ClapTrap

Vox Day

Trying out vox. Have a new page at http://julei.vox.com/

New Digs

Starting my first full weekend with all ties to my previous apartment now cut. Just had a couple of nail down (deposit, etc.) before I was completely liberated. Still loads to unpack and sort through, but at last am free of roaming between two apartments, a huge distraction from work, to say the least.

Total Meltdown

Or close to it the last couple of days. Having to move (pack, lug, unpack), design this summer's vacation course curriculum, and also prepare for finals while teaching a full schedule has had me close to the brink. Just about through the worst of it. Now time to recharge the batteries.

Zwang Wu Jie Kwai Le!

Dragon Boat Festival is around the corner (5/31) and is a national holiday, so a day off! Woo-hoo! Summer has arrived in the usual brutal fashion, with temps in the 90s accompanied by 90% humidity. Wish I could just laze around on DBF but, alas no rest for the wicked. And I must have been very wicked for the following events to have transpired. A week to the day after I signed a new lease on staying in my current abode, a letter arrived from the dept of public works instructing all homeowners in my neighborhood that they had to tear down the back walls of their apartments and move them in 75cm, all at their own expense in the next month. If they do nothing, the gov't will rip them down and put it on the owner's tab. Current estimates as to how long apartments in the path of destruction will be not be fit for occupation: six months. And knowing the galacial pace that private contractors and government workers operate at, that's certainly being overly optimistic. More like nine or ten months. So instead of being secure in the knowledge that I have a place to rest my bones for the next annum, it's time to madly scramble for the classified ads and start hunting for new digs. Will update as soon as I find a new place, likely to be offline for the next couple of weeks (of living hell).

Spies 'R' US

So it turns out that we're all being spied on all the time. And the response has been a big ol' yawn. Yarrr! Police State! Oh, hang on, the Colbert Report is on in five minutes, I'll get back to you on that. So films like Sneakers and Enemy of the State were not fiction but actually cautionary tales. Why not save some money and just monitor the blogosphere? That's where the intelligentsia hangs out, and it's not like the terra-ists, er, Mexicans, don't know that their phone calls are being listened in on. I guess it's just the rush of being able to snoop around secretly, well not so secretly anymore, that is the key to understanding their motivations for setting this all up.
Something I haven't seen discussed much is why is all this coming out in the open now? I imagine it's largely because there's a behind-the-scenes power struggle going on, probably to do with our near future foreign policy agenda, i.e., whether or not to nuke Iran. It'll be interesting to see how low the current chief executives JARs can get before members of his own party in congress start impeachment proceedings. And when will The Economist have a cover that says 'Just Go'? I remember back in the Clinton presidency when they had just that, not coincidentally when I stopped reading them. A blogger can hope.

Hot Diggity Dog!

Feh. Bring back the Cold War. At least that was credibly scary. Or just round up all the terrorist subjects and be done with it. Oh, wait, there are tens of millions of them? Maybe as many as 300 million? Hmm. Bigger problem than I'd imagined. Not much posting of late as life and work have so rudely intruded. Oh to be able to retire and blog full time. That would be the life. And that whole wiretapping thingamajig? As long as the new detention camps have high speed wireless and iMacs(intel), they might not be so bad. Just as long as KBR doesn't supply the food or water. Hope the camps can comfortably house 200 million residents (71% of 300 mil). I do so hate to sleep in bunk beds.

Barbara Ann

Why we'll definitely bomb Iran: they have it coming! No, seriously, they'll do it, and it'll barely make the evening news. I remember the hostage crisis, and the shockjock I loved to listen to at the time took the beach boys song and morphed it into bomb iran (barbara ann---bomb iran). People were on board then, when carter was president, and they certainly will be this time around. It's not the warring that's the problem in most folks mind, it's the warring and winning that's important.

Creativity Vs. Control

The powers that be want us to be more creative, yet it has to be in the strict framework of control that they set down. Kids should be active, engaged, interested, and learning a whole lot (and fast!), and also be really quiet angels that sit at the teacher's knee and listen to him/her spout the gospel of wisdom that he/she has by virtue of being a teacher. They figure that if the kids can memorize the dictionary (or their government approved list of 3000 words)then they can speak fluently. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The best way to improve your conversation is to (surprise) converse! And make loads of mistakes, shrug them off, make a bunch more mistakes, learn from them, and move on. The whole idea that they can memorize their way out of this is just so faulty I can't even begin to describe it. As it is, these kids will do really, really well on their standardized testing (stuff they have memorized and re-memorized) and horribly on any real world conversation opportunities. Sure, they know 'how are you? I'm fine, thank you.', but if you throw them something a little different then the phrases they've so carefully memorized (like: how's it going?, What's up?, etc.) then they freeze up with a puzzled expression on their faces. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

Wifi Woes

Trying to get my wifi at absolute top signal strength is more of a chore than I had planned on. Finally had to move the base station to within about ten feet of my computer to get it up to par. May as well just use a cable to connect. It is nice though to not have all those extra cables getting underfoot so I'll probably continue using it, at least for the time being.

Broke Down

And got one of the new Intel iMacs. Just too tempting to pass up. Can't remember (if ever) that computing was this fast and easy. Apart from playing around with my new toy, I've been muy busy with work, or what passes for work these days.