Bierfaristo Blog

I completed my Annual Faculty Review document today and submitted it. I actually got the document done yesterday, but needed to submit a letter describing my responsibilities and some copies of letters where people were thanking me for doing nice things. I realized as I filled it out that when I came here, I was responsible for one lab of 22 computers. Now I'm responsible for 6 labs containing nearly 100 computers with 4 different configurations. That, combined with the new poster printer has resulted in me having a lot less time than I used to have to do interesting projects. I met with the chair this afternoon and we talked about workload and stuff. I've been feeling a bit over scheduled or over tasked lately and now I can see why.

This time, I took the whole family to see Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm in Northampton. The show was great. They seemed a little tired and a little punchy, but mostly were able to turn it into humor for the show. The music was great and I got to hear some songs I hadn't heard before, as well as most of the old favorites. Paul and Storm opened the show again and got the audience warmed up. I was a little disappointed that they didn't have a larger audience -- I guess I should have put up posters or something. Jonathan played a new song that I don't think is released anywhere yet.

It was fun to have the boys along. Charlie is old enough that I don't worry about him and the language, but Daniel is another matter. He was singing "First of May" in the car on the way home -- that was the one song I hadn't let him hear yet. Oh, well. It was worth it for him to see JoCo play Millionaire Girlfriend and Skullcrusher Mountain. We got to talk to Jonathan for just a second.

This evening was "Curriculum Night" at the Elementary School. I made a point of meeting with the technology specialist and explaining carefully what Muppyville was to her -- she was enthusiastic. Although Charlie had spoken with the school folks during the first week of classes, they still hadn't unblocked the URL to Muppyville. The school system uses one of the fascist censorware systems that prevent students from accessing any page on the internet that aren't among those deemed "worthy" by the companies that rate these pages. Muppyville is "unrated" -- and therefore needs to be blocked. We live in a very strange world. Although they had told Charlie, they would get Muppyville unblocked, they didn't. We'll see if anything happens now. In any event, I've created logins for Daniel's teacher and the technology specialist. Hopefully, they'll get it unblocked and Charlie can set up Muppyville logins for the rest of the kids. My kids haven't asked me about trying to route around the school's moronic blocking software -- probably because at home (and elsewhere) they don't have to deal with the idiotfilters.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've decided that I really need to write a book about how the Internet represents a kind of freedom that is only too scarce in our society -- and to envision: what the rest of our life looks like by comparison and (2) what our life could look like if it were modeled on the same principles. I think this is something that I know something about, feel strongly about, and recognize that the rest of the world mostly doesn't get. I don't know if I can sell a book about this, but if we can get the rest of the world to realize that: if email is free then textmessages should be free too; if you can install programs on your computer, you should be able to on your phone too; if you can walk on the sidewalk for free, then you should be able to use the wireless for free too -- I think the examples could go on and on -- enough to make a whole book. We'll see.

Today, I received an invitation to attend the opening of "Natural Reflections", an exhibit of photography currently on display in Town Hall in Amherst. The photographer, Michael Phillis, is the son of a colleague and also works as a student consultant in the BCRC. I had seen pictures of his, on the web, in the Collegian, and in Randy's office, but its really striking to see them beautifully framed and presented in Town Hall. The opening is Thursday, October 4 from 5-7pm and is open to the public. We can only stop in for a few minutes before we drive over to Noho to see JoCo. That's going to be great too!

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.

When I set up the BCRC and the other computer labs in the department, I found it very convenient to have a networked file volume available as scratch space for everyone to share. Years ago, it was implemented using Appleshare and more recently with SMB. I used a variety of strategies to make the connection, but when we started using OSX, I implemented it with an Applescript -- a bit clunky, but it worked. I was never happy with it as a solution and played around with using automount. The advantage with automount is that you don't need to make a connection until you're ready to use the volume -- then the system sets up the connection automatically and tears it down as soon as it's been idle for a minute or two. I spent a few hours over the past two days trying to figure out how to get automount to work using files, rather than having it as part of the netinfo database. There are a bunch of pages about automount and macosx but I couldn't get any of them to work. So, I set up netinfo the way I wanted it, made a new radmind transcript just for netinfo, and edited netinfo out of all the other transcripts. I hate embedding any kind of settings in netinfo because it's entirely opaque -- a bunch of binary files that can't be read or tweaked easily by a human. I wish Apple would use freaking text files for settings -- it's such a PITA to deal with binary configuration files and for what? To save the computer the time of doing it. Sorry -- that's what I have computers for -- to make life convenient for me and not the other way around.

I like MacOS X as a desktop operating system -- its stable, if a bit slow. But for management in the labs, its very frustrating. It would be a lot easier to use linux We are in a position where we could switch to Ubuntu easily enough in the labs, although there are a few legacy apps that wouldn't be available -- but they probably won't be available once we switch to Intel anyway. When that time comes, I think I may advocate to go with Linux.

Since the spring, the relations between the UMass Amherst faculty, president, and board of trustees has been strained. When the trustees announced plans to have a retreat with the goal of generating action steps, there was some concern raised. Today we held a general meeting of the faculty with a set of resolutions in place to express our lack of confidence. But the trustees decided to have an open meeting, rather than meeting in a secret retreat and so we backed away from the resolutions. One trustee, James Karram, attended the meeting and spoke briefly. I'm encouraged by the positive steps and I hope we are beginning to move away from the series of confrontations that have driven faculty governance relations since the spring.

I was involved in drafting a resolution for the meeting related to the governor's Readiness Project -- this is a commission that has been drawn up to study education in the state. One subcommittee is supposed to study public higher education. Pat Crosson, a highly respected former-provost, is on the committee, but no current faculty, staff, students. We drafted a separate resolution to encourage the commission to hold open forums at the UMass campuses. I drafted the following resolution (with help from many others) to try to provide some guidance to the new readiness project subcommittee:

The Faculty and Librarians of the University of Massachusetts Amherst appreciate the Governor

Tip O'Neil used to say that "All politics is local", but there's nothing like local politics in Amherst. This spring, before Lombardi left, the University signed an agreement with the town over an array of issues where the town and the University interact including fire and police services, water use, and Mark's Meadow school. Recently, the Selectboard was asked to ratify one aspect of this: a waiver for charges the town previously made to the University for the use of wastewater. A local curmudgeon believes that Alisa and another Selectboard member should recuse themselves because of connections to the University and has been sending complaints to the state ethics commission. The tempest-in-a-teapot has stirred up a series of articles in the press that talk about me as "Brewer's husband, a full-time lecturer...". (Now that's Senior Lecturer!)

Yesterday, in comments to one of the articles, the curmudgeon posted a series of comments, trying to make a math joke (because the other Selectboard member is a math professor). At the end of each comment, he included the URL to his blog. Another commenter, who called himself "Hogwash" responded with a critique and included a URL at the end of his comment that looked just like a link to the original blog, except he changed the hostname from ".blogspot.com" to ".hogspot.com". I was tempted to go out and register "hogspot.com", but its probably not worth the $12 and only netwits would get the joke anyway. The curmudgeon evidently didn't notice the change, because he thanked the previous poster for plugging his blog.

The water issue has been hanging over the town and the University for several years. It started when the University developed an energy-conservation proposal to be a more "green" campus. A colleague who served on the committee that developed the proposal told me that the town, which had been complaining about the high demand of the campus for water went ballistic when they found out that the University was going to be able cut their water use by 40% or some such: "What? You're going to save $400,000? Wait! You need to give 75% of that to us!" There's really no politics like Amherst politics.

I was reading this article about rude people which, it turns out, is really about community. It reminds me a lot of the response that a lot of people had to Cliff Stoll's book Silicon Snake-oil. He argued that people shouldn't spend all their time devoted to "virtual" communities, and should spend time making their "real" communities to work. To which Regina Lynn says, "I prefer to attend to friends and lovers through our cell phones rather than allow geography to determine who I can and can't relate with." She goes on to talk about how people are socially disengaged if all they have is virtual contact. But I think Cliff was onto something: getting to know your neighbors and the people in your local community and maintaining connections with them is *really* important.

A lot of important decisions are made locally that affect your environment: community planning, zoning, tax rates, etc. Moveon.org is great and all that, but real democracy begins at home. Geography really does determine who gets to vote in your local elections. If you don't know the people around you, you are crippled in trying to affect who gets elected and how local issues get decided.

Geography also decides (in large part) who your kids interact with. If there are kids walking in front of your house and you don't know their names, I think you should spend more time in your front yard and get to know their names. It makes a huge difference in how a neighborhood works when the kids know that the adults know who they are. It just does.

If you think you live someplace where this stuff doesn't matter, then you probably aren't very invested in what happens there -- and you're probably being dumb. Places that are nice to live are nice precisely because there were people who were invested in the place and made it a nice place to live. It takes hard work. You should grow up and do your part.

Recently people found a photo album showing SS officers enjoying themselves just a short distance from where people were being systematically starved and murdered. There seems to be a sense of astonishment on the part of many that people could do this: be monsters and yet have regular lives. Yet, as we carry on our normal lives, mugging for the camera, people right next to us are being treated the same or worse -- and in our name. With a global media, we no longer need to be right next to where some people are systematically starving and killing other people for us to be implicated in the activity. Yes, we're not pulling the trigger directly, but, given our government's involvement in destabilizing some world leaders and propping others up, we might as well be. And yet, we carry on our lives, eating our bowls of blueberries while others starve and reclining on our Adirondack chairs while others are stretched on the rack. It's a small world now -- and our responsibilities in it loom larger than ever.