the reality tunnel

I thought about this a lot when I was in Germany this summer, seeing all the monuments to the atrocities of the Nazis, and even reading the last Harry Potter book – there is an identifiable pattern to despotism. Naomi wolf says this of her recent book that talks about the rise of despotism in [...]

Online classes were just emerging as I left college.  There was a piece on Morning Edition this morning about the technology and trends in general and an instance of them at on University of Illinois branch.  I think this technology is inevitable and it does have some egalitarian advantages, as the president of the University [...]

I’ve been using the unix screen command a lot lately, and enough to want to learn more. I used to just scroll through windows with CTRL-a n and CTRL-a p, but now I have a ton of windows in my screen session, so I want to be able to navigate easier. List to windows: CTRL-a [...]

I’ve had this on an ATM receipt floating around my notebook since this summer.  Chiara and I ate a very good meal at a restaurant in Prague that specialized in vegetarian/organic/local foods: Albio Truhlarska 20 Praha 1 (accessible via the namesti republiki stop on line b)

These are songs that we came up with at our last practice. New Disaster Song 1 (2007-11-18) New Disaster Song 2 (2007-11-18)

Last night, I watched a movie called Saving Face. It was your traditional rom-com in the sense that it had both an interrupted wedding and an airport scene. However, the characters were Chinese-American and the primary love stories were between two young women and an older woman and a younger man. Link I heard a [...]

Monday through Thursday: Noon – 2:30 p.m. Friday: Noon – 1:30 p.m. and 7 – 9 p.m. Saturday: 12:30 – 2 p.m.; 7 – 9 p.m. (Lunar Skating) and 9:15 – 11 p.m. (Night Owl Skating) Sunday: 3 – 5 p.m. Link

I’m always interested in people doing big, helpful, transcendent things with whatever resources that they have.  I’m also interested in people’s activism or humanitarian work following from the things that are relevant in their life.  I heard a story this morning about one man’s work: Bay Area Gardeners Foundation founder Catalino Tapia trims a tree [...]

This is a comment to news article about efforts to confront the racist history and reputation of a town that is halfway between Bloomington and Indianapolis.  I liked that this commenter noted that a homogeneous community is fundamental to racist beliefs and that racism exists outside of the lower-class white communities (another commentor replied to [...]

Helping out with the AMC website, I threw together a quick Drupal 4.7 module (haven’t tested it on newer version of Drupal yet) to export user profile data generated by the profile module to a CSV file suitable for import into a spreadsheet program. UPDATE: After searching the Drupal website, I realized that someone had [...]