not falling down

This is pretty spectacular.

“I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.“

That’s an excerpt from Erica Goldson’s valedictory address, which she wrote and issued earlier this year. Read the whole thing: it’s brief but convincing.

I wasn’t first in my class, but I was close, and I was aware of many of the issues Goldson raises even then–though less concerned, at a more self-centered time in my life, and mostly just happy that they were working in my favor. (Another thing we had in common: the textbook inspirational English teacher.) I’m less complacent these days, less willing to accept the cruel theater of fear and shame that we expect smart young people to suffer with piety. Our schools are bad, and their splash damage is everywhere.

I’m not sure what use I can be to education reform right now. It’s one of those issues that is never urgent but always important, and I need to figure out a path to involving myself in the cause. Erica Goldson’s example seems like a good start.

This piece of xenophobic garbage was the top Google News story under Sci/Tech as of a few minutes ago. It makes me so angry I want to blog.

Basically, ICANN–the governing body for domain name registration–finally got around to saying people could register domains with country codes in their own character sets. Country codes are the national domain endings, like .tv (yes, Tuvalu) and .kr, that until now have been abbreviated in Latin characters for absolutely no reason. Thanks to ICANN’s legendary corporate/Western bias, people in those countries have been forced to use kludgy keyboard settings to type in Latin characters when they want to go to a website. Is it any wonder search engines were desperate to do business in China? It’s easier to click through to your site via Google than it is to type its name into the damn address bar.

And so far, country endings are still the only part of domain names to which the change applies! You still have to type the rest of the domain with Latin characters. The rest of the domain scheme is coming, but only ICANN knows when.

So naturally it makes sense for David Coursey to start mongering fear. Oh, sorry, I meant “Tech Inciting.”

“Is this a change for the better? Perhaps, but is there any doubt that if another country had ‘invented’ the Internet–say the Russians–that we’d all have had to learn to type Cyrillic characters by now?”

Jesus Christ, what decade is it? C’mon, “journalist!” LET’S GO TO HISTORY SCHOOL. Setting aside your blazingly simple-minded assertion that “the U.S. invented the Internet,” if you’d bothered to go even Wikipedia-deep in your research, perhaps you’d remember–or learn–that the URI addressing scheme was invented by a British scientist working at a lab in Geneva. Unicode’s been around since 1992, two years before Berners-Lee’s RFC 1630 and RFC 1738 formally set out URL syntax. ICANN’s policies have restricted, not fostered, the Web’s growth into a truly worldwide entity.

“How many new domains will be needed to protect international brands?”

Oh, I take it back! I hadn’t considered the possible damage to brands!

“Will there be hidden domains that cannot be displayed on some computers or typed on many keyboards?”

HEY DIPSHIT! See the fifth sentence of this entry, because THERE ALREADY ARE.

“Will cybercriminals some how [sic] be able to take advantage of this change?”

This sentence is so stupid that it must have set some kind of Internet record.

“Practically, I am not looking forward to perhaps someday having to learn how to type potentially 100,000 non-Latin characters that ICANN has embraced. How many keys will keyboards need to have?”

Record broken!

Go ahead and read the article–it’s a cornucopia of minor idiocies in the same vein. This guy is, to all appearances, a professional blogger published by a real-world magazine (albeit one with a circulation smaller than some webcomics). In a world where major news organizations fight and win legal battles in defense of their right to knowingly lie, I suppose I should be expecting media of every vintage to continue stoking the terror of small minds to drive their dwindling profit engines.

This has been Brendan Makes Fun of Something on the Internet! I will now return to my usual activity of narrow-eyed hunting for the tilde key. And hey, David Coursey: Φάτε ένα εκατομμύριο πέη.

Fourteen hours ago I was on top of an Alp. Three hours ago I was getting lengthily hassled by Immigration about my months-long residence in the United Kingdom with no visible means of support. Eventually they decided they couldn’t really deport me and grumpily let me back in, but not without permanently detaining–get ready for it–my London library card. That is the pettiest thing I can imagine! I am going to write a book about petty people just so I can use that as an epitome!

But the hassling and bag search and back rooms and subsequent two-hour night bus ride don’t really take away from the experience of looking down on Innsbruck from four miles up (a good quarter of which we hiked) with a really good song on my headphones, learning the secret of Hafelekar summit. The secret is this: it’s fucking covered in poop and bugs. I guess the mountain goats and snow rabbits just love to use the lookout point as their special private time space, but man. They grow the flies big on Hafelekar summit.

Have I mentioned yet that I’m done with school? I’m done with school, as of the day after my birthday. I ended up with two Bs and a C, balancing the two Bs and an A from last semester, and finish my first year of postgraduate education with a pristinely average 3.00. I did some complete crap work, in places, this spring; I got thoroughly and undeservingly rogered in others. It all balances out, in 3.00 Land.

One more year of this and I’m done with school forever. Whoof. I am ready for that.

I’ve been panicking on and off for a little while here, trying to make myself remember to register for fall term. If they let me come back to school. But anyway, I registered really late last fall and didn’t get all the classes I wanted, so I keep beating myself about the head and shoulders, trying to make myself do it.

I finally remembered while at a university computer today, and clicked frantically through the (horrible) catalog system… to find that nobody else has registered either. I guess it’s okay to wait until summer, or at least until I meet with my advisor.

I did do one thing already, though. As of this fall, I am FINALLY IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.

Allilea rants at length about usage of “fuck.” “Fuck the registrar’s office,” she says, is an appropriate usage. She is correct.

I think there’s a Muse of Incompetency, and the University of Louisville computer system is her masterwork. It is so fiercely and proudly retarded that I eventually gave up on even trying to check my U of L email, and thus missed the opening of spring registration by a week, which means I have to put off taking Software Engineering (basically the course for which I came to grad school) and Compilers again, for a term and a year respectively. Because they’re full.

Since I don’t really know anything about the way scheduling works here (what professors to take, what course numbers mean, et cetera), I ended up feeling like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer when I tried to put together a schedule without the two classes I’d really counted on taking. Maria, lucky roommate, got to see me in full HATE SMASH TECHNOLOGY mode while making that attempt the other night. She also talked me down from it and told me to go see my advisor, who was actually really helpful considering he didn’t know my name.

So in the spring I’ll have Networks, Evaluations, Internet Application Design (Java whee!) and, after a frighteningly long time, Prob ‘n’ Stat. I really should have taken that last one, like, decades ago, but it wasn’t a requirement and I never had room as a double major.

For a while, Blizzard was looking for somebody to write statistics code for Battle.net–a job I bet I would have loved if I’d ever, well, learned anything about statistics. I mentioned how this made me want to take PnS at Centre to Jon, who laughed in my face and told me that one undergraduate course wouldn’t qualify me anyway.

I’ll show you, Jon. You hear me? Your world frightens and confuses me, but this caveman will show you all.

P.S. Fuck the registrar!

Ten minutes until my very first graduate class, and I only managed to find the classroom by coming into this second-floor computer lab and searching the U of L site. My very first class (Artificial Intelligence) is, as it turns out, in the basement.

Omens. Mmm.

Remember my credo about fucking the Registrar? No, I’m not at Centre anymore and no longer really feel the need to do such fucking, but I’ve been thinking lately about the history and progress of this journal. How will future generations of NFD readers know just who this fuck-target was?

Thus, to give you a frame of reference, I have procured a casual photograph of said fuckee (visible below). It’s like a party for my gall bladder! Yes, he’s in the front. Please try not to shriek.

Yesterday was my very last class at Centre, which isn’t nearly as impressive spelled out. It was also the first of two Short Story reunion concerts planned for the end of the year, and we sounded damn fine, and it was the first and last time I cheated the system here at school.

Centre students are required to attend twelve cultural events per year, as designated arbitrarily by the administration, in order to better ram the humanities down our throats. Even more than that idea, which I mildly dislike because I don’t like ramming, I can’t stand the way in which credits are assigned–there are one or two people collecting these colored cards outside the door when you leave, and if they happen to cut out early, you’re screwed out of your credit. Granted, there are around forty a year, but when the count starts getting close at the end of spring, it can be a dangerous thing. Not getting twelve credits means a pointless one-hour F credit on your transcript.

Tuesday was the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra concert, the last convo of the year, which I had to attend because the aforementioned stupid system kept me from getting credit for two other ones to which I’d already gone. The only problem was that they suddenly moved up the start time of the concert to right in the middle of the Jon and Brendan / Jon / Short Story show.

Cheating at convos is a time-honored practice among Centre students. Most convos are boring and sucky and packed with old Danville townies, and people have other things to do most nights. You’d think that such widespread corruption would invite a reassessment of the system, and possibly a correction (like, say, a freaking ID scanner), but instead it just means that it’s impossible to get credit for a convo without a card, even with multiple witnesses.

Like I said above, I’d never done it until yesterday, when things just went beyond my control. So at 7 I left the show, went and got a card, and left through a side door. We played the rest of the show, and I returned to Newlin and idly surfed the interweb from the design studio until I heard the applause go off. Then I went downstairs, handed in my card and went on my merry way.

I’m a cheater. Except not really, because I earned the credit already. What law does that fall under? Conservation of convocations?

Rhymes aside, I finished Blind Loop. I can’t play it all consecutively right now, because I can’t play piano, but if I can get it put into a MIDI program I’ll try and post a playback here. Thanks to everybody who said you liked it!