Jarrett House North

My classes for the second and final year of my graduate program at “MIT Sloan” start tomorrow. This didn’t really hit home to me until I came to school this morning to register and pick up my course packets.

As always, a disconnect between the professor’s syllabus and the availability of the course materials. Today’s breakdown? I need to read and be ready to discuss a case for tomorrow’s class in Finance Theory II, but the course packet containing the case won’t be ready until later this week. More on that in a minute.

Other changes? Well, other than everyone being a second year, and things going well on the “e-MIT” website rebuild (a significant change compared to recent days), I noticed a wrenching upheaval in the food trucks that line up for lunch along the construction site behind Building 68. Moishe’s Chicken, the falafel vendor who fed me gyros at least once a week last year, is gone. In place of his truck is a poor imitation, the Jerusalem Falafel truck, which offers dry, cold lamb shawarma in place of hot, fried, juicy lamb gyro. I suspect that I’ll have better luck with the kebabs; still, to develop a routine like that and then have it change out from under me is a bit jarring.

Speaking of jarring changes, I was thinking this morning how inefficient the whole course packet/photoduplication of materials thing really is. We have e-books now (even if they have a tendency to land computer scientists in jail); failing that, we have the Web, Acrobat, and other e-textual systems. Why am I still spending a mint (in excess of $250 today, with two packets still not ready to be picked up and paid for) on photocopied course readers?

Well, one obvious answer is that copyright law mandates that I pay that much. Since the fair use rights of professors were amended to require written permission for use of copyrighted materials in classrooms, occasionally with steep fees attached, we’ve all been paying through the nose for the privilege of course materials that are more up to date than textbooks and less up to date than the Web. Don’t get me wrong; I respect the right of copyright holders to be reimbursed for their work. I just wonder whether there might not be better ways to redistribute it.

That brings me to the second part of the answer, which is that right now it’s damn hard to deliver all the materials a professor may want to incorporate in teaching a class online without resorting to paper. The packet for one of my courses includes forty-three readings from twenty-one different sources, and that’s Part I. I can’t imagine negotiating online distribution rights for all of that content.

The amazing thing is that the readings are that diverse. Given the cost of negotiating to get the readings reproduced, I would have expected the readings to be drawn from a narrower pool of suppliers. In fact, it’s pretty easy to see how that’s already happened to an extent: look at the dominance of Harvard Business School cases in the curriculum of MBAs, regardless of their distance from Soldier Field.

With all of this as background, it’s easier to start to imagine the wrenching amount of change that’s going to be necessary for “MIT” to implement the OpenCourseWare initiative. But that’s material for another day.

It’s been fun working with “Esta” on this site–both helping her get started and thinking about how my writing style is changing in response.

When I started writing regularly on this weblog earlier in the summer, I didn’t know whether I could sustain a regular schedule. I found, much to my surprise, that it was hard to avoid writing. I guess once you start thinking there’s an audience out there, it becomes important to keep talking to them.

In college, this sort of prose was rarely my specialty. I used to like poetry, primarily because it was an art form that allowed me to turn my short attention span to the advantage of my writing. (See my last poem for an example.) Now I find that I have more attention that I can pay to these sorts of things.

I’m about to face the severest challenge to keeping this page on a steady footing–school is about to start again. I’m already working on three website revisions, a bunch of new arrangements for the “E-52s”, and trying to ensure that my schedule is straight for the semester–and it hasn’t even really started yet. Days like yesterday, where I let Esta’s words fill in for me, may be more common.

This is by no means a bad thing. Esta’s by far the better writer in the family and is more likely than I am on any given day to say something frightfully interesting. Also, her good writing is apt to kick me in the butt and make me write something meaningful.

I just realized that I’ve spent an entire essay breaking the fourth wall and talking about my own writing, something that I hate it when other writers do (see Piro’s rants at Megatokyo as an example). Maybe I’ll replace this later today with something better.

Anyway…finished arranging Pyramid Song yesterday. One down, fourteen to go… 🙂

There appears to be a conspiracy that is drenching me in Star Trek this week. Yesterday it was Wil Wheaton; last night I channel-surfed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which I haven’t seen in its entirety since it was released in 1978. It definitely has its up and down moments. There was one period between commercials that consisted of absolutely nothing but the Enterprise flying into the V’Ger cloud, with the crew members’ jaws on the floor. About five or ten minutes worth of this…. Between that and the video-game warp effects, I had a hard time not laughing. It’s a shame. This and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan were about the only two movies in which you could still take the aging actors seriously as the crew of a starship.

This morning the Register pointed to a flub on the part of Microsoft I had heard about but not seen yet: Windows XP running on an old Macintosh!

The image, apparently part of the tour video of Windows XP, shows a user looking at the XP startup wizard running on a monitor sitting next to a pre-blue and white Macintosh tower machine (the Reg thought it was an 8000 series tower, which were made when I was in college!).

The funny thing is that Microsoft has poured so much time and money into the Windows XP launch and the user experience, and yet they missed this in a very public part of the prospective user experience. There’s a Zen point to be made here: you can’t control everything, and (as the DOJ will tell you) you can’t own the whole dialog. Isn’t it better to admit there are other operating systems out there, now that you own 19 out of every 20 desktops? Can’t we all just get along?

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I, in fact, run Windows 2000 on my Mac, through the magic of Virtual PC. But only when I absolutely have to…

Back again. Yesterday was definitely a catching up day. I spent the morning doing laundry, getting a few groceries, and getting locked out of my apartment (thank goodness, our leasing agent down the street still had keys for the building and could let me back in).

I went down to school afterwards and discovered that I couldn’t get online. Every year MIT cycles the MAC address records on the DHCP server to ensure that graduated or expelled students aren’t leaching high-speed access from the Institute, and I had to re-register my card. Only problem was, I couldn’t connect to re-register it: the nameserver addresses they had given us were either wrong or offline, or I just couldn’t get to them. Another item on the to do list for today.

Another ongoing project: got to get our HP 2100M printer (from Lisa’s work) accessible on our wireless network. I need to get the JetDirect card working, which should keep me occupied for a while. I also need to arrange some tunes for the “E-52s” (and updating the web page). This should help keep me busy until Lisa gets back from Italy (work–she’ll return on Friday).

The morning’s surfing turned up a couple of names that I had been wondering about. Philip Greenspun dropped off the map last spring after his company kicked him out and his VCs started suing him. He’s apparently teaching again and getting linked to by Dave. I never got a chance to work with Philip when “e-MIT” was working with “ArsDigita”, but secondhand gossip suggests that he never strayed too far from his passion for teaching. Hope that he can turn his current misfortunes into a renaissance in his other life.

A more surprising link: Blogdex has had Wil Wheaton’s blog in the top ten for a few days now. Yes, that Wil Wheaton. It turns out he’s an articulate, web-literate 29 year old trying to find meaningful work and avoid being miserably typecast for life. That doesn’t sound familiar at all :). As I fight through trying to understand myself in my world, newly expanded by a summer at Microsoft and entering my second year at “Sloan”, I sometimes feel a little typecast myself. Good luck, Wil, and I’m sorry I laughed at your character. (Though I do have to give you a shout out for helping to popularize the alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb newsgroup naming convention, as in alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die. A web pioneer even in 1992.)

I spent the rest of the week with my parents and their boxes. I moved quite of few of their boxes from one side of their storage room to another as we tried to find a few of their items that remain hidden.

I also made a trip to the family house in Madison County, where my dad grew up and where my grandmother lived until her death in January this past year at the age of 95. The one item that my wife and I wanted to keep from her house was an old Singer sewing machine–the kind on a wooden table with a wrought iron base. Grandmother’s machine must be nearly as old as she was, but the mechanism still turns smoothly. As we were retrieving the sewing machine, we also found an the original copy of one of the property deeds, listing my great-grandfather Zeb Jarrett as a witness. Hopefully I can get it scanned at some point.

Esta arrived on Friday and we followed with the obligatory all-hands family meal at my Uncle Forrest’s. It was a good time–lots of stories, lots of news (my uncle finally got the county to pave the road in front of his house!), lots of fun.

I think Esta and I use blogging as a surrogate for talking to each other sometimes. It says something that in the entire time that we were there, although we both had access to dial-up lines, neither of us updated our blogs. We were too busy making each other laugh with old jokes.

Now it’s Sunday evening and I’m stuck in an airport. This seems to be emerging as a theme recently. This time it’s Newark. I should have looked more closely at my “miracle cheap” ticket–that it went through Newark on Sunday night is going to add another couple of hours to my trip. My flight was supposed to get into Boston at 10; now I don’t expect to get home before midnight, and it’ll be a minor miracle if I get into bed before 1 a.m.

Still, I have to laugh. Having a late flight in Newark on Sunday evening is a bit like owning a stock that’s lost a lot of its value in 2001. You really aren’t in trouble relative to everyone else in the airport unless your flight is much later than everyone else’s. It’s kind of a sliding scale for expectations.

I’m finally here. Found myself thinking on the way in, as I was stuck on a non-moving Blue Line T train, that the cities I’ve lived in have had the underground transportation systems that they deserved. Washington, DC–the silent meditation chamber, where everyone ponders what they’ve done or are about to do (except for the tourists, who can’t sense the tension). In polar opposite, getting onto a Boston train for me is like I’m already home, even if I’m saddled with heavy luggage. The train is crowded, smelly, too warm, but colorful and people for the most part seem relaxed and human. And the Airport station on the Blue Line smells faintly of fish.

I’ve unpacked a lot of boxes, unwrapped a lot of china, and heard a lot of jokes today. I must be in North Carolina.

First order of business this week is helping my parents unpack and get settled into their house. So far so good. A little minor damage here and there (turns out packing tape should not be used to secure things to a varnished wood cabinet if you don’t want to lose some of the finish–word to the wise!), but otherwise a-ok.

I visited with the “Liars’ Club” (not the real name of the organization), a group of folks who are approximately my uncle’s peers and who meet weekly at the Denny’s in Asheville to tell stories, the more ridiculously unprintable the better, and help each other out. One of them was running for City Council. One reported that he and his fellow shipmates had succeeded in their quest to get the president to declare March 1st a US Navy Asiatic Fleet Memorial Day. Some just told dirty jokes.

I always wondered who hung out in Denny’s at lunchtime on a weekday. It turns out to be, well, just folks.

From time to time I give up on The Onion. Then they run something like today’s “Bush Vows to Wipe Out Prescription-Drug Addiction Among Seniors:

“Older Americans tend to give in to peer pressure,” Lakewood said. “They just do what their doctor tells them because they want to ‘be cool’ or ‘live,’ and win their doctor’s approval. They also want to fit in with all their other elderly friends, who, no doubt, are doing these prescription drugs, too.”

It’s only been a few days since the last day of my internship at a major software development company, and already I can feel the industry sloughing off me. I’m more relaxed now than I’ve been in a few months, probably the result of the pressure of being a “strategic planning intern” departing.

I’m procrastinating. I need to pack; my flight to visit my parents in North Carolina leaves at 1 pm from Logan. I may be able to dial up to update this blog occasionally, but more likely things will be silent until next Monday. I’d suggest that you get out and enjoy the summer, but the weather here in Boston is ghastly humid and I suspect that you’re better off staying inside reading a good book.

My airplane reading today is a Borges collection. It’s been a long time since I’ve read him. I’m looking forward to being immersed in the hyper-unreal again.

Nice to sit in one’s own living room and write. Really nice. It’s been a long summer, and it’s good to be back.

Saturday’s post linked to a quotation from Doc Searls, editor of Linux Magazine, about “blogging naked over a fat pipe.” It has been pointed out to me that this statement might be misinterpreted. For the record, when I or just about any other computer geek says the word “fat pipe,” we mean a high bandwidth network connection. Unfortunately for everyone’s mental health, Doc was probably writing his weblog (“blogging”) in the altogether, as he posted that comment from a hotel that was wireless enabled during a conference.

After everything, here’s the last update on my travel back from Seattle. When the plane got in, I met Lisa, grabbed my bags, and we drove back to the North End. We were pulling into the parking garage when my phone rang. The woman at the other end asked me to check my bags–apparently they had mine and couldn’t find hers. In my haste, I had grabbed the wrong bag. We had to turn around and go back to the airport (mercifully the traffic was light) and swap the bags. It’s the first time in four years of owning this particular bag that I’ve seen another like it…

Lisa and I met up with our friends Niall (a classmate of mine) and Dubhfeasa (his girlfriend) yesterday afternoon. We took in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. It’s an eccentric place–built to resemble a Venetian villa, it’s chock full of art both famous (Titian’s Europa, a Raphael, a Rembrandt self portrait, Sargent’s Jaleo) and obscure. Many of the paintings are unlabeled. Some sit in rooms open to the outside air. Apparently Gardner’s will specified that no permanent changes could be made to the museum, the collection, or the manner in which the art was displayed. It’s a gorgeous building and some gorgeous art. Some of the displays are a bit interactive–glass cases containing letters and books are protected from the light by heavy velvet cloth, which the visitor can peel back to examine, for instance, letters to Gardner from T. S. Eliot and other luminaries.

Afterwards we sat down over curries from the excellent Thai place down the road from Niall and Dubhfeasa and caught up. It’s good to be home.

Sorry about the recurrence of radio silence. Tomorrow’s the last day of my internship and I have to take care of a few things before I clear out of Seattle.

For your amusement in the meantime, I suggest you check out the insanely funny “Bastard Operator from Hell” archive. You can pick up at any point if you know that “PFY” is the Pimply-Faced Youth, the BOFH’s assistant, and that they are on a secret war against their users, the boss, the beancounters, and anyone else who interferes with their work…

It’s a sign of how easy it is to get lost in popular culture when I can make a headline like the one above that won’t make sense to anyone except perhaps the six or seven people who read both Seanbaby.com (warning: funny but extremely offensive material at that link!) and Slashdot (warning: deeply geeky and extremely offensive (to non-open-source people) material at that link!). But Jon Katz reached out and highlighted Seanbaby.com as an example of a unique voice on the Internet writing about pop culture, and posted his thoughts on Slashdot.

It’s interesting to read the commentary from the Slashdot audience (suggestion: filter the comments view to +3 or +4 to avoid really repetitive or otherwise uninsightful commentary). A couple of major threads stuck out: first, Seanbaby certainly isn’t the only “chunk of real America” that you can find on the web. I would agree with that, and I think both “Esta” and I would argue that this is good. The more voices on line, the harder it is to get sucked into homogenous groupthink, corporate or otherwise.

Second, a lot of the really interesting stuff on the Web isn’t on the super-robust, super-scalable servers that the corporate giants run–it’s on little matchstick servers like Seanbaby’s that are slow on a good day and highly susceptible to being knocked over by thousands of page views. This is the so-called “Slashdot effect”–in fact, “being Slashdotted” (or /.ed) has become a verb online. It looks like Seanbaby has weathered the Slashdot effect today, but the fact that the site got Slashdotted in the first place made me think:

If you graphed online web sites by number of visitors, you’d get a really broad, flat curve. There are only a few sites that get significant traffic. The top ten sites, in Jupiter MediaMetrix’s estimation, average about 36,000 unique visitors a month. Most of the rest, including mine, have maybe ten unique visitors a month. Nobody has the resources to keep up with the growing number of people on the Internet.

If someone with some money wants to make a significant difference in preserving freedom of speech and some of the more unique aspects of online culture, they could do worse than to drop a chunk of change on making hosting for sites like Seanbaby’s reliable and affordable.

First off, a heartfelt congratulations to my parents, who on Tuesday finally moved into their new house. They moved to western North Carolina about a month after I took off for school in Boston last year and have been living in my uncle’s one room guest house since then. Yesterday was their first day in the new place, and they’re thrilled. (It was also my Mom’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom!)

A nasty little hardware lawsuit came over the AP wire yesterday. Apparently some folks are claiming that syncing their Palm Vs fried their motherboards.

From the discussion on Slashdot, it looks like there might be some merit to the allegations. If you have a Palm V charging cradle connected via a serial cable to your computer, you may want to be careful. No word as to whether feeding the cradle through a serial-to-USB adapter (as I do on my home Mac) causes problems.