Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Seeing as how Christmas is slightly less than three months away, I figured I’d indulge my lust for new-‘n’-shiny-things and add a link to my Amazon Wishlist to my site (it’s towards the bottom of the sidebar, just above the shameless plea for money — gotta keep my greed centralized!).
There’s a mix of stuff on there, from music to ‘puter hardware and software. Pointless? Possibly. But I figure it’s worth a shot. ;)
As mentioned in my previous post, today was the day for NION rallies across the country. Prairie was visiting for the weekend, and she and I decided to head up and participate. Something of a new experience for me — I’m fairly vocal with my friends and occasionally here on my site about my beliefs, but I’d yet to ever actually participate in anything like this. I figured it was time to ‘put my money where my mouth is’, so to speak, and so about 12:30pm we started walking up to Volunteer Park for the rally, in time to get there right about 1pm when it was scheduled to start.
Not really knowing what to expect, or how these things generally go, we just wandered into the park and found a spot on the grass to sit and listen to the various speakers they had. I didn’t have anything to write on with me, so I don’t remember who all spoke, but there was a lot of interesting stuff, if fairly predictable for the crowd and event (that sounds horribly cynical, but it’s not meant to be at all — forgive me, I’m tired and need to go to bed, but I wanted to get this in first). One thing I thought was really interesting was the broad spectrum of people there. There’s something of a preconceived notion of the people you’d ‘typically’ find at a political rally like this, usually leaning more towards the obviously leftist/radical side of the population. This rally seemed to attract a very wide range of the population, however — rather nice, it makes it seem like more and more people are starting to question where our government is taking us, rather than just accepting everything that comes down the line. Definitely neat to see.
At about 3pm, everyone started moving to begin the march portion of the day’s events (no small feat with an estimated 7,000 people gathered at the park). A giant inflated globe carried by a bunch of kids led the march, followed by a bunch of giant puppets, then all the rest of the gathered masses. We marched out of Volunteer Park down to Broadway, down the main drag of Broadway to Pike St., then hung a right and went down the hill into downtown Seattle, ending at the plaza in front of Westlake Center.
The entire event (rally and march) went quite well from what I saw. After reading things like the account of the march in Portland that ended up in conflicts with the police, I knew that it was possible for things to get a bit hairy, but thankfully enough, that didn’t happen. I did see a few people in the crowd that came prepared for conflict — dressed in black, with black stocking caps, black bandannas tied across their face, and goggles — which made me a little nervous, but apparently none of them actually felt like causing any problems.
I don’t entirely understand people who would take this approach to a protest. If they were just bringing along facemasks and such in case things did get out of hand, and they had them ready to wear if necessary, that would be one thing. However, coming to the event and spending the entire event ‘dressed for battle’, if you will, gives the definite impression that not only are they expecting conflict, but they might even welcome it — if not instigate it. Not very encouraging when the intent is for a peaceful protest, and when the protest is focused on crying for peace.
I was also rather pleasantly surprised that there didn’t seem to be an overbearing police force out (something that Seattle seems to have an issue with in recent history). They were definitely present, but didn’t at any point take an aggressive attitude — at least, not that I saw or heard of. About the only time I noticed tensions rising at all was as we passed one street in Downtown, where there was a line of riot troops blocking off the street about halfway down. This, unfortunately, did attract some amount of boos and catcalls from some of the marchers as we went by, however the troops did nothing except stand there, and march organizers made sure that noone broke ranks to actually try and directly confront any of the officers. I’m pretty sure that the only reason they were there (especially since it was only on that street) was that a protest last summer suddenly changed direction and blocked traffic on I-5 for a couple hours, and they were blocking off the access ramp to I-5 to ensure that this march didn’t try to do the same thing. Nobody went after them, though, and they left us alone, so aside from a few unnecessary taunts tossed their way, it was pretty uneventful.
Eventually we made it down to Westlake Plaza, where a post-march rally was being held. I saw one of my favorite rally signs being held up here by a guy probably in his late teens: “And I heard the Reagan administration was bad”. It made me laugh, at least. We hung around for a while longer and listened to a few of the speakers that were at this rally, then decided that we were hungry, it was a good time to duck out, and did just that. All in all, a very entertaining day, and it felt good to actually get involved and give some more visible, vocal support for the NION movement.
Some other reports on the march:
A crowd estimated by march organizers at 6,000 to 8,000 people registered their dissent yesterday, rallying and marching in a nearly mile-long procession from Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill to Westlake Center as part of a nationwide anti-war protest.
They chanted “Drop Bush, not bombs,” carried origami birds on long poles, wore Uncle Sam costumes on stilts and sported signs that said “Save us From Mad King George.”
There were the occasional whiffs of patchouli, John Lennon buttons and refrains of “we ain’t gonna study war no more.” But this wasn’t a repeat of the 1960s.
Mennonites mixed with anarchists. There were groups of Vietnam veterans, social workers and blue-haired teenagers — all opposed to a brewing war.
Strollers got stuck in potholes and baby boomers in Dead Kennedys T-shirts carried camcorders.
— Seattle P-I: Thousands walk for peace
Yesterday’s march attracted a broad collection of protesters — young and old, students and professionals, and many who said they rarely, if ever, attended rallies.
Tracey Marsh, a graduate student at the University of Washington, had begun to wonder if anybody paid attention to demonstrations anymore. Taking a break from the procession, she said she now feels a new urgency to be in the streets.
“It does give me a sense of hope,” she said as the people flowed by. “It’s really important to let Congress know we don’t support (an invasion).”
— Seattle Times: Thousands hit Seattle’s streets to protest war
After rallying in the park for several hours, the group moved en masse towards Westlake Park, bringing their message of peace to the downtown streets of Seattle.
Speakers included Congressman Jim McDermott, who recently traveled to Iraq; Rev. Jeffrey of New Hope Baptist Church; Peggi Thompson, mother of Seattle political prisoner James Ujaama; and Mark Kolner of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“If theres a problem well work through the United Nations, we cannot go alone,” McDermott told KING 5 News. “If we go alone we lose the whole world.”
— King-5 News: Thousands rally for peace in Seattle
I just got back from a nice goodbye dinner for Dez, who’s leaving on Tuesday to move to Toronto to live with her finacee. Was a good evening — Dez, her finacee (who’s name I’m completely spacing on at the moment…), Rick, Chad, Don, Kareem, Scott, Mary, Kim, Kayo, myself, and a few other people that I didn’t manage to catch the names of, all just sitting back, joking around, and having fun.
Looks like there’s a chance I may be heading to Toronto over Memorial Day weekend next year, too. That’s the date they’ve set for the wedding, and I might end up providing the music for their reception, also! Pretty cool…we’ll see what happens.
That’s it for now, though, I’m pretty brain dead. Thinking zoning with some DVD’s for the evening will be a nice way to relax.
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on converting every audio CD I own to .mp3 format on my computer. I just got done tonight — and the results are kinda frightening, in a very cool sort of way.
Here’s the final tally:
40.5 days. It would take me over a month to listen to everything I have, listening 24 hours a day. Just crazy.
But very, very cool.
If anyone’s bored/morbidly curious enough, feel free to download my .mp3 list (586.6kb .zip’d .xls file).
I like being a music whore. :D
Goth will never die. Of course for fun we could take it out, bury it, and then dig it up later to see what it looks like.
— kcwise1, in the WWDN Soapbox thread Calling all goths
I think I just heard gunshots. Eight, very quick, all together, no pauses. Creepy.
[2:30] Called the police, they’re going to check out the immediate area.
[2:33] Nice response time — there’s two police cars looking around now.
[2:55] Haven’t heard anything else, nor have the police felt the need to get back in touch with me for any reason. I’m going to assume that all’s well — or at least well enough that I don’t need to actively keep an ear cocked.
Hooray for living downtown! ;)
Interesting timing on this one. My friend Prairie is working on getting her teachers degree, and teaches English classes at her college. She stopped by for a few hours last weekend on her way through Seattle, and we ended up chatting for a bit on just how often students seem to have, at best, a very questionable grasp of the English language.
One of the things that drove this home for me within the past few years was corresponding with a friend of mine who I know is quite intelligent, knows how to express herself quite well, and generally is quite handy at doing so. However, all these strengths are almost entirely verbal — when it comes to the written word, reading e-mail from her was like corresponding with a different person. Little use of capitalization or punctuation (and what there was was often used incorrectly), poorly constructed sentences…the works. Eventually I had to break down and ask her about it, and she attributed it in large part to how she was taught in school. Apparently, teaching basic things like grammar, punctuation, spelling, and all the building blocks of the English language had fallen by the wayside, usually being replaced with an admonition from the teacher to be sure to use the grammar check and spell check on the computer.
Quite frankly, I was pretty floored by this. Admittedly, much of my command of the language (which, though it may be somewhat egotistical, I like to think is fairly decent [though I do tend to over-use parenthetical remarks {like this} too much]) was greatly influenced by having two parents with a love of the language, but even without their assistance, I know that proper writing was still being taught when I was in school. Is this just not deemed worth paying attention to anymore? Or are teachers just getting lazy? Either way, it’s a fairly disturbing development.
What started all this rambling, though was an article in the New York Times about how today’s teachers are coping with students using online abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons in their writing.
Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. “They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end,” said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. “If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown.”
As Trisha Fogarty, a sixth-grade teacher at Houlton Southside School in Houlton, Maine, puts it, today’s students are “Generation Text.”
On the one hand, suddenly typing — and writing in general — is ‘in vogue’ again among kids, due to the explosion of the ‘net and its associate technologies, such as IM programs like Yahoo! Messenger, chatrooms, and weblogs. However, if teachers aren’t able to help train these kids in the differences between the online slang and the correct usage, today’s students may very well be in for a world of hurt later in life, when they’re asked to write something more formal than a quick IM note to set up a date or pass gossip along. The teachers in this story sound like they’re all at least making some effort to make sure they’re actually instructing their students well — it’s the other teachers, those who ‘teach’ their classes to rely on all-too-inaccurate grammar- and spell-check software, that really worry me.
“Kids should know the difference,” said Ms. Harding, who decided to address this issue head-on this year. “They should know where to draw the line between formal writing and conversational writing.”
Found via MeFi
I was playing with what I’d hoped would be a new feature for the site last night. Things were looking really promising for a while, too — but it looks like it’s not going to happen, or at the very least, not anytime soon. Bleah.
A while ago, Kirsten recommended I take a look at Andromeda, an application for streaming audio across the ‘net. At the time, I didn’t figure it was something to look into — primarily because all of my .mp3 files were on one computer, and my webserver was a seperate machine. Howerver, since the old webserver died and I’m now serving djwudi.com off of the same machine that has all my music, I thought I’d take a look at it.
Downloaded and installed it last night, and after a quick e-mail with the developers to figure out one small glitch, things were up and running. It works really nicely, too. From my PC, I could hit my website, browse through my music folders, set up playlists, and listen to any .mp3 file stored on my webserver. Nifty! I had all sorts of ideas for how I wanted to play with it, too — everything from linking to a band’s directory if I mentioned them in a post, to seeing if there was a way I could integrate it with my ‘Music of the Moment’ display to add a ‘play’ button for whatever track was being displayed at the moment.
Unfortunately, there’s one key roadblock — my connection to the ‘net. My incoming connection is nice and fast (1.5 Mbps, about the speed of a T-1 line), but my outgoing connection is pretty pokey (128 kbps, about twice the speed of a 56k modem). So, I figured it was worth taking a look at what other options I might have through my ISP, Speakeasy.
Turns out that according to their pricing grid, I’ve got two options for adjusting my speed, and staying close to my current price range. For $10/month more I could drop my incoming speed in half to 750 kbps, but triple my outgoing speed to 384 kbps. Or, for $20/month more, I could keep my incoming speed as-is, and triple my outgoing speed. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to go for the first option — while I really like having the T-1 speed incoming, it’s rare that I really use it all, so I figured I could go ahead and live with half of that, and take the smallest possible increase to my bill.
So, off to the phone to call Speakeasy. At which point, the bad news hits. It turns out that there are two different companies that Speakeasy parners with to provide their DSL service locally, Covad and WorldCom (though it might not be WorldCom, I’m hoping I remembered that correctly). The connection I currently have goes through Covad, and apparently it’s the top of the line Covad connection. Upgrading to a faster speed would require switching me over onto WorldCom’s network — which would require me cancelling my current line, and re-ordering a new line at the different rate. Sounds easy enough…except that it would create about a month where I’d be without DSL access.
Dial-up access only, and no website. Ugh.
The only other option would be if I had a second phone line. Then I could order the new DSL line, hook that into the second phone line, and kill the current DSL line when the new one kicks in. Unfortunately, that would require me paying for two phone lines for that month, two DSL lines for that month (plus all the setup costs for the new line), and then the hassle of changing my phone number at the end of the switch.
None of those options are particularly appealing.
End result, then, unfortunately, is that my site stays it’s current pokey (but, thankfully, usually okay since I keep most of my pages pure text) speed, and no Andromeda integration.
Ah, well. It was worth looking into, at least.
In working on the job submission tool I’m involved with at my job, it keeps amazing me just how many complaints and/or comments we’re getting from customers that they wouldn’t have if they would read the information on the page. But they don’t, and they whine, which forces us to attempt to dumb it down even further. I’m convinced that the lowest common denominator is sinking minute by minute.
Then I realize that I’m working in a place where there are signs posted on all the soda machines — which are free, and marked as such — explaining in four steps how to get your free soda from the machine.
As my dad once told me, “you will never lose betting on human stupidity.”
Erk…as horrid as a thing this is to admit, I goofed up.
Yesterday (the 15th) was my dad’s birthday, and in the midst of my usual weekend duties, I completely forgot to call. Or write an e-mail. Or post a note here.
Or anything. Sigh. I generally try to be better about this.
I’ll be calling tomorrow morning — if I’m lucky, before he gets up and checks this website…but if not…happy (late) birthday, dad! You’ll be hearing from me soon!