Bierfaristo Blog

I spent most of the day today relaxing with a smile on my face from the great time I had yesterday. Sally Lawton and I left very early on Saturday, drove to New Haven and took the train into NYC for the day. Everything went about a smoothly as could be imagined and we had a great time. Our train was delayed a bit due to a signaling problem, but that just meant that we met up with Jakobo in Grand Central Station and could share a taxi in the rain to the UEA New York office by the UN. That's where our adventure started.

I think most people in the US would be astonished to discover there was an office at the UN for the World Esperanto Association. It's not much -- just a desk in an office shared with 4 other non-profits. Neil Blonstein has been running the office since the autumn, taking over after the previous person had to step down due to health. We signed the guestbook and looked through the past 30 years of signatures to see what names we recognized -- a who's-who of Esperantism.

After taking a group photo in the office, walked back to Grand Central Station in the rain and got a cup of coffee while we sorted out what to do next. Eventually, we decided to navigate to the place where we were supposed to meet people for lunch. We got to Zaro's a bit early for lunch, but that gave us plenty of time to get situated and chat with folks. There were maybe 12 or 15 of us in all. We had a cheerful lunch chatting happily. Eventually, we decided to push on to the Natural History Museum for a while in the afternoon. There seemed to be big crowds and it took us a long time to navigate there. We walked around for a bit in the museum and eventually ended up having a soda in the food court.

For dinner, we had planned to go to the Esperanto Cafe -- a well-known restaurant in Greenwich Village. We got there in good order, but found it full with no-where to sit. After I looked at the menu, I suggested we go across the street to the Mexican restaurant. They had a fabulous spot right at the front with a two couches right in front of a big window. We could watch people go by, keep on alert for people to arrive at the Esperanto Cafe, and stretch out and relax in comfort and style. We got some margaritas and appetizers. Mauro said he'd never had Mexican food before. I asked him if he knew what a margarita was. He said, "Yes, I know what Margherita is." I pointed out that a margarita was something else.

Eventually, Sally and I got Neil to lead us back to the right subway station and we arrived at Grand Central Station. Checking the departures, it looked like we had missed the earlier train to New Haven, but we rushed to the track anyway just in case. The train was still there and, when we arrived, the conductor said they were pulling out in about 20 seconds. We just made it.

It was a fabulous day in Esperantujo and I've spent the whole following day basking in the good spirits I have from the special connection that Esperanto brings to my life. There's something special about Esperanto. When Jakobo mentioned to folks he was thinking about staying over, one of the other esperantists said, "I'm leaving to spend a few days with my fiancee, but here's my key -- you can just stay at my place." It's really something the invisible bonds that tie people together. They may be invisible, but if you could feel the bonds that Esperanto makes, they'd be warm and fuzzy.

In response to my post about why to participate in the Landa Kongreso, someone asked what it was really like, so I wrote a kind of rant about the Landa Kongreso -- I called it Limako's Guide to the Landa Kongreso.

Everyone is trying to print posters and so today the cutter broke on the poster printer. The guide to the poster printer, of course, doesn't even have the cutter in the index. They have one reference to some manual cutter that other models of printers have. Sigh... We ordered a couple and now have to hope that they'll come with some guide that explains how to install them.

I've been just flat out for the past several days. Lobbying at the State House yesterday. This morning, working in ISB, presentation to sysmanagers, more ISB, then poster printing. But being needed does make me feel appreciated. Lots of people today thanked me for my efforts in helping them make stuff happen.

Great Esperanto meeting tonight. I love having a local group to meet with and chat in Esperanto. It's the best.

I love weekends. If I were a wiser person, I would probably use weekends to do work -- to get ahead of what I know I need to do. I have several things I need to write, a lot of work around the house, and no end of things I ought to be doing. But on the weekends, I have the freedom to leave it all behind and fritter time away like a kid. Today, I played StarCraft with Phil, watched Natsume episodes, went shopping, cooked, and basically frittered away my day accomplishing nothing. Sigh... I wouldn't want to do it everyday, but sometimes it just feels right.

I really enjoyed the road trip to UConn to look at the collections space they have. It was new, beautiful, and well-appointed. I took some pictures (posted at Flickr) and we spent some time grilling them about how they persuaded their campus to dedicate the space to the collections. UMass has never expressed much interest in supporting the collections and some administrators have been downright hostile. I always have loved collections -- it was what got me interested in biology in the first place. And I've spent a lot of time using and contributing to collections: doing a archeological faunal analysis at Michigan State, making herbarium cards for plant systematics, and building an insect collection when I took entomology. Unfortunately, due to the lack of support, we've already lost a number of the collections that got donated away when the people who were supporting them left and could see the collections might just get thrown out, given the lack of support from the administration. With the new construction going on and the proposed college mergers, its a good time to bring all of the natural history collections together and provide for their maintenance. I've started planting seeds and we're talking about developing a proposal to outline what we need.

Being away for a day meant that the first class using the machines I set up on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday had to run without me being here, so I was a little worried coming back that it would have been a catastrophe. But everything went swimmingly and we got a nice thank-you from Kate about how smoothly everything ran. Whew!

I've spent yesterday and today catching up, going to meetings, and wrapping up loose ends. I'm taking tomorrow off, since I worked all last weekend. That will let me go to Esperanto in Northampton, meet with Tom and Zane at Woodstars to work on a paper, and go out for dinner and drinks with Buzz in the evening. I'm definitely in need of some distraction.

I didn't get all 40 hours of work done, but with intense efforts on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I got the machines needed for Tuesday set up and some more besides. I still have a bunch more work to do, but nothing critical.

On Friday, we got the network minimally functional and I set up an assembly line to update laptops. On Saturday, I had three drives that I could use to wipe a laptop and install a stripped down image. Reboot, launch the radmind script and, in about half an hour, the laptop was ready to go. In between, I played some SC with Phil and watched episodes of Natsume Yujincho. I find them charming and heartwarming. I got most of the laptops done.

On Sunday, I came in to finish up the laptops and work on the Kodak Molecular Imaging software. I built a transcript of the package and found that the ownerships were wrong on the server, so I was stuck. I sent a note to the technical staff and used the excuse to take off to see Coraline in 3D with Charlie and Lucy.

On Monday, I opened up the BCRC, made sure things were still working in Morrill, and headed over to the ISB. In between working on the lab, I met with a visiting faculty member from Ohio State who is here observing our use of instructional technologies. I helped him get to Zane's genetics class and then spoke with him for an hour or two during the afternoon. Late in the day, Kate and then George arrived and we finished getting the room set up for class tomorrow.

I will be out of town tomorrow, going on an excursion to UConn to meet with the collections director. So I won't be there if things collapse in the new classroom. But I think things are going to be just fine.

The server is up, but I still can't get any machines in the building to talk to it. Grr... I have 40 hours of work to do this week and only day is left.

I don't normally use Skype, but I've left it on for a few days since Buzz was suggesting that we use Skype while he was in St. Croix. We caught up with him tonight and the boys and I chatted with Buzz and Jonathan sitting outside Caravelle. That was the cottage we rented when we were there last summer. I wish I could have gone this time, but I really felt I needed to stay here and work on getting the labs in the ISB ready to go.

I've been a bit frustrated that the resources I need still aren't set up. I tried to get the server I need moved over on Monday, then Tuesday. We finally got it over there on Tuesday, but it still wasn't functional at the end of the day on Wednesday. I took a couple of pictures of wahoo making the journey. Hopefully tomorrow, it will be working and I can start doing productive work -- I really can't get much done until it's working. At this point, I might as well have gone to St. Croix and spent the week hanging out on the beach.

I don't mean to complain. The technical staff make the work I do possible. If I had to keep the servers going, I wouldn't be able to do much of anything else. I went to a meeting on Friday where representatives of different units on campus met with OIT to describe what functionality they could use in a content management system. It was striking to see that our technical support in 1996 was better than what most of them had today. And I've had 13 years to build on that. We're already better off than they'll be when they get a content management system up and running.

My next fun thing to look forward to is a trip to NYC on April 11. A group of us in Amherst is going to drive to New Haven and catch the train to NYC to spend the day with an esperantist from Rome who's visiting. We're planning to see all the sights. I mentioned at E-USA that we were planning to see the sights of Esperantujo (ie, Esperanto-land). Someone was very excited to hear about that and wanted to know what they were. I pointed out that since we were going to be in Esperantujo, all the sights would be in Esperantujo. He seemed a bit deflated by that line of reasoning and wondered why one needed to even leave home, if that were the case. I pointed out that, for whatever reason, some of the best sights in Esperantujo happened to be in NYC. It should be a lot of fun.

Naruto fansub is one of the most common search terms that people follow when coming to my blog. I suppose that since dattebayo stopped subbing Naruto, there are a lot of people looking for alternatives. We decided to subscribe to Crunchyroll. It's not as good as dattebayo, but isn't bad. The cost is only around a dollar a week. And they have other stuff, in addition to Naruto, like neko rahmen.

When I arrived in Amherst, I noticed a couple of unusual things about driving here. First, I was surprised to how courteous most of the drivers were in Amherst: when you needed to merge, they would make room for you with no problem. But this had a dark side. I noticed that it was de rigeur to let people turn left in front of you when a light turned green. And that many people just did it, whether you let them or not.

It happened to Lucy's brother David when he was helping her move out here. He was rendered speechless that someone would do that: "Wha!?! Hey... Hey! Did you see that? Did you see what that guy did?!?"

We call it a "Massachusetts turn". I never would have imagined doing something like that before I moved out here -- I think the traffic rules of right-of-way are pretty clear and this has nothing to do with them. But here it's just commonplace. Most people expect you to do it, so whenever a light changes, you have to try to read the other driver: Are they waiting for me? Should I wait for them?

The topper was when I was driving home last week. I was stopped at a light near my house going straight. When the light changed, a car made a Massachusetts turn in front of me and it was a driver education car. The student was driving and the instructor waved at me cheerfully as they turned left in front of me at the light. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

It was very disappointing to hear Barack using the same, tired metaphors for education that we've heard from the Republicans: "reward the good teachers and fire the bad ones". How do you identify good teachers? Standardized tests! Let's have one standardized test for the whole country! Sigh... I posted a quick comment at whitehouse.gov:

In remarks today, you outlined a strategy to "reward good teachers and fire bad ones". It is very disappointing to hear you use this kind of rhetoric. We need to move beyond a system that pretends to "measure" a few things and rewards the people that figure out how to game the system. We need to think hard about how to build a culture of learning and independence among students -- not just prepare students to score well on standardized tests. The culture of educational "measurement" is destroying our schools because we don't know how to measure anything of any real importance. Please don't listen only to one side of the educational measurement community: find some of the critics and develop an overall strategy that values more than test scores.