Word Up

I spent an hour or so this afternoon working with Sandra, the housekeeper of the Highlander, on Microsoft Word. She's taking a computer applications course, and she's got most of the concepts down (her understanding of applying formatting to different parts of text is surprisingly complete), but she was having trouble with inserting clip and word art. In some respects, I think the world might be a better place if more people had her set of Word skills. I cringe when I see clip art laden signage that has such poor formatting that the message is hard to understand.

Selecting text was also difficult for her. I showed her the trick of using the left margin (looking for the backwards cursor) to highlight a line at a time, but I was probably confusing at times. I've grown very used to the (far-superior) configuration of Word 2002, and going back to Word 2000 was frustrating. It's nice to see that Word is improving as a word processing program.

Halo Иineteen

I received an email this morning telling me that Nine Inch Nails' newest album, With Teeth, which is to be released on 3 May is now available in its entirety online. The album is indeed up at NIN's page at Myspace, a website which is pretty interesting in itself. Many tracks on the album remind me in some manner of "The Perfect Drug," which NIN released on The Lost Highway soundtrack. Sometimes the connection is in the sound; sometimes it's in the lyrics. I kind of think of it as an explosion of that one song, and the result is quite good. The album is tightly constructed and impressively organized. It's not as beautiful as The Fragile, but beauty is not the goal of this album. It's an album of energy, and it succeeds. It packs the power of NIN's inconsistent debut album Pretty Hate Machine into a work that is a cohesive as The Downward Spiral. Trent Reznor's falsetto on "All the Love in the World" and "Sunspots" is particularly exciting. It's not strong enough to be used for long durations, but it's highly effective used as is. Reznor is a talented musician, no doubt, and his stuff still has so much edge that it seems strange that he'll be turning forty in May. I feel like he should be exempt from aging.

Nat and I took two of the art history professors to lunch today. Prof. Menocal, who prefers to go by Narciso, and Prof. Buenger both wrote letters of recommendation for me during my (successful) bid to gain admission to an architecture school. Prof. Buenger wrote a letter for Nat as well. We ate at the Great Dane Pub, where my mother took me one Saturday during my first semester here. I had a "Full Monte Christo" and I enjoyed it greatly. I wish I could take my favorite professors with me to the next school. I'd gladly take both Narciso and Prof. Buenger along with Prof. McDonald (from whom I learned Russian History) and Prof. Begam (with whom I currently have James Joyce).

A Forest Consumed

I'm sitting in a pile of books, notes, and printed-out articles and essays. My James Joyce paper was due today (I titled it "Wandering of the Sun: Astronomy, Scientific Discourse, and Father and Son in 'Ithaca'"), as was my second Environmental Conservation paper (in which I wrote on land-use in Tambopata, Peru from the point of view of an ExxonMobil executive). Neither was terrible experience, but the combined total was more than I'd perfer to do again. Its hard to say, but maybe it won't be necessary.

I had a 80 minute nap this afternoon to help compensate for the short night's sleep. I'll need it since due tomorrow is an Ancient and Medieval Art paper.

Blink of an eye

My best friend Claire visited Madison for the weekend, arriving Friday for a late dinner and departing mid-afternoon today. I think the past 44 hours were surely among the most fleeting I've experienced. We had dinner with her good friend, future roommate, and traveling companion Melissa, Melissa's host for the weekend Brenna, and Brenna's friend Rachel. During the next day and a half, Claire and I succeeded in visiting Memorial Library to retrieve a volume of James Joyce Quarterly I needed, in applying an oatmeal facial mask (below), in visiting the Elvehjem art museum, in visiting Memorial Union, in taking a nighttime stroll around the capitol, and in mixing and consuming cosmopolitans. We failed to visit Jamba Juice (in part due to the surprisingly frigid weather) and the Community Pharmacy. We had two memorable meals; Sarah, Evan, and Mike's girlfriend Annika took us out to King of Falafel to both meet Claire and celebrate my admission to Syracuse School of Architecture (Mike was unfortunately away visiting family). It was a most enjoyable meal and get-together. We had our last lunch at Pelmini, a hole in the wall that serves Russian dumplings. They serve potato dumplings and beef dumplings; you can order them butter-style or spicy-style. That's it. (They do have a fridge with cans of soda and tubs of sour cream, both of which are included in an order.) The dining experience, like the rest of the weekend, was very highly enjoyable. Claire's visit most pleasantly bisected our two months apart between spring break and summer vacation.

|n\/a1id Pa55w0rd

I set up my NetID for Syracuse this morning before class, and the process confirmed my suspicion that computer administrators' expectations for having "hard to guess" passwords are getting way out of hand. Back in the mid-90s many servers would let you use pretty much anything over four characters. Granted, you could be stupid and use something guessable (say, password), but you could be smart and use a phrase that means something to you and you alone (say, elvis24). Around 2000, though, many systems started being choosier, but for the most part requirements were reasonable. A seven character minimum or requirement of letters and numbers would prevent you from using password or j0hn, but still allow elvis24. In the past couple years, however, password requirements have become increasingly strict and are now downright ridiculous at times. Businesses like Amazon.com don't want to irritate their customers, so they're easier going, but school servers are the domain of the nerdiest of the computer nerds, and no one is more paranoid about password security than ultra-nerdy computer nerds. Look what I had to face this morning:

Rules for a Good Password

· The password must be 7 or 8 characters.
· The password must include at least one lowercase letter.
· The password must include at least one uppercase letter.
· The password must include at least one number.
· The password must include at least one non-alphanumeric character from this list:

` ! # $ & * ( ) - _ = \ | [ ] ' ; : / ? . ,

· At least 4 characters must be different.
· The password must avoid any known word.

Examples of a password that will NOT pass: a2b!ccd!, zab!bcd#, a*a*a*a*
Examples of a password that will pass: Abc!jk1!, D1ngd!ng, B*12fr*g

I think we've got some major concerns if zab!bcd# is not sufficiently secure. And is Rock_00- really less secure that oRck_00-?

Up Top!

It's National High Five Day!!!!!

The first use of 'high-five' cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1980:

Maclean's Mag. 20 Oct. 48 They used to slap palms ('Gimme five, man'), but what they do now is reach high and bang hands up there ('The high five, man').

The Phrase Finder says of the origin of the term and associated gesture: "Began in the basketball circuit in the US in the 1979/80 season. The University of Louisville player Derek Smith claims to have coined the term."

A Tundish For Malapropism

I noticed this evening that James Augustine Aloysius Joyce is an oft quoted author in the Oxford English Dictionary. They list practically everything he wrote as sources:

Chamber music 1907
Dubliners 1914
Exiles 1918
Finnegans wake 1939
Giacomo Joyce ed. R. Ellmann 1968
Letters ed. S. Gilbert & R. Ellmann 3 vols. 1957-66
Pomes penyeach 1927
A portrait of the artist as a young man 1916
Stephen hero: part of the first draft of "A portrait of the artist as a young man," ed. T. Spencer 1944
--(ed. J. J. Slocum & H. Cahoon) 1955
Ulysses 1922

While this doesn't really surprise me, I find it amusing nonetheless. It amuses me in part because there are numerous occasions when Joyce intentionally misuses words, but also because a significant piece of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has to do with Stephen Dedalus (certainly a representation of a young Joyce) deliberately choosing to use English, the language of Ireland's unwanted occupiers. There is a very interesting scene with Stephen and the dean of studies at his university in which the dean, an Englishman, shows his ignorance of the word tundish and apparently assumes its from Gaelic, when in fact, it is an English word that Shakespeare himself employed in Measure for Measure.

I've come to feel that Joyce intended to conquer the English language (if such a thing can be done), and there is not a small amount of irony in the fact that he's now being used to define that same language. Does this mean he succeeded? I'd like to think so, but I'm not sure.

XVI

It looks like "God's Rottweiler" has a new nickname: "his holiness." Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger will be installed as Pope Benedict XVI this coming Sunday. As with the outcome of our recent presidential election, I can claim neither surprise nor pleasure, although I do take satisfaction in the knowledge that the new pope, regardless of his stance on homosexuality, probably won't be starting any wars. In fact, if we are to assume that Cardinal Ratzinger chose his papal name based upon the career of the most recent Benedict (the pope during the first World War) instead of the first one (about whom we know very little), we can expect a strong stance against Bush's questionable use of force.

Sexually Explicit

Like most of the e-mail using world, I get spam. For reasons unknown to me, my Gmail account tends to get spam only of a pornographic nature and my AOL account tends to all the other types (home mortgage, "bad credit?", perscription drugs, etc.) This bifurcation caused me to take interest in a recent report issued by the Pew Internet and American Life Project regarding a survey on spam:

Among other things, the survey found that people were getting less porn spam.... While 63% of email users now say they have received porn spam, down 8 percentage points from a year ago, 29% of those email users say they are now getting less porn spam, compared to 16% who said they are getting more.

I suspect that this drop primarily reflects two things: (1) spam filters are getting better on a whole and (2) many Americans are either unaware of their spam filters or they just don't check their spam folders. I'm doubtful that this poll reflects an actual drop in porn spam.

In truth, I haven't been been checking my spam folders that often either. As I move away from AOL, whose filters are less than impressive (I'd say they get it right about two-thrids of the time), to Gmail, whose handling of my unwanted email has been nothing short of amazing, I feel less pressed to keep a carefule watch on the spam. Nearly all of my unwanted messages are automatically sorted into the spam folder, and it is unusual for legitimate messages to end up there by accident. To make life even easier Gmail automatically labels messages with pornographic content with the all capital label "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT." This makes messages that are mistakenly sorted (either spam in the inbox or good mail in the spam folder) stand out like a sore thumb.

As a result, I almost never read even the subject lines of my spam, but today I read a few when I was retrieving a message I had marked as spam by mistake. Most were of the subject lines were typical ('webcam,' 'hot,' 'co-eds,' and other such buzzwords were a dime a dozen), but one subject line really just cracked me up:

Naughty Doctor Fucks Pretty Whore In Cute Anus

As if having a subject written like a New York Times headline wasn't humorous enough, I can't but help laugh at the choice of adjectives.

An Odyssey Completed

I finished Ulysses this afternoon. I enjoyed it greatly, and I'm looking forward to reading it again. I might have to settle with the 1961 version of the text however, since my Gabler Edition is in unimpressive condition, partially due to standard wear and tear, mostly due the poor binding, which I've had to glue in numerous places throughout the semester.

I read much of the final episode of the book yesterday afternoon up on the sundeck with Sarah. It was an excellent day for such a pastime, and the experience was further enhanced by our trip to Jamba Juice beforehand. Jamba is introducing a new line of naturally caffeinated drinks, and we both received coupons for free drinks. I had the Matcha Green Tea Blast.

Matcha green tea powder enticingly blended with soymilk, nonfat frozen yogurt, sorbet and ice for a cool and creamy burst of energy! High in protein, calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D. The power of Matcha, with antioxidants, theophylline and caffeine, makes this a blast.

Bad punctuation aside, the description proved accurate. The flavor reminded me of green tea icecream, but the texture was far superior.

Update

This post refers to the 27 March 2005 post "Back In the Madtown / Out."

I just received the following memo from the Highlander staff:

Topic: THEFT

Dear Highlander Resident:

We regret to inform you that in the recent weeks there have been a number of theft incidences within the building. iPods, various CDs and (pathetically enough) beverages are a few of the things that have been targeted by the thieves....

I'm quite proud of my 'pathetically enough.'

I also got the pleasant news (as a result of the post) that the professor who I believe to be in South America actually made a relatively small mistake. His "relationship" seems to have been a single phone call that he made after much pressuring on the student's part. Professor Cohen, however, remains very much in trouble.

Like pistons fans, but with style

Fans throw flares, soccer match ends early

By The Associated Press and Bloomberg News

MILAN, Italy - AC Milan goalkeeper Dida was hit by a flare thrown from the stands, and yesterday's UEFA Champions League quarterfinal match against crosstown rival Internazionale was halted with about 15 minutes to play.

AC Milan was ahead 1-0 in the match and set to advance to the semifinals on a 3-0 aggregate score when Dida was struck on his left shoulder by the flare in the 73rd minute.

The match was stopped. As many as 20 flares were burning in the penalty area.

When referee Markus Merk tried to restart play 10 minutes later, more bottles and lighted flares were thrown. Merk abandoned the match in the 75th minute.

"Tonight's episode doesn't just hurt Inter, but the entire city of Milan," AC Milan manager Carlo Ancelotti said. "The reaction of the Inter fans was surprising. I've played and coached in Milan for 10 years and I've never seen anything like it."

Inter fans in the crowd of about 80,000 were upset that when Esteban Cambiasso put the ball in the net in the 71st minute, the goal was disallowed because of a foul.

"After the goal was annulled, the fans' anger was understandable, although the reaction of throwing objects onto the field is not justified," Inter defender Ivan Cordoba said.

Curiosity To Become Enemy No. 2?

We spent about ten minutes of our environmental Conservation discussion talking about the proposal to list feral cats as an unprotected species is Wisconsin. I'm for it, but I'm against the rider on the bill that allows for trapping of large cats (mostly as a gut reaction since I don't have any real facts on the matter).

Apparently the issue is getting national attention despite similar laws in a number of neighboring states including Illinois and good ol' Minnesota. I just stumbled across CNN's story about it on their main page.

A Step Up From The 486 DX

I placed an order for an Alienware MJ-12m 7700 this afternoon. For those of you unfamiliar with Alienware, they're a Florida-based company that sells customized PCs via the internet. In many respects they are a Dell for people who want or need better hardware or service. They hype their gaming computers first and foremost, but unlike their primary competitors Falcon Northwest and Voodoo, Alienware offers professionals some more serious computers that have a little less styling and a little more bang for their buck. The MJ-12m 7700 is the current highend "portable workstation." The key specs of the system I selected are below; take a look if this kind of this thing interest you.

This is my second computer (I'm still getting along just fine with my 2001 Dell Inspiron 8000), but the fifth computer on which I've been a regular user. Our family got its first PC in 1993. It was a 486 DX (not one of those sorry SXs), although I was quickly frustrated that we had VGA graphics instead of VGA+ like my cousins did. (It actually did limit our software options substantially.) Perhaps the coolest feature our computer had this thing called a "cee dee rom" that the salesperson thought was likely to be quite important in the coming years. (He was correct, and we actually upgraded to a double-speed CD-ROM eventually.) It's funny thinking about how many copies of that computer would be needed to match this new laptop I'm getting. Probably it's only slightly less funny than thinking in the year 2017 how many copies of my 2005 laptop would equate to my new handheld.

Case Alienware® MJ12m 7700 Case with 17" WideSXGA+ 1680 x 1050 LCD Display with Built-in Camera
Motherboard Intel® 915P Chipset Supporting PCI-Express
Processor Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 530J w/ HT Technology 3.0GHz 1MB Cache
Memory 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM at 533MHz - 2 x 512MB
Graphics Accelerator Alienware® MJ12m 7700 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Go with 256MB of DDR3 memory
Hard Drive RAID 0 - 160GB (80GB x 2) 5400 RPM ATA100
Primary Optical Drive 8X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW / 24X CD-RW Combo w/Software
Wireless Network Internal Wireless 802.11a/b/g miniPCI Card

Over and out

The much anticipated letter from Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation was waiting for me on my desk when I returned from Milwaukee. I had Sarah look for me, and although she recited Psalm 4 and said three Hail Marys for me before she opened the envelope, the answer was, sadly and expectedly, 'no.' She took me out for a nice long walk around the capitol, and I felt better.

I'm going to be an Orangeman. Knowing is nice.

The Sound Of Milwaukee

I spent today in the Cream City with my friend Vladislav Ivankovich; I met Vlad when we were living on the seventh floor of the Langdon last year, and I tutored him in mathematics this past fall. He picked me up from my bus stop, bought me lunch, and then we stopped at his aunt and uncle's house, where I met his maternal grandparents and his two cousins Kat and Tina, who I must say were two of the most quickwitted high school students I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Both of the girls were busy, so Vlad and I headed downtown by ourselves. Our first stop was the Milwaukee Public Museum. It was a mixed bag; the place was clearly intended for much younger visitors, but I had a great time in the butterfly room. I had insects swirling about me almost constantly, and I got to watch some of them feed from up close. Afterwards we stopped at a huge (but somewhat smelly) used book store and a Starbucks, where I had a Chocofino and the necessary accompanying glass of water.

We proceeded to the main event of the day, which was the play Bach at Leipzig by Itamar Moses at Milwaukee Repertory Theater. This new play proved to be quite hilarious, and I'm looking forward to seeing another work from this young playwrite. The play is set in Leipzig in 1722, and features a cast of seven organist/composers, all of whom are named either Johann or Georg. I was particularly delighted to find actor Mark Corkins playing the role of Georg Friedrich Kaufmann, for I had seen and enjoyed him in the role of Sir Andrew Aguechee in Twelfth Night last October.

The play ran longer than Vlad expected, and we most unfortunately had to forgo dinner with the family so that I could catch my bus back to Madison.

April Fools!

Well, the Life and Times is alive and well, despite the April Fools message that was displayed here thoughout the day. (Visitors, instead of seeing the usual blog, found the message "This blog has been deleted.") I can't be too proud of my simple little prank, however, while I'm busy getting the news from PNN.com (the Potter News Network) or drinking Google Gulp. Some people clearly put a lot more effort into their annual gag.

Rouge

I think I've spent a good ten minutes today with my face in various shades of crimson.

First, in James Joyce, we were examining the episode "Oxen of the Sun," and pulling apart some of the text that was written in a rather antiquated style. The chapter takes place at a maternity hospital, and is chockfull of offcolor references.

Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch.

Professor Begam mentioned that there is, of course, a pun in this last word. I (true to form) must have had an amused look on my face, for he turned to me and asked me what the joke was. Decidedly less amused, I tried quickly to think of how to answer the question. It's playing at a reference to her pubic hair, isn't it? What was the word Joyce used back in "Lotus-Eaters" during the bath?

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream This is my body.

He foresaw he pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

'Bush.' That's it, as the passage came to me.
"It referring to her bush," I answered, which I figured would be perhaps slightly amusing, but not overly so, since I've made a habit of using Joyce's wordchoice whenever possible ('waistcoateers' for 'prostitutes' and 'the BMV' for 'the Blessed Virgin Mary'). What I hadn't counted on was being just a little bit wrong. Apparently 'thatch' was the female genitalia, and not the surrounding hair. The professor corrected me, and everyone laughed. I blushed for a good long while.

Then, in the Rise of American Post-Colonial Architecture, Narciso suddenly turned to me and commanded, "without blushing, define for me an 'erotic impulse.'"
By this time I was half tempted to look for the candid camera.
"Can I pass? I've already had a sufficiently similar experience today," I replied.
"Oh, do tell," said Narciso.
"You want my story?" I asked in fear.
"I'd rather have a definition for an 'erotic impulse." I paused and thought.
"Well, now I am blushing, but how about a sudden desire for a sexual experience?" I ventured hesitantly.
"Sexual experience?" Narciso asked.
"An experience," I emphasized.
"I don't like this word 'experience.'" he said. He suggest a desire for copulation would be better, and asked me if I was convinced.
"Not entirely," I answered.
"What don't you like?"
"I don't like 'copulation.' I think that many people desire some sort of other sexual act," I said as thoughts of my gay and lesbian friends and my pedophilic professors flitted through my head.
Narciso consented and went on to discuss a famous (but impotent) nineteenth century critic of architecture. I continued to blush for a good long while.

I can't remember a day like this since eighth grade health class. The day I recall took place during our sexual health unit. It was, of course, very uncool to laugh at anything of that type by the time we were in eighth grade. Come of think of it, I think it might have been uncool to laugh at anything. Anyhow, I sat right behind this fat kid named Brent. Brent was not cool, either by the eighth grade definition or my current definition. Brent would laugh at anything and everything in the sexual health class, even the most unfunny words imaginable like 'urethra.' Being as fat as he was, ol' Brent'd jiggle all over like a bowl full of jelly. And while I didn't see much to laugh about in 'vas deferens,' I did find much to laugh about in seeing waves of fat cruise up and down Brent's body every time Ms. Hegadus said 'vas deferens.' So I laughed, and no one knew the real cause for my mirth, and I blushed for a good long while.

Nighttown

Walking down State Street I had a brief experience that seemed as if it came right out of the "Circe" episode of Ulysses, which is a rather long series of nighttime encounters and hallucinations in "Nighttown," the red light district of Dublin more commonly known as Monto.

BUM
Can you spare any change?

JAMES
Sorry.

BUM
(in an entirely serious tone) Don't apologize!

Back in the Madtown / Out

Sarah and I had a smooth return trip to Madison, watching Friday Night Lights (which required more empathy for football fanatics than I could give) and the first two-thirds of the excellent film Collateral. Sarah informed be on the bus that my suite was one of many that had been illegally entered over the break. My losses seem to have been light at only three sodas and a can of Guinness. I'll look into reporting the theft of the sodas tomorrow, since the guilty parties are known. I also learned on the bus that one of my former professors was arrested for sending nude photos of himself to a 14-year old boy. Keith Cohen, who has admitted to having done this, was my comparative literature professor last spring. I liked him very much, and even paid him a visit this fall to tell him about the New York Clasical Theatre production I saw in Central Park on my last night in the City, since we had read a book by the playwrite, Aphra Behn. I had briefly considered him for letters of recommendation, which is somewhat ironic since one of my previous recommenders reportedly left for South America after a relationship with a student became public. It irks me to see nice, intelligent, creative people make stupid choices.

I arrived to find more bad news: Yale and Harvard both offered me their regrets. This saddens me some, but I increasingly like the looks of Syracuse as I read more about its master of architecture program, and it is certainly the most affordable of the lot. It might be a difficult choice if I do get into Columbia, which has been my favorite since attending classes there this past summer. Both schools are very good; Syracuse has the right price, and Columbia has the right location.

On the upside, I made my first ever visit to Qdoba this evening. I had a delicious chicken burrito. Perhaps I need to check out their competitors, Chipotle, and do a taste test.

[Please see also the 13 April update to this post.]