Life

General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.

Random Updates

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A few random things, since I haven’t updated anything here for a little bit…

  • Last quarter’s grades: 
    WIN07    ENG   120         CONTEMPORARY WORLD LIT         3.7          5.0     
         HUM   200         READING THE MEDIA              3.7          5.0     
         MAT   102         COLLEGE ALGEBRA                3.5          5.0     

Qtrly:     Gpa Cr  15.0  Cr Earn  15.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   54.5  GPA 3.63   

Cum:       Gpa Cr  45.0  Cr Earn  50.0  P/S Cr   5.0  Grpts  167.0  GPA 3.71   
Clvl:      Gpa Cr  40.0  Cr Earn  40.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts  152.5  GPA 3.81

    No Dean’s List anymore, but I thought that might happen. I’m just thrilled I managed to pull a 3.5 in my Algebra class!

  • Prairie and I did our version of going to the beach for Spring Break last week. In our case, it was meeting up with her dad Lon down at Long Beach, on the Washington coast. Grey and windy, so this wasn’t exactly MTV’s Spring Break Miami (or whatever), but it was gorgeous, and we had a good few days. I’m still working my way through the pictures, but everything I’ve posted so far is in this photoset. More pictures will be appearing as I find time to work through them.

  • I went to the last night of Confessional with camera in hand, intending to take photos. However, lighting both within and without the Mercury is damn near nonexistent, and since I didn’t feel like lugging the flash around, I just put the camera away and enjoyed the night. Evidence of my appearance has popped up here, thanks to gravesme.

  • I was going to go get pictures of the Utilikilts 7th Birthday Bash down in Pioneer Square last Saturday night, but a head cold kept me at home instead. A bummer, but since school started on Monday, I figured staying home and resting was the better plan.

  • Spring quarter has started. This quarter I’m in PHI101 (Introduction to Philosophy), CHE101 (Chemistry), and CSC142 (Programming). Looks to be a fun (if busy) quarter.

  • This upcoming weekend is Norwescon. I’ll be heading down there as soon as classes get out on Friday, and spending Friday afternoon/evening and all day Saturday at the ‘con. I’ve also been asked by spitkitten to shoot the Fannish Fetish Fashion Show on Friday evening — really looking forward to that! Of course, I’ll have camera in hand the rest of the time I’m wandering around down there as well.

And…yeah, I think that about brings me up to date.

I am so smart…S-M-R-T…

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Another quarter done! The last day of my English/Humanities class was last Friday, and I had my Algebra final this morning. Amusingly, I’m actually feeling cautiously optimistic about the Math test — rather than being a comprehensive test, it was just over the last couple weeks of class. Those last couple weeks were covering the basics of Trigonometry and, rather surprisingly, I was actually catching on to Trig far better than I had some of the earlier stuff we’d covered.

I never could beat all the right equations for circles, ellipses, hyperbolas and the rest into my head, but for some reason, all the equations we worked with for sines, cosines, and tangents actually stuck. It helped a lot when I found a couple mnemonics for the basic trig functions — both ‘SOHCAHTOA’ (pronounced like it’s spelled, for Sin = Opp / Hyp, Cos = Adj / Hyp and Tan = Opp / Adj) and ‘Oh hell, another hour of algebra’ (since sine, cosine, and tangent are always referred to in that order, this phrase maps to [Sin] Opp / Hyp, [Cos] Adj / Hyp and [Tan] Opp / Adj) helped me keep those straight in my head. As for why or how I was able to keep the Law of Sines and Law of Cosines in my skull, I haven’t got a clue. Even the introductions to radian measure managed to avoid fading into obscurity before I needed to use them.

So, I’m hoping that once grades come out, I’ll end up with a solid A and B in Eng/Hum and Mat, respectively.

On that note, though, I did recently realize something that was a pleasant surprise, and I’ve meant to brag about mention to my parents. I double-checked my grades to date (not including this quarter), and found this…

TUE, MAR 20, 2007          NORTH SEATTLE COMM. COLL.                            
                         UNOFFICIAL STUDENT TRANSCRIPT                          
HANSCOM MICHAEL D                                                               
----- --------- --- ---                                                         
SEATTLE          WA 98---                                                       

 TERM     COURSE ID         -------- TITLE --------       GRADE      CREDITS    
 WIN06    ENG   101         COMPOSITION                    4.0          5.0     
          MAT   097         ELEMENTARY ALGEBRA              S           5.0     

 Qtrly:     Gpa Cr   5.0  Cr Earn  10.0  P/S Cr   5.0  Grpts   20.0  GPA 4.00   

 SPR06    MAT   098         INTERMEDIATE ALGEBRA           2.9          5.0     
          MUS   113         MUSIC IN THE U.S.              3.9          5.0     

 Qtrly:     Gpa Cr  10.0  Cr Earn  10.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   34.0  GPA 3.40   

 FAL06    CSC   110         INTRO TO CMPTR PROGMING        4.0          5.0     
          ENG   102         COMPOSITION                    4.0          5.0     
          HIS   101         WORLD HISTORY TO 1500          3.7          5.0     

 Qtrly:     Gpa Cr  15.0  Cr Earn  15.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   58.5  GPA 3.90   
                                      VICE PRESIDENT/DEAN'S LIST                

 Cum:       Gpa Cr  30.0  Cr Earn  35.0  P/S Cr   5.0  Grpts  112.5  GPA 3.75   
 Clvl:      Gpa Cr  25.0  Cr Earn  25.0  P/S Cr   0.0  Grpts   98.0  GPA 3.92

See that bit, third line from the bottom? I made the Dean’s list! Okay, so for many people this wouldn’t be a big thing, but while I’ve never doubted that I’ve got a couple brain cells to rub together, good grades have never been a common occurrence in my life (something about having a disturbing tendency to ‘forget’ to do my homework during my high school years…).

I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep that up — as I said, I’m hoping for a B in my math class, so my GPA may very well drop a bit — but at least so far, I’m not doing too shabbily. Yay me!

Prairie and Penelope

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Prairie and Penelope, originally uploaded by djwudi.

My girl and her latest friend — Penelope, a wonderfully soft, cuddly, pink bunny.

While I’ll freely admit that I’ve never been the gothiest of gothlings, I’m still at times very amused that I ended up with a girl who’s big into the pink and fluffy side of life. Just one of life’s odd little quirks, I guess.

I’m keeping my black wardrobe, though. ;)

Happy π Day!

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π/2, originally uploaded by brionv.

Once again, it’s 3/14 — π Day!

Prairie and I will be stopping off at the store on the way home to get some pie for dessert. You should too!

Marie Antoinette

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Last weekend, Prairie and I went down to the Blacklight, and they were playing Marie Antoinette on the projection screen. Neither of us had seen it, and from the nearly universal panning it got when it came out, it wasn’t terribly high on our ‘to watch’ lists. However, the costumes really caught Prairie’s eye while she was watching it, and we figured it would be worth a rent to see the pretties.

As it turns out, we both really enjoyed the flick. The dialogue, which Prairie said looked fairly insipid when seen in bits and pieces as subtitles at the club, actually worked — it’s rather minimalist, and there’s a fair amount that is just presented as snatches of gossip heard in the background. The gloriously anachronistic soundtrack fit perfectly (for the most part, at least, there was one scene that neither of us liked the music choice for), and we ended up grabbing the soundtrack from iTunes. And, of course, it’s gorgeous to look at.

So don’t let the bad reviews steer you away from this one — for us, at least, it was worth the rent.

In other, unrelated news: this morning, we went out and doubled the size of my shoe collection, replacing my boots and adding a new pair of all-black Converse and some light shoes perfect for wandering out to the pool or walking along a beach.

And after a nice couple hours wandering around Magnuson Park, I know have something a bit more cheerful leading off my photo page. There’s more photos from the day to come, but I have to start paying attention to homework at some point….

Are ‘diggers’ the internet’s neocons?

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A couple of disclaimers to start with:

  1. I don’t use digg (outside of setting up an account which has rarely been touched).

  2. The analogy is probably quite strained, and I keep bouncing between two ways of expressing it, neither of which I think are quite right:

  • internet : politics :: digg : internet
  • neocons : politics :: diggers : internet

That said…

Wil went on a rant today about diggers dragging the ‘net down to somewhere below the least common denominator.

I’ve been a Digger for a long time, and always felt like I could rely on Digg’s homepage to reliably and consistently direct me to interesting and useful content, accompanied by insightful, funny, and interesting commentary.

My, how things have changed in just a few months. The links (that make it past the bury brigade) are still pretty good, but for whatever reason, the maturity and behavior of the average Digger has evolved into, well, something resembling a middle school lunch room. While Digg has always been a great way to share your creation with a large audience on the Internet, the associated grief that frequently comes with being exposed to Digg’s userbase has lead to several sites blocking Digg, shutting off comments because of abusive Diggers, and using complicated .htaccess rewrites to send Digg’s traffic away.

This struck me as being the same basic premise of part of what Mike was talking about here (some of which I mentioned yesterday) only applied to neocons and the internet in relation to politics, rather than to diggers.

I think this is a specific result of the rise of neoconservatives to cultural and political power. Note that I don’t attribute this to conservatives or conservatism, but specifically to _neo_conservatives. I don’t believe that the neoconservative political or social culture is interested in conducting their affairs with civility or with any degree of compromise — and therein lies the problem, as it creates a culture of war. I may not have written about politics in quite a long time…but during that interim, I’ve constantly linklogged to neoconservatives’ actions throughout the American political and social culture, and they are always extremist and seemingly operating under the slogan of “no quarter given.” And although I had hoped this extremism might die with the end of Bush’s Presidency, it seems as if moderates are willing to metamorphose into extremists if it gets them the power they seek (McCain) or that other extremists are ready to jump into the situation the moment a void forms (Romney).

It’s that same all-or-nothing, no-quarter-given, us-or-them, black-and-white viewpoint that our culture is rapidly sinking into. No matter whether the arena is politics or the net, online or off, there seems to be no room left for people who actually want to talk to each other, even if they don’t agree. Respectful discourse, on the whole, doesn’t exist anymore — and how can it, when we’re too busy shouting down the opposition to actually listen to what they have to say?

Happy Valentine’s Day

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Me and Prairie on Valentine’s Day (Smooches), originally uploaded by djwudi.

Okay, so this is going up a bit late in the day, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. We took the pictures before heading out the door to school this morning, this is just when I got a chance to get them uploaded.

Hope everyone’s V-Day (or anti-V-Day, depending on how you look at this particular holiday) was a good one!

Hatred Fatigue

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I missed this when it was first posted, but thanks to this (also excellent) post of Mike’s, I’ve just discovered a nicely concise explanation as to why I’m not posting about politics as much as I used to: Hatred Fatigue:

I also seem to be experiencing something that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call “hatred fatigue” — namely that, after over five years of abhorring almost every single action, day in and day out, the Bush Administration and neoconservative movement takes, there’s a part of my brain which is simply screaming “I can’t stand it anymore!” — it not being Bush and neocons, but instead the sheer weight of continued pessimism and fear.

Similarly to Mike, while my primary posts have lost much of their political content, my linklog is not exactly devoid of links tagged ‘politics‘. As frustrating as it is to see what I see going on in this country, it’s hard to bother trying to make my voice heard when discourse today never seems to be a rational, respectful discussion of differing points of view — instead, anything that isn’t what we believe is to be damned, vilified, cast out, and exorcised, by any means necessary.

What strikes me as particularly troublesome…is how this incident demonstrates the uncivil demeanor of this country and our relationships with our political opposites. And my definition of civility needs some clarification: I do not mean prudish stuffiness. I mean the treatment of another human being with simple, decent respect, even as you acknowledge with no rancor that your position differs significantly from theirs.

It’s a rather sad commentary on our current culture that as a whole, we’re so intolerant of other viewpoints. There’s nothing wrong with other viewpoints, and neither is there anything wrong with disagreeing with other viewpoints. When we stoop to destroying people in order to destroy their viewpoints, however, there is something seriously, seriously wrong.

Bonus thought experiment that Mike brings up, but that I don’t have time to poke at right now (other than to say that at first blush, I agree with where he’s going):

The Internet is a powerful tool, and it has wired us all up to each other in metamorphosing ways that I still believe our culture hasn’t fully assimilated yet, and perhaps won’t for generations to come.

The Internet allows that intrinsic incivility — that Hatred of the Other — to be both concatenated and ring-led with no lag time or delay. There’s no organizational time needed; all that’s needed is a charismatic figure and its followers.

[…]

The Internet has done such great harm to us as a political culture because, viewing it on the much larger scale of societal development (as opposed to human lives), we’ve suddenly become wired up to each other far more quickly than we ever were before.

[…]

As a species, I don’t think we were sociologically equipped to be hooked up to each other’s beliefs and to handle the combined weight of Internet-scale movements and politically biased memes. I simply don’t believe that as a species we’re going to get an okay handle on this situation, wherein we’ll somehow, someday resort to a situation where we find an easy peace with each other. I think that unless somehow such vitriol and rage falls out of vogue, a possibility I find so small as to be nearly non-existent, we’re going to be culture-warring and meme-warring with each other until the sheer massive neglect of society’s normal business causes something catastrophic to grind us to a halt.

What do we do if the only way to combat this culture of hate is to unplug?

Wanted: One Apology from the Seattle PI

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Generally speaking, I tend to like the Seattle PI better than the Seattle Times. However, when a crane collapsed in Bellevue last November, I was disgusted by the PI’s response: an immediate front-page article digging up and detailing five-year-old accounts of the past drug use of the poor guy operating the crane that day. As if this guy’s day wasn’t bad enough — he goes to work, climbs to the top of a tower crane, and then rides the thing down as it collapses into nearby apartment buildings — he then has to endure the ingominy and public humiliation of having his past transgressions dug up, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, and implicitly blamed as the cause of the accident. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drug conviction in five years, nor that his employer required drug tests that he had reliably passed, nor that there was no indication of drug use at the time of the accident. What mattered was that he was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!

This morning, the PI reported on the official determination of the cause of the crane’s collapse:

A poorly designed foundation was the primary cause of the tower crane collapse in Bellevue, a deadly construction accident that spurred state lawmakers Friday to introduce crane-safety bills that would rank among the toughest in the nation.

A three-month investigation into the crash by the Department of Labor and Industries has found that the crane’s steel foundation failed, and that the 210-foot-high structure would not have toppled if it had been bolted into concrete like most other tower cranes, sources close to the investigation told the Seattle P-I.

I, along with more than a few other people, feel quite strongly that the PI owes the crane operator an apology. Easy as it may have been to do, their public vilification of the crane operator — based on nothing more than sensationalistic items in his past, not through any verifiable current information — was a slimy, sleazy way to grab eyeballs and sell papers at the expense of his reputation. Trial and conviction should be handled in the courts, not in the headlines.

Nobody Likes a Quitter

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As we enter this first day of February, I’ve now officially been one month entirely without cigarettes.

I’d been ‘working on quitting’ for a few months now, but as anyone who’s done that can tell you, exactly how hard one is ‘working on’ it can vary wildly day to day, and ‘quitting’ is often a long way from ‘quit.’ Still, I’d done a pretty good job of drastically cutting down how much I was smoking over a few months, to the point where I went the five days of our Christmas trip to Alaska entirely smoke-free without any hitches whatsoever. I had my last few smokes while out at the closing night of The Vogue on New Years Eve, and that was that.

Two major points to make:

  1. This was not a New Years Resolution. Out of long experience (both personal and vicarious), I’d never make ‘quitting smoking’ a New Years Resolution, as I rarely see a New Years Resolution that survives much beyond a week (often, they don’t survive more than a few hours). It’s for this very reason that I tend to make the same New Years Resolution every year — to suddenly devote myself to a regimen of strict celibacy. Hey, if I’m going to break a resolution, I might as well enjoy breaking it! ;)

  2. I’m not sure I’d really say that I’ve quit smoking. It was definitely time to stop, for a number of reasons — but I know myself well enough (and have read enough about the physical and psychological barriers to quitting smoking) that a flat-out statement that I’ve ‘quit’ would be foolish. At the same time, when I decided to stop dropping acid some time ago, I never claimed to have ‘quit,’ only that it was something that I didn’t want to do — and it’s been probably somewhere close to a decade since I’ve done any illicit drugs, and I certainly don’t see myself picking up the habit again. Sometimes — for me, at least — it’s simply easier to decide to stop than to QUIT.

As it turns out, once I was approaching it from a “this is something I don’t really need to do anymore” perspective, rather than an “everyone says I should quit, so I guess maybe I should try” perspective, it wasn’t terribly difficult at all. No major cravings, no major mood swings (Prairie verified this one, too, so it’s not just rose-colored glasses on my part). I am getting very tired of having colds, though — apparently one of the big side effects is a few weeks of increased susceptibility to illness, as your immune system adjusts to the sudden drastic switch in chemicals being pumped into your body. I’ve spent the majority of January sniffling, wheezing and whining my way through at least three rounds of head colds. Ick.

Still — if that’s the worst thing I have to complain about with this, I’m doing okay.

I did find a timeline that I’ve been keeping in mind during this…

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