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May 28, 2005
more recipes
I've added my flour tortilla, pie crusts, and coconut soup recpipes to Recipes page, in addition to pizza, veggie chili, salsa, and Mango Selassie I's.
Posted by griffjon at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 27, 2005
random thoughts
I miss the smell of mimeograph machines.
Posted by griffjon at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2005
Amnesty International
Governments around the world betrayed their commitment to human rights in 2004, Amnesty International says.In a 300-page annual report, the group accused the US government of damaging human rights with its attitude to torture and treatment of detainees.
This granted "a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity", the human rights advocates said.
The report also criticised the world as a whole for failing to act over crises, notably in Sudan's Darfur region.
Afghanistan was slipping into a "downward spiral of lawlessness and instability", it added.
--BBC
Posted by griffjon at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2005
post conference
The conference went great. Despite some last-minute gotchas, which we handled without even letting anyone know what had happened! I think all my Ja conference running has jaded me to the chaos of day-of problems, but also taught me the value of back-up sysytems -- every laptop we had there had the presentations queued up, plus 3 burnt CDs of the presentations, we had a backup network hub, power cabling, and a printer. uUnofrtunately, the printer wouldn't work, but we managed.
I worked 28 hours over the past 2 days. I was up at 1am Monday night burning CDs and transferring presentations. Yay, that was fun. Especially when I work up at 5:30 the next morning to get to the conference center and set up...
anyhow. It all went well. Some crazy cool technology presentations, and a good reception afterwards. I ran into a former Barrone dorm-mate who's currently a co-inventor on one of the coolest developments in neural networking and a game that displays it: http://dev.ic2.org/nero_public/index.php?page=description
It's basically applying evolutionary design to neural nets, in real time, to the point that a computer really learns and can come up with novel approaches. It's actually almost scary, some of the demonstrations of its capabilities thus far.
I slept in a bit this morning, but am still a bit zombie-fied by the whole debacle. Luckily it's memorial day weekend coming up, which I plan to use to chill the F out. right now it's looking like rain, but rain prediction in Austin is not a reliable science. I'm not sure I care, one way or the other, as I mainly just need catch-up time anyhow.
Posted by griffjon at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2005
My secret reason for my wanderlust
This article by the Washington Post that Dad forwarded me is a perfect description of why I want to find a career that gets me out of this country on occasion, an gives me contacts globally. Beyond the attraction of travel and development work, it's a nice back-door when US turns into Argentina II:
The timing could not have been more apt. On the eve of a titanic partisan clash in the Senate, eggheads of the left and right got together yesterday to warn both parties that they are ignoring the country's most pressing problem: that the United States is turning into Argentina....
With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina's economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago.
"The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt," Walker said. "The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina."
"All true," Sawhill, a budget official in the Clinton administration, concurred.
"To do nothing," Butler added, "would lead to deficits of the scale we've never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We've seen them in Argentina. That's a chilling thought, but it would mean that."
...
The unity of the bespectacled presenters was impressive -- and it made their conclusion all the more depressing. As Ron Haskins, a former Bush White House official and current Brookings scholar, said when introducing the thinkers: "If Heritage and Brookings agree on something, there must be something to it."...
And where is that? "No republic in the history of the world lasted more than 300 years," Walker said. "Eventually, the crunch comes."
Posted by griffjon at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
Fedex, and do you have an FBI file?
The ACLU has a cute quiz on things that are likely to get you into an FBI file somewhere. Among them is this gem;
Have you ever sent a package using FedEx?
You might think your privacy is ensured, but you should know that FedEx maintains its own deputized police force and is part of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. We don't yet know what kind of information FedEx is sharing with the FBI and other law enforcement officials, but given what we know about JTTF activity, we thought you'd want to know about the relationship.
FedEx has a deputized security force?? How can I get one? Can any corporation get their internal security deputized? Just what we need -- Wally World rent-a-cops with actual authority...
Maybe you should take the quiz yourself?
Posted by griffjon at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)
Work: Technology conference
Stephen Baker (BusinessWeek writer) is the keynote speaker for our UT technology conference, and is asking for public input on his keynote (which is an amusing method).
He says:
Here's the key point:
Still, the winners in the coming decade will have to break through traditional boundaries. Whether it's nanomaterials or biotech, the innovations increasingly come from the mingling of disciplines and cultures. The challenge is to reorganize our institutions—from banks and universities to government—to promote the wondrous hybrids that will define 21st-century technology.Yes, I had qualms about using the word "wondrous." But click on the Texas site to read some of the things the researchers are working on. I think it's the first time I've ever used the word wondrous in my life. But it fits.
Anyhow, this is my life right now. Back to print deadlines!
Posted by griffjon at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2005
Goals and Plans and Hopes and Dreams
My indecision and lack of direction is beginning to have negative effects on not just me, but people I care deeply about, so it's time to start at least putting some thoughts down on "paper" on what I think my life should be like, what I'm imagining it to be, and so on, if for nothing else to have a rough sketch to base off of.
Grad School -- GWU, 2 years in DC, getting a masters in public policy in science and technology. Hope to focus my classwork in international relations, economics (gag), development, and applying IT to culture/development/etc. (prolly a class or two at GTown for that last part).
The next step is to find a job. My ideal job is something that lets me help implement IT in development projects in a sane and appropriate fashion. Admittedly, most IT projects in development are insane inherently, and the money is potentially more valuable building ventilated pit latrines (join the Peace Corps and learn about the wonders of ventilated pit latrines, boys and girls!), but nevertheless, the money is sent towards IT projects, and IT, like cell phones, can enable leapfrogging if implemented well, so...
I haven't gotten my wanderlust out of my system, I think this is central to a lot of things. I'm still... restless. Or perhaps just afraid of commitments, and masking it with wanderlust? I mean, I really dislike contracts that extend outside of the months range. I can't even decide on a fucking cell phone plan! Anyhow, unless this changes, I'd like a job that enables it; so working in-country on these IT projects would be nice. I don't really want to return to the English-speaking Caribbean again; I would like a Spanish-speaking Central or South-American post, or perhaps Eastern Europe (mainly so I could explore Europe at a comfortable pace).
Not sure how long I want this phase to last, or how long I'd want any segment of this phase to last. One to two years per country/post? Five years? Ten years? All of this is uncertain, and, frankly, I don't know the job market for this kind of position. Will it be USAID contracting? UN contracting? Hopping from one agency to another? I hope to have a feeling for it through networking during grad school.
Also, realistically speaking, do I want to be single while doing that? No. I'm getting fucking tired of goodbyes already. So that means either I need to get a job where I'm not away for more than a month or so, which isn't the same (and is more expensive to the various agencies), or find someone who'd want to join me hopping around.
Eventually I guess the plan ends up back here in the States working at a non-profit or international development consultancy or somesuch after I get tired of hopping around so much. This is the really-fuzzy long term planning -- there are many different paths this could go down, I wouldn't mind ending up writing articles/books, or teaching, or some combination of all of these things.
It seems like almost everyone else has set end goals, or some subset at least, covered in their lives. Like, many of my friends fully intend to live in Austin for the rest of their lives, or with a specific person, or doing a certain style of job (geekery, mostly, among my friends). I guess I have a general area of job worked out, actually, so I'm better than I was pre-Peace Corps at least, so perhaps it's not as bad as I often paint it in my head.
So that's the professional plan. I guess I need to spend time pondering the personal plan too. Like I say, I'm getting tired of goodbyes. As I learn (by painful trial-and-error) more about how to make relationships work, I get better at them, and realizing the value in them -- which just makes the goodbyes get worse and worse. So, I'd like to stop that, and I don't think becoming a hermit is the path for me. At the same time, I have a few things working against me in this arena. First, naturally, the aforementioned fear of commitment -- nothing particularly exciting there, just a dragon to be slain from the inside one day. I also am having a very hard time dealing with the possiblities afforded by being single. To mix metaphors horrifically, I feel like a bull in a candy shop (a kid in a china shop, incidentally, doesn't seem to really change the meaning of that saying). There are so many possibilities, but it seems that I can't not do damage in the process of exploring them, even with lots of honesty. I guess I'm making up for all the fun and painful stupidity I failed to have earlier in life? The fun part is great, the pain and stupidity are irresponsible.
I guess the end result of that rambling is that I don't have a personal plan in as good a shape as my professional plan, and since my professional plan is really just a vague outline anyhow, what does that say about the personal plan? I'd say more thought it necessary, but I'm not sure if it's thinking that needs to happen, I've thought a lot with very little progress. It definitely needs further refinement before it gets called a "plan"...
Posted by griffjon at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2005
Wiki?
So, we have wiki software on the server now. My question is, if GriffJon.com had a wiki, what would it have?
Similarly, if I get Moodle loaded... any requests for "classes" ? I'm thinking of formalizing the tutorials about moving to Mozilla/Firefox and configuring it with extensions, playing with hosts files for fun and profit, general computer maintenance that I went over so, so many times in Peace Corps...
Posted by griffjon at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
FOOOOOOD
So, I'm finally putting some recipes up, see my Recipes for fun gastrointestinal adventures! Right now it's just my Mom's pizza recipe (slightly modified) and a guess at my salsa recipe (it's a very, er, fluid process). I'll keep adding more as I find time, make requests!
Posted by griffjon at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
Got Ike?
Daily KOS links to a quote turned up by sirota;
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54
Posted by griffjon at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)
Abuse
Nour Miyati had to have several fingers amputated.She said the Saudi couple who employed her had bound her hand and foot and left her on a bathroom floor for a month without food.
She also said the wife had accused her of dressing immodestly around the house and had beaten her with a shoe knocking out several teeth.
Incredulity
But after a newspaper showed the maid black and blue, with bandaged hands, the authorities launched an investigation.
That has now concluded the gangrene came from an existing but unspecified disease but other injuries were caused by cleaning fluids used in the maid's work and that the bruising was self-inflicted or caused by a falling wardrobe.
Nour Miyati has now been charged with making false allegations.
Some Saudis are incredulous at all this.
--BBC
No doubt. A falling wardrobe? Honestly. She prolly fell down the stairs.
Sigh.
Posted by griffjon at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2005
First we got the bomb....
N Korea may have up to 6 nukes
Greaaaaaat....
Posted by griffjon at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)
Geek amusement
http://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54&swfSize=1
Posted by griffjon at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2005
adblock filters updated
My AdBlock Filters are updated! Even better ad blocking power if you use FireFox with the adblock extension.
Posted by griffjon at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)
Just cool
We need more art visible from space:
Posted by griffjon at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)
May 07, 2005
Papers, Please
What's all the fuss with the Real ID Act about? President Bush is expected to sign an $82 billion military spending bill soon that will, in part, create electronically readable, federally approved ID cards for Americans. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the package--which includes the Real ID Act--on Thursday.What does that mean for me?
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.
--News.com
Just great.
Posted by griffjon at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2005
Sick to Super
So, Wed-Fri I was sick as a dog. I felt it coming tuesday night and stocked up on OJ and did laundry, and then barely left my house for the next 3 days. Friday morning I finally went to a doctor after it hadn't gotten any better (oh, and let me tell ya, RPCV insurance is about as useful as a rubber fork.
But I got some antibiotics and such, and possibly it was just a virus that ran it's course, 'cuz I woke up totally, 100% back saturday morning.
Which is good... I'd promised to help a friend move, and Cory
was coming down to hang with the Austin RPCV gang. I moved until ~1p or so, then hit Eeyore's to find the other RPCVs who were hangin' there (evidentially LOTS of people were there -- but I only saw Robyn (easily found by following juggling objects).
We hung out and wandered around a bit; then went to meet Cory
and returned. We got split up, Cory and I ended up bouncing around in a drum circle for a while, and then we went down to the new Opal's where another Jamaica RPCV is working for dinnerish stuff and drinks, and then a bit of 6th streeting, but a lot of us were dead tired by then, and I didn't want to over-exert my first day or recovery (hah, too late!)
Sunday we lounged around, walked around UT for a bit, then in the afternoon went kayaking on Town Lake and then went to HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy at Alamo South (and got free Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters!). I love Alamo -- the final answer to what you'd do if you had a movie theater at your disposal.
Wow, a great weekend, amazing after a sucky week of sickness.
And Monday, I find that K's looking into tix to visit during her summer "break" between sessions! Yay good newses!
Posted by griffjon at 10:53 PM | Comments (1)