amherst
Issues around town
Eight years ago, I set up a text-based adventure game with my older son called "Muppyville". He was in fourth grade. We showed it to all the kids in his class for one class session and then he and a handful of his friends played it for months.
There was a little boy who was fascinated by the potential of Muppyville to exert power over the other children. He created places in the game that he could lead unwary people into where they would be trapped and he could taunt them and then leave them stuck there. He eventually figured out that he could change his "name" to "1imako", which looked a lot like the username name I used "limako" (the first character is a a one instead of an "L"). And then he would pretend to be me to other kids but then insult them and use obscenities -- among other things. I gave him a couple of chances to straighten up, but eventually I had to block his access and tell him he would have to have his parents contact me if he wanted access again. He was understandably reluctant to do that.
Fast forward to 2011: According to my son, this boy got an administrative password to "Powerschool" -- the database that the school uses to maintain records -- and subtly adjusted a few of his own test grades to change his grade from a B+ to an A. And he got caught! Reportedly, he was suspended and all of the colleges and universities he had applied to were notified of his academic dishonesty.
Some people just never learn...
Tom and I left early on Saturday and drove to Manchester for Drupal Camp NH. Tom and I met around the turn of the century when he worked for me in the BCRC supported by our Pew course redesign grant. Since then, he's gone onto graduate school, fatherhood, and other harrowing adventures. He does freelance web design work in the area, but is super busy with babies and work and life, so I don't get to see him very often. We were both looking forward to the drive to actually have some time to talk and reconnect, let alone to share the experience of Drupal Camp.
We arrived right on time and in good order. Check-in went smoothly. They provided a little card you could slip into your badgeholder with the morning schedule on one side and the afternoon schedule on the other -- that was a useful innovation, to not have to refer to some separate piece of paper.
Tom and I intentionally selected different talks to attend in order to get maximum coverage. The first I attended was about Drupal security Hack-proof your Drupal App by ebeyerent. It was fantastic. I'm reasonably familiar with security and Drupal security, but I still learned a lot. The biggest insight I got was to understand that Drupal doesn't vet user input. Although you have "input filters", Drupal generally saves user input directly into the database (with the exception of escaping meta-characters that might allow SQL injection) and then its the responsibility of the themer/programmer to ensure that they check user input on output before displaying it (and there are eight different functions for doing this in particular contexts: check_plain(), t(), l(), etc). Getting this insight alone was worth the trip.
Another great insight I had actually learned from Tom on the way down. We had begun talking about developing for the mobile platform (something I've been meaning to learn more about for a couple of years) and he mentioned that the keyword was "responsive design" and that the modern approach was to design first for mobile, which is generally the most limited platform. This helps focus on the key functionality that the website needs to provide and make sure that its accessible. Later, you can easily add-on a pretty, fancy skin for giant monitors. But getting people to focus on what's important is harder when the primary concern most people have in that context is aesthetics. With this preparation, I went to Jake Strawn's presentation on "Responsive Drupal Today" where he said all this again with many excellent examples drawn from his work on Omega.
In the third session, nothing grabbed me, so I went to the code-sprint room and spent some time trying to hack on the Nodewords module. With the guest wireless, I couldn't use ssh to get to a server so, instead, I spent most of my time installing apache, mysql, php, drupal, and nodewords and, at the end of the hour, had only gotten to the point of configuring the module and looking through the issue queue. I tried applying a user-submitted patch for one issue to hack on it a bit, but it didn't apply cleanly and I didn't have time to sort out what was wrong. It was unfortunate to not get any actual coding done, but still good use of my time.
Lunch was great: pizza, salad, etc. There was plenty of food and lots of snacks later. There wasn't any Coke Zero, which I would have preferred, but lots of bottles of water.
I went to Christina Inge's presentation on Analytics and Usability. The presentation was a little basic for me: too much time on why you should care about analytics, installing the google analytics module, and signing up for an account. I could have used more in-depth tricks on actually using the data. But I don't know how representative I was for the audience: the audience might have needed the more basic info.
The last presentation I attended was Why Drupal Projects Fail. This didn't really hold any surprises, but was a good reminder that the key issue is one of expectations. No matter if you think the project is a "success", if you violate the stakeholders expectations, the project will be perceived as a failure. Managing expectations requires good communication, transparency, and honesty. Good reminders.
Tom and I skipped the last presentation and tried to head home. We had been watching the forecast, but the storm was ahead of us. After a few miles, it became clear that the intelligent thing to do was to go back and find a hotel for the night. We got back to the conference in time for the closing plenary. We each won a prize in the raffle: I selected a copy of the Drupal 7 book and got the available authors to sign it.
On the way to the afterparty, we reserved a room at the Radisson and then spent a pleasant couple of hours at Milly's Tavern -- a great microbrew in Manchester. I tried the IPA and the Hopzilla: excellent bitter beer.
By the time we headed to the hotel, the snow was already several inches deep. As we approached the hotel, we found the roads barricaded by the police due to an event at the Arena that was across the street from the hotel. We drove all around the block looking for a way to get up to the hotel -- nearly getting stuck once or twice. Eventually get got in and spent a reasonably pleasant night in the hotel. I tried to check email and found that the servers were down. I was able to reach my home server, which helped me sleep a bit better.
The next morning, I foolishly decided not to breakfast before we left the hotel. I was eager to get going and didn't want a giant buffet breakfast, thinking that we could pick something up along the way. But it was clear once we got going that no place along the highway had power. Trees were smashed down everywhere. Tom thought we were driving through giant stands of birch trees, until we saw it was just wet snow coating the north-east sides of the tree trunks. Power was out along the Masspike too. At the second rest area, we found a McDonalds that had generator power -- they were only serving coffee and a few food items, but we got a bit to sustain us.
In Holyoke, we stopped at Tom's house. The snow looked to be around 1.5 feet deep, where it was in the shade. Many streets had downed branches and wires, but Tom's street was not too bad. We had to park on a side street, but we were able to get up to the house and touch base with Kirsten and the kids. They hadn't lost power. In a bit, we got back in the car and headed for Amherst.
There were no working traffic lights. Crazy people were driving right through them, rather than treating them as a 4-way stop. Insane. The power was off everywhere. A few business had generators, but whole the valley looked to be shut down.
At home, everyone was OK. The power had gone off around midnight, but there was no damage to the house or even to most of the trees. The cherry tree looked undamaged. Our azaleas were a bit smashed, but looked like they might recover. There was some water in the basement, but it hadn't yet gotten to the hot water heater (the first serious concern). Since then, we're just waiting for power.
After a long cold, night, we went for breakfast at Kelly's in shifts. Lucy and went first and confirmed that they were open and serving food. Alisa got the rest up and brought them a bit later. Afterwards, we headed for the BCRC to charge up our devices and get some connectivity. It's still going to be days before power is fully restored in Amherst, but we're not in some isolated cul-de-sac and we hope to get power back sooner rather than later. It's been quite an adventure.
Over the past couple of years, I've not been exercising sufficiently -- for a whole variety of reasons. This summer, I'm trying to build in enough time to get back into shape bicycling. So far, it's going pretty well.
My old bicycle was falling apart. I bought it used and it was a model that was known for having a good frame, but marginal components. And the components were all failing. When I got it, I had the idea of wanting to do mountain biking, so I took it off-road and am afraid I abused it a bit: riding in soft mud and cranking on it harder than it could probably take. The drive train was becoming worn out and it was beginning to lose spokes.
A couple of years ago, Lucy decided that she didn't want to ride anymore. She had a mountain bike that had been "used gently" and just needed a little tune-up: the bearings needed to be repacked and everything adjusted. I moved my Brooks saddle and my Continental tires over to Lucy's old bike and, voila, I was ready to hit the road.
My first rides were very short -- literally just around the block. But day-by-day, I've started making longer rides of 25-30 miles, arriving back home at the end of it barely able to turn the pedals.
One wonderful thing has been the extensions that have joined the Norwottuck, Northampton, and Manhan Rail Trails. Now I can ride to Northampton, Easthampton, and Williamsburg without leaving the trail. When I ride on the road, by comparison, it's a much less pleasant experience, with cars constantly roaring by.
In the Midwest, where I grew up, the roads were laid out in a grid, and so there were often alternate routes parallel to the main roads -- if a road was busy, just a half-mile or mile in either direction was a less-traveled road. Not so in New England, where almost all of the roads actually go somewhere.
I haven't set any particular goals for bicycling, but I'm planning to take my bike to Champaign when I go to visit Phil. And I'm looking forward to Copenhagen where (reportedly) there are bikes that you can borrow by putting a coin in a slot and retrieving the coin when you put the bike back in any of the corresponding racks around the city. If so, that will be great for exploring.
I had seen the right-wing's attack on unions coming -- they've had the talking points out there for a while. I feel a lot of solidarity with the brave folks in Wisconsin who are on the front lines of this vicious attack by the monied classes to shift more money from the working class to the hyper-wealthy.
I also appreciated this article (via Krugman) about how the unions and workers tried to convince Boeing they were stupid to outsource all the profitable parts of aircraft production. "On-the-job training for senior executives, it seems, can be very expensive."
Alisa pointed me at Gavin Andreeson's blog a while ago, which I put in my reader to monitor. He's a local technologist who writes principally about libertarian politics. The other day, he asked the question Why are teachers unionized? I responded to point out that teachers need a union for the same reason that other workers do: because their interests and their employer's interests aren't aligned. Here's my take on the exchange:
"But why are teachers forced to join unions and pay dues?" he asked.
"They're not," I replied. "Although, the contract may require them to pay agency fees if they don't join."
"But why are teachers singled out to pay agency fees?" he asked.
"They're not," I replied. "Police, firefighters, and many others have that in their contracts."
"But why do we make employers charge those fees," he asked.
"We don't -- they negotiated that as part of the contract and could renegotiate that, if they wanted to," I replied.
"Well, unions still suck."
"Whatever, dude."
Alisa and I were invited to a beer-tasting party at Mary Carey's house and had a nice time. There were around 30 people packed into the dining room. I was pleased to find a spot at the back of the room, where I could sit and chat with people quietly, out of the sturm und drang of the party.
We tasted 11 different kinds of beers, with a winter or holiday theme. A number of them were weird things, with raspberry or chocolate, but a few were just good beer. The Samuel Smith Winter Ale came out on top after the voting. Or some chocolate thing, depending on how you counted the votes, apparently. Alisa rather liked a raspberry lambic beer. It figures.
Alisa and I attended the Amherst 250th Gala on Saturday night. It was an amazing event. The organizers had done an outstanding job to create a festive atmosphere in the Campus Center Auditorium: a venue not known for it's native attractiveness (it being a monument to brutalism and all). The lighting and decorations were beautiful.
The most interesting decorations, of course, were the clothes that everyone was wearing. It was a "black tie optional" event and so most of the men were wearing either a tuxedo or a suit and for women fancy dresses were de_rigeur. It's very strange to be in that kind of environment. Some people live in that sort of milieu constantly. I feel rather out of place.
I mostly enjoyed the live music early in the evening. They played a mix of songs from the big-band era through to modern stuff. Later, however, the music was provided by a DJ and it became increasingly loud and obnoxious. Eventually, I had to leave the room because my throat was sore from trying to talk over the noise.
The University had organized two tables of participants and many of the high-level administrators were there: the chancellor, his wife, the CIO, the vice chancellor of A&F, etc. On the whole, I'm glad to see increasing engagement between the university and the town.
Alisa is running for re-election and seemingly knows everyone. It wasn't possible to walk from one place to another without her talking to each person along the way. I remember seeing a seminar once called "working the room like a pro". I think Alisa could teach that now. I enjoyed being able to "participate" in her discussions with other people, because then I didn't have to say anything and could just nod and listen to her. But she succeeded in ditching me for much of the evening and I had to talk to people.
I don't really like talking to people. I can enjoy talking about things I'm interested in, but those areas don't overlap with the general public very often. And it's a minefield to talk with people about anything related to the town or local politics because of Alisa's role. One guy was trying to organize people to pass an override to raise revenues for the school and I said, "But since we've already lost the Mark's Meadow school, what's the point? What's left to save?" I feel like Hagrid: I shouldn't have said that. Many of the people who know Alisa, see her as the only thing we have in common and end up trying to talk to me about her, which is similarly dangerous.
Early in the evening, I (half-heartedly? resignedly?) asked Alisa if she wanted to dance and she said, "No way." Alisa's friend Clare undertook as her special project to make both Alisa and I dance (separately, with her). I have little affinity for the terpsichorean muse, but I did my part, shuffling about and waving my arms like a drunken pelican. Alisa and I even went out later and danced a bit with each other. Clare is very sweet and a good friend.
Finally, at midnight, Alisa relented and we went home. I can't really say I enjoyed it thoroughly -- I just don't like things like that very much. But it was something.
There is a big construction project on campus to replace aging steam lines. A big chunk of the work is taking place around the intersection between my neighborhood and the University. They've been tearing up some parts of the intersection and have paved an alternative path for traffic that is going to be used for the next 2 (two!) years. I have been watching them construct this thing every day as I've biked to and from work (and home and back at lunch). Today, I actually tried to ride through the thing. Sanktan Merdon! It is terrifying! I've drafted the following letter and sent it to facilities planning and the town to see if they can't come up with some better accommodation for bicycles:
I live on North Pleasant just north of campus (5 Fairfield Street) and ride my bike to UMass every day. Today, I tried to actually ride through the repaved route through the North Pleasant / Governor's Drive intersection. It's terrifying. There really is no accommodation for bicycles: the bicycle lane goes away, the remaining lanes are very narrow, you can't easily tell what signals are being given to different directions, and cars are coming out from around various visual obstructions. It's an accident waiting to happen.
If there were a better way to take bicycles into consideration in the way this intersection is handled, it would be greatly appreciated. Many, many students ride bicycles and I'm concerned that when the academic year starts, there are going to be accidents.
One way might be to provide a small bicycle connector between Farview and the crosswalk between Lederle and Polymer Science. It used to be possible to cross there, but it is now impassable by bicycle. If a bicycle route could be provided along Farview (signs could direct people to follow the route by turning at Old Town Road) only a small connector between Farview and the pedestrian crosswalk would be needed to shift the bicycle traffic away from the intersection.
Thanks for your consideration of bicycles in this project.
A few weeks ago, I was searching the catalog at the Jones Library and, in searched C/W Mars, found an Esperanto book I'd never heard of before. It's called "Kavaliro en Tigra Felo" (or Horseman in a Tiger Skin). It was for "in-library use" at the Williamsburg library. I was puzzled that they would have a book like that, so I wanted to go take a look at it. On Saturday, Lucy and I drove over to find out more.
We learned that an exchange program had brought a group of librarians from Georgia (the country), who donated the book during their visit. It's a 300 page epic poem about a king and his daughter's suitor who meet a horseman wearing a tiger skin and the suitor goes on a quest to track the horseman down. It was a delight to read: as interesting to read as the Odyssey or Gilgamesh.
I couldn't read it all, but I read for an hour or so and took some pictures. There was also an interesting story at the end by the translator, about why he believed the story should be translated into Esperanto. I wrote a longer blog post about it at E-USA.
It's the weekend before the last week of the summer. I was stressed coming back with only two weeks to get stuff ready, but the first week went pretty well. I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm starting to feel like I have things under control.
Today is my birthday. I'm planning to go to the tomato festival at Red Fire Farm. I mentioned to a lot of people that I was going there -- I think Tom and Ella are going to join us, but it seems that most people are busy doing other stuff. Too bad for them.
Yesterday, I saw something that mentioned that there was a survey by McDonalds at The Lost Ring. It's all about their branding. The marketing types believe that everything is about "adding value to the brand" and they're trying to see whether sponsoring a game like this adds value to the brand. I tried to answer the questions honestly, but I think the idea that business is about leveraging the value of a brand to convince people to buy crappier stuff than they would have on their merits is just stupid. I'm sure they would say that its just good business. The weirdest question was something like "What does it say about McDonalds that they would sponsor an experience like The Lost Ring?" My reply was along these lines: "That's like asking, 'what does it say about amphibians that when you lick their skin you have a hallucinogenic experience.' I would answer (1) it's an enigma and (2) it says more about the problems inherent in global capitalism than anything about McDonalds."
After the long ride yesterday, I decided a short ride was in order today. Lucy, Daniel and I rode downtown to the Lord Jeff and had drinks and a light meal. I had a glass of chardonay and we shared an appetizer. It was another beautiful day and we had a wonderful time sitting in the shade and chatting in the warm breeze. The only downside was a nasty blower that the Lord Jeff has right by their exit that would run every so often, drowning out conversation.
I could have ridden quite a bit further, but this was perfect. It's all uphill to downtown, so after our brunch, we could practically just coast home. Tomorrow the weather looks like it will be unsettled. I'm hoping to get work taken care of before noon and have the rain finished up by then as well, letting me take a long bike ride in the afternoon. I think I'm about ready to circumnagivate the Connecticut River.
I took a long bike ride today, leaving around 10 and getting home around 2pm. I wasn't riding all the time -- I rode to the bridge along the bike trail and then explored the new extension into Northampton. I rode along King Street into the middle of Northampton and past to Northampton Bicycle. Then I rode back and turned right at the middle, went under the tracks and along past Joe's Spaghetti. I had a hankering for fried rice, but the Chinese places weren't open yet. So I rode back along the bike trail to Whole Foods and stopped there. I couldn't find fried rice, but I did see a weird "forbidden black rice salad" that looked cool, so I got some of that and some clam chowder. The last 5 miles were the toughest: its the endless hill part of the bike trail and then there are two small climbs at the end of the bikeway connector and by Computer Science. It looks like I rode around 25 miles, all in all. It was about the right amount for the day.
The bike trail is one of the best things about the Amherst area -- it gets a lot of use. There is work going on near the bridge to smooth out the places where roots have created rough patches along the trail. Some places are so rough that you can barely ride, but there are only a few places like that. It's a very restful way to ride a bike, without having cars zipping by just waiting to clip you.
Afterwards, I had planned on going to my office to finish off grades, but the weather is just too nice. It's sunny and cool with a very light breeze -- simply perfect weather. Maybe it will rain tomorrow and make it easy for me to sneak into the office for a couple of hours. But not today.
I went with another group of students on Saturday to collect data. I took some pictures, in addition to the research images. It sounds like another group is going out this afternoon, so I'm planning to ride my bike to meet them.
One of the things I love about doing research is how I start looking at one thing, I notice more stuff about everything. Without projects, I have a tendency to blunder around without noticing what's happening around me. When I get started on a project like this, I'm reminded of how much I've forgotten in terms of tree and plant identification. I don't know the first thing about identifying lichens.
That's actually not quite true. I do remember the first thing: the three basic forms of lichens: crustose, foliose, and fruticose. In searching around for ways to identify lichens, I found The Macrolichens of New England (Memoirs of The New York Botanical Garden, Volume 96) . It sounded perfect, so I bought it instantly. I don't know if it will arrive in time to help us with our projects, but hopefully, we can turn around and do lichens again another semester.
Over this week and next, the semester reaches its climax. On Monday, I tried to get my students organized for collecting data, but we didn't really get everything set until Wednesday. Last night, I went with one group to collect data at the East Amherst Common. I'll go with another group tomorrow. The other groups haven't contacted me -- I suspect that means they'd just as soon not have me go with them. The goal is to have the data collected by Monday, which will give us a full week to analyze the data and write the final reports. It would have been good to have another week, but I'm really excited by the data we're collecting.
This semester, the students chose to look at lichens on trees. I love lichens -- I've always thought they were really cool. We're collecting imagery of lichens on trees on town property in Amherst. This is a critical year to collect the imagery, because the coal-fired cogeneration plant on campus is shutting down this year, being replaced by a new oil and gas fired plant. The imagery we collect now can serve as a baseline for studying the changes in air quality associated with the new plant. And we're looking at a bunch of other factors: distance and orientation of roads, traffic, north-south orientation, species, and distance to other trees. There is real potential here for publishable work.
We had a great party in the department to celebrate Zane receiving the Distinguished Teaching Award. The chairman said a few words and then Randy and I each spoke a bit. It was such a treat to see Zane surrounded by her colleagues and students. And friends -- friends all. I sometimes get frustrated by the University and the senseless way they approach things and then I remember who I get to work with. Zane and Randy and Elizabeth... And George and Chris and Robbie... And Tom and Tom and Sally and Brian and Elsbeth... And everyone. Well, not quite everyone. But I really love my job. What wonderful people and what a great place I have to work.
My student's first projects were due today. There's nothing like a due date to bring out all the problems -- there weren't as many as I had feared: a few groups that hadn't worked perfectly and then some individual students trying to jump through all the hoops. With respect to groups, I ask students to reflect that, even if their group hadn't worked perfectly, it probably saved them some effort and that, with a wiki, I can easily see which students contributed fully and which had shirked. The individual problems often revolve around the software: students who haven't figured out how to define styles with their word processor -- or who haven't installed a word processor with styles.
I always ask students to present their work -- usually in a fairly informal way. Great stuff! I was also very pleased with the number of thoughtful questions from other students. The semester is off to a good start.
In the March 27 townwide elections, Alisa trounced the competition, receiving twice as many votes as her opponent. She will serve a three-year term on the select board starting immediately. We're both very gratified by the support of the many volunteers and voters who turned out to make her candidacy possible.
The election got ugly as the other side became increasingly desperate. I was pleased that Alisa ran a very clean campaign. She did everything right: got out an early letter to solicit donations, made an early reservation for a good spot for a signature ad in the paper, got the lawn signs out first, and got two mailings out: a brochure early, and a reminder postcard just before the election.
People have been offering me their condolences - since I will now be a "select board widow", but I don't think it can be any worse than when Alisa was on the school committee and chair of comprehensive planning. And, hopefully, she can slow down for a few weeks before things will need to ramp up again for the override. On May 1st, the town will vote on whether to have a 2 1/2 percent tax override to offset the structural deficit in the Amherst town budget.
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