I am … unhindered by talent

I’ve long coveted a good hand drum, finding myself drawn to them in stores and often coming close to (but never quite) purchasing one. Joe Alia picked up a Djembe a few months ago in the Cities, and I’ve completely fallen in love with it and really enjoy playing it while Joe solos on the sax. Our little combo has recently been joined by Imre Tuba (new this year in Math) and he’s been playing Joe’s drum leaving me lost and bereft :-). Thus I want a drum for Xmas!

Brian Ohs pointed me to Mother Rhythm right up the road in Bemidji, MN. Brian and some of his friends have been buying some cool didgeridoos there, but he also has an excellent selection of interesting drums, including lots of cool looking djembes.

Now I’m going to go off and rub my hands together in gleeful anticipation…

Currently listening to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” by the mighty Otis Redding. No djembes, but great stuff.

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Each year Digi-Key (a major catalogue/on-line vendor of electronic components several hours north of here) hosts a very nice programming and problem solving competition for several regional schools. They obviously see it as a valuable computing and PR exercise as they really lay out the red carpet for us each year, including paying for the hotel stay, tons of food, and nifty prizes. A week ago Friday (21 Oct 2005) was our fourth time to participate, and the for the third year running we had a team place in the top three (out of 17 teams). In fact, of the six teams that have competed in the last three years, no team has done worse than fifth and four of the six have place second or third. (The first year we competed was odd because the students had to use a language and programming environment they were completely unfamiliar with.) The action shot below shows the team that placed third: Declarative Non-statement, featuring (l to r) Matt, Scott, Tyler and Jake.

This year the winning team (from U of M Duluth) blew everyone away with 367 points. The range from second to fourth, though, was only 27.5 points (279.5, 264.5, and 252), and then another big drop to fifth with 195 points. Only 12.5 points separated our two teams, so it was definitely a tight finish.

From a teaching standpoint it’s a nice contest because they mix a lot of different skills and activities (short and long programming problems, word/math problems, engineering puzzles, etc.) so it’s clearly about problem solving instead of “just hacking”. And from a departmental standpoint it’s a cool event because we get money if the teams do well. Every member of the third place team, for example, gets a $100 gift certificate at Best Buy, and the discipline gets a check for $600 - w00t! Last year, when our teams placed 2nd and 3rd, we received $2400 on the backs of our students’ success :-).

Congratulations to both our teams on another fine year! Now we’re in the chaos of prepping for the ACM regional competition. No money in this one, but much tougher competition so more prestige. The top team or two in the region (probably out of over 150 teams) will get to go to the International Finals (in San Antonio this year) in the Spring, which is a pretty sweet deal. UMM had a team make the finals in 1998, and have had numerous teams in the top 20 over the years, so on any given day…

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Below is a letter to the editor for the University Register, UMM’s student newspaper…

Tuesday, the 8th of November, the residents of the Morris Area School District will turn out to vote on a proposed school levy. While most UMM students realize that they can vote in this election, I realize that many are unsure as to whether they should vote in this election. My purpose in this letter is to try to convince you, the UMM student, that as members of this community you absolutely should vote in this election, and that its outcome will have a direct and powerful impact on your experience as UMM students, and the experience of students to come.

Of the many reasons why students should care deeply about the outcome of this election, I think the starkest is also one of the simplest: the quality of the Morris Area schools has a profound and direct effect on the quality of UMM’s faculty and staff. As Peter Wyckoff said in his recent piece for The Counterweight

Let’s say you are not moved by the plight of my kids and their peers. You, fiscally conservative UMM student, still should vote for the levy. Why? Because the fates of UMM and the Morris Area Schools are intimately entwined. If local school quality erodes, UMM faculty and staff will leave. I, for one, love UMM. The one thing, however, most likely to cause me to abandon ship is if the local schools become inadequate for my children. Talented UMM professors feel this way too.

Peter’s comment focus on the concerns of faculty and staff currently at UMM, but they apply just as strongly to our ability to recruit and retain top quality staff and faculty in the future. Last year I was on three search committees: the Computing Services Director, the Digital Services Librarian, and a tenure track faculty position in Computer Science. In each of these cases, one of the first questions almost every candidate asked was about the quality of the local schools. This was by no means atypical of my past experiences on other searches, and is, I suspect, representative of the attitudes and concerns of candidates in the vast majority of UMM searches.

To date I’ve been able to respond by honestly and openly discussing our family’s positive experiences at Morris Area Elementary. If this levy fails to pass, leading to the deep cuts that are inevitable given the current financial situation, it’s going to become much harder to answer those questions, and consequently harder to recruit quality people. So the risk of Peter and others like him leaving is a double hazard: Not only do we lose great people, but we run the risk of being unable to replace them with equally great people.

Communities are complex creatures, with subtle and deep connections. As UMM students you are, obviously, important and powerful members of the UMM community. What is not always as obvious, however, is that you are also important and powerful members of the Morris community. Your choices affect the larger community, and the choices of the community affect you.

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Or further reasons why I hate computers…

Sub-Evil Boy got a new computer game while I was away at the Digi-Key competition (more on that in a later post). Unfortunately something weird happened in the install process (we’ll probably never know the details) and it wiped the entire Applications folder on that computer. Everything in it was gone except for about a half dozen application fragments (which I’m guessing survived because he didn’t have permission to remove them). I suspect it was a combination of a poorly designed install mechanism and an honest mistake, but it still sucks.

It’s amazing what a pain it is if Mac OS X loses its entire Applications folder. There are the obvious things like iTunes and a bunch of Sub-Evil’s games, but there are some more tricky bits like, oh, no web browser (so you can’t [easily] download replacements for, say, the lost web browsers) and no System Preferences or anything in the Utilities folder. Argh!

Restoring the apps from the DVD doesn’t do it because that doesn’t give you things like Safari and iTunes and the Utilities. So it looks like I’ll need to re-install the system software, which bites, in part because backing the Users beforehand is a pain with so much missing. We’ve had really good luck with BackupPC in our CSci lab so I’m really thinking I need to install it here at the house to manage the backups of our boxes.

As much as this sort of thing drives me nuts (and sucks up way too much of my time), I figure I at least have some clue how to handle it when it happens. One has to wonder, then, what all the other poor souls do who are just barely getting by. If you’re still nervous about the power switch, I suspect that erasing your Applications folder is pretty much the apocalypse.

Oh, and the picture? Sub-Evil was understandably pretty stressed and worried that I’d get a wee bit upset at him. So I just want him to know that I don’t blame him and we’re all still cool. But if he ever does it again I’m going to make sure this photo (from when he was about 6.5) appears in his high school senior yearbook :-).

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By default the BBC only keeps their radio shows on-line for a week, and if they stick to that policy then all the wonderful John Peel Day shows will disappear tomorrow night (UK time) so listen while you can! There’s some great stuff and I highly recommend it. Also be sure to catch Annie Nightingale’s excellent show featuring some brill dance/DJ/grime work recorded in session for Peel over the years. I don’t know why she’s not listed on the “official program“, but there’s some great stuff here from people like Orbital and from a ton of DJs I’ve never heard of but which definitely kick ass.

I could go through the many highlights of these great shows, but there are just too many to make sense out of. I think the best bits, though, tended to be when the musicians talked about how important he was for them and how much he meant to them. And I think it’s telling that they often started by talking about the influence he had on their record collections and ideas about what music was and could be, and only after that did they talk about how cool it was to have him play their music. Most radio (and Big Media) is about creating and controlling consumers. John was a brilliant example of that all-too-rare alternative, where media is a tool for creating a community where people grow and develop, and where their possibilities are expanded instead of constrained. John didn’t (just) make customers that bought music, he helped people wrestle with music, whether as “just” listeners or (as obviously happened with remarkable frequency) as producers as well.

Or, as Thom Yorke of Radiohead put it in a recorded message they played on the show:

Dear John Peel - Wherever you are, thank you very much for all the music that you played over the years to me on my radio. Blew my mind, and changed the way I thought.

Amen, brother.

I think one of the tricky things about all this (very genuine) adoration is captured in the oft heard comment that this needed to become an annual event. That could be really cool, but only if it increasingly focuses on the future of the music rather than the past. The risk of hanging something like this on a giant like Peel is that we engage in an increasingly nostalgic wallowing that would in the end be completely contrary to the spirit of John and his shows. In my tribute show (which almost no one heard because KUMM’s streaming was down :-( ), for example, I only played 2 or 3 tracks from 2005 in a 2.5 hour show. I played a lot of great music, but given that John played almost nothing but new music, one could argue that my show missed an important piece of the point. That’s probably OK for now, as the pain of loss is still fairly raw. But next year? Five years from now? Probably not a good thing to keep playing Fall session tracks and “Teenage kicks” every year, no matter how good they are.

So go have a listen to these great shows while you can and raise a glass to this remarkable life; the world will definitely be a poorer place for John’s passing. Then go listen to a live show by a band you’ve never heard of, or check out a weird record, or do something to stretch your head.

That’s the real tribute.

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It’s a sign of how totally crazy life is at the moment that I totally forgot to plug today as John Peel Day! Luckily the Beeb will allow you to check out significant parts of their massive tribute show on-line for at least a week, so go check it out.

As a much less cool alternative you can listen to my Peel Day show on KUMM this Sunday, 16 Oct 2005, on KUMM from 9:30pm-Midnight. What a great excuse to try out the spiffy new 128K stream!

Unlike the Beeb, I’ll have no amazing live shows from bands who’s lives were totally changed by Peel, but I will have lots of great music I discovered through his shows, intermingled with my mumbling attempts to explain just why he was such an idol for me. He was very possibly the only person that I never actually net that I could seriously say I saw as a role model and someone to actively emulate. I can safely say that for a period of over 15 years I’ve always wanted to be like John Peel when I grew up (or at least got to be his age), and listening to the bands and DJs (but especially the bands) talk about how important he was for them just spins my head.

To quote the man himself:

More of the same unpleasant and disorientating racket on tomorrow night’s program. Until then, from me, John Peel, good night and good riddance.

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New Kid just posted a really wonderful analysis of a recent variant on the all-too-common Nigerian Oil Scam spam. What a hoot! Shows what can be accomplished if a keen mind is brought to bear on a problem of importance. Or, well, maybe not so much importance, but still quite fun and definitely recommended.

And to think - I just delete most of mine :-).

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Our happy on-line tea vendor (Adagio Tea) also sells a lot of teaware, and through them we’ve purchased some really nice stuff made by Jenaer Glas. In particular I have a nifty Zylindro Teapot that I keep at the office and which is sufficiently cool that at least two students ordered ones as well. And if memory serves New Kid and LDH have a teapot or two of theirs as well.

Sadly, Jenaer Glas is going out of business:

After more than a century of making the world’s finest glassware, the factory of Jenaer Glas is shutting its doors.

There is still time to brighten your day with the stunning design and intelligent functionality of these fine products. These expertly crafted products remain in limited supply, so please consider them before they are gone.

Sigh. They have a really nice sense of design, and it’s always sad to see something like that go out of the universe.

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A few weeks ago, Sub-Evil Boy amused himself greatly with his new, improved definition of vending: “Buy crap, sell crap, eat crap”. Short and to the point, eh?

In that (not entirely) grand tradition, we’re here to flog our first foray into the land of unhindered commerce with our new, improved (huh? there was nothing there before…) Unhindered By Talent Cafe Press shop! You can use this venue to purchase really spiffy “Make tea not war” gear, calligraphed by yours truly. You can’t eat our crap, but you can wear it, and help spread an excellent meme in the process.

This all started with Mags’ excellent photo on Flickr, which I just had to show to WeatherGirl. Her immediate response was that she wanted that sentiment on a shirt for her birthday, which seemed an excellent idea to all. I then squandered my opportunity to do the work over the summer, and ended up doing the calligraphy in a crazy rush the weekend before her birthday. Once we got it all sorted out, it became clear that we would all need to get “Make tea not war” clothing, and once we’d started down that road a Cafe Press shop was pretty much the unavoidable outcome.

So, there you have it. “Make tea not war” on a dizzying array of random stuff.

Or, to (mis)quote one of the great minds of the 21st century (at least among those minds that regularly hang at our house): “Buy crap. Sell crap. Wear crap.”

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Nick Hopper (UMM ‘99, now a tenure-line CSci faculty at the Twin Cities campus) invited us out to the Twin Cities’ Computer Science and Engineering biennial technology forum/open house, which was very cool. At various times it looked like as many as 10 or more UMMers might make the trip, but in the end mid-terms and on-campus events trimmed things down to Emily, Elena, and myself.

The scramble to get ready was pretty crazy, but all worth it as it was an excellent event and I got to meet some interesting new people and hook up with folks I hadn’t seen in a while. A major highlight was the informal UMM CSci reunion dinner last night after the open house was all over. We had 20 UMM folks in all, plus two wee’uns, for a fun and tasty evening.

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