Category Archives: School

Tacos

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Don’t forget to get your free taco from Taco Bell, conveniently scheduled to be given away on Tuesday from 2 to 5.

For those in the area, here is a gameplan. You may want to focus on the Boston area and skip Western Mass. (Unless, of course, you are in Western Mass.) You get more bang for your buck. Or, more accurately, you get more taco for your free.

Unfortunately, collecting my tacos due will require that I skip two classes in a row. While I argue that it’s a sunk cost, it’s been pointed out that the opportunity cost of my tacos will be about $300. And you should include the cost of complementary goods, too.

So it seems that I’m going to class on Tuesday from 2 to 5. But, in return for my roadmap, if you’re collecting tacos, remember who did the laborious research of typing “Taco Bell” into Google Maps for you.

Helping Kids

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I feel like no one in politics can ever agree, and that if a bill were introduced to, say, ban child abuse, someone would come out against it. But still, I feel like this is something everyone should support. There’s a strong correlation between kids whose families aren’t there for them and kids who end up in jail. And there’s a strong correlation between kids who can’t finish high school and kids who end up in jail. Or selling drugs. Or homeless. Or shot by peers. Take a wild gander at how much keeping children locked up costs us each year. An estimated $1 billion. Why do we make it so hard for these kids to get help? Why don’t we offer GEDs and the like to people in jail? (And not just the kids, although they need it most.) Why are we not doing more job training? We spoke tonight with someone who runs a bookstore. It’s run entirely by kids who were referred there by the Department of Social Services and by probation officers. They learn job skills. “It takes them a long time to see that they matter,” she told us. Soon they come to realize that, and she praised their work ethic after that. One kid came in to talk to us. He didn’t want to speak about his past, so I don’t know the story, but he’s 17 and in this program. He’s working on finishing up high school, and is not just working in this business, but is one of the people helping to run it. After a while, the kids “graduate” out of the program and get real jobs, or go to college. It’s impressive, but it gets exponentially more impressive when you realize that every single person in this program is someone who would be in jail, committing crimes, homeless, or some other miserable fate that’s not just bad for them, but a drain on society as a whole. Why is this program an anomaly? Why are we not trying to place every kid who’s in jail in programs like this? It’s costing us $1 billion to keep them in jail. They’re wasting their lives away there and, when they get out, they’re almost certainly not going to be any different. The recidivism rate in the US is at about 60%. That is to say that 2 out of 3 people release from jail will end up in jail again. It sounds like the system is very broken. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t lock violent criminals up. If you commit a crime you should go to jail. But it seems incredibly short-sighted to not educate these people and help them get jobs. If you come out of jail with the help of drug crime defense attorneys from Missouri and the government helps place you in a job, you’re going to have less incentive to sell drugs or hold up convenience stores. And if you get an education and/or job training? Even better! Of course it’s not a cure-all. People will always do stupid things because they’re drunk, or stab someone because they’re angry. But when two-thirds of people who go to jail get trapped in a downward spiral of crime, I think it’s time that we do something to try to help. By all means, we need other stuff too. But I’m fed up with people giving the ax to plans for petty reasons like, “There would still be some criminals.” Of course there will. But let’s at least start to do something!

Academia

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I was thinking about this last night…

In my earlier years in school (e.g., first grade), I thought of learning as facts. George Washington was the first POTUS. (And, a more handy acronym, the SCOTUS is the nation’s highest court.)

Of course, it’s not even true to say that all I was learning was facts, but it’s how I thought learning should be measured. Around that time I was also finishing up mastering the skill of reading, and learning arithmetic.

Nowadays, though, I learn very few facts. (In Forensics we learned that a person who has been poisoned usually has purple fringing (but not chromatic abberations…) on their extremities, especially fingertips.) But mostly, I’m learning concepts and strategies. Last night we talked about the Blue Ocean Strategy, for example. The “facts” might be what a “blue ocean” is, versus a “red ocean.” But I’m not here to learn colors. The real learning was the concepts and the strategy.

The problem is that I haven’t quite gotten over that mindset that learning is measured in facts, and I’m not learning a lot of them. It also makes the “So, what have you learned?” question harder. “Well, a person who’s been poisoned may have a purple tint in their extremities,” but that’s not really going to impress people with my business knowledge. (I’ll be sure to bring it up an interview. I hear some businesses these days are looking for cutthroat people.)

Mixing it Up

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This is from my, “Really abstract thoughts” file…

Often you try to recruit leaders internally, because they’re familiar with your existing procedures. On some level this is good. But “familiar with your existing procedures” also means that they see things with blinders on. Sometimes I think you have to bring in someone without any of that institutional knowledge, to shake things up and move you in a new direction.

For example, there’ve been a rash of thefts from the library. People will sit there working with their laptop, get up to go the bathroom, and their laptop is stolen. (Part of this, of course, is their own negligence.) I couldn’t possibly know the full story, but it looks to me like CP is content with just writing reports for each theft and letting insurance handle it.

Why not set up a “sting” in the library? Put a few plainclothes cops (we have several!) in the library, “studying.” Get someone to leave their laptop unattended. Wait for the thief, who clearly is comfortable stealing things in public. And then, arrest him.

Similarly, there were two crimes this week where they caught the suspect on video camera. (Neither was exactly a major crime, though.) In both cases, though, they say they can’t identify who it is, and that’s the end of it. Why not show it to a student, who may well recognize it? Or why not publish it? The school newspaper is always desperate for material. We’d love to run a few stills from the tapes.

Too many people seem to assume that you need to master all the ‘cruft’ that existing leaders have. I don’t know nearly as much as the police chief, so far be it from me to have ideas. And yet I’m fairly certain my ideas would work. The “sting” might be a little over the top, but it beats the status quo of doing nothing!

Oh, another example! My digital SLR camera is basically a film SLR with a digital sensor instead of film. I never quite understood why you needed things like a complex mirror array or a shutter. Couldn’t you just take them out, and just sample the sensor for whatever time period you needed for the exposure?

It turns out, yes. There are a few little “gotchas” I wasn’t aware of, but mostly, they’re holdovers from the film world. People designing the cameras just still have that leftover baggage of the film era, so they keep making cameras with shutters and mirrors. A tiny little bit of R&D could probably eliminate the problems with simply removing them, and you’d end up with something with increased reliability, the ability to take faster exposures, and added versatility. But it looks like it’s going to take an “outsider” to get this done.

Yes, you need some existing knowledge to keep you in reality. But people seem to averse to letting ‘new’ people have ideas. And in my experience, they’re the best ideas. Getting the record industry to distribute music over the Internet took Shawn Fanning and, finally, a failing computer company in California. Why didn’t the record industry, with a multi-billion-dollar budget, think of it? (And, even now that lots of evidence shows that it’s doing well, many record companies are still digging in their heels!) Organizations get too big, crufty, and narrow-minded, which causes them to think that only the biggest, cruftiest, and most narrow-minded of them should be allowed to try out ideas. Why?! Do people like the “stability” of their old ways — selling CDs and booing the Internet, using unnecessary moving parts in cameras, and not catching criminals — even when the old ways are clearly the worst possibly way to do things? Are they so bent on sticking with what they know that they’re willing to lose?

Windows, Reviewed

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Mr. T’s post jibed with something that was in the back of my head. I can’t sleep right now, and have sent my friends enough meandering e-mails, so I’ll post here.

For at least the past month, I’ve been in Linux exclusively. I have a 160 GB, 5400 RPM drive with Linux, and a 60 GB, 7200 RPM drive with Windows. (I also have a combination of network storage and external drives for moving/storing data.)

My roommates have been big into Orange Box lately, so I figured I’d give it a try. (It can apparently be made to run under Wine, actually, but I didn’t want to bother.) I swapped out disks, booting into Windows. And it was just one thing wrong after another after that. Admittedly, many of the problems weren’t directly the fault of Windows, but it was truly the worst experience I’ve had in a long time. (Steam was even more badly-behaved than Windows.)

Here are some things that really bug me:

  • Performance. Windows has my ‘fast’ hard drive. I scan regularly for viruses and spyware. (But I’m so OCD that I’ve literally never had any viruses, or even any malware, on this machine.) I disable unnecessary crap from starting up. I run a lean, mean machine. And with a dual-core processor and 2 gigs of RAM, it should fly. Especially on the 7200 RPM drive. And yet I can be in Firefox browsing the web under Linux in less than it takes Windows to finish logging me in. I don’t really understand what’s going on, really.
  • Fragmentation. Maybe this partially explains the above point. Most operating systems don’t make a big deal about disk fragmentation. It’s (supposedly) just a non-issue on both Linux and MacOS filesystems. I suppose I wouldn’t know, not having a defrag tool. But my Windows drive is laughably fragmented. I have more fragmented files than non-fragmented. And, when I was using Windows regularly, I’d run a pull-out-all-the-stops defrag every week or so, scheduling a boot-time defrag to make sure it also got my paging file and the MFT. Having successfully “fixed” my heavily-fragmented paging file, I thought it a done deal. But it’s again in about 300 pieces. What the hell? I thought it was one file. Where did it go? I know it stays between sessions because I tried to get rid of it when shutting down and couldn’t. So what happened?! And really, shouldn’t that be permanently mapped out?
  • Bizarre errors. I never thought I’d see the day when I was criticizing Windows and not Linux for this. Linux still has its share of bad errors. But what’s with the “The memory cannot be ‘read'” errors? (BTW, Memtest finds nothing.) What’s with rtvscan.exe crashing?
  • Slow performance. Not just bootup, mentioned earlier. When I go to start an application, I usually sit there waiting for several seconds. Just sitting, waiting. I’ve never had this problem under Linux. Maybe it’s just that Linux isn’t a fan of big ‘suites’ of programs, preferring to have lots of little lean applications. But I click on the Firefox icon in Linux and Firefox pops up. I click on the IE icon in Windows and my disk churns and, five seconds later, it pops up. Why?!
  • Disk mounting. Again, I never thought I’d see the day when I thought Linux had this better than Windows. It used to be that you’ve have to pull up the command line and su to root and mount a device manually, specifying the device name and a mount path and the file format and various other parameters. Unplugging the device without unmounting it would usually lock up the system and/or cause a kernel panic. Now in Ubuntu I just plug in external devices and they show up on my desktop. They’re comparable that way. (Although Linux doesn’t give me five little bubble icons in a row about “Unknown device” and searching for drivers.) But what about when I want to remove something? In Linux, I right-click and select “Unmount,” and the icon disappears and I remove it. I forget periodically and nothing bad happens. I consider myself to be a very advanced ‘power user’ of Windows, and I’m still not sure. Do I click on that little icon in the system tray? Why is it so hard to use? I’ll find something that sounds like what I want, and I click on it, and it brings up this hierarchy of devices, ranging from the name of the physical disk to a ‘mass storage device,’ and asks which I want to stop. And honestly, I know a lot about Windows and I know all about the hardware, and I’m still never sure. Rusty informs me that Vista’s the same way.
  • Updating. I guess it’s not as practical since Windows has a whole different environment, but MacOS and Linux both have a centralized package manager. An automated daily check might inform me that my word processor and graphics editor have new versions, and let me choose what to do. In Windows, each application does this on its own. It’d be kind of nice if Windows had a central package manager, just so that I wouldn’t have constant headaches when running Windows for the first time in a month with everything I start going out and downloading new updates.
  • File copying sucks! I’ve long-complained about how copying a group of files shouldn’t abort completely when it hits one bad file. But I discovered something else. I was getting low on disk space, so I was moving things over to another drive. I had about 3 GB free, and was going to move a DVD ISO over to the external drive, too, for 7-8 GB free. But it wouldn’t work, due to insufficient disk space. I was confused, because there was plenty of space on the target disk (like 400 GB free). It’s apparently that the Windows drive didn’t have enough space. Which for a second almost made sense: it’s a big file, so it needs room to work. But wait… Why? It can move it, chunk-by-chunk, over to the new disk. I can’t think of any other way of doing it, in fact. And there’s enough room to copy it at least 75 times.

Half-jokingly, I pondered over e-mail, “Why do people ask if Linux is ready for the desktop? The question, I think, is ‘Is Windows ready for the desktop?’ And I’m not sure.” But really, if I have constant headaches, I can only imagine how the people with 75 IE toolbars and lots of spyware and viruses and no idea how computers work must feel. I think my computer is slow? I have bizarre, unexplained errors? I’m confused by technobabble messages that pop up?

Of course, in the interest of fairness, there are two things that I’m liking about Windows:

  • I can put my laptop into standby / suspend. It’s been possible under Linux for years, but doesn’t work properly out of the box for me, and I don’t feel like jumping through hoops to make it work.
  • There’s this one insidious bug (I’m running the “bleeding edge,” Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon, so I suppose I can’t complain too loudly) where the logout/shutdown button locks up the machine for 30 seconds before it displays. This is apparently a known problem with several different causes, but it seems pretty pathetic that it’s still an issue.

Oh, see, this is exactly what I hate! As I’m writing this, I can hear my hard drive going. And the disk activity light is on solid. What’s going on? I have no clue! All I have open is Firefox. Some background process is apparently accessing my disk. What is it? I’m not quite sure!

Conversations, Poor

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A conversation I had yesterday.

What I thought was said:

Me: *picks up a bag of Cheez-Its he brought to meeting*
Them: “Where did you get those?”
Me: “I got it over in Adamian, at the vending machines.”
Them: [incredulous look]
Me: “I was going to go to Einstein’s for a bagel, but the line was too long.”

What was actually said:

Them: “Oh, nice haircut!”
Me: “I got it at the vending machines in Adamian!”
Them: [incredulous look]
Me: [discusses attempt at dinner]

Jobs I’ve Overlooked

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Kyle has a book called Gigs that I’ve been reading. Basically they interview hundreds of people with various jobs about what they do. “We feel that the world hears too much from ‘experts’ of all political stripes, and not enough from the people for and about whom they presume to speak,” one of the editors writes. Reading just a bit of the book so far, I’ve realized a few things:

  • People are people. So many people view people at work as just a human embodiment of a company, or merely as an ‘object’ with which they’re forced to interact. (Sidenote: spending some time in customer service should be mandatory for everyone.) A bus driver talks about the abuse she takes when the bus is late. A flight attendant complains about the time someone threw a hamburger in her face because he didn’t want it. The world would be a much better place if people could see that people were people.
  • I’ve narrowed my horizons far too much. I never considered that I could be:
    • A train engineer. He apparently makes about $90,000 a year and gets to see the country. The hours aren’t great, though, and I’d probably get bored.
    • A member of the paparazzi. I love photography anyway. This guy has a wild job. He doesn’t mention his salary (he works for a magazine), only that one of his photos got him into the “six-figure club,” referring to his revenues from a single photograph. He does claim to have been punched by Alec Baldwin, and mentions that he goes to the bathroom in his car because he has to remain vigilant. Those aren’t the working conditions I look forward to.
    • A porn star, although he makes the job sound less appealing than I’d have imagined.
    • Fisherman. It’s intense work, and risky, but he makes good money.
    • Casino surveillance officer. Watching hundreds of cameras. It actually sounds fun, though I’m not sure I’d be making the $40,000+ that jobs out of college are supposed to pay.
    • Drug dealer. He made good money!

There are so many more I haven’t read. Slaughterhouse human resources director? Chief Executive Officer? (I’ll do it!) Clutter consultant? Crime scene cleaner? Taxidermist? Bar owner? Buffalo rancher? Food stylist? Anchorwoman? (Err, man, in my case.) Television station receptionist? Carnival worker? Squash instructor? Transvestite prostitute? Mother? The possibilities are endless for me! College professor! Bounty hunter! Prisoner! Town manager! Psychiatric rehabilitation therapist!

Kerry

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John Kerry gave a speech at Faneuil Hall today, focusing on economics. Between being interested, having been a Kerry ’04 supporter, wanting to try my hand at photographing the event, and having no classes during the day, I decided to attend. What follows is a write-up of the event, a combination of photography stuff and politics.

I was worried when I found out it was inside. I have a fairly “slow” lens (f/5.6 when zoomed in, which I knew is where I’d be shooting), so I wasn’t sure how they’d come out. It ended up being fairly bright inside, but shooting zoomed to 200mm still requires a fairly fast exposure. I left the lens wide open (which has the added benefit of helping to throw the background out of focus) the whole time, and bumped the camera up to ISO800. (I spent a little time at ISO1600 to try to get some “safety shots,” figuring a little grain was better than motion blur, but I can’t even tell without looking at the metadata which was which.)

Anti-Semite

This is not John Kerry, but I’ve still got a few photos uploading so I’ll start with those that are already online. This guy was marching around Harvard Square ranting about his dislike for Jews. I kind of wanted to get into his head: momentarily pretending that hating Jews isn’t crazy in and of itself, I have to wonder what possesses someone to dress up in a ridiculous costume and try to convince a ton of other people that they should hate Jews, too. Does this guy have a job? Is he sane in other settings, or is he always like this? Does he go to the grocery store to buy eggs and ham and rant to the cashier about Jews? Does he have a wife? What’s going on with the couple beyond him to the left?

Upon seeing this guy, someone near me wondered aloud, “Can you say that in public?!” This guy must not have gone to our school, because just a few weeks ago, we handed out about 1,000 copies of the Constitution. He wouldn’t have had to read far, even: we put that part right up front for him.

Dancer

These guys (there were several) were dancing (?) outside Faneuil Hall. Really off-topic, just thought it was neat.

Quincy Market

I had lunch in Quincy Market. Since I was by myself and didn’t feel like looking for a seat, I ate at one of those bizarre troffs tables. I took this shot with my 18-50mm lens, at 18mm. Even with the camera’s crop, 18mm (effectively 29mm) is really wide! This picture should also go in textbooks that talk about barrel distortion.

Orange

What are the odds that everyone here would be in orange? (It was pure coincidence.) I really like seeing that it’s not just young college students calling for Bush’s ouster.

Senator Kerry's Ride?

I think this is Kerry’s car. It’s a Massachusetts Senate plate, number 1. I didn’t see him in it, though.

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I’m fairly certain that Gore isn’t even running.

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The room was really impressive, and was a great place to hold something like this. Of course, there was no shortage of flags. The inscription on the bottom of the pictures behind Senator Kerry reads, “Liberty and Union Now and Forever.”

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One of the central themes of Kerry’s address was how terribly the middle class have done (tax-wise) during Bush’s regime.

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This breaks one of the cardinal rules of photography. You want the subject looking “in.” It’d have been great had he been facing the right (his left), but he wasn’t. Also, at least for me, the object that my eye jumps to is the woman in green, who was just some random audience member.

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The enormous picture behind him wasn’t level. Another “cardinal rule” I’m big on is keeping straight lines. I’m more prone to noticing than most people, but when the horizon is slanting, it really detracts from the picture. I realized early on that my pictures were coming out pretty crooked, so I started being careful to try to keep the bottom of the frame nice and level. But on more zoomed-out shots like this, the stage was pretty slanted. I’d love to fix the alignment of the painting, but when I try aligning pictures on walls, they tend to fall off. I think I’d be in pretty deep trouble if I knocked that painting down.

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Attorney General Martha Coakley, who, surprisingly, doesn’t have a picture on Wikipedia. I think I’ll remedy that!

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Here’s the room. It’s on the upper floor of Faneuil Hall, and is incredibly nice. (This was a little before we started; the guy on the right is an usher.)

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A light on the ceiling. (After fixing the crooked painting, they could maybe replace some of the bulbs.)

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Any idea who this lady is? She was right near the front and a lot of people were coming up saying hello. I’m assuming she’s either a former politician or wife of a politician, but I didn’t recognize her.

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Kerry greeting someone on his way to the stage… Another ‘VIP’ in the group.

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See what I mean? Here I aligned the image so the stage was perfectly level. Look at that sloping painting! Isn’t it distracting?

Kerry talked a lot about health care, and the utter disaster that is our status quo. He actually slipped in what I thought was a hilarious joke… Discussing Romney’s move for universal health care in Massachusetts, he mentioned how he’s now downplaying it. “It’s almost as if he’s saying he was for universal health care before he voted against it.”

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He then added, “Man, if I saw him today, I’d…” and trailed off with an angry hand gesture.

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He also discussed tax cuts and the preposterous situation of giving the richest Americans huge tax rebates. “Teresa and I didn’t ask for a tax break. We didn’t need one, especially not when 43 million [?] Americans can’t afford basic health care.”

I’m not sure I did such a great job going over what happened, but it was great. My one critique is that he seemed a little too quick to bash Republicans: it’s something most all Democrats are quick to do, but unless we start working together, the schism is going to get wider. We need to work with the Republicans, not against them.

Art

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The walls in our room are bare, and it’s starting to get to me. Some ideas:

What prints do you recommend? I think I need to get a half-dozen or so.

Social Skills

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I’m hardly in the upper echelon when it comes to social skills, but I’m going to post this anyway…

I’ve come to the conclusion that a person’s social skills are one of the most important things they learn. The problem is that they seem to be learned solely through trial and error and observed experiences: no one ever teaches you anything formally. Some people are naturals. I just read an article about Obama, and he’s definitely one of them. Most people here, being a business school, have pretty good social skills. But we’ll periodically mingle with other schools. At a big convention we went to last year, I realized that some of the people there had terrible social skills, to the point of being somewhat creepy.

I think it’s somewhat industry-specific. In the business world, you need strong social skills. If I’d gone on to become, say, a programmer as I once considered, it wouldn’t have been as important, but it’d still be very important.

I view this as a sort of crisis. Too many mal-adjusted people are passing through our schools. In my opinion, it’s one of the most critical skills, and they’re just never getting taught. Let’s cut out history and replace it with Socializing 101. I never did like history anyway…