I am … unhindered by talent

We have Mags to thank for sharing this nifty piece. I have a pot brewing as we speak…

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Regular readers will remember from earlier posts such as this and that that a group of concerned citizens (MARQS) has been working to encourage the Morris School Board to address their budget issues head on by proposing a long overdue school levy.

Tonight saw a major step in the right direction, with the Board approved sending a $385/student levy to the voters in November, despite the continued obstructionist tactics of Laura Carrington. It was a long and often unfocussed discussion, with a lot of shadowboxing and talking past one another. I think most of the Board members had largely made their mind up in general terms coming in, but people tended to dance around both the specific amount and the justifications for those amounts. That said, both Amy Doll-Wohlers and John Luetmer get kudos for speaking strongly and clearly on the importance of investing in such a key resource. Vance Gullickson, while mostly silent, got an excellent little bit in, and Kurt Gartland (Chair) made some nice points despite his tendency to be a weak (IMHO) on the question of the actual amount.

After discussing the issue for the better part of an hour, Mark McNally asked for a recess, which allowed everyone to engage in some backroom chats and feel each other out. Returning to the table, McNally proposed a predictably (given his comments all along) low figure of $250. There was clearly no support for this and really should have died for lack of a second, but Chair Kurt Gartland did what I’m sure he thought was a “good” thing by giving it a second when no one else would. After a little unenthusiastic discussion it came to a vote and died.

John Luetmer then proposed $385 which, with the current $315 levy, brings our total to $700/student. After a bit of discussion this was approved handily by a 5-2 vote, with Laura Carrington and Mark McNally against and everyone else (John Luetmer, Amy Doll-Wohlers, Vance Gullickson, Kurt Gartland and Brent Fuhrman) in favor. They’ll now have to draft the legal language that will actually appear on the ballot, and it’s up to us to ensure that the vote goes well.

This $385/student amount brings the total back to the levy level that was approved back in 2000 before the state legislature mucked about with things and works well with the new state equalization levels that the legislature just approved. I personally would have liked to see them propose something a little higher (at least $500/student) so we’d have the ability to really invest in a school system that’s been gently starved of resources for several years. And frankly, I think a larger proposal could have won (although perhaps by 4-3 instead of 5-2) if it had been proposed before the $385. The $385 amount (and the discussion of it) was, however, a very Minnesota Nice sort of proposal and I think should win handily in November if we do our work properly. Then in a few years we’ll have an opportunity to return to the levy levels because the current $315 levy will expire and need to be replaced.

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WeatherGirl just handed me a recent copy of The Observer, an excellent British weekly that she subscribes to as part of her campaign (along with listening to BBC radio on-line) to both keep track of what’s happening “back home” and to get her news from organizations that regularly provide intelligent, thoughtful reporting.

An excellent example of this is John Naughton, the author of a regularly technology column in the Observer, and the author of the piece WeatherGirl was handing my way. The column in question is an analysis of the recent (and much discussed) Supreme Court decision regarding Grokster and StreamCast Networks which has been seen by many as a huge defeat for the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, and victory for the big players in corporate media that are trying to desparately to maintain at least the illusion of their control over their content.

Most writing on this and similar issues tends to suffer from serious myopia as the writers typically understand either the technological side of the issue or the socio-political-economic side of the issue. It is sadly all too common that writers understand neither of these sides, and very rarely do they understand both. Naughton is the happy exception, who really understands the world of the nerds that drive the technical changes that constantly ripple through our lives, and can write with wonderful perception about the larger context that these issues live in.

In the column in question, for example, Naughton understands (and clearly explains) important differences between Grokster and StreamCast Networks and the classic Sony decision that is often quoted as precedent. As he nicely points out, a better analogy to the Sony decision is BitTorrent, yet sadly most writers on the issue (not to mention many of the policy makers involved) probably know little about BitTorrent and less about its place in this complex set of issues.

In short, John rocks, and you could do much worse.

Oh, and I should mention that he also helps support the interesting Living without Microsoft site.

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Yesterday’s stage win by George Hincapie in the 2005 Tour de France was, barring something quite remarkable in the final week, my highlight of this year’s (excellent) Tour. In fact, it may well be the highlight of quite a few Tours!

Road racing like the Tour is held together by a very complex network of social interactions built on rich interactions of competition and trust, as well as decades of tradition. It’s full of shifting alliances and challenges, many of which lend themselves to a Prisoner’s Dilemma style analysis.

Hincapie has supported Lance Armstrong for years, being the only rider to be on his team in each of Lance’s 6 (and now very likely 7) Tour victories. Yet, until yesterday, George had never won a Tour stage. He’d had considerable success in other races, but never a Tour stage. In fact no one on one of Lance’s teams (except, of course, Lance himself) had ever won a Tour stage. Yesterday was the reward for all those years of hard work and loyalty. Like the best rewards, though, it wasn’t a gift - Lance didn’t “let him win”. Sure, the team allowed him to remain in the breakaway, and you can bet they would have told him to wait if Lance had found himself in difficulty. But it was George that stayed with the leaders throughout an absolutely killer series of vicious climbs, and it was George that took the sprint at the end. When you have over 100 extraordinarily talented cyclists in the race no one, not even someone as powerful as Lance Armstrong, can promise, ensure, or dictate anything. No one could give this to George, which I’m sure makes it all the sweeter.

To see the emotion on George’s face when he crossed the line, and the embrace when Lance came in a bit later, was right up there (for me) with great moments like The Look.

Lance has never won a Tour without winning at least one stage, and I think there’s always (almost always?) been at least one mountain stage win. The mountain top finishes are done for the year, and Lance has yet to win a stage, so the most likely remaining opportunity will be the final time trial. I suspect, though, that even though Lance will probably be disappointed if he doesn’t win at least one stage on his way to a historic seventh Tour victory, yesterday’s win by George Hincapie will come damn close to making up for it.

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I’ve never participated in one of these “Answer N questions on a theme” memes, although I was sorely tempted by these questions from ScribblingWoman (see answers by New Kid and Pharyngula for my inspiration). Unfortunately it came up at a bad time in the semester, so nothing ever happened.

However, I just got an invite from hkvam to contribute to an “Author’s interview” meme on Flickr. I’ve never actually been personally invited to participate in such a thing and flattery and ego will go a long way in my petty little universe, so here I am answering some semi-random questions about my photography. This will probably get a bit long and rambly; don’t say you weren’t warned :-).

Not surprisingly, I also posted this (with some minor changes) over on Flickr.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I always have this vision that I’m going to write about new albums and stuff (dreams of being a small-time music critic :) ), but then rarely get to that part of the program. The big problem is that I overthink things and find it increasingly hard to say something I’m comfortable with about a complex piece of work. Hmph. So I had an idea a while back that I might instead let iTunes choose two or three random songs now and then, and say something about them in a more informal (less professorial) sort of way.

I’ve never gotten around to trying this in the context of music, but thought I could also apply the idea to photos from Flickr just as well, so that’s where we’re going to start. I figured I’d choose two random pictures, one from my list of favorites (i.e., photos by other people that I liked enough to favorite), and one from the set of photos that I’ve posted on Flickr. I’ve used the happy joys of random.org to “roll the dice” for me, so we’re off!

The first photo is “Medinet Habu” by Hey Jack Kerouac. Hey Jack Kerouac was one of the first people I added to my list of contacts after joining Flickr, and this was the ninth photo I favorited (I’m up to 219 now). I was immediately attracted to his photos because of the amazing colors and the cool locations (so exotic for us in rural Minnesota) of many of his shots, as well as the neat eye for light and composition. This particular photo also appeals to my love of old, weathered wood and calligraphy (in this case hieroglyphs). All of which makes this a real winner for me.

Hey Jack only started posting to Flickr in April of this year, and hasn’t posted anything since 11 June. I hope that he’s just away for a bit and will return to sharing more of his excellent work with us.

The second photo is “Way out, man!” (one of mine). This was the exit sign at Hall’s Croft in Stratford upon Avon. (Hall’s Croft is where Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna lived with her husband John Hall.) I’ve always loved the British use of “Way out” where here in the U.S. we’d say “Exit”, and it’s especially fun at such an important historical site such as this. I also love half-timbered walls and peeling paint, both of which are combined here, giving a neat collection of textures.

This was pretty popular when it was initially posted, with two quick favorites, but not much activity since then. It’s currently the 20th most viewed photo (of my 95 posted photos). My guess is that the text of the sign was pretty crucial to its popularity, as it gets one attention even in a small thumbnail version.

Well, that was fun! I’m not sure how often (if ever) I’ll do this again in the future. It took longer than it should have (as is always the way, probably an hour in this case), so we’ll have to see how interesting I (and you) find the piece.

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He learned to play the french horn in band last year. Next year he’ll be in jazz band, but oddly enough they don’t have french horn in jazz band, so he’s adding cornet to his repertoire. He only started today, but got a thoroughly recognizable rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, little star” straight away.

We then recorded it on GarageBand and added seriously lame and disorganized drum, bass, and organ backing in a vaguely techno (but mostly spastic) style. I don’t think the single’s quite ready for release, but it was fun!

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I use GoogleAlert to look for places where my name appears on the web (a strange but instructive exercise in narcissism). I was really confused by a recent hit entitled “Example Resume Simple, Go Now“. Huh? I’m hardly out there looking for help with my resume. It’s not that it doesn’t need it, but I’m not looking for a job so I don’t really care.

So I click on over to see what’s up, and find that these guys just aren’t real bright. They have a section headed “Our top example resume simple resource” which is clearly being automagically generated by some web trawl, and it’s none too clever. It’s picked up and included a page I wrote for a class in 1998(!). If this page happened to be on, say, resume writing, this might make sense, but it’s on CRC cards (or see Beck and Cunningham’s original CRC paper) and has nothing to do with resume writing. I do use as an example the problem of one person sending their resume to another person, and it’s presumably that (very thin) connection that caused their search tool to pull that page up and include in their list of Really Great Resume Writing Resources. Ugh.

I just hope there aren’t poor saps who are clicking through to my ancient CRC page and then getting really annoyed because it’s not about resumes. Or at least that they’re not annoyed at me. I’m totally fine if they’re annoyed at the silly people at all-about-resumes.com, ’cause they deserve it. (One hopes, of course, that at some point their page will no longer include my CRC page, making this post simple a relic of a bygone era. For now, unfortunately, it’s still there.)

Weird.

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The BBC has long (like since 1942 long) run a program called “Desert Island Discs” (with numerous other broadcasters running similar programs). The basic setup of the Beeb’s version is you bring in some person of interest (a celebrity or author or politician or whatever) and ask them what they’d take with them if they were going to be stranded indefinitely on a desert island. They get the King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare for free (it is the BBC, after all), and then have to choose eight recordings to take with you (as well as an additional book and a luxury). They are interviewed about their choices, with their musical choices interspersed amongst the chat.

While it’s often interesting, it’s often less so (not all these people are that interesting underneath their celebrity), and I am by no means a regular listener. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea though, as part of my love of Top 10 lists and the like. Every now and again I think about what I’d say if someone asked me, and I’ve come to realize that modern technology has fundamentally broken the metaphor. The whole thing was premised on big, heavy objects which forced choices in the face of limited resources. (Check out, for example, the excellent program on John Lennon’s jukebox, where he could only carry a few dozen singles with him on tour.)

When my sister was first heading to the Galapagos 1.5 years ago, my dad and I bought her a small, inexpensive, solid state (for low power consumption) MP3 player. She was going to be on the islands for several months, including several weeks on Española, an uninhabited island mostly covered in lava boulders (with the smattering of marine iguanas, horseshoe crabs, and Booby poo to break the monotony). This was about as close to a desert island experience as most of us will ever have, but we were able to spend less than $100 to give her the ability to take vastly more than eight recordings. And that was 1.5 years ago. The same amount of money today would buy her far more capacity, and there’s every reason to believe the trend will continue into the significant future.

WeatherGirl, Sub-Evil Boy, and I have a second generation 10Gb iPod we bought several years ago, which is truly wonderful on long car trips. (The 14 hour drive down to my folks in Arkansas is probably another modern equivalent of a desert island given the state of American radio and the diversity of our tastes.) We each choose about 2.5-3 Gb of music, load it up, and hit random. It works really well, especially if we all avoid overly long pieces and I don’t put in too many really weird bits.

3 Gb is an enormous amount of music compared to the eight recordings from Desert Island Discs, and you might think we wouldn’t have to choose at all. The other two don’t (much), but I definitely do. We (meaning mostly me) have over 1K CDs, and I have well over 10Gb of music on the Mac in my office, so choose I must. At first I agonized over it, but I’ve learned to avoid that by simply have the computer choose 2.5 Gb of random music from a list of stuff I know I like (mostly things I’ve rated as 4 or 5 stars). Sure, I’m not guaranteed to have “Lord, I just can’t keep from crying” by Blind Willie Johnson, but I might get to stumble something obscure and strange from David Lee Myers’ Arcane device: Engine of myth (an album composed entirely by sampled and arranged electronic feedback sounds). I get what I get, and it’s almost all really good, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Starting last year I started doing something similar in my First Year Seminar (FYS) course on American Roots Music. Instead of sweating over the careful construction of weekly listening lists (which I was never entirely happy with because I always had to leave something “crucial” out), I now let iTunes pick 30 minutes of random music from the big pile. I sometimes do a little editing (we’ve already heard that artist before, or that’s really too long to justify inclusion), but mostly I leave it alone. At first I was pretty nervous about stepping back that much, but it in fact worked out really well. We got to listen to and discuss a lot of cool music of many different types. This also allowed the combination of my general taste and sense of what’s important (which determines the pool the music’s being drawn from) and the students’ tastes (and sense of surprise or confusion) drive the discussion in interesting ways.

(I’ve also thought of taking this approach with a show on KUMM, but it would have to be different from our family show and I doubt I have time for two shows at the moment.)

So it seems that the old metaphor of Desert Island Discs is arguably seriously broken, and that replacing it with “What would you put on your huge MP3 player?” just isn’t going to work as a replacement metaphor, at least for a radio show. (MusicMobs, however, does suggest an interesting on-line way to deal with the vast amount of music in people’s collections.) Memes like “Ten random songs on Friday” are arguably closer, but the sample is so small that really unrepresentative things can happen, so many people feel the need to manipulate the list (or at least apologize for it).

Weirdly, the metaphor also wouldn’t have made any sense 100 years ago when most people had never heard recorded music, but carried it around in their heads and made it on their front porches. “What do you mean I can only take 5 songs? I know dozens! Do I have to forget the rest? Am I not allowed to write any while I’m there?”

Everything old is new again? Probably not, as we have access to a vastly larger and broader spectrum of music now than at any other time in human history. But it’s not all completely new, is it?

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Yeah, so these guys apparently made a wall-sized “mosaic” of Elvis using different colored post-it notes. People then posted photos so we could all bask in the reflected glory. (This thing is big - that’s the conference table and chairs in the bottom and left of the photo.)

Makes me feel less silly about taking pictures of paper cut outs of our hands in the garden yesterday…

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