I know, I know — Borders is Evil. Support local independents, by all means. I moved last month, and am pleased to find that a local used bookstore, Dead Poets Books, moved too, and right up the street! But sometimes there’s a book that just hasn’t made it into the stock of your local used bookstore, and Vegas is really not hip to the whole “independent bookseller” thing, so it’s Borders and B&N for me, or no bookstores at all.
And normally it’s no new bookstores — I can be pretty happy with just used bookstores and the Web for new books, when I absolutely positively *must* have some new release (Walter Mosley comes to mind). But this weekend it’s Education Day at Borders, so educators — among whose exalted ranks I count myself — get a whopping 25% off their (our) purchases. Given that the bulk of our society, for all the lip service it gives to “Leaving No Child Behind” and all that, sees actual educators as only a step away from prostitutes moonlighting as terrorists, it’s refreshing to know that there is at least one place where, for a couple days out of the year anyway, we can get a little respect. Before, you know, going back to bilking taxpayers out of their hard-earned money, training their children to hate America, and securing entirely unreasonable stashes of WMDs to use against the government.
I haven’t done much blogsurfing lately, due to my back and a busy schedule, so maybe this has been commented on ad nauseum, but did anyone else think it somewhat refreshing and even surprising to see The Man Who Would Be President admit on national TV during the first debate that he’d made a mistake? (“I made a mistake in how I talked about the war…”) I know that the Bush campaign would have me believe that any display of less-than-fanatic certainty is a sign of lack of leadership capability, but I actually appreciated it. Although I’m never going to be a Kerry booster — I want Bush out, but Kerry is far from who I’d have chosen to replace him — I wouldn’t mind having a president who can recognize his (or her — when’s that gonna happen?!) mistakes and publically admit that s/he’s made them. It takes a certain kind of courage to realize and admit that you’re wrong, and Bush has demonstrated time and again that courage is not something he’s particularly familiar with.
The accident a few weeks ago has left me with some lingering back problems, which have made it somewhat difficult for me to spend any significant length of time at my PC, hence my absence. I am slowly starting to come back together, and hope to pick up my blogging again in the very near future. I was just starting to get back in the swing of things, too…
Ken MacLeod says:
It’s recently struck me that the moderate, liberal, democratic and humane response to the build-up to the Iraq war should have been to argue for the West to arm Iraq. It’s not merely the case that invading Iraq was a distraction from fighting Al-Qaeda: it was objectively fighting on the same side as Al-Qaeda. If you’re serious about fighting Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, the last thing you’d want to do, on the face of it, is overthrow – or even weaken – one of the few regimes in the region that was capable of and interested in crushing them within its borders. But that’s what the US and UK did. The conclusion must be that they have other priorities that come higher than fighting Al-Qaeda.
But what could those priorities be…
Here’s the nice police officer who wrote up my accident, writing up my accident.
[[image:picture2.jpg:Police Officer Joe:center:0]]
I turned 34 about an hour ago. Somewhere between sorting my winter clothes (which I didn’t do when I moved into this place in February because, in Vegas, “winter clothes” means little more than long pants…) and packing up my tapes and stereo. It didn’t feel very birthdayey. Oh, well. Capped off a wake-period (what passes for a “day” in my life) in which someone rear-ended my new (well, new to me) car (a ’99 Ford Ranger — me, a pickup driver!!), virtually totalling the front-end of her car but only smooshing up my bumper and gashing a fender — hooray for trucks. She hit me hard enough to shake me up for the rest of the day but not hard enough to do any serious damage, or to stop me from teaching two classes, and doing — I think — a bang-up job of it. I’m kind of afraid to go to sleep, though — I know I’m gonna be achin’ when I wake up, and I don’t wanna be all achey and bitchy on my birthday. I made an appointment to see a chriopractor, but with the holiday, I have to wait until Tuesday; tomorrow I’ve gotta call my doctor. Just want to make sure everything’s ok — I’m kinda sore today, but that could just be from shock and standing in the Vegas heat (108 degrees!) for an hour while waiting for the police to show up and write a report. They use PocketPCs to log into the police database and file the report — that was kinda cool (I took a picture with my phone, will post it in a moment).
I suppose now is a time when I should be taking stock of my life — but I don’t feel like it. Things are going pretty well for me, aside from not being able to find time to write my freakin’ dissertation. But keeping busy is good for me — like my father says, “Waxes work best when Waxes work.” He’s full of snappy little sayings like that, the product of a life spent gleaning wisdom from wherever he can find it. “If you don’t make dust”, he’ll say, “you eat dust.” (The aged and wise among you will remember that as an Elephant floppy disk ad in the early ’80s.) “The business of business is business”, he might note, riffing on the famous the-business-of-America quote from Pres. Truman or someone notable like that. Do I know what he’s talking about? Absolutely not, but he’s my dad, so I nod and look like something’s resolved.
We had lunch the other day, my dad and I — his birthday was on Tuesday, so I took him out for, IIRC, a grilled ham-and-cheese on rye. We talked for a couple hours, which is something we don’t normally do — not that there’s bad blood between us or anything, just we don’t tend to speak the same language, if you know what I mean. Him and my brother are a lot more alike — they get each other. Anyway, something he said stood out; he said that my brother and I had never done anything he’d ever told us to do, and somehow we’d both turned out ok anyway. He’s in that kinda “I’m getting old and need to take stock of my life every chance I get” phase, and I think feels like he’s failed in some important way. He’s one of those Old School Men, whose first and last priority is providing for his family, and he’s had some pretty big spills, business-wise. Of course, normal people are more concerned with the values and compassion a parent instills in his kids, but if you have parents (or grandparents) from that generation (born during the Depression, came of age in the Cleaverite ’50s), you know, they’re not normal.
Anyway, he was wrong about us never listening, even though we haven’t really taken his advice all the time, or even most of the time. But we had something not a lot of my peers had — we had a father we could go to for advice — neither of us ever felt like we had to hide our problems or failures from our parents, neither of us ever felt that, if our parents didn’t approve of or understand something we were doing, they would stand in our way and try to prevent us from doing it. Even when they have completely opposed something, they’ve tried to support us (I say “tried” because nobody’s perfect, and sometimes things have been said or done in spite of their best efforts). One of the things I’m proud of is that my friends and my brother’s friends would come to my parents with problems, and my parents always listened and took them seriously. That’s pretty cool!
So maybe I am taking stock a little, not so much of my accomplishments and failures but of where I am right now. Not where I want to be, exactly — I really want to get out of Vegas, and hopefully will have a PhD and an academic job by this time next year — but emotionally and spiritually (if I can wax spiritual for a moment, which I rarely do), I think I’m on the right track. The year before I came to Vegas was a tough one — my research was floundering, my financial situation was bleak, and my relationship was slowly crumbling away (and finally dissolved completely a few months after I came to Vegas). I met my 33rd in a state of near-despair; I meet my 34th feeling that life is pretty sweet, and if I’m a couple years behind where I thought I’d be by now, well, I’ve lived a lot in those couple years.
So, with that said: happy birthday to me.
It’s my birthday and I’ll do what I want to
Fuck you it’s my birthday.
A special holiday only for me, so do what I say,
it’s my party, I’ll make you cry if I want to…or leave.
Fuck you, it’s not your birthday, so do what I say.–The Vandals
Why are telecoms so behind the curve when it comes to the web? AT&T Wireless’ website is a horror — mMode services are handled separately from other wireless services, a query I once made on how to access my voicemail from a landline got dozens of separate results for how to access voicemail wirelessly from every model of phone AT&T services (this despite the fact that the phone I actually use is recorded in my profile — and despite the fact that on every phone the answer is “press and hold the ‘1’ button”), and so on. I ended up googling up the answer, which I found (fairly easily) on a non-AT&T site.
Right now, I’ve been up all night transferring services from my current address to my new address, or starting new services. I’ve started Cox cable high-speed Internet and Southwest Gas services (my current place is electric-only), and I’ve transferred my Nevada Power account as well. So all that’s left (other than change-of-addresses with my bank, renter’s insurance, and wireless) is to transfer my Sprint local service and cancel my DSL (which my new landlord tells me will interfere with the alarm system in the new place). So I head to Sprint’s website (which doesn’t work with Opera, so I have to open IE) and look up FAQs on customer service. The answer to all FAQs involved with moving, changing, or cancelling Sprint services online is the same:
This feature is currently not offered online. Please call the Sprint Local business office at 1-888-723-8010 for assistance.
So while the power utilities totally get the web, not one but two telecommunication companies are totally lost. Which isn’t very heartening, is it — after all, the Internet is a freakin’ telecommunications application!!!!!
Sigh.
Not for lack of desire, but this is a crazy week for me. Classes started yesterday, and though I’d asked over a month ago, I found out in my first class that we’re moving on to a new edition of the textbook (as an adjunct, I don’t get to choose my textbooks), which means lots more prep time as I suss out the differences. On top of that, I’m moving on Friday, which means, as you know, crazy packing all week. Plus, today’s my father’s birthday, and Thursday is my birthday. So, I’m a little busy.
I hope to continue my blog-a-day (plus vitamins!) project next week, along with whatever else crosses my mind.
In my previous post, I noted the predominance of Cub Run Elementary School projects on the National Reconnaisance Office’s NROjr website. A quick snoop of my own (via Google) turns up the Cub Run Elementary School’s “Business Partnership” page. Turns out the NRO is a “business partner” of the school (how creepy is that designation? Not “sponsors” or “teaching partners”, but…). Here’s the skinny:
As volunteers in our school, over 100 NRO employees devote more than 1,000 volunteer hours each year. They act as tutors, mentors, role models, and guest speakers. They also participate in various clubs or after school activities such as the Chess Club, Writers Club, Computer Club, Science programs or Math and Language Arts enrichment and remediation.
Joining the NRO in this illustrious role is the Outback Steakhouse in the Union Mill shopping center. You know the one. In addition to providing catering for fundraisers, “Periodically, Outback offers free meals at the school for the Cub Run Staff. This is a wonderful way to pull the staff together for an enjoyable time of socialization.”
Incidentally, it seems the NRO website itself is down. So I haven’t been able to find out much about the wonderful agency behind NROjr and it’s almost interesting content.
Via BoingBoing via Joi Ito comes news of the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROjr. The NRO is in charge of our nation’s battery of snoop satellites; NROjr is their child outreach project. What they could possibly hope to gain from this is beyond me. They claim that “Our hope is that the various activities will spark an interest in your child to learn more about space”, ostensibly by inspiring them with the love of science and technology and driving them to excel at math and other academic skills.
The thing is, it’s easily one of the most boring and downright crappy sites I’ve ever seen — and Im a big fan of Web Pages That Suck. Start with the awful, Muppet-esque voiceover that sounds when you hover your mouse over a menu item. Add some of the lamest games in the universe, some purely awful stories (admittedly, by students — though how those three students (all from the same school, Cub Run Elementary) got chosen I have no idea) with titles like “Proud to Be American”, an art gallery (mostly models of satellites made by students from — wait for it… Cub Run Elementary), and a few kinda ok projects (making models of satellites like the kids at Cub Run Elementary), and you got one suck-ass website. The questions it raises are so numerous: Should we embarassed to have a ‘gov domain name of this low quality? Why hasn’t the site been updated in at least a year? Where’s the “Satelline Rescue Hero story” (yes, the NRO misspelled “satellite”) we were promised would be up by October of 2003? Why is the Flash section in a frame that cuts off the menu in Opera? Why is their no “back” navigation in the Flash parts? Is this really the best online experience that one of the most technologically advanced agencies of the richest, most powerful government in the world can provide?
Finally, given that this experience is soooo poor, are they actively trying to make kids dumber?!
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