I'll definitely be checking out the archived show: Yo La Tengo play a live set on Jersey Citys own WFMU every year during the station's pledge drive. Cool thing is, it's a call-in, all-cover set. I've been meaning to donate to some of my favorite public media this year, but I really wish I'd have the chance to force Yo La Tengo to play "Here I Go Again (on My Own)" while I was doing it.

Listen online, all you Ann Arborites in the crowd, right here.

(In other news, I imagine there'll be an Ivor Cutler song performed, but it's a sad reason that makes me so certain.)

Students 4 Michigan founder verbally harasses student, student's mother

2006-03-06T15:48:00.000-05:00

Oops.

"The kids who don't enjoy going to parties either join the Board Game Club which meets every Monday at 7PM in the Tap Room of the basement of the union, or they masterbate in the stacks of the Shapiro Undergraduate Library. Thanks for your concern.
Ari Liner"

"I thought I’d let you know that your mom is destroying your life. Enjoy!
Ari Liner"

I'm certain that Ari made sure to verify that the student in question isn't a member of a faith that prohibits the use of alcohol. I mean, he wouldn't want to violate the University's policy on discriminatory speech.

Electioneering

2006-03-06T15:37:00.000-05:00

I'll be scarce 'round these parts for the next few weeks, as the MPP's campaign ramps up. Without being too Geraldic, I can say the party as a whole will be out among students or otherwise getting the word out almost twenty-four hours a day. As for me, I've been dashing through those immediately-post-Spring Break busywork projects for a few days now, in preparation of spending a lot of time knocking on doors. If I come to yours, please get me caffeine. Oh, and, er, vote for us.

Ever dreamt of living in Angell Hall?

2006-03-05T19:42:00.000-05:00

Now you can. (as advertised in my Gmail inbox)

MPP on Wikipedia

2006-03-02T23:30:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Owosso tonight to retrieve my car from the shop, as well as to relax. But, during campaign season at least, I can't just sit still. So, to the tune of WKAR's rebroadcast of the Roy Orbison film Black & White Night (Tom Waits and Elvis Costello guest, among plenty of others), I present the Michigan Progressive Party article on Wikipedia.

SCOTUS inks ink decision

2006-03-01T14:45:00.000-05:00

The SCOTUS has ruled on one of the the cases I heard argued a few months ago. I couldn't follow it then, I can't remember it now. But, um, monopolies are bad, so this is good. I think. (It's that very kind of nuanced legal analysis that's gonna get me into Harfurd!)

If I ever become an intellectual property lawyer in the ink industry, you have my permission to be very surprised indeed.

MPP banners

2006-02-27T01:56:00.000-05:00

Readers will notice the new, red addition to my blog today. I whipped up a corner banner to link to the Michigan Progressive Party's website during a strategy meeting today; those are the results you're seeing. It's a bit more becoming on my homepage, and it's been tested to work on Myspace. I'll have it hosted on the MPP's server soon enough with a page telling how to implement it on your site, but for early adopters:

.topright { position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; display: block; height: 125px; width: 125px; background: url(http://danray.org/MPP/MPPbanner.gif) no-repeat; text-indent: -999em; text-decoration: none; }

and

<A class="topright" href="http://www.michiganprogressiveparty.com/" title="Michigan Progressive Party" rel="nofollow">Michigan Progressive Party</A>

EDIT: Permanent instructions are now up here.

I'm happy to do tech support on this; if you have any problems getting the banner to show up just drop me an email. As I say, formal instructions will be up within the week. Thanks in advance to everyone who loans the MPP his or her top right corner for the next four weeks!

Notes from Ottawa: "Hockey is Silly" edition

2006-02-25T01:32:00.000-05:00

What follows is a complete transcript of between me and the hono[u]rable delegate representing Norway, a native Canadienne.

Her: Oh, so y'know Todd Bertuzzi?
Me: What country's he representing?
Her: No, the guy who punched the guy from the Avalanche a few years ago?
At this point, I realize I'm in the middle of a cultural exchange. I giggle uncontrollably.
Her: No, you know! It was all over the news!
Head on table, I can't stop laughing.
Her: Not just the sports! It was all over the CBC!
I can hardly sit up I'm guffawing so hard.

Eventually I regained enough compsure to remind her that Americans don't, as a rule, follow last night's hockey scores, let alone 2003's hockey scandals. Norway was put out -- I apologize that we don't seem to be able to communicate in terms of shared cultural experience. Norway punches me in the face.

As it happened, there was also an earthquake just across the river that night. I didn't find out until the next afternoon on the Greyhound trip back -- in the land of lax drinking ages and nationwide 16% off sales simply for being an American, I'm confident in my recollection that Norway and I had the floors lurching well before the earthquake did.

Candidacy for LSA-SG

2006-02-23T20:13:00.000-05:00

It's official: I'll be the Michigan Progressive Party's candidate for Vice-President of the LSA Student Government. I'm really excited (and not a small bit surprised and overwhelmed) for such an honor, and I'm looking forward to the campaign. I'm confident that the MPP's platform is strong enough to win this election. I'm also confident that soon-to-be President Joey Golden, I, and the rest of the MPP slate will be able to deliver on it. Until such a point as we have a chance to, though, I'll just say congratulations to everyone and remember to vote March 21!

Notes from Ottawa

2006-02-22T19:27:00.000-05:00

My prior complaints earlier in the week concerning the twelve-hour Greyhound ride I had to look forward to were misplaced. It was actually fifteen and a half.
I really do like to travel, though. I'd also agree that the journey is half the fun. In thinking about it (and I had plenty of time for that), I think that such a duration of sensory perception really is healthy. At least in my life, I can really feel Mcluhan's sensory overload effect -- I never have any time to reflect anymore. If I'm not in class, in a meeting, or in front of the computer, I'm probably minutes away from sleep. In the course of the bus ride, I completely (if mentally) outlined my thesis' lit review and my law school apps. It felt good.
On that note, watching the scenery go by is just so calming. I decided a long time ago that my life's mantra is "appeal to complexity." I don't take the logically falacious interpretation (er, not intentionally, anyway), but rather just that things are complicated, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. So, it's brilliant to just watch the scenery, perfectly linear, go by for so long.
Fifteen hours on an overnight bus appears to trigger some unfortunate philosophic blatherings. Forgive that -- next thing I know, I'll be demoted to Livejournal.

Remainders: Snotty

2006-02-19T19:56:00.000-05:00

By sidus imfection ad I wibb be id Oddawa dis week bor the Model NATO combrence. Ib you need do reach be durig dis dime, you doe whud do do.
Callig be do hear be dalk bike dis id NOT a good enub reason.
Okay, that's ridiculous.
Bought an Indian cookbook with Jessica this afternoon in a fit of culinary aspiration after another fine meal at Ann Arbor's Madras Masala. Nothing like curry powder to clean out the ol' sinuses.
If you live south of Central Campus and care at all about your neighborhood, you were probably here yesterday.
Shaun of the Dead. Rent it, love it.
Finally, there's no affliction of head or heart (or sinus, actually) that can't be cured by a little J Marimba Ponies.

The present's eminent escapability

2006-02-14T18:44:00.000-05:00

How many people do you know who have just been having a bad week? Me, for one, and the vice president. If you've seen me this week, know that I feel just like I look: exhausted and disheveled, but with a headache that isn't immediately visible. Really, though, it seems like forces aligned to make the first full week of February suck for a lot of people. Everyone I talk to lately has a story to tell. It's just been a dank week. Dark, dirty, slushy. Full of drudging work shifts, slow readings, but never even half full of sleep. The solar system expects its annual "thank you" for an extra five minutes of daylight which only ever lights up the muddy path to my apartment.

Okay, moving away from the post title. Audience is growing sad, less uplifted. Back on track...

Can we all just step back, survey the last seven or so days of human endeavor and agree to forget them all?

No, probably not, but that's okay. Every day, it is getting brighter, and some day I'll look down and see real grass on the way up to my door. I think that I can outlast whatever vibes the heavens are presently directing my way. Just today and in my very own freezer I found an expiration date past the date I'll be graduating. Granted, it was on a bag of frozen broccoli, but it's important to establish the future as a concrete thing sometimes. Eventually that same magical SELL BY 5/2007 will show up on my condiments and pop cans, then on my soy milk, and ever on down the scale of perishability. Onward, unrealistic notions of deterministic salvation! Deliver me from today!

Of Montreal cover set

2006-02-06T18:51:00.000-05:00

Regular readers might have detected my soft spot for covers some ways back (there's a Michiganism for you). It's this squishy bit of anatomy that tingled with glee when I saw You Ain't No Picasso's post concerning a finally-uploaded bootleg from an Of Montreal cover set from more than two years ago. Apparently, the perenially touring band (I'm sure I've turned down the chance to see them at least three times since I first saw 'em in 2003) is known for occasionally putting together sets almost completely not written by themselves.

What does this particular outing give us? Let me count the gems: The band kicks off with the Who's "Can't Explain," in a fairly straight ahead rendition nevertheless promising good things to come. At this point, I'm curious to see what other power pop nuggets (and Nuggets) went into the band's sound. Big Star, for sure, and there's plenty of mid-model Rolling Stones and even a Kinks cut ("Do You Remember Walter?") further down the line. But for me, the finest twelve minutes of the show are all consecutive, beginning when Jim Huggins' Ringo-aping "Rain" intro. The lolling chorus is spot-on, as is a guitar solo I never detected in the original but which sounds right at home (I could have done better faux-reverse vocals, but that's a minor thing).

Next up is a Velvet Underground cover -- "I'm Beginning to See the Light." Okay, I'll admit: VU fandom, and its accompanying rush of tributes, is becoming a cliche. Never one to allow tastes or taste to interfere with schlock, though, I'm quite content with Of Montreal's take. At least as original as Bettie Serveert's version, at any rate.

Finally comes a really interesting one. I must say, I've never heard a Creation cover. "Making Time" (what else?) here sounds pretty good, too, besides making me want to watch Rushmore again. Like the rest of the covers on the setlist, it's a neat window into the roughly contemporaneous Aldhil's Arboretum and indeed the band's modern sound. Dig if you will:

01 Can't Explain (The Who)
02 September Gurls (Big Star)
03 Rain (Beatles)
04 I'm Beginning to See the Light(Velvet Underground)
05 Making Time (The Creation)
06 Hang Onto Yourself (David Bowie)
07 Sway (Rolling Stones)
08 I Believe in You (Neil Young)
09 Doing Nothing (Of Montreal)
10 Metaphorically Turning into Stone (Of Montreal)
11 Death dance of omnipapa's and sons for you (Of Montreal)
12 Jennifer Louise (Of Montreal)
13 Do You Remember Walter? (The Kinks)
14 Rocks Off (Rolling Stones)
15 Happy (Rolling Stones)
16 Don't Ask Me To Explain (Of Montreal)

Note: Looks like YANP's Matt is hosting this beast on his UKentucky webspace. If the link goes down, drop me an email and I'll seed a torrent (and update my own post accordingly).

How I spent my Superbowl Sunday

2006-02-05T22:53:00.000-05:00

How I spent my Superbowl Sunday
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

With Superbowl XXL being played mere miles from my lonely subterranean office, I yet managed to get some work done on the job. Few people ever need their computers fixed during the Sunday night shift. Nobody, as it turns out, needs his computer fixed when the Superbowl's on.

I had only Ann Arbor's own WCBN to keep me company. I was happily diverted for at least fifteen minutes by DJ Jason Voss' on-air plug for his predecessor's eclectic music blog, both-kinds.com. He's mined (among other things) that same abortive folk movement that WFMU recently dug up: John Birch-core. Apparently, LSD is bad and so are Communists. MP3s abound.

As for my own ravings (considerably better-sourced than the above, I might hope), a thesis bibliography is in the works.

Reel to Reel

2006-02-02T00:02:00.000-05:00

Reel to Reel
Originally uploaded by electric counterpoint.

Megan, by virtue of her media desk afiliation, secured for me the last component necessary to test my ancient reel-to-reel player. This roll of 7.5mm tape, and its accompanying box, harken back to a mechanical, solid-state day long since relegated to the dusty St. Vincent De Paul store called History.

What does it do, though, when jammed approximately into the right area of my machine, though? Well, initially, it gets all messed up, and goes everywhere. I say that as though it's an immutable law; there's a good chance someone who knew what he was doing could stick it right into place, no problems. There's a good chance this guy is dead, too, and that leaves me to squirrel the tape around perhaps thirty metal pegs and protrusions, and worry about keeping the tape flat on two reels as well. I tried, honest I did.

Finally, though, the tape and I approached an understanding (severing anyone's extremity will cause him to quickly and dramatically rethink his position on pissing you off), and I was able to get it threaded around the stoppers, through the heads, and onto the receiving real. Power on, headphones in, expectations high: an arm lowers, touches tape, and the transparent plastic circles whir to life.

There has never been a more beautiful whir than that of an operating tape reel. The sheer size -- for the days of macrosized media anew! -- and the circles of brown in their perfect, inverse growth would accompany music perctly. The background hum, happily audible, is ambient bliss. We've stolen technology's personality by hiding it in transistors. I haven't heard a whir like this in ages.

Anyway, the machine itself. There are still some bugs to work out, to be sure. In particular, the motors that turn the reels themselves must be about ready to check out. While society has condoned certain tricks performed on a manual drive turntable, spinning tape reels permits considerably less expression. However, I'm very happy overall to have a reel to reel player for what, seven dollars and fifty pounds of encumberance? that works at all. My plans concerning a tape loop-based echo machine continue unabated. I'll hope to fix everything up in good time.

Review: Sumo Omni beanbag

2006-01-30T20:25:00.000-05:00

Readers know I take in my share of review material for the Modern Pea Pod. It’s a cushy gig, I won’t lie. “Cushy,” though, only in the sense of unsolicited free stuff arriving frequently. That’s changed, though, with the arrival of the Sumo Omni beanbag.

Oh, yeah.

What’s initially striking about this piece of furniture is its magnitude. Actually, its sheer volume remains striking even secondarily. Upon walking down the stairs to my apartment and seeing the four-and-a-half foot tall box waiting for me, I was filled with a glee altogether infrequent since, oh, the Christmas morning of my fifth year. It’s that good.

The fun didn’t stop once I got the Omni uncrated. This is not your playroom’s beanbag. Apart from its size, Sumo’s offering features a modern nylon material that retains its fresh, clean look very well indeed (you’d hardly know the “pure white” version has been sitting around my apartment as long as it has) yet retains a comfortable feel. Combine that with some sort of Canadian-engineered foam bits that noticeably outperform the domestic filling of my youth, and you’re talking about an eminently ploppable piece of furniture. Hey, when you’re reviewing a beanbag chair, this stuff matters.

The model is 5'4", adorable, and my girlfriend.

And how. Half the fun of the Omni is just taking a calculated fall onto it. If this doesn’t produce a satisfactory lounging experience, get up and try it again. (As a side note, I’ve noticed that if you’re still able to force yourself to get up, it’s not as good as it could be). The beanbag’s size lends itself to endless reconfigurations: I have personally sat up, reclined, leaned back, watched a movie, read a book, listened to music, and reviewed this beanbag in this beanbag. All transformations quite easily carried out on the Sumo’s unbeatable, plop-based user interface.

What else can I say? If you’re reading this and sitting uncomfortably, you’re probably not sitting on an eighteen-pound beanbag. I’d recommend dealing with that at http://www.sumolounge.com/.

Postal service conspiracies

2006-01-30T13:25:00.000-05:00

I'll bet T-Rex has read himself some Pynchon. The long-extinct reptile and the reclusive postmodernist would probably have lots to talk about.

Baby steps towards adulthood

2006-01-30T08:36:00.000-05:00

I leave now to visit the landlord with my security deposit for the new apartment on Packard. Still haven't been inside, but I've seen the photos and Jessica likes it.

Thesis ideas

2006-01-26T08:24:00.000-05:00

I think this is blogworthy -- I'm getting my ideas together for my honors thesis and have four general ideas. This is an edited version of an email I sent to my soon-to-be advisor:

I'm very interested in comparing dispute resolution mechanisms between parties. I've been fairly interested in international courts (especially the ICJ), but I understand that most treaties incorporate less institutional mechanisms (arbitration, referals to higher authorities, etc.). I would be interested to find the factors that predict parties' initial preferences for dispute resolution system, although I admit I haven't got any sources right now to cite in my hypothesis. This is actually the question I've done the least preliminary research on.

I'm also interested in indications of power relationships in rationally designed agreements. Bilateral treaties between a dominant and a less powerful state are almost sure to reflect that asymmetry of power. How does this occur in multilateral treaties, and how does the rational design paradigm explain it? Do powerful states team up to ensure that they collectively negotiate favorable terms relative to less powerful states as a whole? Can one powerful state, acting in its interest, block another powerful state from creating such a power relationship? I'm interested in how these, I guess I'd call them "systematized" relationships help or hinder multilateral treaty laws' effectiveness and likelihood of ratification.

Implementation as a reaction to rational design. This is what I was trying to say this morning, but I was thinking more of selective enforcement at the time. Literature exists to show that signing-but-not-implementing is a unique response, separate from not signing and fully complying. I think I could design a study to predict that response based on the occurence of certain features in a rationally designed agreement. This area's crowded, though. I really like Jana von Stein's method, but this topic would need some definite refinement before I'd dare start on it, even if it is valid. (I'm interested in putting into the same rational design frame the idea of external, extra-legal force: can/do treatymakers unofficially acknowledge hegemons' willingness to enforce treaties themselves (as is the case with the US and Iran over and above the IAEA)? Does leaving the door open to hegemonic pressures count as rational design?)

What features account for the differences in the US and EU's (and others'?) handling of various international/regional courts and tribunals? This really interests me. I'm curious not only about the design and implementation, but in going deeper into the motivations of each actor -- who originally advocated the institution, what were their original preferences going into negotiations, etc. The way I'm thinking of it, the project would be multilevel comparative, which could make for some complicated statistical work, but I'm up for if necessary. Again, as it stands this is really broad, but it's something that's interested me for a while now.

If I had to choose, I'd say I'm most interested at the moment in the extralegal power question in my third bullet. That's likely just because it came to me in a flash after reading this Opinio Juris post last night. Might just be a passing phase, and anyway, how would I test that?