GriffJon.com Blog: life

January 19, 2009

Inauguration Concert Photos

A and I went to the concert on Sunday. There were a few people there. I guess if you get U2, Bruce, Steview Wonder, Beyonce, Usher, and more - as well as the Bidens and Obamas, people will show up?

More...

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January 17, 2009

Inauguration Insanities

So, I realized in talking to on of my old Austin friends that DC is really it's own unique snowflake right now. Let me share the insanity which is the Inauguration.

We're closing all bridges from VA into DC. Take that for not funding the Metro system more, VA! If VA residents want to share the celebration, they get to drive around through Maryland or *gasp* take public transit (Virginians are known for driving - a lot). Also, for any tricksy outdoorsy-type Virginians, the Coast Guard is dispatching over 40 boats to patrol the potomac against kayakers. Really.

We're shutting down huge portions of downtown to secured-access, no cars, etc. It will be a great, if cold, day for pedestrians and bikers - the local bike advocacy group secured a deal with the City to offer a free Bike Valet program for bike riders. The street in front of our house is a designated pedestrian pathway, and they're going to tow all the parked cars from it on Monday night.

My work building is within a "lock-down" area, so I'll have to have my secure-entry card, photo-ID, and be on a pre-approved list if I want to get inside on Tuesday.

Which is fine, because Tuesday is a DC-only federal holiday. Everything is shutting down.

Except for the Metro, which is operating very extended hours (opening at 4am on Tuesday!) and ... bars, which got an emergency ordinance passed to allow them to stay open and serving booze until 5am all weekend. So - monday night, party until 5, then take the metro to stand in line for the inauguration security checkpoint drunk! (note: not my current plan)

They're setting up ~6 jumbotrons along the National Mall between the museums and the Washington Monument to rebroadcast the event.

I mean, all of that is crazy enough, right? It goes deeper. All the craft vendors at Eastern Market are selling Obamabelia, there's a store downtown that /only/ sells Obamabelia, and each and every random street-vendor, who usually makes their money from emergency umbrellas, ties, and hats, is selling obama hats (with blinged-out glittery Obama faces, etc.).

We were doing some emergency stock-up shopping at the local Safeway last night. They had photo-on-icing obama cookies (we bought some), cakes, and patriotic-themed cupcakes, and were blasting orchestral versions of classic American jingoistic songs - you've never shopped until you're selecting avocados to the tune of "Johnny Comes Marching Home" by a full orchestra)

Everyone's trying to cash in - people are trying to rent their homes out for extravagant amounts on Craigslist (http://dcist.com/2009/01/has_the_inauguration_rental_bubble.php), and despite the posted "prostitution free zone" (http://dcist.com/2009/01/dc_tries_to_ban_prostitution_for_in.php), there's also a hot trade of dates-for-ball-tickets (http://lostintransition.nationaljournal.com/2009/01/inaugural-ballers.php).

Half of DC is battening down the hatches and not even planning to venture out, the other half is getting ready for a 4-day-long bacchanalia.

Good times.

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December 27, 2008

We fish you a merry xmas and a happy new year

This fish pillows cannot really be explained - only experienced. And let me tell you, carrying the newest purchase home on the DC Metro at rush hour was marvelous.

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August 20, 2008

Round up of updates

I realize that while I comment often here, I don't post much. So here's a wrap-up post on my life.

Work continues. Less horrible than a few months ago, but still I have too many tasks, too many interrupts, too little funding, and not enough pay or belief to work unpaid overtime to get it all done in a timely fashion. I'm still pursuing leads for a good and engaging ICT4D / social media 4 dev or citizen journalism via SMS/civic engagement type position with some field time, but based in DC. I've spent the last 5 months in a long distance relationship (after swearing I'd never do one of those again!) and I'm done with LDRs (again) (this one ends (happily) next month, see below). I've mostly made peace with DC. There's a hidden but interesting group of folks here. It's a stuffy, stodgy town (especially considering its voting record), but for the time being at least, it's my home.

Speaking of, I'm moving in with A (big step) in a real, honest-to-god rental rowhouse in a month. It's in the Capitol Hill area, essentially across the street from Eastern Market, which houses a great selection of regional produce and meat, and has a decent farmer's market combined with a craft/flea market on the weekends. We have a guest bedroom, so the open invite to friends stands. It has less crazy outdoor space than the Nut House, but it's also well maintained, and not shared with 6 others, not counting raccoons. I'll still be able to garden a bit.

Gardening is going well. The peppers are coming in, and the "random packet of peppers" has turned out to produce 1 anaheim, 1 poblano, 4 jalapenos and 5 banana pepper plants. I'd prefer more of the first few and no banana peppers, but them's the breaks. I planted 2 habanero pepper plants separately. The sunchokes are taller than I am, and it's looking like I'll have to come back to visit the house in the fall to actually harvest them. The tomatoes are peaking currently, which is great. I've been eating at least 2 huge tomatoes every day :)

The summer homebrews turned out decent; a solid lager and an experimental whitbier with lemon zest. Ironically, now that the two perfect-for-hot-august-days beers are ready, August is ending up with a series of downright pleasant days.

I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. If you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it. I considered myself decently informed on the importance of local sustainable food, but I still learn one amazing thing per chapter, and it's just a heartwarming story that makes me want to go farm.

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August 05, 2008

A wedding in Crested Butte

While all the cool kids were offline at ASA this weekend, I was out seeing probably my oldest friend get hitched (we were first introduced at the tender youth age of 6 mos). He had a "destination" wedding in Crested Butte, Colorado (near Aspen) (both their families are from Texas, and they're now living in Alaska, so it seemed a fair location for all).

The wedding was great, and CB, despite it's one-trick pony of being a ski destination, was still a beautiful location.

Photos and HDRs after the jump

A fantastic photo of Mom and Dad:



An HDR of the vallery floor:

Camfields build Cairns

Just some mountain scenery

Mountains:

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January 02, 2008

Resolve 2008

Yeah yeah. I've had at best mixed results with NYE resolutions, but I like to keep posting them to keep me in check.

-Expand my DC friend set
-Network more with local DC ICT/development types
-Write more blog entries at my professional blog
-Write at least one entry a month at OLPCNews and get the OLPCLearningClub wiki off the ground
-Fish my resume around and hopefully find an international development centric position (that pays)
-Move further and further away from Microsoft; set up virtualization or good emulation for when I need XP-only programs, find viable alternatives to as much as possible
-Continue going to the gym regularly, as I get closer to my target weight shift more and more to strength and endurance training
-Get back into dancing (so rusty!) and even take some classes

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June 04, 2007

Serious Research

Finally, a
a game theoretic analysis of leaving the toilet seat down:

In this paper, we internalize the cost of yelling and model the conflict as a non-cooperative game between two species, males and females.We find that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is inefficient. However, to our dismay, we also find that the social norm of always leaving the toilet seat down after use is not only a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies but is also trembling-hand perfect. So, we can complain all we like, but this norm is not likely to go away.

All hope is not lost though. An important issue regarding social norms is whether they are created to increase welfare. Are they society’s response to market failures? One such norm is tipping for service quality. Azar (2003) has shown that the norm of tipping increases social welfare. In this paper, we show conclusively that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down after use decreases welfare and by doing that we hope to convince the reader that social norms are not always welfare enhancing. Hence, there is a case for scientifically examining social norms and educating the masses about the fallacy of following social norms blindly.

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May 31, 2007

Tastes

Watching this video, which morphs between 500 years of female portraits (go, watch it now) reminded me of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty ad, revealing the work going in to presenting a fashion model - including photoshopping at the end.

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May 29, 2007

Weekend

I didn't actually do that much, but I got a lot done. If that makes sense. I cleaned out a good chunk of our basement, in hopes that we can continue straightening it up and make a living space out of it (since it stays cool during the summer!)

A and I had bought some yummy apple wine[1] from Chateau O'Brien, and wanted to drink it before she disappears for the summer to China, so we planned an entire meal around it - Salmon with sliced apples marinated in an OJ/apple juice/mint mixture with nuts and brown sugar sprinkled on top, apple and fig chutney, basmati rice and mushrooms saute'ed in white wine. It was an apple-y but awesome meal.

[1] Yeah, yeah. I don't like "dessert wines" either - but this stuff is good.

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January 24, 2007

xkcd on wikipedia

This is only a problem if you can't justify it as "research:"

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January 21, 2007

NYC? Get a bus.

So, I finally (with A's prodding) got to NYC. Some of her MIT friends were gathering for the weekend, and I have a brother and many Plan II folk there as well who I've been promising to meet for a while now. We took a bus up (http://www.washny.com/ - $35 r/t!) and dropped our bags off at a friend of A's office, and walked down to Battery Park from Times Square, stopping to admire the Empire State Building, a few street markets, parks, the Statue of Liberty (from afar) and "ground zero."

We met up with the rest of A's friends and hiked it out to Greenwich village to go to Lederhosen, a German beer garden with insanely excellent waitstaff. After tiring outselves out there, we retired to Brooklyn to pass out.

Saturday, we woke up to a light blanket of snow (the first for the season up in these parts!) and walked down to where A's mother and grandparents grew up in a more southerly part of Brooklyn, and then had dim sum for lunch, meeting up with one of my closest P2 buds, C., and wandered Chinatown a bit more, then headed to the Met and Café Sabarsky for coffee. We taxi'd across the park (it was COOOOLD by then!) to meet up with my brother Ev at Calle Ocho, a very hip Cuban place (yum!). We met back up with C. at a housewarming party thrown by yet another P2 friend in NYC, where a few other P2ers were in attendance. We eventually wandered back to Brooklyn and failed to go out with A's friends to Brooklyn bars as we had to get up early Sunday to make the best bus back.

NYC is... a bit weird. Too much city, but some interesting adaptations by its residents to living with so many people.

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January 17, 2007

Resignation

Resignation

So, I gave notice at $dcjob[0] today, as an old Peace Corps buddy encouraged me to apply for his previous position, where I will start next month.

It was hard, as my co-workers are awesome folk, and I'm leaving them at a critical time before two big events (to be fair, I can't think of any point in the last year or so where it wouldn't have been a "critical point" -- one of the reasons I was encouraged to follow this other opportunity. In the informal exit interview, the ED even mentioned that she'd noticed my lack of engagement of recent, due in large part to the high stress levels at work.

I do think that long-term it will be bitter but good medicine for the organization. It is at a point now that a full-time IT person, or the effective equivalent, is sorely needed; I've been running at full capacity for months now just to keep things at a bare minimum of operations. I try to be rather humble, but with this style of IT work, I am highly skilled -- if I can just barely keep things going at part-time, it's a sign that it's easily a full time position.

I was reminded of my favorite positive psychologist's introduction (to me) of the concept of "flow" where you are right on the threshold between overwhelming and (too hard and not enough time) and boring (too much time and too easy). My old position moved into the overwhelming area and has been there for far too long, and I haven't enjoyed that perfect balance of challenge and personal growth to reach that challenge due to the time constraints, and it is that more than anything else that's worn on me. I hope that my next job will provide more opportunities for that. At the very least, it provides a substantially better compensation package and almost 2/3 less of a commute.

I feel bad leaving, but if it causes them to change to a full time position, then it will be for the best.

So, let's do a quick catch-up from a more positive light on life - I'm starting my last semester in grad school, taking a full load of courses, one at Georgetown which promises to be more work than I'd like, and taught from a Bank-positive techno-positivist position (I love tech, but am a pragmatist and a cynic too - I want to see it work before I suggest someone go into debt for it). I'm also taking our capstone course, which is basically a team-project course where each group runs a class and we all have a big presentation at the end. The last is another IT policy course, focused a bit more on security and privacy issues. I still need to complete my independent study from last semester, which is mostly justa case of sitting down to do it, it's pretty close.

I haven't had time (really?) to write much for OLPCNews of recent, though I did put up another post on cost estimates, this time referencing the incredibly detailed spreadsheet than an OLPC supporter in Brazil (who I got to talk to through the power of Google Spreadsheets + Chat (with some help from Google Translate too). I hope to get back to some more posts there, especially if I can tie them in to my Tech+Dev course.

Last weekend my girlfriend took me to this fantastic bed and breakfast in West Virginia for my (early) birthday present. WV is... well, let's say it reminded me of the more underdeveloped parts of East Texas, but the owners are South Africans who are huge conservationists and have been buying up as much land as they can to make a black bear reserve with conjoined to their B+B land. We saw a huge herd of deer (~20) and 2 black bears, one of which was just hanging out less than 10 feet away.

This coming weekend I hope to get away to NYC, as it's my last "open" weekend before school really gets nasty, and then the weekend after that will be my huge bday party. If you're interested in coming and for whatever reason weren't on my evite list (most likely, you're not in DC), post here and I'll add you.

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January 01, 2007

That was the 2007 it was

2006 had its ups and downs. 2007 was overall a decent year.

January finally got me up to NYC to visit some good college friends, some of A's college friends, and my eldest brother. It was fun, and I intend to head back there on occasion. January also found me switching jobs. I like my new job, and it's a great change in pace and stress from my previous job. It's not my career yet, but it's a good job to pay loans back with and look for a career-track job. I also turned 30.

In February I discovered the secret to Ararat's Drinker's Choice dip. Between that, school, and the new job, it was otherwise a pretty uneventful month, but I did buy a new-to-me laptop for Linux to replace my dot-com-vintage one that was falling apart quickly. I'm posting with it now with lots of eye-candy.

In March pretty much everything at the new job melted down, which sucked. Add on to that some friction with our tech support company and lots of workywork for school and it was a poor month overall.

April had me presenting (badly) at the STGlobal conference at the AAAS and going into high gear finishing up papers and independent study projects.

May got me all gradumicated from GWU. My parents came and we protested the white house and went wine tasting, so that was good.

June transitioned me into fulltime at the new job, and Audrey headed off for Japan and China for the summer. I joined a gym and enjoyed the many fruits of my labor on my summer garden, getting more tomatoes than I could have possibly hoped for, plus squash, potatoes, habaneros, cucumber, and spices. I'm totally doubling that garden this year. July was more of the same: gym, garden, cook, work, complain about our government, sleep, repeat.

August found me in a shouting match with my student loan company and their poor at best business practices. A got back from China (finally!!!)

September took A and I to India (she had a conference, I had vacation time to burn). India's a fascinating country, but man, not a relaxing place to travel. In case you missed my pimping of all the photos we took, they're still all at Flickr.

October saw another throw-down party from the NutHouse which was Life Aquatic themed and so badass we made a video of it.

In November I blacked out from hot sauce and also went to Nicaragua for Chana's wedding, and that's pretty much that. We had a tiny thanksgiving here in DC too.

December took me to San Diego for our annual conference, where I had a good presentation on web 2.0 and open source, which spurred a flurry of posts on another blog to create a basic how-to-web-2.0 guide for non-profits. A and I went to Angelo for xmas, and had a nice relaxing time there.

Overall, a LOT of traveling, which began to wear thin at the end there. I'm totally out of vacation days currently, tho, so I'll prolly stick around for a bit. It was a decent year, and I'm glad to be done with school and generally enjoying life.

Posted by griffjon at 10:06 AM | TrackBack

December 25, 2006

Resolution tracking

Last year:

--Grad School AND THE FUTURE: Over the course of the next year, I need to narrow down my focus and start sniffing out realistic and enjoyable job opportunities.

--Activism: Also, focus down on a few topics/causes for real activism. Give the ACLU and EFF some money, and make this more of a priority than it has been. Of course, continue occasional blog/rants filtering through BBC, DailyKOS and similar.

--DC: If I stick with international dev, DC will probably be a decently important city in my life, so I need to make peace with it and find more things about it that I really and truly like.

--Travel: I also want to get out of the country again, I've been gettin itchy. There are still-nebulous plans to head down to Nica this summer, and I need to work with my job and find a travel grant or two to get that to work out.

--Keep in better contact: a LOT of people have kinda fallen off my radar. Basically everyone not on LJ or IM... I need to be a bit better about staying in touch.

--Fitness: The last month of finals and projects and cold and thanksgiving really didn't do much good for me. I've been good about staying active in DC and walking a lot, but I need to work on eating less and maybe getting some non-walking exercise in.

Grad School and FUTURE - some limited progress on future. Still mostly a process of elimination, a few leads. I've made some peace with DC - living in Granola Park has helped, and finding a few gems of DC life on my own have also helped. I still haven't made it to any good protests, but gave the EFF some cash and tried to give the ACLU some, too, but their credit card system was b0rken, and I never got around to it.

As for travel, I made it out to Cali in May for a wedding and Nica in August for 2 great weeks of hard work and great exploration. That scratched the travel itch enough for... well, not very long, really.

I kept in some decent contact. but that faded out as I got buried in books during the semester(s). Caught up with lots of Peace Corps folk at the May wedding.

Fitness came and went. I used the weight bench we had in my old place on occasion, but didn't really do great. I recovered from last T'giving/xmas, but then the spring semester really dragged on me. Summer was good and this fall I've been reasonably active, too. Having more control over my kitchen has led to better eating habits and grocery lists, and my new neighborhood is much more walkable, all of which help.

So all in all I did OK on last year. Partially because I set reasonable goals :) All the more reason to keep that up. Y2k7 resolutions coming soon!

Posted by griffjon at 10:22 PM | TrackBack

November 25, 2006

Thanksgiven

I feel that my house's Orhpan's Thanksgiving went excellently. Three days effectively lost to prep, eating, and unwinding; but we sat down 16 people at our table and sent everyone home with leftovers. We demolished 18 lbs of turkey and 16 of ham, two types of dressing/stuffing, corn casserole, corn, broccoli, salad, two types of rolls, cranberry sauce, cranberry salad, sliced canned cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, two types of gravy, some rice casserole, and of course a green been casserole.

Oh, right, and 8 pies. We had a few latecomers so fed ~20-22 people in total.

The really sad part is that we ran out of turkey by the end, except for some gristly dark meat... so went out Friday and bought another turkey to roast to go with the remaining side dishes. :D

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November 07, 2006

DC Taxi Zones

One of the most confusing parts of DC is dealing with the Taxi Zone system; as the one map that seems to be available is grainy and poorly made, only showing the "zone boundaries" and not landmarks, non-boundary streets, or things like that. It feels like an attempt to maintain an information advantage over the consumers (especially the tourists) and extract that extra fare from dropping you off on the side of the street that's the next zone out and sillyness like that.

If you know how to work and abuse the zone system, walking that extra 1/2-block on either side of your journey can save you a sawbuck. To help with this, I've plonked the grainy, fuzzy map of the DC Taxi Zones on top of Google Earth, so you can actually see where things are.

DCTaxiZones.kmz (1.6MB, requires Google Earth)

Posted by griffjon at 10:57 AM | TrackBack

October 23, 2006

Small Pleasures

On Mondays, I work until 5 and then commute up to GWU for class from 7-9, then walk and rail home and get there around 10pm. I make up for this long stretch of no food by going to a little Cuban restaurant next door to my work and getting (among other things) deep-fried plantains to dip in their mysterious mayonaise-mustardish sauce. YUM

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October 22, 2006

Haloween Party

The Halloween party was a huge success. I DJ'ed using my linux box (but without relying on a wirelessly-mounted SMB share this time, which, though awesome, doesn't work if there's any other network traffic in my situation). I've created a set of perl programs that make it easy to export playlists of songs into folders with playlists and the songs themselves, and a way to change a playlist from Windows to Unix directory formats, and even remap from windows' C:\... to my mountpoint for that. woot.

Huh. I seem to remember having to change the nixification script last night, while drunk. It worked, but now I can't even remember the problem I was solving, much less what I did. I should go back and look at that code before the next time it gets used, perchance. Drunk coding != idea.good;

There are a few photos up on flickr, hopefully more will show up from the roomies.

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August 23, 2006

More Nica Photos

More photos are up from Nicaragua at flickr

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August 21, 2006

Campo

Let me break into this sum-up of my campo trip by saying that Jamaican transit, for all its foibles, may in fact be better than the cross-country chicken-buses of Nicaragua. Also, for all the bad press this old form of development project gets, hey, someone build some paved roads down here, OK? Aside from the Panamerican highway and parts of Managua, it's all Somozo-bricked roads [1] at best, dirt in general. That being said, fun bus travel games to play include "Which Box Has the Chickens?" and "How Many People Can Really Fit?"

Our first stop was...well, actually at the Managua northbound bus station. We missed the last bus to Esteli, so instead spent the night at a ... well, crappy hotel. Such is life. We got up at the ass-crack of dawn and caught an early bus on to Esteli, where the museum we were trying to go to (of martyrs of the war, put together by their mothers) was closed. We ate breakfast in town and then an early light lunch at La Casita, which is an awesome organic garden place run by a former development worker who's now "living by example." It's a very tranquilo place, with double-ventilated composting pit latrines (that's in there for the water san volunteer(s) reading this).

So early afternoon, we caught a PACKED bus up to San Juan de Limay - it turns out it was the last bus of the day, and students from the region take it home after their saturday classes. I stood for most of the way up to Limay, in an old schoolbus packed 3 adults to a seat on both sides and two thick down the center aisle.

San Juan de Limay

In San Juan de Limay, a town that Chanita assured me is a metropolis, the primary mode of intra-city transit is by foot, with horses being a close second. It's a super tranquilo town, with a few tiny general stores, a bar/restaurant, and a hospedaje(guest house)/bar/restaurant - Mi Rancho - where we stayed. and, uh, that's it. no cybercafes, no nothin' else.

The owner of Mi Rancho was leaving early the next morning (it turns out, to go to Managua as a candidate for his area on the PLC / conservative party), so we had to get out of the hospedaje at an ass-early hour. So we dropped our packs off at the house of this cute abuelita we'd talked to the day before (who it turns out was our host's aunt -- small towns for ya). We were strolling around town, waiting for the (other) restaurant to open, and were invited to walk with Marta, who was going out to her parcel of land to check on the wells and for her children to swim/bathe in the river. We ended up spending most of the morning walking around with her, learning how her family made mud bricks to sell in town (manually), her husband is working in Barquismetro, Venezuela, and we got to see their garden where they grow most of the food they eat. We got back into town, had breakfast (and coffee finally!) and went to visit one of the EeA artisans, Ramon, who is a stonecarver. He works mostly in marmolina, but is moving to marmol (I think that's soapstone, and marble, respectively - I need to figure this out tho). He showed me how he carves the stone, and gifted me a new carving at the end of our visit. It's amazing to see how much he has been able to accomplish thanks to being able to sell his sculptures at a fair price. He's rebuilt his home (with brick instead of unfinished wooden planks), to begin with.

We then walked down to another nearby community, Rio Abajo, where there is a cooperative of potters who use local clay and seed dyes to color their pots. They have one spinning wheel (manual/kick wheel) and turn out some amazing pieces.

Somoto

That afternoon we took a bus back through to Esteli, then out to Somoto, a town further up in the mountains, and the capital of the poorest state in Nica (Nica is the 2nd poorest country in the Western hemisphere, behind Haiti). It's an... odd place. It reminded me of Merida slightly (tho much much smaller). There's a humongous presence of aid/development workers in the town, so the town has adapted to cater to their tastes. There are cyber cafes and fancy restaurants (and pizza even!) With any luck, they will be able to broaden their focus and become their own tourist destination (they're close to the Honduran border, and on the panam highway), so as to not become a ghosttown if the dev community moves on.

We hiked up to another artisan's house, Christian, who at somewhere around 19 is his family's prime breadwinner through his painting. He has never finished school not even taken an art class, but is an obviously skilled painter. Another example of the impressive power of sustained, well-developed fair trade / economic justice work - not only is he able to support his family, his sick brother, but he also rebuilt his house with stone bricks (and bought himself a bike). Just as a tip of the hat to the hardcoreness of his entire family, his father is a carpenter, and I saw him sketching out marks on a piece of wood to cut. His straightedge? The disassembled barrel of a rifle. Probably, his own rifle from the 80s. Swords to plowshares.

There's probably a whole lot more that I'm leaving out. I'll try to add some detailed mini-stories as they come back to me, and photos will be appearing on flickr soon.

[1] The Somozo family ran Nica as a dictatorship for over 40 years, and repaved most of the paved roads with bricks manufactured in their family's factories.

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August 17, 2006

fotos!

A few fotos from thus far:

http://flickr.com/photos/griffjon/tags/nicaragua/

Posted by griffjon at 11:40 PM | TrackBack

August 13, 2006

The Monkey Hut

Despite my GWU frustrations, I had a WONDERFUL and TRANQUILO weekend at Laguna de Apoyo between Granada and Masaya. It's an old mostly-dormant volcano with a lake in the crater (very minor thermal activity). The water is slightly salty, but super-clear and blue. I got to kayak, tube, swim, dive, hike, chat and relax all weekend. Chana has some photos on her flickr account here: http://flickr.com/photos/oklanica/sets/774400/ , I'll upload my own Monkey Hut/Apoyo photos when I return or take the time to download from my camera.

Even better is the fact that the resort is run on the honor system. There's a snack counter, a soft-drink fridge and a beer fridge. You take a beer, and make a note on your check. There are canoes/kayaks/tubes[1], you take them out on the water (free/included in being there for the day). There's a coffee maker and coffee, it's free, just make it. There's a full kitchen for general use, just clean up after yourself. They recommend a local grocery (pulperia) and local restaurants nearby, if you don't want to buy their snacks. Their beer, when you sum it up and pay your bill, turns out to be expensive -- it's almost a dollar US per beer. If I ever own a resort hotel, I will run it this way.
http://www.thebeardedmonkey.com/monkeyhut.htm

Next weekend we're going through here (http://flickr.com/photos/oklanica/sets/813101/) on our campo trip.

[1] Real inner tubes, with the tire-inflation knob sticking out!

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July 18, 2006

General updates

I'm really loving my new living situation -- despite it's many, many flaws, overall it gives me a lot more personal freedom (BTW - this is a general open invitation to crash at my place in DC now). And the porch! Woooooo porch! It's great to sit on it and watch the fireflies in the yard, or the occasional summer storm roll down.

Work has been really difficult the past few weeks. I'm caught between an impending workshop and the contractor putting the registration system together, and am reminded why I hate managing people, as they so rarely live up to my expectations, at least in business situations. In social situations, they generally surpass my wildest dreams and make me feel inadequate, but that's an entirely different story. But even on that thread, I've been doing better of recent.

Despite some rocky/stressy times at work and in life, I've been overall in a good mood. I watched The Day the Earth Stood Still at Screen on the Green with some other grad students last night (the origination of "klatu barata nictu"!!) and have somehow found myself busier than when I was in school. Generally, this is a good thing, tho.

I've read a collection of Mieville short stories (Looking for Jake), and Freakonomics. I'm currently reading The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' misadventures in the tropics, which, as points out, has perhaps the best 2nd edition forward ever:

"... many readers have asked if my statement in the original prologue that “my employer ... the World Bank ... encourages gadflies like me to exercise intellectual freedom” was really accurate. Well almost. It should be modified to “the World Bank ... encourages gadflies like me to find another job."

I was underimpressed by Freakonomics. Sure, some interesting points, but it read more like the string of smaller articles and publications it grew out of than any cohesive idea. To be fair, the authors stated that this was the case many times, but still. It left me unfulfilled.

Posted by griffjon at 10:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 06, 2006

Cautiously Optimistic

I hate to break the general pattern of malaise of my blog of recent, but I ... I might be kinda happy right now. I'm done with school until August, getting moved in to my new place, and ... dunno, just a bit more cheerful.

But in the tradition of personal blogs, let's over-analyze! whee!!!

*I enjoyed the summer course, but it's nice to not be constantly be nose-in-book or writing, or worrying about those things. I'm reading for pleasure. It's nice. Next semester should be OK, as one course is an independent study, so it'll be a bit more structured towards exactly what I want, and I'm slowly figuring that want part out.

*My new house is interesting. Lots to keep me busy with, and good roommates interested in a communal situation, where we do home-improvement projects together and such. It's a beautiful old (late 1800s) house, with some definite problems, but it has a great vibe.

*Takoma is a great neighborhood. People are out and about walking dogs and kids, all the homes are turn-of-the-century with big yards and trees and anti-war protest signs in the windows. There are restaurants and coffee shops and vintage clothing stores and a big farmers market on Sunday. There's a food co-op and a Safeway both within an easy walk. I'm <5 minutes from the metro, and there are bus lines straight to Adams-Morgan.

*E and JP came down for the weekend of the 4th. Tho I was a bit frazzed with the move and grad-crowd plans, I got to spend some quality times with them, which always has a centering effect, reminding me that balance is within reach!

Posted by griffjon at 09:58 PM | TrackBack

June 26, 2006

Rain, rain, come again

The first half of the story from last night (before wading through the 4' of water by the metro station), was that I'd gone down to the Kennedy Center for a free performance by and then documentary on The Refugee All-Stars. It was thundering and lightning downtown when I left, and I decided to walk... to Farragut North station (not really that far of a walk, outside of torrential downpour situations). It decided to pour like a goddamned mofo, but it was a perfect temperature, the rain was wonderful, and the lightning show was spectactular (for DC).

I was a bit of a spectacle on the metro. Everyone stared at me when I sloshed through the door. I informed them that it was still raining outside. I wonder if they noticed the folded-up umbrella sticking out of my pocket?

After getting to my home metro station, I found that I had to wade through hip-deep kinda-scary-looking, rushing, manhole-cover-loosing, muddy water to get home. It probably wasn't the smartest thing I've done this month, but I don't think it wins the dumbest-thing-I've-done-this-year award.

Regardless, my current moleskine notepad has finally had its baptism, but I fear my cell phone will never quite work right again. :|

(...It was worth it.)

(my pants from that night remain outside. This is, generally speaking, still one of the least interesting ways your pants can end up soaking wet and draped over the railing on one's front porch)

Posted by griffjon at 08:30 PM | TrackBack

June 15, 2006

It's worse than we thought

So, I've been using CVS for this summer class to keep all my reading, presentation slides from the prof, articles for my paper, and writings themselves, in sync across my home laptop, my travelling Linux laptop, and my thumbdrive (and my work computer at times, and a private directory on my website).

Though it comes with some annoyances when handling big annoying docs in directory structures and not plain text files, it's made my life a lot simpler (no more counting files in a directory, sorting by most-recently-modified, etc.)

So yeah, I'm working on my paper at the GTown building (the roof has a great view of the potomac, electrical outlets and open wireless!), and I just raised my arms and shouted towards the Potomac "I LOVE CVS!"

I especially love the automatic version numbers. I am on rev 1.2 of my paper. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.

I think this qualifies me for dorkiness, beyond geekiness.

Posted by griffjon at 04:52 PM | TrackBack

June 13, 2006

House Hunting

I looked at two places Sunday, one is in an excellent location near Eastern Market/Capitol Hill (10 minute walk from the Red line at Union Station, and the Orange and Blue lines at Eastern Market!), for cheap! It's a tiny room in a large rowhouse, with some good common areas, full of non-profit save-the-world types. They had a house outing to the Darfur rally, so I feel I'd fit in well there. And it's cheap. But tiny.

The other place is way out in Takoma Park, about 10-15 more minutes of metro riding, but closer to the metro station than my current place. This also means no walking home at all, and no cheap taxis home late, which kinda sucks. BUT, the HOUSE IS HUGE. It has a wrap-around porch over the front and side, enclosed in the back. It has a humongous basement (with a DJ booth installed) and a ginormous backyard. The inside is quirky and rough around the edges. It had its radiators ripped out and is now all central heat/AC (that's not happy). There are literally 5 bathrooms on the ground floor, 2 (1 private to a room) on the second, and sadly none on the 3rd floor where I'd most likely be (converted attic).

I'm waiting to hear back from the E.Mkt place first, as it's cheaper and more metro-convenient; but if it falls through, I'm jumping on the TkPk place.

House hunting is a really bizarre thing in DC, as there's such a constant flow of people coming, leaving and moving around based on work changes and DC in general. For the shared-house crowd, of course, it's generally self-selecting for non-profit types and grad students, so the open houses are almost always impromptu parties and networking events. At the E. Mkt place, one of the housemates is ivankara's girlfriend (I know him through the PCV IT crowd, her set up pcvs.org from Mauritania where he served) (and they evidentially met through house hunting themselves!), at a place a few weeks back I ran into a current roommate of a friend who'd changed jobs, and a girl who was thinking of volunteering in Jamaica with the Jam. Assoc for the Deaf, who I worked with a bit on IT.

Anyhow, I should be reading, outlining, doing laundry and beginning to box some stuff up, not blogging.

Posted by griffjon at 11:04 AM | TrackBack

April 03, 2006

Sportz

I think I care less about sports than pretty much everyone I know.

Why do I care whether Team A beats Team B, and their left-ball-hanging-lower-ratio is higher, but not when they play on tuesdays or after playing in cold climates? Honestly.

Posted by griffjon at 10:20 PM | TrackBack

April 02, 2006

To Have Done List

Things I did this weekend:
*Went salsa-dancing
*Went hiking
*Hosed down my overcoat
*Met up with ISTPers for dinner, Cherry Blossom Festival fireworks, and a party
*Troubleshot Mom's email problem over VNC
*Researched CAFTA/IPR issues for my trade paper
*Found some courses to take next Fall
*Shopped for and made a fancy chiles rellenos style dinner
*One blog entry for IT Policy

Things I didn't do this weekend:
*My reading for Wednesday
*My stats homework and reading for Tuesday
*More catch-up blog entries for IT Policy
*Research for my IT Policy paper
*Any actual writing on my trade paper

I'm severely lacking in motivation, plus, it's finally decent outside and my skin wants some sun and breeze and physical activity! This doesn't work so well with sitting in front of a computer or poring over policy documents.

Posted by griffjon at 10:55 PM | TrackBack

The Turducken of Chiles Rellenos

I'm trying an experiment -- jalapenos stuffed with pepperjack cheese, stuffed inside anaheims stuffed inside poblanos (with more cheese added at each step), baked with egg batter, casserolish style.

I've already decided that, while a nice alternative to getting my reading done, that was WAY TOO MUCH TIME spent peeling peppers (this recipe may be better performed in New Mexico, where you can outsource this kinda thing).

It's baking now, and I'm gonna get some reading done.
...

OK, they're alright. one too many peppers -- the jalapenos are still mostly raw while the poblano is crisping and the anaheim is soggy, and the casserole-batter attempt went poorly, but I still like the anaheim-and-cheese-inside-poblano effect, so it's worth a retry.

P.S The mofos are PICANTE

Posted by griffjon at 06:35 PM | TrackBack

March 16, 2006

Worst. Tech Support. Evar.

So, I wss trying to print out my 1040 from TurboTax to fill out my Fafsa more easily (it gives all these hints e.g. (line 37 on 1040...) ). Since I'd entered my DC filing information (before I'd figured out that I could file to get it all back as a nonresident), TurboTax wouldn't let me print my Federal filing without paying to print my DC filing. You'd think that'd be a simple thing to communicate and perhaps come to some sort of conclusion.

You'd be wrong:

Terence A: Hi, my name is Terence A. How may I help you? Terence A: Hello, how may I help you today? Jon: I am having problems printing/viewing my completed federal forms Jon: I also have entered a state form, but I don't currently want to print that Jon: TTonline is requiring me to print and pay for the state forms to print the federal form Terence A: Jon, we apologize for the inconvenience/delay that this had caused you. Let us see what we can do to help you out with this one today, okay? Jon: great Terence A: And just to confirm Jon, what version of Turbotax Online product are you using? Is it Turbotax 1040EZ, Deluxe, Premier, Ultimate or the Free File Alliance Program? Jon: FreeFile Terence A: Jon, did you get any error messages/error codes during the process? And if any, what was the exact error code/error messages that was generated so that I could take note of it? Jon: it doesn't seem to be an actual error, it just won't let me choose to only print/view my federal return Terence A: Jon, have you tried searching the Help options on the Support web site of TurboTax first for answers before contacting Technical Support? What steps did you take and what were the results?

Jon: Yes, they all instructed me to follow the path I had already taken to get to the print for my records menu, but nothing beyond that

(10 minutes go by. Did I break the chatbot and it had to go call for a real human?)

Jon: hello?
Terence A: Yes Jon, let me make sure I understand your concerns, you wanted to print and view your completed federal return and you can't. You also have entered information on your state but don't want to print that, is that correct?
Jon: Yes
Terence A: Jon, did you save first your federal return as a PDF FILE (".pdf" format) prior to viewing and printing?
Jon: I can't get to that step because it's asking me to pay for my state file
Terence A: Jon, can you please click on "state taxes" main tab.
Jon: ok
Terence A: Jon, what sub tabs under "State Taxes" can you see?
Jon: Your State Returns and State Review
Terence A: Jon, did you access your Turbotax Free File Alliance Edition through the IRS or is it through www.taxfreedom.com site?
Jon: IRS
Terence A: Jon, were you able to take note at the taxfreedom.com site below the red flag or red button that says "State available, fees apply" just below that red button?
Jon: I realize that the state print/filing costs money

Am I just being mined for demographic info, or is their help script truly this bad?

Terence A: But Jon, were you able to take note of that-"State available, fees apply" just below that red button?
Jon: I did not use the taxfreedom.com site, I came through the IRS. I do not know which red button you are talking about
Terence A: Jon, accessing
Terence A: Jon, accessing Turbotax through the IRS site will direct you to www.taxfreedom.com. You can double-check that later on to see the information that I was mentioning you after we troubleshoot your issue.
Terence A: Now Jon, can you please click on "Your State Returns" sub tab.
Terence A: Jon, what does it say on your screen?
Jon: it lists my DC return
Terence A: Jon, does it give you option to "edit" it or "delete" it?

At this point I'm fed up. I've already filed my DC request for reimbursement offline, but was just reluctant to actually delete it after putting the effort in, but the cost/benefit tipped somwhere during the last 20 minutes chatting with Terrence, and though I continue talking to him, it's out of spite to see how far we can go

Jon: Yes. I just deleted it so I can continue to print my federal return. I will just use the DC Gov't form for my DC return instead of filing through TurboTax
Terence A: Yes Jon. Can you please save it first as a PDF FILE before going through the process of printing?
Jon: NOW I can because I DELETED my state return. It was NOT POSSIBLE to do this previously without paying for the state return.
Terence A: Yes Jon. Please take note to save your return as a PDF FILE and to back up your returns as a TAX FILE using the "My Return" option at the lower mid-left portion of your screen and select "Other Options" then select "Download My Tax File" option.
Jon: that option does not exist on my screen
Terence A: In that way, you can have a reference for the next tax season and saving also your return as a PDF FIle will allow you to view or print a hardcopy of your return.
Jon: ah, now I see it
Jon: but when I had my state return entered it was still asking me for payment
Terence A: Would you agree that we have completely resolved your issue today?
Jon: yes
Terence A: Yes Jon. Federal is free but for State, there is a fee for that.
Terence A: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Jon: no

Honestly. I'm actually still not convinced that I wasn't dealing with an advanced version of ELIZA.

Posted by griffjon at 05:01 PM | TrackBack

Dotting i's

Obviously, I'm not in DC. I'm rescheduling for a more convenient-to-everyone time in May I think. It'll also give me a bit more time to plan my attack on The Big Apple.

So instead I telecommuted in for a few hours to work on a programming project for work, and made some definite headway on that, to the tune of saving us tons of time and volunteer-arm-twisting to get our ancient phone system's log files from a human-readable file into a data structure to run statistics against. Yay for changing boring tasks into interesting problems. (If anyone needs to extract reports from an Executone system, now you know where to go)

I then filed my FAFSA renewal as an important step in getting more loan monies for next year and avoiding that whole being poor phenomenon.

I meant to get a lot of reading done outside today, but these above items ended up taking a lot more time than I'd meant for them to (see entry on tech support from hell).

Posted by griffjon at 05:00 PM | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Punctuation matters.

" Please Note: We are not responsible for lost or stolen packages From all of us at Washington Deluxe - Have a safe trip!!"

I guess tipping isn't exactly a voluntary action?

That being said, I'm off to NYC next weekend ("Spring Break!"). Whee.

Posted by griffjon at 08:48 PM | TrackBack

March 12, 2006

Yay, anti-productivity

This weekend has been a practice in getting non-school stuff done.

Friday night, I hung out with various an sundry friends at Island Jim's, an odd place within extended, if not exactly safe, walking distance from my house. It had decent drinks, and a good atmosphere -- it was an inside/outside patio place that will be fanstastic further into the spring and summer, and it ajoins a British pub type place, which will do well for next Winter. Bonus: it has free wifi. Is this my DC "default"? The crowd is an eccentric mix of NorthEast DC locals, students from Catholic University, and staff from the nearby hospitals. It's about a 15-20 minue walk from my house, but unfortunately it's not exactly a great neighborhood to be stumbling home through (Hasn't stopped me yet, mind you).

In celebration of an early sneak-preview of Spring, Saturday, I and some other grad students headed out into deep VA to visit the Virginia wine country. Three tastings and four bottles later, we were happily buzzed and well informed on Virginian wine. The short story is: their whites are decent, their reds suck ass, but it's a great way to spend the day.

That night, I linked up with a fellow ex-RPCV from Jamaica who's becoming my most reliable dancing partner in DC, and we and her friend from even deeper Virginia hit Havana Village for their salsa bands--Havana is definitely a good salsa club. You can usually avoid cover if you arrive there not-even-that-early, and even then it's $5-10, so not unheard of. They have three floors, two bands, and a DJ, serve excellent Mojitos and Caipirinhas, and are usually crowded enough to see some excellent salseros, but not so crowded that you can't squeeze in and join the dancing.

This morning, I forced myself to get out of bed instead of lounging in, and met my uncle at the Smithsonian for some museuming and lunch. He was in town on his way through NYC to see the Smithsonian's presentation of Dada on his way to Paris to work on his Dada book/project (you might say that he wrote the book on Max Ernst.

The remainder of the day, I'm doing some much-needed laundry, working on trip-planning for next weekend, and perhaps some catch-up work, planning my schedule for next semester, and whatnot. Whee.

Posted by griffjon at 05:15 PM | TrackBack

March 07, 2006

DC Area Trivia

Localities in the DC area are so deeply ... FUBARed and confuzled.

There's a Chevy Chase neighborhood in DC, which is seamlessly integrated into Chevy Chase (city), Maryland, which overlaps mostly with a census-designated place called, also, chevy chase, and these border Chevy Chase Village. Chevy Chase the actor, born Cornelius Chase, was reportedly nicknamed Chevy and stuck with it into acting. Similarly, there's a Takoma Park, Washington, DC (No relation to Tacoma, Washington), and Takoma Maryland, which is one "city" that spans two "states" -- I've even found one of the boundary stones set in place by the original city planners, no doubt so the evils of the federal government could be kept in check through enchanted means or somesuch.

Also, zip codes cross municipality borders. I don't actually know if this happens in other dense cities, but a zip code could encompass 2 or three separate municipalities, which breaks my mind on how they should be laid out.

This, no doubt, is what happens when you let the French design your cities -- and it only makes it worse when you let Virginia reneg on the deal and take back (retroceded is the term, it seems, in 1847) half of the District.

More DC info at Wikipedia, including why there's a sculpture of Darth Vader on the National Cathedral

Posted by griffjon at 10:05 PM | TrackBack

February 26, 2006

The Coffee Conundrum

I realize that I'm a coffee snob, and that were I not a coffee snob, I could use a coffee maker with a timer to solve this issue. But let's take for granted, for the moment, that I'm going to use a french press, because the coffee it makes is so superior.

Another given is that I am fully addicted to coffee. I freely admit this. I need coffee to function.

The condundrum, then, is how to make french press coffee before having coffee? It requires filling the teapot (but just perfectly so that you're not wasting time heating excess water!), boiling it, grinding coffee, placing the grounds into the press, pouring boiling water into the press, positioning the filter part of the press, moving the press to the table w/o spilling, and waiting for it to steep, then pressing, then finally pouring a cup -- all before coffee!

To be more specific, this morning was a royal running disaster.

My roommate's dog Megan had pooped and pissed all over the kitchen (what happens when everyone sleeps in on weekends), and this spurred my inner type-A OCD cleaning demon, so this ended up being sweeping, bleaching and mopping of the entire kitchen floor (mainly to replace that lingering dog-shit smell with a lingering bleach smell).

Then, while grinding the coffee, our grinder died. Luckily, it was close enough to ground that it was passable.

Then, I had defrosted the night before a loaf of orange bread that Mom had baked, so as to toast and eat it this morning. We don't have a handy toaster oven, so I was doing it in the oven, using its broiler. It's... rather....hyper broiler. So I smelled them getting probably just a bit too toasted (which is how I like them, to be fair) and opened the door, and was greeted by leaping flames coming off of the poor orange bread. "luckily" someone had left the back grill unlocked, so I placed the smoldering orange bread on the ledge outside and deactivated the now-screaming smoke alarm (and the teapot was boiling all at the same time, as well).

I recovered from that point, tho -- I sliced more orange bread (and didn't burn it), and the rest of breakfast went as normal. But still -- not a great way to begin the day.

Posted by griffjon at 10:56 AM | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

Satellite/Airplane ads

So, rooftop advertising to capture a few eyeballs via satellite-maps (i.e. Google Maps) and hopefully mostly passenger airplane fly-overs is a good idea. Uses existing space, makes ugly rooftops at least a bit less boring, fine, whatever.

But seriously, if you're TARGET, it just seems like you're asking for bad things to happen.

(via BoingBoing)

Posted by griffjon at 10:16 AM | TrackBack

January 10, 2006

OK, fine, it IS the apocalypse

CNN (via BoingBoing) reports that "The mummified body of a woman who didn't want to be buried was found in a chair in front of her television set 2 1/2 years after her death, authorities said."

Continuing;

An air conditioner had been left running upstairs, and that allowed the body to slowly mummify, he said. The machine apparently stopped working about a month ago, and the body began to smell.

"Standing outside, one could smell death," Owens said.

Posted by griffjon at 09:58 PM | TrackBack

December 26, 2005

Resolutions tracking

Following 's lead, let's get on to the resolutions.

For 2k5 I set these up:

--Grad School: Get in, keep focused, kick ass, try not to go into too deep of debt.

--Geekliness: I need to upgrade my geek cred now that I'm back.

--Activism: I have problems with being in the US, and I want to redirect this frustration into positive activism, both on the warm-fuzzy volunteering for good causes kind, and the sabre-rattling kind of doing protests...

--Travel: Not a likelihood for 2k5, but I want to maintain it as an ideal.

--Live a good life: Especially over the next few months, I need to combine saving money, being good with the job, and living healthily, and simply.

--Figure things out.

Well, I did a decent job of these. I got in and got aid for grad school, and so far have kicked ass. I've been doing a good job at getting deeper into database stuff, though my language of choice continues to be perl. Activism has panned out less. I've maintained a lot of the work-on-the-side for PC/Ja's intranet and some geek help for EsperanzaEnAccion, but I didn't make it to the big protest in DC this year in time, and I haven't gotten involved up there. Yes, I'm in grad school full-time and working part-time, but still. I didn't figure as much out as I'd like.

So, for 2k6....

--Grad School AND THE FUTURE: Over the course of the next year, I need to narrow down my focus and start sniffing out realistic and enjoyable job opportunities.

--Activism: Also, focus down on a few topics/causes for real activism. Give the ACLU and EFF some money, and make this more of a priority than it has been. Of course, continue occasional blog/rants filtering through BBC, DailyKOS and similar.

--DC: If I stick with international dev, DC will probably be a decently important city in my life, so I need to make peace with it and find more things about it that I really and truly like.

--Travel: I also want to get out of the country again, I've been gettin itchy. There are still-nebulous plans to head down to Nica this summer, and I need to work with my job and find a travel grant or two to get that to work out.

--Keep in better contact: a LOT of people have kinda fallen off my radar. Basically everyone not on LJ or IM... I need to be a bit better about staying in touch.

--Fitness: The last month of finals and projects and cold and thanksgiving really didn't do much good for me. I've been good about staying active in DC and walking a lot, but I need to work on eating less and maybe getting some non-walking exercise in.

Posted by griffjon at 09:59 AM | TrackBack

The Big Holiday Mass-email

I guess it's been kind of a big year, but it began and will end for me in Austin, even though temporarily.

I've mostly adapted to life in the States again after being in Venezuela and Jamaica for most of the previous three years (If you've been under a rock or I've been remiss in keeping in contact, and that's a surprise for ya, check www.griffjon.com/travel), returning last October. I helped my girlfriend from Peace Corps on the last days of the 2004 campaign season a bit (though not much, as going from hot and humid Jamaica to dry and cold New Mexico didn't sit so well), toured some grad schools, and spent December planning the next step and finishing applications.

I ended up in Austin starting in January, living in "Das Blue Haus", a living situation that's been passed through a group of friends there for almost 10 years when I joined in. Unfortunately, this 100-year-old historic home is now an empty lot awaiting high-rent, low-occupancy luxury condos, as the "Drag" and West Campus area near UT goes through another round of saddening gentrification/starbucksification. I worked with some of my former co-workers from eCertain at the technology commercialization office of UT, doing a pleasant assortment of random tech/IT duties. My most fun and hopefully long-lasting and beneficial task was to map out the various ghosts in the machines and create a central and living documentation project in the form of an internal "wiki".

So I passed spring and summer in Austin, enjoying the Austin life and defending my house in front of various historic-preservation and city hall panels until we finally lost a vote. You can read all about the house, its varied history of being home to your Austin-normal gathering of eclectics, musicians and academics at http://www.griffjon.com/dashaus/ .

The grad school acceptances rolled in, but fewer came with any financial support. I chose GWU's International Science and Technology Program in the end, and will continue my focus on IT in development work. Through GWU I can take classes at other DC-area programs, and they gave me by far the best deal.

I moved up to DC in early August as my lease came due and the haus was being torn apart (quite literally from under my feet!). I found a part-time job filling all the IT needs of a non-profit crisis call center in northern Virginia (CrisisLink.org). Grad school (rather, the reading load) has taken up pretty much every available hour outside of work and sleep, even to the point of catching a few pages on each leg of my subway journeys to school and work.

I'm here at the end of my first semester, still generally convinced that grad school is a good idea. Ask me again in a few years when I have to repay my loans...

I'm back in Texas for xmas and the new year, then back to the cold northeast for another round of grad school. Drop me a line, call (202-380-8782), or visit, and I hope you're having a great whatever you like to celebrate. This year I'm claiming to celebrate "Saturnalia," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia) the original Roman holiday of cut-down trees, parties, and gift exchanges.

So, Io Saturnalia, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyous Solstice, Happy Kwanzaa, and so on and so forth. If you find anyone complaining about "Holiday Trees" please just remind them that "Christmas trees" are rightfully "Saturnalia Trees" and they should relax and enjoy the syncretism.

Oh, and happy (Western) New Years!

Posted by griffjon at 09:42 AM | TrackBack

December 16, 2005

Death by caffeine...

Calculate how much coffee it would take to kill you. Evidentally, as few as 35 mugs of strong coffee could give me serious problems (such as death). Kinda scary, actually.

Posted by griffjon at 01:26 PM | TrackBack

November 19, 2005

Darwin Award Nominee?

From the Sydney Morning Herald via BoingBoing :

A rugby fan who cut out his testicles with wire cutters to mark a Wales victory is at a loss to explain why he did it.

Geoffrey Huish, 31, performed the impromptu self-surgery in February when his beloved Wales beat world champions England.

After performing the deed, Mr Huish put his severed anatomy in a bag and took them to his local social club to show fellow fans.

He collapsed with blood loss and was rushed to hospital but surgeons could not reattach his missing parts.

He was put in a psychiatric ward but has no history of mental illness and was at a loss to explain why he did it.

"I'd told my pal Gethin Probert before the game that Wales didn't stand a chance," Mr Huish told The Sun.

"It wasn't a bet but I said I'd cut my b*lls off if we won...

Posted by griffjon at 11:04 AM | TrackBack

November 06, 2005

DOOM

So, I failed to lure even the most die-hard geeks from my program to go see DOOM for fun. So, I downloaded a cam of it and watched it last night. It wasn't as horrible as I thought. It was still a pretty bad movie, throwing out very, very predictable plot "twists" and some horrible one-liners. But, to give 'em credit, they didn't over-use the first-person perspective, and they did take on a Demon-Dog with a chainsaw.

I do like the idea that the human genome has an evil bit.

I wish they'd kept closer to the DOOM story line (man, that's hard to say!) and gone with the whole hell-unleashed-through-the-teleportation-devices; it allows for more cool CGI critters, and you can ditch the whole Mars-evolution craziness.

It is definitely a Carib movie -- that is to say, it almost makes me want to fly down to Jamaica and go to the 2-for-Tuesday special at the Carib 5 theatre downtown to see it, it'd be a riot. Maybe literally...

Posted by griffjon at 10:00 AM | TrackBack

October 23, 2005

WTF: A collectionq

"Tropical Storm ALPHA" ???

Voluntary Milking System

AYBABTU mashed with Queen

Racist singers

Posted by griffjon at 09:20 PM | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

Lighter side of Ja

To balance out the story from the other day, here's a piece from the Star, as seen in BoingBoing, of all places:

http://www.jamaica-star.com/thestar/20051006/news/news1.html

DARAIN HOUSEN HAS not taken off his hat for the last 20 years. He bathes, he sleeps and does everything possible in it. It is a perfect fit.

But unlike other hats, his is not made of cloth but from the very hair on his head which is why it cannot be removed.

Housen has been sporting his 'natural hat' hairstyle for the last 20 years. The 40-year-old barber who lives in Somerset, St. Thomas said he came up with the idea after some of his friends decided to wear hats to a party but he could not find one to wear.

Posted by griffjon at 10:36 PM | TrackBack

October 07, 2005

Jamaican Violence

From Ian, I thought some of my non-overlapping readers might get a nice dose of Ja reality from this:

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20051006/lead/lead1.html

FOR MANY residents of Barnes Avenue in St. Andrew, the screams of 10-year-old Sasha-Kay Brown, as she attempted to escape the fire which eventually took the lives of her grandparents, her aunt and herself, will live with them forever.

Tearful women told The Gleaner yesterday how they heard Sasha-Kay crying out for help, until her voice faded in the blaze which destroyed the family's five-bedroom concrete house near Maxfield Avenue, yesterday morning.

Dorcas Brown, her husband Gerald, their daughter Michelle, along with Sasha-Kay, were trapped inside the building, after heavily armed gunmen fire-bombed their house about 3:00 a.m.

Neighbours who attempted to assist the young girl were fired at by the gunmen.

PLEADING FOR HELP

"The little girl climbed up on the grill and called out the names of almost everybody who lived on Barnes Avenue, begging them to come and help her," said a woman who spoke with The Gleaner.

"But (when) we ran out of our houses and tried to assist her, the gunmen fired at us. The last thing we heard the little girl said was that the fire was burning her, then her voice just faded."

The charred remains of Sasha-Kay and her grandmother were found on the veranda while in another room were the burnt bodies of her aunt and grandfather.

...

"Me daughter should never lose her life so," the 26 year-old mother of three said.

...

Head of the West Kingston Police Division, Deputy Superintendent Delroy Hewitt, has linked the fire-bombing and death of the four family members to an ongoing gang feud in the community.

"We believe the fire-bombing is a reprisal to an incident in which a man was shot and injured. The injured man is now hospitalised under police guard," said DSP Hewitt.

The feud is between men from Barnes Avenue and Ramsay Road.

Posted by griffjon at 02:08 PM | TrackBack

Ads

I figured I'd add in some advertisements to my website, mostly just google text ads, to see if I can bring in any $$ through that. If you don't like 'em, well, use FireFox and the AdBlock Plus extension, obviously, and you won't see 'em. Easy. I'll let you all know how it goes to my ability to report that publically.

Posted by griffjon at 12:12 PM | TrackBack

September 25, 2005

Now that's just.... bizarre.

The Military helps evacuate the elderly:

Soldiers methodically loaded the elderly and sick onto baggage carts -- sliding stretchers onto the shelves normally used for suitcases -- and pulled them to the open ramps of huge cargo planes as they evacuated residents of hospitals and nursing homes in the path of Hurricane Rita.

Working throughout Thursday night, military and civilian agencies pulled off an ambitious airlift in 19 hours to avoid repeating the failures of New Orleans, where hundreds of infirm residents were trapped and died before help could reach them.

Good job, creative thinking, and all that, but I'm just waiting to hear someone say;

"I'm sorry sir, but your grandmother seems to have ended up in Hoboken, New Jersey..."

Posted by griffjon at 11:54 AM | TrackBack

September 23, 2005

Fun quote from my reading today

From my reading for Tech, Culture and Development

"Globalization has eviscerates the power of states, reducing them to mere instruments of policies that support the interests of global capital and the U.S. government."

-- Silvio Waisboard, "State, Development, and Communication" in _International and Development Communication_, Ed. Bella Mody

Posted by griffjon at 12:47 PM

September 15, 2005

Mas Gasolina

There's something inherently right and amusing about walking by an SUV cranking out the "Dame mas gasoliiiina" song while its human is frantically pumping $3.39.99/gallon gas into it.

Posted by griffjon at 03:47 PM | TrackBack

September 06, 2005

First Class

Due to my Mon/Tues schedule, and labor day, today was my first actual class, and it's Econ for policy types. It seems like it will focus heavily on econ and policy interaction with mentions and summaries of the various Big Names in theories. There are 3 other ISTP people in it, and then lots of people from other policy-esque programs who I didn't really get a chance to meet much.

I think we covered in 2 hours the majority of what I remember from my undergrad survey of micro/macro econ. ( think the majority of what I don't recall is the math...

I'm hoping it's light on the calculus, because my calc is ... uh... 11 years old now? I crash-coursed this morning on it and recovered a surprising chunk (well, it's not like I have the chain rule memorized, but I know when to apply it), and it looks like the course will be heavier on essays than math questions. For anyone else in the oops-I-don't-know-calculus-boat, I recommend Tutorials for the Calculus Phobe. They're very basic, and at times painful, but they force you to go through all the elementary material, which I was having trouble with on the other calc sites. It takes you through limits and derivatives, and covers the derivative "shortcuts"/rules. Wikipedia's calc pages are particularly useless to learn calc from. Very info-rich, very not-useful if you don't already drink the koolaid.

I spent my metro ride home trying to figure out the demand curves for spam and puppies. I figured my spam demand curve is a point at $0 cost, 1 can of spam. Hey, free spam. I can make art out of it, or use it as catapult ammo. (requirement: build catapult). Puppies are a bit harder, as I am trying to capture the free-as-in-puppies version of free (contrast with free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech), free-as-in-puppies is like advertisements; sure, they're free, but they're worthless, and potentially of negative value to you. So, the puppies curve would seem to be inverted; the cheaper they are, the less value they confer (e.g. a crappy banner ad on some random website as opposed to the click-thru watch-the-flash ad for Salon.com content, the Salon content is (supposedly) of higher value, and the ad "costs" more to watch...

Hm. I need to work on this further...

Anyhow, it went well. I'm looking forward to next Mondays courses in Culture/Technology/Development and the ISTP intro/cornerstone course.

Posted by griffjon at 09:48 PM | TrackBack

August 28, 2005

More whining

I don't have a goal, I just have a direction.

I think this lacking goal causes problems when I'm in between, waiting, and looking. My "Direction" as such is international IT development, but really, what does that mean? What is my dream job? Time and time again I find that I really don't like managing people. I enjoy working together with people who have complimentary skills with some overlap, who are similarly motivated. I like organizations that are as flat as possible, with the least amount of pyramiding and pandering to having nice titles. Similarly, I really despise red tape and bureacracy, as they almost always tend to get in the way more than anything else.

I'm really ready for school to start up right now. I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels this month in DC, wading through the bureacracies and check-lists of the basic requirements of getting through, and, mainly due to lack of effort, newness in town, and people to go out with, I'm missing Austin, in the sense that nothing so far really requires DC over Austin; tho in a week that will not be the case, it has been for 4 weeks now, so is getting tiring.

I feel like if I had a more specific, solid goal, as opposed to a laundry list of things I want to avoid in life, I'd be doing better, but as it is, the vagueness is un-motivating.

So, let's codify why I'm spending 80k to get a Masters degree in DC:

• I like travelling and living in other countries, and hope to do some integrated into my job.
• I feel that development work is important, and so far the most attractive area of work for me as a career of any sort
• IT continues to be one of my central skills, but I do not want to be an IT professional with many sets of MS certifications after my name.
• IT-in-Development requires creative problem solving with small budgets -- which strongly appeals to my desire to fix everything in the world with duct-tape and baling wire.
• IT-in-Development can be applied locally, in education, as well as Internationally, and also eventually (with more experience) as a topic for writing or academia, all of which appeals to my inner commitment-phobe.
• DC in specific is where international dev in the USA happens, and a focus for a lot of progressive domestic development work, so it's a good place to be for a while to make contacts and explore job horizons.

OK, that helped. Still, tho. Damn houses-being-torn-down, I should've not gotten here so soon.

Posted by griffjon at 03:55 PM | TrackBack

August 20, 2005

Life Updates

I've been busy!!! Sorry, I feel I've been out of touch with everyone out there.

OK.

I got the job at CrisisLink / 1-800-Suicide. It's a good job for me, not unlike OTC in that I'll be full-spectrum IT support/development/planning/etc. I work part-time. It's a bit of a commute, but I figure I'll have enough reading pretty quickly...

I've bought some new clothes (I was getting a bit low on decent shirts there) and found a new pair of shoes. (grrr shoes). I've established a local bank account, as UFCU only has one ATM in DC that it has a shared agreement with. I've bought a cell phone, and am waiting for it to be delivered (Verizon). I'm very excited about the phone, which will be free-to-me after some rebates; it's a 1.3 megapixel camera with LED flash, video camera, MP3 player, bluetooth, and USB connectivity, with 512MB of memory internal plus a mini-SD slot! It's CRAZY. Hopefully I'll actually like it once I get to use it...

Outside of work, I continue to try to keep up with the local DC friends, but that is not a cheap proposition! Fun, tho.

I continue to explore parts of the city -- Adams Morgan, Georgetown, and Dupont Circle all appear to be pretty fun areas to hang around in, with coffee shops that aren't starbucks, indie bookstore/cafes, and the like.

Classes start for me in early September, with lots of orientation type things happening over the next 2 weeks.

I think that's the big news up here.

Posted by griffjon at 06:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 19, 2005

Weather Advisory

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN STERLING VIRGINIA HAS ISSUED A HEAT ADVISORY...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TO 6 PM EDT SATURDAY.

HIGH TEMPERATURES SATURDAY ARE FORECAST INTO THE LOW AND MID 90S.
COMBINED WITH HIGH HUMIDITY...THIS WILL CREATE HEAT INDEX VALUES
AROUND 100 DEGREES

I guess, since AC is less common here, that that's a problem. But, uh, low and mid 90s? That's like... a cold front in Texas during the summer. I will say that it's more humid here than Austin at least, and there's no breeze to speak of, which does make it more stifling.

Posted by griffjon at 01:58 PM | TrackBack

August 18, 2005

Updates

I spent the morning updating some of the code to GriffJon.com; you may or may not notice a change in the navigation bar to your left; it now has pure-CSS dropdown menus (but only for people with cool web browsers). This means now that there are a few pages that you can only get to via firefox, but they're not super-important, and again, this is my website, darnit, and I'm not going to cater to IE's flawed implementations of web standards!

The afternoon was pleasantly spent finding the best path to and from my class at GTown; it's going to be a close one, especially on bad-weather-days, as the GTown class ends at 4:05, and I have a class at the bottom of GWU's campus at 5:10. And, of course, GTown has no metro stops, so possibly I'll have a bus ride on wintery/wet days?

Also, explored some along M Street and Dupont circle, and located many of the fine recommendations made by JFerguson.

Posted by griffjon at 06:50 PM | TrackBack

August 13, 2005

perspective

(can you tell I'm bored?) Seems like everyone I know in the DC area is busy! Anyhow, this being the second night I've sat around bored, I thought to myself, what the fuck did I do in 99-01 every weekend?? The answer, according to my journals, seems to be not fucking much. I would hang out with FDP99, the Gamers, and not much else. Not that either of those were bad, I'd still do both if they weren't many miles away, but... that's all I did, as far as I can tell. Dancin', more in 00/01...

Anyhow. So, tonight, I'm browsing through my old journals again for some perspective.

Sometimes, I'm downright smart:

And then, after the Corps--what the hell do I do then? Burn some savings, go to grad school? I think that will probably be the plan. I might have to live at home for a bit while I research grad school options, then once it all gets decided, just do one move to the final destination. Of course, I'll also probably need a car... Yeesh. Of course, with some work, I could probably pull off doing contract webjobs again.

I wrote that less than a month into Venezuela, worried if I'd ever have a relationship. So, I guess I wasn't quite as foresightful as it seems.

Posted by griffjon at 07:10 PM | TrackBack

Finances!

I reran my numbers based on the job, the cost of the metro, cost of health insurance, the prospect of being able to find increase my employment to full-time over the summer, and finding a HUGE calculation error in my favor, and some other various means, savings, etc. ... I might make it through!

I have to be more careful than I usually am about budgetting and spending, I have to keep myself to within $5 avg/day spending on non-metro, non-grocery items like coffee, beer, eating out, etc. Not sure if that's at all realistic, really, but we'll see. I also have no clue how much books will cost as of yet, so I estimated $500/semester for class-related expenses, hopefully it won't be more, maybe even less? It's also calculated on taking the metro every day of the month for an average of $6/day (minimum one-way charge is $1.35, it varies by time of day and route, but I hope to walk occasionally at least one-way to school on occasion, so hopefully that number's also high.

But, as with all my budgets, I'm sure there's some hiding numbers that I'm failing to take into account somewhere, and it's not accounting for travel or studying abroad, which I'd like to do if possible, which will most likely just eat into my savings a LOT. Hey, worth the cost.

Posted by griffjon at 02:29 PM | TrackBack

August 12, 2005

le sigh

I suppose this is a sign that I need to put more effort into making more connections in DC. It's Friday night, my flatmates have all vanished, and I'm perched here on my computer with nothing but an overwhelming to-do list to keep me occupied. I'm at the lost-in-new-city stage of my DC experience; I knew Austin very very well, and had many people to go and do random shit with. Here, I know only a few people, and none of the cool/fun/cheap/neat places to go. Yet. I'll figure it out, but for now, it's still frustrating. I've been spending a lot of time wandering the downtown area, getting a better feel for it. I found chinatown today, and by extension, I a Texas BBQ place (in chinatown, of course) that smelled and looked pretty authentic, and had Shiner in the fridge. I might reward myself with that this weekend, if I get my to-dos down a bit.

I need to:

-Bite the bullet and get a cell phone. I've pretty much decided on Verizon, I just need to do the deed.
-Sign up for GWU's healthcare, pay them money, and cancel the crappy CorpsCare and get a bit of money back from them
-buy some clothes -- I should've done this in Austin; DC is a very suit and slacks kinda place, and I'm, uh, not. Nor do I want to be. I'll be f'in Austin-informal, THANKS, and no I won't be wearing long sleeved shirts and a suit when it;s 100 and muggy outside. I'm not stupid. Also, it's not like I am ever the height of fashion, but DC has an incredible amount of UGLY shirts. Gah. Maybe I'll use some of my Amazon gift cert to buy clothes over the Internet, it can't be worse than wandering from shop to shop looking for something reasonable here.
-get my birks repaired -- they;re almost through, and were just repaired in January. :(

Actually, a lot of the other liners are easier. Buy some stuff, look up a few things, and I've been knocking these off as I go. I think I'll make it my goal this weekend to figure out how to buy the healthcare and how to get refunded from CorpsCare.

I'm anxiously awaiting my finger to heal, it is REALLY ANNOYING to type without my right index finger. I sliced a chunk of skin off the top hanging my corkboard :(

Posted by griffjon at 09:56 PM | TrackBack

Notes from DC

I have a job offer; $18/hr with available pro-rated health (GWU still overall is a better deal I think), and paid time off.

I am approved for a consortium class at Georgetown, and it still has seats available; which rocks. I get the best of both worlds; a recognizable degree from GWU in public policy, GWU's financial aid package, and can occasionally pick a GTown (or whatever) class! Yay.

I think the best way to describe my 'hood is that I often feel like part of the gentrification shock troops.

Posted by griffjon at 05:27 PM | TrackBack

August 07, 2005

Adios

Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer dies

Que te vayas bien

Posted by griffjon at 10:15 AM | TrackBack

August 05, 2005

Breather

(deep breaths)

OK.

Yup, I'm in DC. I've almost totally unpacked, boxes are gone or at least empty, and my room is arranged decently enough. Still some things to be hung on walls and whatnot, but it's at least feeling like a place I can be in without tip-toeing around boxes now.

Today I finally am catching up on the various things, emails, journal-reading and newsing. (sigh). Also, I'm making it a point not to walk too far today, as my feet are expressly not happy with me right now, and all blistery.

Let's go through the journey!

Saturday, Mom, Dad, myself and Tucker (an Austin friend) packed the Trailblazer to absolute max capacity. I wasn't able to fit quite everything, and left my desk, chair and lamp, but squeezed in my bookcase and futon. Post-stuffing, I headed up to Dallas to have a short day and relax a bit before the drive with Cory and some of her closest friends.

We left mid-morning on Sunday and drove all the way to Memphis, Tennesee. Mostly lots of lush vegetation. We made great time and were able to explore Beale street a bit, saw some good live music and all.

We left again mid-morningish and pulled into Asheville, North Carolina the evening, just in time to get some random caribbean-cuisine downtown. We stayed in some cute log cabins just outside of town.

Unfortunately, we had to get up and go pretty early the next morning, but I hope to be able to go back to Asheville and explore it more, it is a total hippie/hipster town in the middle of nowhere. OK, that, and one store had stuffed gaming dice (d20s, d12s, etc.), which I really want now. I believe my quote at the time was something to the effect of "hanging those from the rear-view would be totally gamer-pimp."

We drove out of Asheville and enjoyed the fantastic mountain scenery between there and Virginia, but it was a long long haul into DC. We arrived at peak rush hour, too, both needing to pee rather badly, and we managed to take the wrong 3rd street the first time around (DC has numbered N/S streets that spread out from the capitol, so there's a 1st St. NW on the west side, and a 1st St. NE on the other. It sucks.

DC is a horrible city to drive in; it's all unpredictinly one-way streets, diagonals, narrow, and poorly signed. All props to Cory for doing all the DC driving, I would've gone catatonic by the end. Even Cory, a skillful driver in much better practice than I, was getting a bit flustered by the end.

We did a rushed unpacking job, getting most of the small crap out, and then went to meet an RPCV living in Maryland who was Cory's best friend from Jamaica and K for dinner in Dupont Circle, then returned to my new home and crashed out.

Wedensday, we had brunch at Ben's Chili Bowl in the U, and returned the car, then did the Mall. We went to the American History museum, which has an excellent Civil Rights exhibit, and the Natural History Museum, then to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

We then managed to get lost AGAIN, thanks to the NE/NW problem, finding another RPCV in the area for dinner at the Flying Scotsman (supposedly the only Scottish bar in DC). It didn't help that we were dehydrated and hadn't eaten since brunch, but had done a LOT of walking up and down the Mall. We were grumpy until the water, beer and munchies started appearing.

Thursday I saw Cory off, sending her to have lunch again with her friend in Maryland before she flew out, and then I went about unpacking a bit and then to my job interview at a crisis hotline in Virginia. It looks like a good match, and they're calling references, and I'm meeting the rest of the staff Monday. They're a non-profit and need to be able to hire one IT generalist to handle their entire system, and most of the skills they need are things I've had experience with at one level or another, and nothing that I couldn't pick up quickly, so I'm hopeful on that front. It's a bit of a commute, but *shrug* so's everything.

I got back from the interview yesterday and realized that I'd failed to eat... well... pretty much anything all day, so I cooked a quick high-protein dinner and chilled for a bit.

Today I've done the majority of unpacking/moving things to their real locations and trying to not do much else. Hopefully this weekend I'll be up for some hanging out if I can link up with some subset of all the DC peeps.

Oh, the house! It seems pretty cool. The people and pets are friendly, and everyone's pretty laid back.

Posted by griffjon at 02:12 PM | TrackBack

August 01, 2005

Moving: North Carolina

Safely in Asheville, NC, staying in a log cabin. the Internet's flaky, and we're tired, and have a long road tomorrow.

Asheville's a cool towb, wish we had more time to spend here

Posted by griffjon at 10:19 PM | TrackBack

July 29, 2005

Last day in Austin

whoa.

...yeah.

Guess I should work on finishing packing, and reserving a hotel for Monday night...

I think I haven't been taking leaving this time as seriously, because I'm not leaving the country, but still, I'll be far away from my Austin and Texas peoples, and most likely, super-busy.

Posted by griffjon at 11:53 AM | TrackBack

July 22, 2005

Moving Progress

I've chosen this place from CraigsList:

Room for rent in 4 bedroom rowhouse, shared bath. Hard-wood floors. Rent includes utilities, including high-speed wireless Internet and unlimited long-distance calls. Washer/dryer in the basement. Room can be furnished or unfurnished. Temporary resident is OK. The space would be perfect for a grad student/intern or young professional.

Off-street parking; 10 minute walk to Rhode Island Avenue metro (Red line); convenient to downtown and the Hill; walk to good grocery store and drug store.

Housemates include journalist/grad student, engineer, and barista. There's a small dog and one very cool kitty cat. We're all friendly and tolerant, and quite busy, so you'll frequently find yourself with the place all to yourself. We care less about whether you're a guy or gal, gay or straight, Dem or Republican than if you're going to pick your dirty towels up off the floor and wash your dishes. :-)

It's 600 with utils included and a W/D, on the Red line metro and only 3 mi from GWU, so I can walk if I have time, weather permitting. The live-in owner writes for the Washington Post and blogs as well, and they do communal dinners/cooking and such. Evidentially they use the peapod service for groceries and split it up evenly.

Should be fun. And, if not, for whatever reason, it'll be soooo much easier to find a place while actually in DC, and knowing the neighborhoods better.

I'm trying to get in touch with the Avis place nearest me to cement my rental, they came in at under $600 for a minivan or SUV. I think I'll try to drop by after work and look at the options.

Posted by griffjon at 01:04 PM | TrackBack

July 20, 2005

Busy

So, my first choice in housing fell through, but there's lots available (much thanks to and Jeri in DC for recommending neighborhoods, surfing CraigsList with me, etc.. There are three places right now that look pretty exciting, and I'm in touch with 'em; so I'm not freaked out on that yet.

Getting my sh*t up there, tho, there's some fun. I need to call around today and find rental agencies that will do one-way out-of-state car rentals, and see if any have minivans/vans/large SUVs for a reasonable amount.

And make some hotel reservations along the way.

And get a job in DC. I have one lead, and sent a lot of resumes out, but nothing solid yet.

And finish registration for classes; only one class left to register, I'm trying to take a consortia class at GTown (getting the best of both worlds!)

...AIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

I'll get through it, it's just lots of details and variables to hold at one time.

Posted by griffjon at 10:02 AM | TrackBack

July 18, 2005

Move Pondering

Can I compress, pack, discard and re-organize enough stuff to move in an SUV?

UHAUL has upped their rates by $200, making it now cost $824 plus gas, or take a Budget truck for 778 + insurance + gas

I can get a minivan or large SUV for ~500 + insurance + gas, and the MPG will prolly be significantly better, and easier to drive, more comfy, etc.

At a minimum, it means ditching my futon frame, perhaps also the bookcase. Can I fit a futon matress, my desk, a trunk of winter clothing and a duffell of everything else, and ~6 boxes of Kitchen Shit, computer stuffs and misc objects into the back section of a minivan?

I'm also posting on CraigsList's rideshare board for both cities, but that's a long shot.

Posted by griffjon at 11:10 AM | TrackBack

July 14, 2005

Morning

This morning consisted of getting woken up by the demo team pulling up floorboards downstairs and then getting curdled milk on my cereal. The day can only get better.

Posted by griffjon at 09:40 AM | TrackBack

July 03, 2005

Moving

So, I've spent a lot of this quiet weekend working on getting things straightened out for my move out of Austin to DC. The unfortunate downside is that my job ends on the 27th and my lease on the 31st, and the haus will prolly be demolished ASAP afterwards[1].

This focuses my options, regardless, and there are a few variables in play:

DC Housing -- I currently have no place to live in DC. I have sufficient couch-surfing space there, and has a big basement where I could store my stuff while finding a place, so this is not a deal-breaker, but it'd be nice to be able to not have to rent another truck within DC to move my futon and desk and such.

DC Job -- I'm sending my resume out and in contact with some people I know in the area, but have no job lined up. Again, this isn't the end of the world, I've managed to save a decent chunk between my dot-com savings, my PC readjustment, and my Austin job to float if I need to. Realistically, I could go a semester, maybe two, with only a few contract jobs here and there, but my goal is to be able to repay a large chunk of my loans as soon as they start accruing interest.

Schedule -- I must start attending GWU functions on August 25th, (class starts onthe 31st) which means I'd like to be in town 1-2 weeks before that to get settled, buy books, get accustomed to my commute, neighborhood, see my DC peeps, potentially find housing and settle into a job.

I'm going to see if I can press on the guy to let me stay through the first week in August, but my first foray into this territory was responded to with "the extended stay on 6th is nice," so that's dubious. Before the flood arrives, I realize that there's many Austinites who could put up with me for a week or two, and I may in fact utilize that; I'm primarily pondering how to most optimally get my Stuff from Austin to DC (ideally, one move out here, one move in in DC).

Thoughts and inspirations welcomed.

[1] I actually got an eviction notice to move out on the 1st (...on the 1st), but maintained a cheerful polite attitude with the cheerful polite land developer, cheerfully and politely reminding him that I had not received my 30-day notice of cancellation on my lease, and therefor had the right to continue my lease through the end of the month, thank you.

Posted by griffjon at 04:35 PM | TrackBack

June 30, 2005

Last night...

You could have found me ransacking my bedroom in a robe and leather gloves.

(Another baby possum got in the house)

(they're cute, but slow and dumb)

Posted by griffjon at 10:01 AM

June 28, 2005

Back

Yup, I was offline Friday-right now, pretty much. More details about the weekend later, this is just a heads-up hiya, I'm fine (very good, really), had an *excellent* weekend, and am totally behind on everything.

Posted by griffjon at 10:41 AM

June 14, 2005

DasBlueHaus :(

So, we lost against the Planning Commission, and it's therefore so incredibly unlikely that we could win in Council that we're not planning on putting forth the effort.

Of the seven commissioners present at the meeting, one understood our goal and supported us hands down, two offered lots for placement of the house if it could be moved, but voted against us anyhow, and another was very torn on the issue. They all emphatically requested that we submit our research to the Austin History Center, which we will do.

Basically, the new zoning for West Campus comes down to this: The City agreed to stop screwing developers who bought non-hisorically-zoned and/or non-high-density-zoned land in certain chunks near UT in return for protecting still-fully-intact historical neighnorhoods in danger of developer encroachment (Hyde Park, and Heritage, which, incidentally, is where the owner of the Haus lives). It's basically a pact-with-the-devil type situation, as many commissioners live in these sought-after historical-but-not-protected neighborhoods, and the developers could have really been unpleasant about it, so, West Campus is scorched earth for historical property, basically.

The one vote for us was emphatic, and the three other commissioners basically sung the same song -- you're right, you've made compelling arguments for saving the house, but (a) the owner does not support it , which requires a much higher standard of historical import, and (b) the buyer intends to build high-density housing on the lot and we promised to stop doing this. Sorry.

Realistically, this was going to happen at the City Council if it didn't happen here, so.

Amusing side notes:
The Owner approached blanu and repeated the request that we submit the data to the history center. She also refrained from making ad hominem attacks against me this time, which I very much appreciated.

The Purchaser approached me and gave me his card and seems interested in taking up our leases until they get the right demo/building permits, because, seriously, uh, we are tenants that in different situations landlords would compete for.

So, the actual movement asks the owners to seek someone who'd be willing to eat the cost to move it to a lot (and two lots were proposed, one which already is historically zoned, and therefore worthless to developers!) so the Haus might still have a chance to survive, but not in West Campus.

I'm not as sad as I feared, overall. I was realistic going into this whole thing, and was pretty certain that we'd lose at the City Council. I hoped we'd get past Planning, but they have a lot of deals binding them down. It's a happy-ish ending. We fought a good fight, we reminded the Planning Commission of some painful sacrifices they've made, and we can sleep at night knowing that we didn't roll over and let it die without this.

Posted by griffjon at 11:12 PM

June 12, 2005

Haus Meeting: Planning Commission

We're on to the next level, with the Planning Commission. It starts at 6PM TUESDAY (June 14) in the City Council chambers.

CITY HALL - COUNCIL CHAMBERS
301 W. 2ND STREET
1st Floor

It's important to have people show up and sign up in support of our saving DasHaus. The secondary speakers can not speak, but just say they support the primary speaker (yes, I watched it on public access TV).

We'll also need a to borrow a projector from one of you projector people, and I'll probably need a ride.

Posted by griffjon at 12:13 PM

June 07, 2005

Cricket

So, I lived in a cricket country for two years, which means I have a vague understanding of the sport -- it's like baseball, but slower. It's a sport you have to be born into, I think.

From the BBC news, here's an excerpt from cricket news:

Second Test, Jamaica, day four (close): Pakistan 374 & 309 v West Indies 404 & 114-6 Scorecard

Lara returns to the dressing room
Kaneria's haul included the prize scalp of Brian Lara

Pakistan were in sight of their first Test win in the West Indies since 1988 after reducing the home side to 114-6 on the fourth day in Jamaica.

Leg-spinner Danish Kaneria took 4-36 as the home side's top order collapsed in pursuit of a target of 280.

Brian Lara and Shivnarine Chanderpaul were both dismissed for ducks and only Devon Smith, with 49, offered prolonged resistance before he was caught behind.

Inzamam-ul-Haq earlier made 117 not out in Pakistan's total of 309 all out.

It was Inzamam's 22nd Test century and underlined his importance to a side which was beaten by 276 in the first Test in Barbados.

Pakistan resumed on 223-4 but their tail did not last long once Tino Best had ended a fifth wicket stand of 73 between Inzamam and Shahid Afridi by having Afridi caught by Smith for 43.

Seriously. WTF?!?

Posted by griffjon at 07:00 PM

June 04, 2005

general update

I feel like it's been a while since I gave a substantive post; mainly because most things are just continuing apace right now. The $job is back to normal pace now post-conference, which is nice. The weekends I've been helping Dave-N-Amy clear their newly-acquired land between Liberty Hill and Lampasas, North of Austin -- it's great fun hacking away underbrush with my machete, moving large rocks around, and decent exercise to boot.

Grad school plans are moving again; I've gotten my loan accepted for next year (w00t, debt, yay), and am more actively watching DC job lists and pondering again moving out there, in terms of logistics and housing.

The house is still standing, the next meeting is the 14th in front of the Planning Commission, then City Council will take it on the 23rd with the recommendations of both the Historic Landmark Committee (which was a yes) and the Planning Commission, so we'll see.

No big haus projects of recent due to both my nearing exit from Austin, the ongoing battle to save it, and being dead tired or too busy. I putz in the yard and keep it clean, but my tomatoes are getting gnawed on by some bug, the peppers never came up (and wouldn't have gotten enough sun anyhow) and I put some over-"ripe" potatoes in the groun and they're very happy, but I don't think it's the right time of year for them.

Many various fun activities, mainly weekend-based, have and hopefully will continue to occur. Texas may be as hot as Ja in the summer, but there's so much happy activity and cool stuffs to do here...

Alright; I spent about 10 hours out on the land today, so I'm burnt and dead tired.

Posted by griffjon at 10:40 PM

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

May 27, 2005

random thoughts

I miss the smell of mimeograph machines.

Posted by griffjon at 11:49 AM

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

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

May 14, 2005

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

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)

April 27, 2005

bleaugh

I came down with something yesterday and have been fevrish and icky all day today. I'm heavily dosing with nyquil/dayquil and echinacea, zinc and vitamin C; hopefully I'll knockk out out overnight tonight. I skpped out of work today and slept until 1pm-ish, and have been tottering around since.

It's a weird time of the year for me to get sick, I usually manage it in the fall or so.

Posted by griffjon at 06:22 PM

April 26, 2005

Leased

...and we have a lease for another month.

phew.

Posted by griffjon at 01:22 PM

Snark

Man, austin springtime...

(courtesy of the ForecastFox extension to firefox)

Posted by griffjon at 12:09 PM

April 25, 2005

Historic DasBlueHaus

Good news: Between our presentation and excellent mini-documentary on DasBlueHaus and its previous residents, the Austin Historic Landmark Commission moved to zone the house historic -- which means it goes forward to the next commission with a recommendation for historic zoning. They are not bound by this committee's decision, only influenced by it.

Bad news: the landlady was there, and contrary to our research is a co-owner of the house, and she was... uh... not pleased. So we're worried that we're getting kicked out anyhow, out of spite or hopes that we'll give up once we're kicked out.

Time (realistically, a few days) will tell. Our lease runs out Saturday...

Posted by griffjon at 08:56 PM

April 13, 2005

Recent Activity

I haven't been posting much of late; between wrrk, DasHaus, and trying to have a life, I've been busy. Let's see.

Two weekends ago, I did nothing, and it was great.

This past weekend was jam packed with fun, tho. Friday night I and a
co-worker met up with some other local Jamaica RPCVs and we went to a
J'can food night hosted by a local college's business club (Winston was cooking, so we were there). We hung out for a while, went for a red stripe run, and continued hanging out. My co-worker had to get on movin', and we stayed and chatted more, and eventually went back towards their place by way of 6th street, where we had to rescue one of their credit cards left at a club, and then ended up stopping at a pool hall, where we ended up staying and drinking more. I think I stumbled home (and it's a long walk from downtown) around 2...

Saturday, I slept in, and then helped out, but mainly observed, the kids downstairs roasting a goat (one of 'em is greek, evidentially it's a greek easter tradition, at least among his family). Anyhow, that was amusing. nosugarsadded dropped by for a moment (she'd gotten some nice dance shoes at the nearby dance-shoe-store). That evening, peace_cory came in to town to link up with us and her friend furfybird, who had a movie (30min feature) premiering here in town with the Cenozoic peoples, where we ran into a smattering of people, including allea.

We then went and hung out with the RPCV gang until the wee hours.

Sunday, blanu and I headed up to Georgetown to interview some former residents of DasBlueHaus and pick up some records of their father, which we're now trying to find a way to listen to. We got back in ~6pm, and peace_cory and I went downtown to watch the bats, then came back to clean up and go out to Opal's with furfybird and friends.

It was a damn fine weekend. Tho I was a bit tired Monday...

This week I'm gettin all my t's crossed and i's dotted with GWU and loans and such, and continuing research on the Haus.

Posted by griffjon at 11:20 AM

April 05, 2005

Adaptation

I was chatting with another RPCV (China, 2000-02) the other evening, and she asked how I was re-adjusting. It occurs to me that I've now been back almost 6 months, and perhaps some things are more permanent than others.

I'm still much colder natured, I continue to be very anti-consumerist and pro-simple living, and I still like chicken, rice, and peas.

More importantly, I seem to be slipping towards being a raging, ranting liberal. I saw what I can only presume to be the MTV realroadrules-whatever "reality" TV kids being filmed riding up congress in a pickup after leaving the theater, and blurted out a few obscenities aimed towards MTV. Unfortunately, no good diatribes about media or the pretenses of reality TV shows; I'll have to work on being quicker next time.

I've also been opening up the rant on people at a drastically increased rate. I didn't used to really rant much at all.

Eh, it's a good thing, and really, I aspire to become a more tactful and informed ranting liberal (hence grad school).

Posted by griffjon at 11:34 PM

Nickle and Dimed

OK, admittedly, I haven't read the book. And now, I'm really not sure if I could push myself through it. It sounds like the post-Welfare-"reform" equivalent of Rachel and Her Children, which was certainly painful enough of a read. I distinctly remember throwing that book across the room more than once in sheer disgust.

Anyhow, NoSugarsAdded had an extra free ticket to the theater adaptation of N+D currently going on at The State Theatre -- it's an amazing production, with wonderful acting, and a powerful, important message about the subsidation of middle- and upper- class Americans by the 30-some-odd million working poor (that's below the food budget * 3 poverty line) also in America, even if you don't always really see them.

It also struck some chords, and tender nerves, with my PC experience; like the author, volunteers always have this safety net. If we get seriously sick, we get taken care of, even flown home -- a volunteer won't be homeless[1] or starving, no matter what happens to the local economy. Many of us had credit cards and bank accounts back home, if we just had to splurge on something, and there was a settling-in allowance to buy basic start-up goods like kitchenware, etc.

But when your safety nets are reduced to this, and when you're constantly exposed to co-workers and friends who don't have them, you feel both a chasm of understanding, true understanding, of what it is to be without a backup plan and also an equally wide chasm with people who don't realize that so many of the people that they come in contact with in the service industries have no safety nets, no savings, no backup plan, and nowhere to turn if anything goes even sightly wrong.

Obviously, I was struck hard by this play. Everyone in Austin should go see it; everyone else, get the book.

[1] OK, so, there were some exceptions, but no one was ever left outside -- there's always another volunteer to crash with, despite PC/Jamaica's rather tarnished record with housing)

Posted by griffjon at 11:31 PM

April 01, 2005

Break time

Ah, screw all this 9-5 stuff. By the time you read this, I'll be on a plane to Thailand, got offered a job teaching English and computer skills. I'm not sure if I'll be back for grad school, depends on how I like it. Details, contact info after the cut:

Yeah, April Fool's. But tempting, too.

Posted by griffjon at 09:40 AM

March 30, 2005

Haus Research

All my notes thus far, a bit cleaned up, lacking recent discoveries re: the Sears house kit possibility.

My extended notes after the cut, not counting a lot of the recent stuff I've found about the Sears plans.

Built 1908-09

Appears to be a modified Fullerton “Sears Modern Home” 4-Square house kit, which would have been delivered to the train depot and then transported to site and built by the original owner.

1910-11 (Earliest listed occupant) Carrol, Owen G, Teacher, TX school for the Deaf

1912-1916 Burleson, Mary (Miss) music teacher

Had her studio in the house 1916 Burleson, Mary and Jennie (Miss) Mary (b Jul 1885) and Jennie (b 1874 Death:11 Dec 1938) are both daughters of David Crockett Burleson (b 6 Sep 1837 in Texas Death:17 May 1911 in Texas), son of Gen. Edward Burleson

Louisa Weir (Wife) b. in Manchaca, TX. Marriage: 28 MAY 1861 in Travis Co., TX. Children:
1. Sarah Griffin Burleson
2. Jennie Burleson b. 1874
3. Martha J. Burleson b. Oct 1875 in Texas
4. Stephen Mack Burleson b. Dec 1877 in Texas
5. Lizzie S. Burleson b. Aug 1881 in Texas
6. Mary L. Burleson b. Jul 1885 in Texas
http://www.gencircles.com/users/belinda_pierce/12/data/3102

1910 Travis Co TX (TX,24,living w/father) -- http://www.gencircles.com/users/mickiewaldron/1/data/5346
Thelma loved her house on San Antonio Street. She could see the children on their way to school, and on the playground, at both the Elementary School and Church. Children were always special to her. Maybe that is what kept her so "young" for ninety years.
The Chambers house has a history of its own, a history she loved to tell. In 1899, Miss Jennie Burleson (a granddaughter of Gen. Edward Burleson) paid her uncle, Peter Weir, $1 for two and a half acres on the northwest side of Buda. Here Jennie built herself a house. Except for a little help from her sister, Jennie actually built the house herself. Although the Chambers added to the house as their family grew, Thelma always liked to remind people that their family's friend, Miss Jennie, really build it by herself.
http://www.buda.lib.tx.us/H11_2ThelmaChambers.html

Jennie Burleson was the second superintendent of the Waco State Home for Dependent and Neglected Children (founded 1919, currently, Waco Center for Youth) -- http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/WW/ynw1.html

1920 Samuel J (Fannie L) Smith Ranchman

1922 Mrs. Willie W Pryor

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/PP/fpr18.html ? Maybe widow of disinherited son of William Pryor?

1924 James, Jos F (Mint O) prop James & Co

1929-31: Waldemar Metzenthin, (Aileen also Aline (student) UT Professor

http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2000-2001/memorials/SCANNED/metzenthin.pdf

UT has original papers of the SongBook Committee he submitted; mostly submissions to his parody contest and some art for the cover, includes a version of “The Eyes of Texas” with alternate lyrics, and Annie Webb Blanton. He graded themm all... rather harshly...

mackbrown-texasfootball.com/pages/winningtrads/coach_index.html :
W. E. METZENTHIN
1907-08 (Record: 11-5-1)
The athletics family at UT was so impressed with the behind-the-scenes work of Waldemar Eric Metzenthin that they prevailed on him to become the head coach for the 1907 season. An energetic young language professor, Metzenthin accepted no additional pay to do the job. Born in Berlin, Metzenthin had attended public schools in Austin and in Lancaster, Pa., and had played quarterback at Franklin-Marshall and Columbia. Metzenthin did not inherit the best of worlds as Schenker’s successor. Freshmen were barred by the faculty from competing their first semester, and the program was in tough financial shape. But Metzenthin, who had been so successful in steering the program from behind the scenes the year before, came through. The first season ended successfully at 6-1-1 and the football program cleared more than $1,000. Metzenthin agreed to coach the team again, along with his professorial duties, in 1908. But his team struggled, and despite a spectacular 28-12 come-from-behind victory against Texas A&M — which allowed Texas to finish 5-4 and escape its first losing season ever — he quit after the season. Stating he was tired of the criticism, he returned to full-time professorship, and Texas began searching for a coach once again. Several years later Metzenthin would return to athletics, serving as athletics council chairman, or athletics director as it would be later known, in 1927.

1935 Harlow, Rex.F. (ruby w) student, UT (b 1892)

Wife, Ruby Daughter Esther Frances

Books:
Social Science in Public Relations c1957
Practical Public Relations, with Marvin Black 1947, 1952
PR in War and Peace 1942
Trail of the 61st (A History of the 61st Field Artillery Brigade During the World War) 1917-1919 (pub 1919)

War history
Camp Bowie during its construction
sailed to France July 31st 1918
"Sea sickness became so universal on the first evening that rail space on the deck became entirely inadequate and conditions aboard the ships were far from desirable"
--73
Brest (landed, stayed at Napoleonic barracks)
Redon by train
"Many American boys and French girls became acquainted with each other in French cafes were lessons in both French and English were exchanged. The soldiers could learn French quite easily form attractive French maids, although they experienced great difficulty in acquiring any knowledge of the language from text books or regular teachers, and the same can be said of the French girls, who preferred to learn their English from jovial American soldiers"
--p121

C.R Revis (colored) of the 347th labor battalion is responsible for a little verse that aptly describes the bean situation in Brest and Redon:
"It was beans for breakfast; it was beans for dinner;
It was beans for supper time.
It was baked beans, stewed beans, fried beans;
Boiled beans,--beans rain or shine
Sometime is was lamb, chicken or ham,
A stranger you may have seen;
But the thing I mind was I got mighty dam tired
of eatin' just beans, beans beans."
--123-4
Camp De Coetquidan
quartered Napolean troops, used by his firing squads

"Practically the only source of amusement in Coetidan was that afforded by the "drag", as it was called. The "drag" was a series of stores and selling booths erected along the road leading to the main entrance of the camp. Almost all kinds of small articles could be purchased in these stores and the men frequented them freely to buy food and drinks. Because of the great number of potatoes served to the soldiers at several places along the road, the whole place was finally dubbed, "Potato Alley."
--141
{because of fighting and overindulgence in alcohol} "An order was therefore issues prohibiting all men of the 61st Brigade from spending any time on the "drag" unless they had business there and could show proper authority for being "out of bounds."
--144

1935

San Bjorn Fire Insurance Maps list it (1935) with an additional back porch which no longer exists

1939 Dallas D. McLean and Waters Darmento, Margt. Mrs. (lawyer)

Waters (d) March 28, 1999 UT Law Degree Admission to Tx Bar in 1933 Clerked for law firm of ex-governor Dan Moody (1931-35?) before entering private practice Research Asst. to UT School of Law Left for US Dept of State in Mexico City Then a series of govt positions in Guam, Japan, France (post WWII?) Returned to florida Survived by husband Josef Darmento (married 1954) in Merritt Island, Fl and son Philip Waters in Dallas. Josef moved to Texarkana and died shortly after Margaret died.

1940 Mclean, Dallas D (Gladys r;2) musician

Dallas: 1man band during wwii, flew around in south pacific with troup entertainment guitar, piano, violin, drums, qwhistle, all together

They rented rooms out to ut students

doctor calhoun acting pres ut next door
had a garden, McLean rooster dug for worms, Calhoun chased rooster with hatchet

Girl Living in boys rooming house, cooking for them, brothers
owners had to visit UT boarding as they were listed as a boys boarding house, but had a girl living there.

http://lonestar.texas.net/~mdmclean/MDM_BIO.html
4. Dallas Duncan McLean

Born August 28, 1890.

Died February 5, 1979, at 1501 S. Wall St., Belton, Texas, the home of his son, Dr. Sterling R. McLean. Buried in Jefferson Reed Family Cemetery, Joe Lee, Bell Co. TX.

Married May 1, 1911, Gladys Robertson. Born May 13, 1890, near Salado, Texas. They were married by Rev. Morphis.

Father of Texas historian Dr. Malcolm D. Mclean, Author of the 19-volume “Papers Concerning Robertson's Colony in Texas”

Died December 5, 1967, Kingsville, Texas. Buried in Robertson Family Cemetery, Salado, Texas.
Note: Gladys Robertson is a descendant of John Robertson and Mary (Gower) Robertson. For their genealogy, see Malcolm Dallas McLean (compiler and editor), PAPERS CONCERNING ROBERTSON'S COLONY IN TEXAS, Vol.XI, pp. 204-215.
http://lonestar.texas.net/~mdmclean/mcleanlines.html

http://lonestar.texas.net/~mdmclean/

I have located the recordings done by my Grandfather, Dallas McLean,
circa 1950. He had a personal record making machine and recorded his own records. One of them has written on the label "for Johnny" ... That would be me. I can recall his recording machine setup and him making recordings with it when I was maybe 6 or 7.

I have about 10 of them.... Size of 45's about, and a couple of old vinyl commercial recordings. Unclear to me if these are 16.5, 33.3 or 45 RPM. You know, this takes a device with a needle, rotating turntable, other stuff that one usually finds in museums (grin).

Dallas’ son Malcolm
1947-1951 Instructor of Romance Languages, The University of Texas at Austin.
1951-1956 Assistant, then Associate Professor of Romance Languages, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
1956-1959 Director, Binational Center, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for the U. S. Information Agency.
1959-1961 Director, Binatonal Center, Guayaquil, Ecuador, for the U. S. Information Agency.
1961-1976 TCU
1976-1983 Professor of History and Spanish, The University of Texas at Arlington,

phd ut
travelled to Honuras, Equador
Historian

Gladys Robertson-McLean is a descendent of
Sterling Clack Robertson was born on October 2, 1785, in Nashville, Tennessee. His father was Elijah Robertson, a brother of General James Robertson, the "Father of Middle Tennessee," and his mother was Sarah (Maclin) Robertson, for whom he later named the capital of his colony in Texas. His education was placed in the hands of Judge John McNairy, with instructions that he should have "as liberal education as the circumstances will admit of."
S. C. Robertson participated in the Battle of San Jacinto (April 20-21, 1836), and joined in the pursuit of the Mexican Army as it fled across country toward the Rio Grande. From the fall of 1836 to the spring of 1838 he served as Senator in the First and Second Congresses of the Republic of Texas, helping to lay the foundation for the new nation. During that time he served as Chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, and as Chairman of the Committee on Roads, Bridges, and Ferries. This latter committee had to organize the justices' courts and create and define the office and power of the commissioners of roads and revenue. He was also a member of the Committee on Military Affairs, the Committee on Private Land Claims, the Committee on Finance, and the Committee on Naval Affairs.

---

1941 William G. Cannon (Vina H) (Not “The” William Cannon) 1942-1949 Wynn, Barbara MR (widow, gordon W) 1944-1945: W.T. Hendricks (fireman) Mattie 1952-Mrs. Edna Grey 1955 Palmer Lolete H, Mrs. (widowed) slsmn, Buttreys Inc 1960 Davis, Gale E, recpt, Christian Educ. Synod of Tx

1965 owner Francis Kelley Bldg permit 96444 July 14, 1965 Estimate 500
Contractor R.T. Davis Remodeled Residence

Probably closed in back porch to create kitchen areas.
Probably closed off internal stairway between bottom and top floors
[17:36] wonk: I suspect the unit 1 bedroom was the foyer with stairway access to the 2nd floor.
[17:36] wonk: The unit 1 bathroom was totally a closet.
[17:37] wonk: I believe the other 3 bathrooms are original.

1969: Jeremiah M. Shapiro; Mrs. Francis. W. Kelley; Yvonne Hunter; Bruce Fuller
1970 Francis Kelley
1975 Francis Kelly (Wid Henry R)
1975 Fuller, Bruce (Marie) Student
1977-80 vacant/no return
1979 Stemtong, Ann (1979 2807A) Banquet Mngr, G&M catering svcs

1985: Four-plex: 1-Vacant; 2-John Ratliff, 3-Mark Weber, 4-Jo Wagner
Ratliff is a writer for Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, and has also written for Nerve and covers SXSW every year
http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/authors/johnratliff.php
http://www.texasobserver.org/showAuthor.asp?AuthorID=213
http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/sxsw/2004/sxsw_blog.html
http://www.nerve.com/regulars/lifeswork/kinkyfriedman/

Posted by griffjon at 10:59 PM

GWU

So, I just accepted GWU. On top of the 5k, they offered me a 6 credit tuition waiver/yr (renewable), and I can attend classes at Gtown for the same price as GWU if they're not offered in any form at GWU.

So. Next decision?

Posted by griffjon at 07:50 PM

March 29, 2005

More Haus

House Defense Detail!

So, we showed up early to sign up (but that's nowhere near as important as we'd been lead to believe), and sat through a huge amount of cases. This was actually a great thing, as we were able to learn from their mistakes and the reactions and deliberations of the committee, and modify our presentation along the way to better work with it. (That, and our house was going to be permitted to be demolished without comment had we not been there to speak for it).

Anyhow, we also got to see how other, more prepared neighborhood associations were organized to deal with it, and decided that while I'd present the main chunk (As it was all in my head better anyhow), blanu would also speak some, just to emphasize the strength in numbers effect. We had a total of 12 people including the 4 Haus residents present.

The city staff on preservation had done his standard review of ownership for major figures, but he didn't dig very deep, and as the architecture is evidentially not terribly outstanding, he'd OK'ed it for demolition or removal to another location.

We overwhelmed them with the amount of information, community support, and research effort we'd gotten together over Easter weekend. The chairwoman asked if I was available for hire, and I responded that only if I had more than a weekend to respond.

All night long, the 6-person council had been split over every single issue, for often very opaque reasons, but we got a unanimous pass in the motion. The next meeting is at the end of April, and we'll present again with more information on the historical and cultural significance of the Haus. Our presentation is at:
http://griffjon.com/dashaus/2807RioGrande.ppt , it has all the coolest information on the history and architecture of the house, lacking a few interesting details of Metzenthin (he graded Annie Webb Blanton very poorly on her submission to the UT SongBook Committee!)

The chairwoman ran after us in the hall to thank us separately for caring; the committee is all-volunteer, and I think we really impressed them by nothing more than caring. Of course we could shrug, accept the annoyance, and move somewhere else -- but the thing about DasHaus is, you don't really want to...

Anyhow, I'm not sure how many other people really believe this would work going into it, but now everyone's jazzed and promising to help me research! Yay!

Posted by griffjon at 08:14 PM

Oh, yeah

MIT turned me down, but I got a nice letter from mres, the head of the LLK program that I applied to. I'd already pretty much decided not to go to MIT for various reasons that I've already discussed at length, but this at least removes the temptation for the crazy good stipend situation they have for their grad students.

Sorry, Bostonians, but I'll be not too far away, in "sunny" DC!

Posted by griffjon at 10:10 AM

March 28, 2005

And the committee moves to...

...Initiate a historic zoning case.

We have to return next month with more research, we won a battle, not the war, but it was on the list for pass-without-comment had we not been there.

The Chairwoman worshipped us for our efforts at the end of the presentation. Literally. hands in the air style. Really. she also ran after us to the elevator to express her appreciation for our efforts thus far.

So. More work to do, but perhaps we can gather more residents who are still alive and nearby, and some more historical info on some of the more important figures. I'll post shortly with all my info thus far discovered notes in case anyone sees anything they can contribute to.

Posted by griffjon at 10:04 PM

March 25, 2005

Gah.

So. DasBlueHaus (where I live) currently has a sign outside of it. There's a bid to buy the property, and a hearing Monday with the Heritage Society of Austin whether it should be marked as a historical site...or OKed for demolition.

Any ideas?

Posted by griffjon at 04:43 PM

March 22, 2005

Decisions, Decisions

MIT (Boston): Geeky, project-oriented, would have to fight pretty hard to get any policy/econ/dev studies out of it.

GTown (DC): Good mix of studying IT impact and various issues in globalization, media, and such, but it almost seems too "light," based on the classes I attended there. Too much on the facilitated-learning bandwagon.

GWU (DC): Hardcore policy wonkiness, with lots of tech, but most of it in more science/tech/patent stuff.

Evans (Seattle): Plain-Jane public policy, but a great center for Internet in development connected to the school.

These are my general choices, now to narrow them down... I haven't heard back from MIT, but am proceeding as if they accept me (if they don't, it makes my choice easier)

I think I'm currently leaning towards GWU, but the more new-media/Internet edge of CCT continues to be attractive. Media Lab is nice in the guaranteed-money effect, but I don't think it'll be that hard to get a decent-paying part-time job in DC that should let me squeak by or enter into a reasonably small amount of debt. Hell, I may even have an offer (long story that shouldn't be posted publically).

All cities are places I have visted at some point and like. Boston winters do scare me a bit, tho. DC is hands-down the place for international dev and non-profit work, tho. Seattle has a lot of pacific-rim dev stuff, and Boston has lots of educational tech work (and edtech is always going to be a big part of int'l dev).

I know cool people in all three cities and environs, and all three cities are a bit pricey in the living. There are a LOT of RPCVs in DC, and a huge chunk of my peeps from Ja (including K) are there.

I'd say right now, GWU is winning. I'm emailing GTown and GWU trying to feel them out a bit better, and digging through their websites to see which I like better. Hopefully, this will be an easier decision than Ghana/Austin was. (Which, I might point out, turned out to be the right decision, even if on some days I do wish I was being more helpful in my productivity).

Posted by griffjon at 09:10 PM

March 20, 2005

Grad School Ponderings

As I continue to wait MIT's decision, I increasingly find myself hoping to get turned down from there. The money is unbeatable, but yet, the program is simply not development-oriented. The dev classes and the Grassroots Invention Group that they had (and still advertise on their site) are gone, and the only thing left is the Lifelong Kindergarten / Educational Technology group, but even that is pretty scattershot.

I feel that if I went to MIT, I'd have to fight very hard to take the classes I feel I need to take, and burn some midnight oil to create a project that I could execute during the 2 year masters program to make the Lab happy.

Now, potentially, I could figure out a project that I'd want to burn the midnight oil on, but I get the feeling that MIT Media Lab is much more strongly concerned about far-flung ideas that practical realities, particularly in development projects; all of their programs are insanely well funded by Intel and other big names -- great, fantastic, for the insubstantially small percentage of beneficiaries.

Could I make it work for me? Possibly.

The CCT program is much closer to my interests, but I worry that, by the same token, if it becomes another Plan II -- great education, that you have to explain constantly. It's not a show-stopper, but it certainly gets frustrating. I served in PC/J with a graduate from the Elliot school at GWU, and he was under-impressed by it, but it is a normal master's / public policy program. The downside there is that while they're big on science and technology, they're kinda behind on Internet and communications tech. Potentially I can take some classes at CCT through a sharing program they have in place.

The downside of both DC programs is that they're expensive and didn't offer me much if any money. K made a very clear point the other day while we were chatting, that both CCT and GWU are used to and designed around their students working part-time; and there are lots of exciting positions around DC in IT/Dev/politics/non-profit work where I could go a long way towards balancing out the cost of school (in lieu of burning my time working on a Media Lab project), plus full-time over the summers, and a bit of loans. We guestimated that I'd end up taking out ~5000/year, which really isn't bad at all (based on attending school part time, working 20hrs/week for $20/hr, GWU scholarship, and full-time summer employment) -- that actually puts me in the black according to their costs, and $20/hr. If I only managed to get $15/hr, I'd be in the red $5k/yr. If I attend a full selection of school and still work 20hrs/wk, I end up 6k in the hole/yr at $20/hr, and 12k/yr at $15/hr.

Boston and DC both have lots to recommend their cities; I have good friends in both places (tho very few in DC with LiveJournals, it seems), both have good salsa scenes, night life (to the extent I want/will have time for/can afford one), both have very functional public transport, both are bright blue cities with lots of interesting cultural mixes.

DC is a lot less cold, and the place to be if I want to link with the international development crowd. And yes, K's there too.

So, basically, I've backed off from the "if MIT admits me I'm decided" step, and am now actually pondering my top choices, as with working I can pull through without too much debt.

Still no word from UT ;)

Posted by griffjon at 10:59 AM

March 17, 2005

GWU $

Their scholarship offer is $5000 for the academic year. Which is $5000 more than nothing, and 5k over what GTown is offering, but it still ain't much in comparison to their tuition, not to mention the cost of living in/near DC, and a lot more partial than the recruiter's "partial tuition scholarship" had gotten my hopes set on.

But hey, any money is good money if it's not coming out of my pockets.

Posted by griffjon at 10:22 AM

March 14, 2005

More Grad Schools

U. of Wash / Evans School has also accepted me, dunno yet if they have any financials for me, tho. Woot.

Posted by griffjon at 02:38 PM

March 12, 2005

Doors

Hanging doors is deceptively complicated and hard.

That is all.

Posted by griffjon at 04:28 PM

Ahhhh, spring!

Monitoring my general energy level and happiness when it's bright and sunny make me worried about moving north for grad school, but I'll adapt, or carry around a sun lamp and a car battery all the time.

I had an excellent night on the dance floor last night, went salsa'ing with a local theater-director friend from back when I was doing pro-bono websites around town. We went to a newish club on 7th in the scuzzy part of the 6th street area, but the DJ was good, and the club vibe was nice, lots of regular traffic, everyone seemed to know everyone (and yes, they played not only my favorite salsa, "La Vida es un Carnaval", but also the Gasolina song ;)

This morning I slept in until 9ish and lounged and breakfasted, and then cranked my music, pointed a speaker out the window, and turned the mulch pile, put my tomato seedlings in the ground, and cleaned up the yard a bit. Yay sun!

I'm now chillin' and hydratin', some partin' going on tonight.

Posted by griffjon at 01:16 PM

March 11, 2005

"w00t"

Well, things continue to come up roses;

I am very pleased to inform you that you will be offered admission and a partial tuition fellowship to attend the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Your admission packet, which includes your fellowship award letter as well as your official letter of admission and other relevant information, was mailed earlier today (March 11), so you should be receiving it very soon.

Congratulations, and have a great weekend!

My decision just keeps getting more complicated. When I get around to complaining about this, please slap me and remind me of my incredibly good fortune.

Posted by griffjon at 03:07 PM

March 08, 2005

Kansas leads the way

Kansas, which brought us past gems such as:

"Where is the evidence for that canine-looking creature that somehow has turned into a porpoise-looking creature, or that cow that has somehow turned into a whale, or that dinosaur that has somehow turned into a bird? I haven't seen that evidence"
--Linda Holloway, chair, Kansas Board of Education, 1999

Now has a new "first":

Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline has demanded that clinics hand over records of nearly 90 women who had abortions.

He is seeking the women's names, sexual history and medical details, saying he wants to investigate possible child rape or illegal abortions.

But the clinics involved accuse Mr Kline, an abortion opponent, of trying to launch a "secret inquisition".
They say he is "fishing" rather than investigating a specific crime and want the state Supreme Court to intervene.

Mr Kline began the inquiry in October but it only became public when the clinics filed an appeal against a court order to hand over the records.

In the appeal to the Kansas Supreme Court the two clinics, which have not been named, said the records contained "the most intensely private information a woman can disclose", adding that much of the information would be irrelevant in any criminal investigation.

If the records were disclosed, the claim continued, "the logical and natural progression of this action could well be a knock on the door of a woman... by agents of the attorney general who seek to inquire into her personal, medical, sexual, or legal history".

Mr Kline told reporters at a brief news conference that he requested the information to uncover evidence that could be used in investigations that could include child rape.

"When a 10, 11 or 12-year-old is pregnant, under Kansas law that child has been raped," he said.

"I have the duty to investigate and prosecute child rape in order to protect Kansas children."

Me, I'd like to see every instance of viagra/cialis prescriptions among the Kansas representatives.

Honestly, did we go through the administrative pain of the HIPAA to regulate and manage medical privacy only to have our most private details subpoenaed and made into public record?

Posted by griffjon at 08:37 PM

March 06, 2005

New Reggae Tracks

shouts out to >Wayne&Wax and his new album based on his time in Ja, Boston Jerk. Check the falls on the CD art and the track, that's my own Gordon Town Falls. Blep! Blep! Blep!

Amusingly, in the small-world effect, his project (working with schools to teach computer literacy through music) came up multiple time with my MIT interviews; it's a small community up in Boston for that kinda fun, it seems.

Posted by griffjon at 10:17 PM

March 04, 2005

MIT, Cont'd

A few more grad students, another prof, and on to dinner this evening with the LLK prof.

It's such an odd little program, in an odd university, in a cold and odd city. It's very, very project-oriented, and you only take 2 or maybe 3 classes max per semester. The MS program is 2 years, the second of which is mostly producing something as a project and a "contribution." The PhD program is 3-4 years on top of that, with more study at the front end continuing into a larger project in the second half.

I must admit, I'm questioning if this would be what I want or need even to move on. Not that I have a good idea of what I want or need to move on is, anyhow, but the project-oriented focus is a bit dismaying. I feel very uneducated on a vast many things that I care about around development, and would like a somewhat structured and guided environment to explore them with. Maybe I just suck it up, read some course description reading lists and play catch-up myself, maybe that'll be my bus reading this summer.

On a meta-note, I'm not overly concerned, as there are some serious financial factors to help tilt the scales if MIT accepts me, and I have GTown (and very serious financial difficulties to tackle) if they don't, so the decision I don't think will be terribly difficult.

It's so hard to continually remind myself that this is just a set of steps on a path, and nothing really ever absolutely locks me in to any one thing. This may open different doors than other paths open, but it doesn't set things in stone (that's what the Lab's laser-cutter is for).

I also can't quite shake the feeling that this is where I'd have ended up if I'd done a science undergrad instead of P2, and honed my geek-focus instead of gone about sharpening other blades of my mental toolkit.

Posted by griffjon at 02:04 PM

March 03, 2005

MIT Interviews, first round

Met with MRes (Lifelong Kindergarten/LLK) this morning at the Lego Lab and one of the research staff / former Media Lab grad student, so far things are going well; my prize skills (reading from my interviews) seem to be my Linux/Education experience (MRes was running off to meet with Negroponte about his idea for $100 laptops after my interview), and my appropriate technology geekiness, finding and exploring ways to hack things to work in odd situations (which is my geek lifeblood).

I'm meeting with Judith Donath (Sociable Media) tomorrow, and it's more along my line of web/media/blog/interaction line, connecting people through internet tools, much like what I did for PC/J with the intranet website. I'd love to end up working with both programs, tieing them together. LLK has a few projects (Computer Clubhouse, Youth Action Network) which are IT/Education/Development programs, and combining that with sociable media information/interaction tools... yay.

Overheard in the Media Lab: "...five lines and a forever loop"

I should add that I'm no longer suspicious that they had just saw this Texan who'd been living in Jamaica and the Carib. for 3 years and decided it'd be worth their time and money to see me freeze for amusement :)

Posted by griffjon at 10:22 AM

February 28, 2005

Interview/Back in 5

So, I'll be in Boston Wed-Sunday, so don't expect to hear much from me, but think good thoughts for my MIT interviews.

Posted by griffjon at 10:53 PM

February 24, 2005

Some quick updates

I've been super-busy with work and life recently, so haven't been updating much.

Let's see. Amusing $job story; our accounting whiz is this black lady, and she brought her kids to work one (cold) afternoon -- they asked her later that night, "Is Mister Jon an African?"

I'd had my rasta scarf and hat in my office.

Otherwise, I'm finally beyond the first hurdle of work-learning, but am now taking on our new DB management and continue to try to wrangle the website into some shape, at least on the backend, that is reasonable, and getting things like logging and stats working. What a concept. On a related geek-note, I really dislike Tomcat.

I've gotta gear up for my trip to Boston, er, next week -- a bit more background on the LifeLong Learning/Kindergarten group would be a good idea, that, and packing.

I'm now truck-less. I took the PRC UT shuttle up today, it's about a 10-15 minute walk from my house to the stop, and it takes maybe 20-30 minutes driving time. Not bad, except it was COOOOOLD again today, and both going and coming I'd just barely missed the bus, so I got to wait the whole time in the unsheltered cold. That was unfortunate. but hey, it's a free shuttle, and I have an alternative, bus #3, which takes a lot longer, but makes stops along the way (PRC is an express).

During my commute, I'm finally getting around to reading "Going Home to Teach" by Anthony Winkler -- it's not fiction, like most of his work, but it's still a fascinating read and exploration into a lot of Jamaica, colonialism, and racism/class issues. It's insightful and true, if often offensive.

Posted by griffjon at 08:19 PM

February 20, 2005

This Week on "This Old DasBlueHaus" (Feb 20)

So, as my parents are comnig through and picking up the truck I've had on loan for so long, I tried to run around and get all my vehicle-required errands done this weekend, so a lot of my time has been taken up by grocery shopping for heavy/hard-to-find-nearby items (So, yes, Fiesta trip for Ja food!), also, the weather has been grey and wet, so I'm not so inclined to be working outside so much...

I got some stuff done anyhow;

I painted the upstairs, outside door blue -- this involved scraping the old layers of (probably lead-based) chipping paint off (I wore a face-mask). It doesn't look pro, but it looks a whole HELL of a lot better than it did.

I then used up the remaining scraps of tile and bought 5 more squares and re-tiled the entry way, which has old commercial crap-tile, so it looks a lot better as well.

I went down and harvested some bamboo from one of our friends whose yards it has invaded; but it's so spindly and mostly-rotten, I don't know if I'll manage to make anything out of it. It was also an exporatory trip to find out if we could make a roll-up bamboo mat for the Dome project for the farm party this summer, and perhaps some camping trips in the spring. (We have a few dome-building geeks in the group, who dream up ways to make easy-set-up huge domes, there's just this problem with good flooring...) I don't think the bamboo we currently have access to will work; same problem here as there -- termites love bamboo. I did uproot some stalks/runners of bamboo and transplant them to our yard (muahahahahaha), we'll see if it survives long enough to take it over.

I moved some of my herbs I've been keeping inside out, so they can enjoy the soaking rain, and any sun that might happen to come along.

I re-strung my drum (to tighten the skin, there's a loop of cord that goes around the top, and the original cord was fraying, so I re-corded it and tightened it so it's playable again).

I also did a little cleaning, as my kitchen and bedroom hadn't been swept/mopped in a while.

I think that's all I've done this weekend, but it's only 2pm on Sunday... ;)

Posted by griffjon at 01:28 PM

February 15, 2005

Niece

This, by overwhelming evidence, is both my niece, and possibly one of the cutest babies evar!!!11one!!! Or something like that.

Posted by griffjon at 09:32 PM

February 14, 2005

Free trip to Boston?

Thank you for your application for graduate study in the program in [MIT] Media Arts and Scinces. Your application has been reviewed, and if at all possible, Prof. [...] has asked us to invite you to visit the Media Laboratory for interviews with our faculty.

dizamn! MIT Interviews. I talked to this prof during my trip, and he has I think one or two slots open for the Fall, so I guess I'm on some form of short-ish list. Now, I just need to schedule a trip, I get up to $400 reimbursed for airfare.

When it rains, it floods. This might actually end up being a hard decision!

In related news, Elliot School (GWU) is bugging me because they didn't get my recommendations, due to their application portal not working right, but I'm on that, and it's working now, and I view it as a good sign (or, at least, not a bad sign) that they're bugging me at this late date.

Posted by griffjon at 03:26 PM

February 13, 2005

This Week on "This Old DasBlueHaus"

So, this weekend, my projects (at least the ones I'm admitting to having, because I did them) were:

Finish the mosaic on the DoorTable
Improving the entryway stairs (sanded and re-varnished, they look real nice, too bad I have no skin on my fingertips!)
Re-arranged bedroom for better space usage

As an added bonus, since the weather was SO DAMNED NICE sunday, I planted the garden (well, I put seeds for Habaneros in the ground, and tomatoes and Jalapenos in planters) (with one Very Painful Habanero-oil incident that I won't get into. It, ironically, doesn't have anything to do with the lack of skin on my fingers, my hands seem to have pretty high pain tolerance.

I also put screens up on some of the windows they'd been removed from for whatever reason, so as to better enjoy the Free Weather effect without having bees check me out.

Posted by griffjon at 02:18 PM

February 05, 2005

Feelin' Better

Friday night, me and some other Jamaica RPCVs (two from my group, and a girl from G65 (T-Beach Amy, who got married in TB last year) went down to St. Ed's, whose African-Heritage student group hosted a Marley bday celebrationm, with a live Marley cover-band, and free chicken rice and peas (not very good rice and peas). We hung out there for a few hours chatting about Ja (Amy was a good friend with Carla, who lived in my same house during her time there, and shadowed my PC sector director when she was just a volunteer) (it's a frickin' small world!) Anyhow, that was great, but then we split up and went home. The G73ers called me up and told me to join them at Flamingo Cantina downtown, for more reggae tunes, so I headed down and we walked over from their yard near 6th street.

The music at Flamingo was alright, nothing special, but they had Red Stripe, and as we sat upstairs talking about re-adjustment woes and what we missed (and didn't miss at all) about Ja, we kept smelling authentic jerk, but figured it was just something drifting over from a restaurant, consufed with out noses longing for some jerk vibes. At some point, I went downstairs to refill our Stripe supply, and noticed that indeed, there was a jerk man serving up some authentic chicken, rice and peas. He was from St. Mary, near Annatto Bay.

DAMN, I never thought I'd crave Ja food, but this was truly ambrosia.

It was also great to be around other people going through the same readjustment pains, and having the same problems ("where'd you serve?" "Jamaica" "Oh, tough" *smack*).

Also, Mom helped out with a great, ego-expanding email that further contained good advice:

Just read your journal entry S A D and thought I would offer some thoughts (!) Vague discontent with one's life is not necessarily a bad thing. It keeps one from becoming smug, satisfied with the status quo, blind to other's plights, and boring. One should never lose the hope that one can do more and better things. Of course, taken to extremes you get to be 62 and still haven't decided what to be when you grow up. I have always thought I should be doing more, achieving more. You are my one saving grace. You have become a better person than I could ever hope for. I take a small bit of the credit for that.
...
Now some advice....go for a walk. Get active. Do something. Make plans for after work. Spring will come. Life will happen.

Posted by griffjon at 06:17 PM

February 03, 2005

S.A.D.?

I really find it hard to be motivated about $job. It pays me $money. I try to save $money and not spend it on Shiney Things, to widen my options for $gradschool this fall. $gradschool -> $degree, and $degree will enable me to get into a new level of development jobs, where I'll actually be back to doing things I care about. I find it hard to care about $money. Most of the things I want right now can't be bought, even with MasterCard.

So the gratification for my current efforts is ~3 years off, down a long road. It's hard to keep that all in focus. I wish $job had more direct benefit to the world. I wish the systems at $job were not so fragile and train-wreck prone, and that I was not inheriting responsibility for them.

I think I'm in a vague funk. It remains cold and dark (I don't know how you folks further north can deal with this for months on end). I'm lonely on two levels -- the whole being single level, which makes the cold doubly worse by having no one to snuggle with through multiple snooze alarms, and also a bit on the friend level. I mean, I have all my Austin peeps (whose who are still here at least), but I still have some problems -- there's just this massive gap in understanding between us. Sometimes it's amusing, sometimes it's endlessly frustrating. There's also been a sea-change in people here; all my friends are suddenly in the settling-down phase, they have reasonably stable relationships, and are buying or thinking of buying/planning saving for houses, with this built-in presumption that Austin is The Place for them.

This just feels weird, and combined with the blahness of the rest of it, it doesn't sit well.

I feel (again) like almost everyone else got the Handbook of How to Live your Life, and I lost my copy.

Or maybe I threw it out the window.

Posted by griffjon at 07:57 PM

January 30, 2005

So, Jon, what did you do this weekend?

This weekend, I:
-Had a party for my birthday
-made a table out of an old door
-bought materials to mosaic and finish the table project
-raked more of the yard
-dug up a plot for the spring garden
-planted some basil, cilantro, and rosemary in inside pots
-finally installed a new light in my bathroom
-cleaned up after all that.

Posted by griffjon at 11:17 PM

Hilary lays the smack down

Hilary posts some hard and fast numbers. If the pro-birth crowd (not accurate to call 'em pro-life) really wants to reduce the number of abortions, maybe they should look at the numbers again.

[Hilary Clinton] said there could be a link between a decline in so-called "comprehensive" sexual education and an increased number of terminations.

It is unclear however if abortion rates have gone up or down under Mr Bush.

Since taking office in 2001, he has tightened legislation regulating terminations.

He has also boosted funding for sexual abstinence programmes which are not allowed to promote contraception.
...

Speaking to a conference of family abortion rights supporters in New York, Mrs Clinton said that during her husband's administration, family planning funding was a priority and "we saw the rate of abortion consistently fall."

"The abortion rate fell by one quarter between 1990 and 1995, the steepest decline since Roe was decided in 1973," Mrs Clinton said, referring to the Roe v Wade decision which legalised abortion.

"The rate fell another 11 percent between 1994 and 2000."

(BBC)

Posted by griffjon at 09:20 PM

January 29, 2005

Yesterday in the Life of Jon

The party was pretty excellent -- cool, calm, with good friends -- lots of people, even a few RPCV peeps from Jamaica were able to show up! Good times, good ritas, and a call from Kathy.

Posted by griffjon at 11:21 PM

Today in the Life of Jon

Blanu and I headed up to his dad's place in Round Rock to take advantage of the crazy number of tools he has available, and we did the majority of work on turning an old door into a coffee table for my living room, photos will follow of the completed project. It's looking pretty nice so far.

We got home too tired and late to bother with food, so we went over to a take-out chinese place, where some police were eating -- and having an in-depth discussion about how to pirate their DVDs and XBox games. It took a lot of effort to neither laugh nor ask them what they thought the moral implications of police pirating DVDs were, and if they supported Bush.

Posted by griffjon at 11:03 PM

January 25, 2005

more $Job

I've finally whacked some moles in $job, and am getting Stuff accomplished. I was a bit worried for most of last week, as I was at the bottom of a Lot of Really Steep learning curves.

Things I've gotten into in about a week:

-ISA (Internet Security and Accelleration) Server management, routing, and firewall/vpn'ing
-mysql installation, backups/restores
-Apache2/Tomcat setup (a really good webserver, plus a java server page server)
-Continuing development on this craaaazy perl parser that reads Word documents
-IIS (MS's web server) installation (it's only to play with an old version of the site, not for anything live)

Plus, the office's byzantine filing system, and the process by which we license things, and I've gotten to read all these nifty new inventions which I can't really talk about.

Posted by griffjon at 10:22 PM

January 19, 2005

More House Repairs

Installed (ghetto) curtains in my bedroom, replacing the stick-curtain things that didn't really suffice to block out streetlights at night, and had dubious privacy qualities.

I moved one of the stick curtains to the kitchen.

Hopefully I'll at some point be motivated to nice-up the curtains, they're not hemmed or anything, but that's a lot of work to take something that's already functional to looking better.

Posted by griffjon at 08:43 PM

January 18, 2005

Wrrk, Day 2

$job looks to be busy, but not hectic. It's a good job, the only problem being it's the heavy weight of The Job as an abstract concept of something I go to every morning, every weekday, and it doesn't save the world. I get to see interesting new tech, which is fun. I can certainly enjoy it for a few months, and basically I just need to defeat the mindgame around working a 9-5 in Austin as opposed to Doing Real Work That Helps People, like Chanita is doing.

Once I get a bit more settled and comfy with a schedule here, I'll be seeking out some local projects to do free or cheap IT geekery for. Well, I'll continue to do remote tech support for Chana's Esperanza En Accion, naturally, but she already has geek support.

Posted by griffjon at 07:08 PM

January 17, 2005

You down with OKC? Yeah, you know me!

This extended weekend, I road-tripped up to Oklahoma City to meet Chana before she flew back to Nica in a week or two. This involved crashing at the ever-gracious Chad's, and meeting a whole bevy of people in their friend group at their weekly Drunken Games Night and Food Nights.

I'm writing this down at the Austin Games Night, after the long drive, so my already-fragmented thoughts on the weekend are further fragmented by very odd comments floating in and games being organized.

It was all very amusing -- Chana's friends remind me strongly of the Austin crowd of my friends, with many of the same foibles and fun as my group, so we played well together. Chana and I didn't have too much time to hang and exchange PC and 3rd World stories, because she's insanely busy with getting all the Ts crossed and Is dotted before she flies back. Even given the lack of time and mutual wiped-outedness from driving and such it was still great to put a face to the name (or something like that?).

The drive was gruelling, but not too bad, I've done worse, (and not regretted it, either). Forth Worth sucked, as they closed down all but one lane of traffic (but kept all the on-ramps open!), so as to do minor repairs to one off-ramp. This took ~45 minutes to get ~2mi down the road. Beyond that, I made great time. I-35 people speed like demons, so even by being in the slow crowd I probably averaged ~75mph.

OKC itself is HUGE and sprawly, which is unpleasant, but the bricktown section was nice (Chana gave me a driving tour), and the memorial is awe-inspiring.

Posted by griffjon at 07:37 PM

January 15, 2005

OKC

I'm going up to OKC this weekend to visit Chanita while she's in the States, and plan world-changing development! Or just chill and share PC and living-in-the-third-world stories.

Posted by griffjon at 11:20 AM

Fridge, II

GAH, the replacement fridge died yesterday. I moved everything over to Blanu's fridge this morning, hopeuflly I didn't wake him up. Called the appliance recycler people, and they say they'll replace it Monday afternoon, so hopefully I can get back into town by then. This is almost as bad as Ja in getting and keeping things working!

Posted by griffjon at 11:15 AM

January 14, 2005

Job, Day 1

The first day on the $job went pretty well. I'm more confident I can handle it all, and so on. Interesting crowd of people and students working there. Not sure what else to report on that front right now.

Posted by griffjon at 06:08 PM

January 11, 2005

More House Repair

Jan 8

• Moved last of stuff in (desk, TV, etc)
• Plants!
• More work on Bench of Zen area
• Put kitchen in order

Jan 9

• Finished raking north side of yard
• Began Porch Renewal Project, adding another pathway, planning for burn-pit access, etc.
• Fridge received!
• Bought $100 of groceries
• baking-powdered the carpet.
• Began a more sane re-wiring to reduce the crazy amount of cables running around for no reason.

Jan 10

• Re-string lights in yard
• Finished second path to porch
• Re-wiring of data, tv, phone cables with Blanu for better cable ability
• Vacuuming

Jan 11

• Stone bench/stools around burn pit
• Birdseed!
• Rat poison!
• More raking
• Plant re-potting and bringing inside
• Linux desktop install
• Smell-pretty plugin for living room
First meal -- Arepas and Asparagus!

Posted by griffjon at 08:31 PM

January 06, 2005

Austin House Repairs, round 1

Dec 28:

• Clean up trash out of living room, move in furniture
• more cleaning

Dec 29:

• sweep, vacuum, mop all rooms
• organize and move around stuff
• set up hifi

Dec 31:

• Move in hifi cabinet (thanks Ben!)

Jan 1:

• hah, RIGHT.

Jan 2:

• Nothin' much

Jan 3

• During Games Night I finshed the tile job in the kitchen that had been started long ago.

Jan 4

• began raking backyard
• moved bricks around into pathways
• Created Bench of Zen
• Organized kitchen
• cleaned doors
(first night to sleep in house!)

Jan 5

• Made path to foundation
• more raking
• more bricks to BoZ area
• decorative rocks
• dug out burnpit
• strung xmas/yard lights higher, found a short the hard way
• weather stripping
• tiled/caulked (most of) bathroom
• got speaker wire set up, Dolby 5.1 surround sound working on hifi

Jan 6

• Maintenance man came by, installed oven connection, works well (no pilot light, but hey)
• Fridge getting replaced tomorrow. Sad to see kegerator gone, but saved the keg/tap connection for possible re-use.
• Weather-stripping/caulking of some windows

Posted by griffjon at 01:06 PM

January 05, 2005

New Years Sum-up

I drove in to Austin on the 28th to move large furniture items in, arrange my lease, and so on. My new flat-mate blanu helped in the very difficult task of moving my futon frame up the stairs. I stayed with Mo and Mike. The next day I spent cleaning the apartment (it was very messy, to say the least), and then in the afternoon going around in preparation for Kathy's arrival that evening, which included checking in to the Omni Hotel (thanks to a reasonable price garnered through Priceline).

The 30th, we lolled in the Omni for as long as possible, then went by my apartment for awhile, and then down to MisterNihil's, where we would camp for the next few days. For dinner, we hung out with some of Kathy's friends in Austin, recently married with cute cats.

On the 31st we slept in and putzed around, and then went crazy going around doing pre-NYE-party chores and trying to find a shirt similar to one K had bought in Austin a few years ago, but with no luck. . We got out to the party house in Spicewood around 7 and I "whipped up" a huge batch of veggie chili, which seemed to be popular.

The party was excellent -- great reunion of all the exAustinites, and it turns out one of Kathy's close college friends was the best friend of the host (small world effect), and they both "had friends in PC/Jamaica... wouldn't it be funny if they knew each other...?" We had massive amounts of mostly healthy food, fun drinks, games (including Drunk or Nude, which is like truth or dare, but for friendly, non-vindictive people), and chillin. The party began to wind down around 5AM, so I set up the back of the truck with a tarp and my futon matress as our bed for the "night", and it was surprisingly comfy. Sorry about the shocks, Dad ;)

The rest of the 1st was spent lounging around, cleaning up, walking down to th Green Hole on the pedernales river, making and eating homemade breakfast burritos, and collaging (the traditional post-NYE party activity). Scans of the collage will be available shortly. I was all intent on making a cool retro-computer collage with these 70s and 80s era computer magazines, but got horribly side-tracked. The night of the first, K and I tried to walk around Town Lake, but it was too dark to go very far, I think we might've gone a mile or so.

We had planned to go out to Enchanted Rock on the second, but it was rainy and misty in the morning, so we turned the 6AM alarm clock off...and slept till noon. I guess we needed to catch up on sleep a bit? We hiked around down at the greenbelt when it cleared off in the afternoon, and talked about religion a lot. I realized I've become a pretty hardened atheist.

For lunch on the third we went out to Opie's, so Kathy could get the authentic Texas BBQ experience, and came back to meet a friend of hers at Amy's Ice Cream (yum), and then walked around to BookPeople, Treaty Oak, and such. It was Games Night, so we went by that (it's currently being hosted in my living room, luckily Blanu has a spare key, so I didn't need to be there to open up or close down, as K and I were pretty worn out. We went out for dinner at Ararat.

On the 4th we had to get up pre-dawn and get Kathy to the airport, where she got special consideration by the security folks, so it took her forever to get through, but she did, and reached Maryland safely.

That's our third parting. I can only say they don't get any easier. Having her in Austin for NYE was great fun tho.

Posted by griffjon at 11:55 PM

December 31, 2004

Resolutions for 2005

So, resolutions of the past first. In 2000, my resolution was to have a girlfriend, which kinda worked. 2001 got more exciting, with some, mostly unfulfilled but lofty ideas, like figuring out direction, and getting a girlfriend (again). 2002 was a good year for resolutions, and I fulfilled them all. I didn't
resolve to get a girlfriend, but yet I had a good relationship nonetheless, which just goes to prove the old adage. 2003 resolutions were pretty lame, but I think only because I stopped mid-sentence, and can't seem to find the rest of the entry.

Last year's:
I've continued to let myself slide in Jamaica, and need to devote myself to walking more, and eating in a more healthy fashion, and at least regaining my Venezuelan physique, if not better. I must figure out the next step in my journey, as this current one finishes in August. I resolve to assist in regime change in the US this next election.

I managed 2k4 alright, resolution-wise, mostly because they weren't very strenuous. Thanks to K for the last one, even tho it didn't pan out. Let's look at 2k5:

--Grad School: Get in, keep focused, kick ass, try not to go into too deep of debt. I need to stay strongly focused on IT in development and resist the temptations of plan2-ing my grad school (scattershot approach to studies great for undergrad, not so much for grad), also resist the temptations of letting whichever program I end up in directing me overmuch.

--Geekliness: I need to upgrade my geek cred now that I'm back. Getting stuff working at Job will provide a lot of this, and re-vamping my contact tool to use perl:DBI and other fun tools will also help. Also, contact-list-wise, just getting all my people-info combined into one coherent document will be a great stride in organization.

--Activism: I have problems with being in the US, and I want to redirect this frustration into positive activism, both on the warm-fuzzy volunteering for good causes kind, and the sabre-rattling kind of doing protests, and continuing doing some political posts on the GriffJon.com blog, and trying, in my own small ways, to get people to look again at current events and consider what's going on in the world.

--Travel: Not a likelihood for 2k5, but I want to maintain it as an ideal.

--Live a good life: Especially over the next few months, I need to combine saving money, being good with the job, and living healthily, and simply. I need to catch myself and maintain my Peace Corps money sensibilities and frugalities -- PC/J was good with money, if you directed carefully what you splurged on, and lived simply in other areas. I hope to continue this in Austin and beyond. Stuff weighs you down, and until you're ready to decide on a place for more than just a few years, it hinders your ability to move about, and moving about has been so nice to me the past few years.

--Figure out things.

Posted by griffjon at 12:23 PM

December 22, 2004

Not Ghana Do it

GeekCorps,

I'm sorry to say that I'm just not ready to head back out into the field right now. I've spent the past three years now out, and have had endless difficulties in managing the grad school application process, (resulting in having to do it again for next fall) and I just need some stateside time to make sure my graduate school application process this time around goes through, loans/grants/scholarships work out, and being available for grad school interviews.

It's an amazing opportunity, and I've gotten very little sleep the past few nights debating endlessly with myself on it, but the scales are tipped, ever so slightly, with getting things in order here, to smooth out the next few years of my life.

I realize this puts you and MISTOWA in a tight spot. To mitigate this as much as I can, I would be more than happy to offer whatever technical support via the Internet that I am able to do, from Q&A to suggestions of web design tools and techniques, to even creation of templates, graphics, etc. If their web server setup permits it, I can log in from here and help tweak things around, all as a pure volunteer, and explain what I do to enable skills transfer and sustainability.

And, 3 months or so down the line, after grad school acceptances, funding status, loan requests and whatnot are all squared away, if there's still need on this or other projects, I'd love to talk again.

Regards,
Jon

Posted by griffjon at 01:13 PM

What I want

Is to build and hide inside a good couch-pillow fortress. It's snowing outside and I remain undecided about Ghana/Austin.

We told you this would happen if you didn't properly plastic-wrap and tape your cushion-fort

Posted by griffjon at 09:02 AM

December 21, 2004

Pro/Ghana take 2

I keep maing a decision, and then changing my mind. I'm choosing between a complete unknown and a partially-unknown.

I've spent a while thinking pro-Austin, and was convinced that Ghana was the obvious choice. I've spent the past 2 days planning to go to Ghana, and am having serious second thoughts about it. A lot of it boils down to plain whineyness -- I'm not ready to go back to being a volunteer again. I like ubiquitous Internet. I like being able to walk with my laptop and not fear of having it stolen. Hell, I like being able to walk around and not be in fear of a hold-up. I like not sweating constantly. I like the casual inherent wealth of Austin (albeit, that's comparitive to my previous living situation).

But does this wimpyness mean that I'm not cut out for development work? Does it destroy the "me" that I've been constructing? Or am I just fucking tired of the shit I went through in Jamaica, and fearful that returning to another formerly British post-colonial nation with a huge history of slave-trade would be another Jamaica? I do not want to have to argue with some a-hole who blocks my cell phone number about whether my water is turned off or not on a daily basis. I've been there, it wasn't fun.

And, of course, most international development workers I knew in Jamaica got fat money compared to the local economy, live in nice places with big water tanks, had cars, AC, etc. etc. etc. so maybe these I'm-not-worthy worries are pointless anyway.

That being said, I'd prolly be living it a hotel there, with AC is likely, with a lot more money than the PCVs in the area get.

I want to have done it, but I don't know about wanting to do it. Historically, every decision that is between "new experience" and anything else, the right choice is the new experience. Also, whenever I suck it up and jump in to something, I do well and have a fine time of it. But inexplicably the more times I do this, the harder it becomes to keep doing it.

Ghana		Austin
PRO	CON	PRO	CON
Outside of US Excellent resume fodder (esp. for my intended line of work) USAID, more Int'l Dev contacts New Experience Maybe learn some French (Update: or not, it was a British Colony :( ) Learn what that weird wingding/adinkra font means Don't have to move all my crap from San Angelo yet (especially good if I do grad in DC) Better living conditions than PC Another country, another continent It'd only be ~4-5 months probably, uncertain termination date really -- but, very high likelihood that it would carry me through to grad school acceptance/rejection time, which enables me to make informed decisions about where to move afterwards. cool wildlife, elephants Far, far away from neocons	No addition to savings for grad school It's another post-British-colonial, slave-history nation It's fucking hot and dusty and rather bleak looking Lots of embassy staff report not wanting to go back if they knew at the beginning of their stint what they knew at the end Malaria medication Living in a hotel Back to the tropical heat No good Internet No potable water 3rd world realities, hardships Problems with dealing with application complications for Grad School, loan applications, etc.	Get to improve on La_Chispa's concept of "poorggeoisie" style Could save money for grad school, and any amount saved is worth almost double that to not pay back as a loan If I do UT for grad school, good contacts in Austin will already have been made Easy to deal with ongoing process of applications, loans, grants, etc. for grad school Stay and fight the neocons There are some interesting projects in Austin that I could get in touch with for warm-fuzzies if/when the job goes to part/time Doesn't burn Neil Standard Austin Benefits (familiarity, wireles, coffeehouses, Central Market) I know peeps in Austin Easier and cheaper to visit people in the States Comfort level, safety, etc. -- it's so nice to be able to walk around freely, at night, not worry about getting stuff stolen or robbed (sheepish) I want it easy for a bit!	Back to Austin If I do Austin for Grad school, I get Austin benefits for Fall If I don't do Austin for Grad school, I have to move/sell (including the Big Stuff) AGAIN I wouldn't have a car Miguel's is closed :( A lot of people have left Austin The job will be very time-consuming, and not much in the warm-fuzzy helping humanity dept.

I realize a few of those con-Ghana/pro-Austin are terribly bourgeoisie. In the case of the Embassy staff comment, I did compare it to Jamaica responses, which were scarily enough more positive. My only reply is that I've dealt with worse, for two years, and have no immediate interest in having to deal with it more.

Safety comparisons: A lot of people have given me crap about my potentially skewed view of safety in the States. Let me give some examples of why this is total BS: open coat racks (i.e. no attendant) -- they exist, and aren't totally ransacked. Also, at a club in Boston, I inadvertently left 2 pair of nice gloves and a beautiful scarf and a hat on a bench (they fell out of the bundle of junk I was compiling to check). I disappeared to a completely different part of the club, danced for a while, came back, and not only were they still sitting on the bench in this crowded club, someone had folded the damn scarf.

Posted by griffjon at 09:11 PM

December 20, 2004

Further Ghana Encouragement

From the people in-country:

They all will be provided Internet access at the place of work and can arrange with IFDC for Internet at their residence for home-based work. As to details on life in Ghana, they should try Lonely Planet or Ghana-based websites.

We can use Jon as long as he cares to stay - there will be plenty of work for him to do! Just let us know when he wants to be fielded in January.

Man. I might have to go. The stipend is 600/month plus up to 45/night for housing (most of their volunteers stay in hotels). I'm trying to find some Cost Of Living figures for Accra.

Posted by griffjon at 03:06 PM

December 19, 2004

Ghana (Continued)

I thought I'd made a decsion on Ghana, but nooooo, they have to be all flexible and shit. They're OK with waiting until mid-January for me to head out there (presuming I will be in dialog with the people who've begun work on the project). There's an inital deadline in Feb/Mar for some form of the website to be live and working, but the project could extend through another few months, and realistically, is likely to not be a done deal in ~ 1 month. It's a 3-part project for which I'll be the web guy, there's also a DB part of it (any DB programmers wanna go to Ghana this Spring? They're lookin), and a V/Sat person to link remote databases to the website via sat-links.

Here's their initial project description:

The MISTOWA project resource center will create a portal web site that links the public to producer organizations, trader organizations, regional market information systems, and other important websites throughout the region in order to increase regional trade. Marketing information, prices, publications, market news, directories, information on grades and standards, transport road conditions, credit options, etc will be available through the MISTOWA Resource Center website. The RATIN system in East Africa is a good example of the model that the MISTOWA Resource Center will follow, www.ratin.net.

I need a pro/con list I think:

Ghana		Austin
PRO	CON	PRO	CON
Outside of US Excellent resume fodder (esp. for my intended line of work) USAID, more Int'l Dev contacts New Experience Maybe learn some French (Update: or not, it was a British Colony :( ) Learn what that weird wingding/adinkra font means Don't have to move all my crap from San Angelo yet (especially good if I do grad in DC) Better living conditions than PC Another country, another continent It'd only be ~4-5 months probably, uncertain termination date really -- but, very high likelihood that it would carry me through to grad school acceptance/rejection time, which enables me to make informed decisions about where to move afterwards.	No addition to savings for grad school (but really, how much will I manage to save in Austin?) Malaria medication Living in a hotel Back to the tropical heat	Potentially could increase saved money Doesn't burn Neil Standard Austin Benefits (familiarity, wireles, coffeehouses, Central Market) I know peeps in Austin	Back to Austin If I do Austin for Grad school, I get Austin benefits for Fall If I don't do Austin for Grad school, I have to move (including the Big Stuff) AGAIN I wouldn't have a car Miguel's is closed :(

OK, so, the Ghana-Pro list is pretty long. I also realize that I'm in the enviable postition of choosing between two different jobs with different (and unique) benefits.

Posted by griffjon at 05:20 PM

December 17, 2004

Turning down Ghana

If only it were a bit different...

To: GeekCorps

The work I have set up in Austin is very time sensitive, and will take be through until I start graduate school, and turning it down would burn a contact a bit. I'd love to join GeekCorps for Ghana, but I need to keep myself occupied without eating away at savings until at least June/July 2k5, as grad school will no doubt take care of my savings as-is. Even under the most ideal of circumstances, I'd be unable to fly out before Jan 15 due to existing commitments. I don't feel that the MISTOWA project, with such a close deadline, will work with my timeframe. If it had a longer scope, or was less time-sensitive in its starting date, it's an excellent opportunity that I would jump on -- for example, if I could work at the Austin contract through until it is able to be passed on in May or so, and then do two months in Ghana, that would be excellent, and please let me know if this becomes the case. I realize nevertheless that with funding being as it is, IESC/GC is probably not so flexible with its projects (I worked closely with USAID during my PC stint, and realize the funding 'spurts' that occur).

I hope you are able to complete this position, and wish I had a different schedule with contracts here such that I could be the person to fill it.

Please keep me in the loop for further contracts, as I expect my schedule to change rather often over the next year.

Best of luck and happy holidays,

Jon Camfield
RPCV, Kingston Jamaica 2002-04, IT Adviser/Webmaster, Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture

Posted by griffjon at 12:11 PM

December 15, 2004

So, Ghana...

I chatted with the IESC/GeekCorps rep tonight, and so here's the dealio. They need this like fast, they got screwed by funding vs deadline timing, so it'd be prolly 2, maybe 3 months in the field (Accra, Ghana) starting basically ASAP. This would be great... if I didn't have a good-paying job waiting for me in Austin, also ASAP. If I didn't have anything in Austin, it would be no loss, but to turn down this job (and in doing so, probably burn this contact a bit), I open up a problem for what happens at the end of the GC assignment, in March or so, at which point I won't have yet heard back from grad schools for sure yet.

It's also gone a lot higher level -- it's closely entwined with USAID nowadays, which is fine, but the new "owners" of GeekCorps are focused less on the young geek crowd and more on the executive/professional crowd, so the vaunted GeekHalla is gone, and the 'volunteers' get put up in hotels and such.

Which would prolly mean A/C, which I'd like, but it also just doesn't sound anywhere near as friendly and fun as the http://geekhalla.org crowd seemed.

I ponder. Opinions welcomed.

And yes, I realize that I'm bitching about the choice between a good-paying job in Austin for which I extended almost no effort to get for myself, or being put up in a hotel in a foreign country for 2 months to do web work with a local business. It's not a real blog unless you whine and moan!

Posted by griffjon at 10:32 PM

December 13, 2004

Crossroads

(Warning: this is yet another in the whining-about-the-future series, not a political post)

Caveat -- I know that, as always before, when it comes time to just jump the fuck in and deal with it, I will pull through, and probably excel in the process. I do best when I jump in and have to deal. If I am in a situation where I can avoid dealing with crap, I will.

That being said, I maintain that part of this ability is because I worry and over-prepare for things beforehand, which is the mode I'm currently in. My general mood is also being heavily influenced by my love for keeping options open, my wanderlust, my fears of the person I was and could again become in Austin, and a whole bevy of other concerns.

The current working plan is to occupy myself for the next few months, working and living in Austin, making as much money as I can (to save) while here. Obvious sub-goals are to maintain or become more fit, and not fail to enjoy life in the whole process. How many months depends heavily on which schools accept me. If one of the DC area schools accepts (and has money) for me, I will try to pick up and move there ASAP and get a job in DC through into the school year, and then move it to part-time or somesuch. If MIT accepts me, I'll prolly stay in Austin a bit longer, and then move up there a few months beforehand to find a place to live and try to ease my way in to new skills which I'll need to have down (before the massive train of MIT whomps me a good one). If Washington/Evans School, I'm not sure -- I don't know much about the area, so I'll ask people who do. Also, it depends on the monies. If it's UT, then, well, *shrug* not much to do, huh? Depending on UT monies/jobs/etc., I might take a short vacation before starting up there (by vacation, I mean going far away, not doing nothing in Austin).

This is all predicated on getting into a grad school, and getting sufficient funding that I don't have to take on astronomical debt. I'm accepting of the fact that debt will most likely be accrued, but there's a big difference in 10-20k or 60-80k, especially if I'm going to be doing consulting / IT work in development projects -- they don't pay outstanding amounts.

This weekend I am laying the groundwork for Austin -- I found a place to stay for a bit, it's "Das Haus" as known to many of my friends, it's an old, outwardly-delapidated house in WC (West Campus). It's pricey for the amenities, but cheap for WC, and if I do end up at UT, it's an ideal location. It's close to some grocery supplies, etc. It also is close to most of the major bus routes for town, including a route to get me to the second important part of living in Austin, a job, which I think I have a solid lead on, I'm going for an informal interview/introduction to the work this afternoon.

I won't have a car, and I'll be generally minimizing my living expenses -- Peace Corps style, I'll maximize on things that are most important to me which don't incur big costs. As la_chispa refers to it, poorgeoisie. Hey, it's actually a good way to live.

I've kinda ignored, thus far, the concerns of my introduction -- Austin, wanderlust, options, and more. I think I can deal with the me-in-Austin effect, by the mental trick of me-in-a-totally-different-scene in Austin. I'm not a college student with support of my parents and discretionary income, I'm not a dot-com whizkid with mad monies, I'm not a freelance contract shorttimer, I'm a soon-to-be grad student, living simply. Done. Options-open, well, is a constant mental battle in me, and that wouldn't change no matter where I go, what I do, it's just me.

Now, the wanderlust, tho, that's a bitch. Coming back to Austin is a dangerous thing. Austin is a nice place. It's a mini-Blue state, it's chock full of my friends, random fun people, cool things, excellent weather, etc etc. But I'm not ready to call it home, or settle. Not that moving back means that, but it took the dot-com crash to shake me out of the Austin-trance last time around, and that was 6.5 years (4 at UT, OK, but still). It's a black hole in and of itself.

So, I re-applied for GeekCorps during this whole Grad school application process. It was a fun diversion from the mindsucking statements of purpose. I got a few emails from them in their hopes that I spoke French (they remain mostly in Africa). While I hope to learn French, I don't really know it at all right now. But then, I got an email (and subsequently have a phone interview Wednesday) for a webhead position in Ghana for 4-5 months starting in January. From my initial peekings into the workings of their Ghana program and such, I can only say this is a temptation. It's only 5 months, I can handle 5 months, and it'd be Something Completely Different! Not that sub-saharan Africa is somewhere that was on my list of places to go, but damn, I bet it'd be interesting, and not-bad timing. The main downside would be I wouldn't earn any money, and could potentially spend a bit of what I already have. But experience-wise, man...

Posted by griffjon at 10:55 AM