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Without tenants to rent the empty rooms, the house presents opportunities for creative experimentation in home office and bedroom setups
With the college closing down for spring break, I decided to make one last trip to the Takoma Park campus for a change of scenery in my work environment. There I ran into Teresa Peachey, the present meteorology instructor at Takoma Park, who confirmed that she had heard the good news about approval for an AOSC105 section at Takoma Park next fall. Since the lab course hasn't been offered at Takoma Park before, we'll need to procure some equipment and find storage space in the science building. I already sent a preliminary shopping list to the department chair at Takoma Park, but there needs to be follow-up throughout the summer in order for the course to start without a hitch next fall. Whether that follow-up can count as alternate ESH eligible for compensation (just like teaching a summer course) has yet to be determined.
While in the part-time faculty office, I wrote a simple shell script that would help put tags on the audio files so that playlists for individual albums aren't needed. The additional tag "TRACKNUMBER" (which I never bothered to fill out when manually ripping many an album over the years) benefits the portability to various media players more than the saving of storage space, since playlists are generally only a few kB. Filling out this tag for all files that make up an album is easy with ncmpcpp, after making a folder for each album. But first run the following script in the album's folder, assuming the playlist and the folder share the same name. The first column of the resulting output can then be entered into the TRACKNUMBER field of the ncmpcpp tag editor the same way I enter grades in Blackboard after alphabetizing the students' papers by last name.
WD=`pwd`
DIRNAME=`basename $WD`
PLAYLIST=../../pls/${DIRNAME}.m3u
grep "^flac" $PLAYLIST > plshort.tmp
for song in *.flac; do
grep -n $song plshort.tmp
done
rm plshort.tmp
Happy Pi Day! After almost two weeks since Mark came over to my house and inspired me to make the sunroom into my primary living/sleeping quarters, I moved back into the small upstairs room in anticipation of warmer summer temperatures in the months ahead. The savings on heating costs by maintaining only the sunroom at comfortable temperatures these past two weeks won't be seen until the first week of April, when I get my gas bill for this month.
A recent trip to the electric meter confirmed my suspicion that the solar panels are already generating more electricity than the house is using, even though we have yet to see the most rapid increase in hours of daylight as the vernal equinox approaches. In addition, the electric heater in the sunroom runs much quieter than the forced air in the rest of the house. Despite these considerations, the temptation to rearrange furniture yet again on a cloudy Friday afternoon proved irresistible, and I found myself sleeping last night in the small, dark room under several layers of comforters.
Today the forecasted rain finally blanketed the region, dissuading me from making the usual trip to Hyattsville for the game with the flying disc. Instead I stayed at home and tried to clean up the tags on my digital music collection, using the ncmpcpp software as recommended by a post to the CRUX mailing list. With full albums sorted into folders and properly tagged, the long-anticipated modification of my wakeup alarm bash script can be implemented as follows.
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin;
mpc clear &>/dev/null # unload the current playlist
mpc volume 100 &>/dev/null # set the volume to 100%
case $# in
0 )
mpc load wakeup &>/dev/null # load the playlist du jour
mpc play &>/dev/null # start the music!
;;
Some people use their spring breaks to get away from their geographical region, either for pleasure or in service to other communities. I opted to stay put in the D.C. metro area and explore more closely one of the trails that has served as a backdrop for hours of contemplative walking throughout the past nine years.
In spring 2006 I had barely any inkling of how far the Northwest Branch Trail extended into Montgomery County. While taking a break from eye-straining FORTRAN coding and giving my legs a chance to stretch, I discovered the trailhead at the intersection of West Park Drive and University Boulevard. Following the trail south from there led me through lush forest to the West Hyattsville Metro, providing a long-awaited answer to my question from many a Green Line train as to what I might find using those paths visible from the elevated tracks.
After moving in 2009 to a group house in Hyattsville, I found that Wells Parkway, much quieter than the state routes 193 and 410, also connects with this segment of the trail. Even living that close to the Montgomery County border, though, I usually cut short my exploration where the trail becomes unpaved and rocky just before the crossing underneath the Capital beltway.
While working as an after-school tutor in the 2010-2011 academic year, I discovered the part of Northwest Branch Trail between Wheaton Regional Park and route 29. One spring afternoon on my way back from tutoring, I wasted several hours walking my heavy bike through mud and over exposed roots, only to emerge on University Boulevard still outside the Capital beltway, precisely where I would have been much earlier if I had stuck to the main roads. After this experience I promised myself never to walk this winding part of the trail unless I had many hours to spare.
In 2011, having moved to a group house on Adelphi Road for a laid-back summer, I started jogging regularly along the paved part of the Northwest Branch Trail, sometimes daring to hike through the rocky part leading to route 29. It was after one such outing that I ran into Larry O'Neil, then still studying in the math department at UMD and living just a few blocks away. We ended up sharing some home-cooked food and a self-parodying western movie once we realized how conveniently close our homes were located that summer.
With the arrival of spring 2012, I could legitimately call Takoma Park my home again, and I got into the habit of weekend runs from Sligo Creek Trail to route 29 and then downhill to the Northwest Branch Trail. These Sunday afternoon excursions helped to release the stress of high-school teaching and to get me ready for the next week of harrowing commutes into the District.
Only in recent years did I start to run the Sligo Creek-Northwest Branch route counterclockwise, starting from the Piney Branch-New Hampshire intersection. This new starting point eventually inspired a variant (clockwise) route, one that brought me back to the Adelphi neighborhoods familiar from summer 2011.
With all these travel itineraries in mind, I designed this week's exploration of the Northwest Branch Trail to cover every segment in four separate trips.
If the unavailability of the Internet this morning was due to Comcast finally figuring out the glitch in their system that kept me from ever getting billed these past three months, then my last use of the Internet at home--until service is restarted--will have been the streaming of Sufjan Stevens' upcoming album Carrie and Lowell through NPR's First Listen series. Prior to that I had streamed the upcoming album by Death Cab for Cutie, also through First Listen. Not a bad way to wind down the evening, in ignorance of the state of disconnection that would soon ensue.
Living "off the grid" to some degree or another has had many precedents in my life, starting in my undergraduate years when I first noticed the addictive properties of going online. During one semester I moved my desktop computer into the IT club office several buildings from my dorm room in order to have an empty desk on which to study without distractions. (It would be another five years before smartphones so thoroughly permeated our media landscape that such a distancing from technology would be impractical.) A similar configuration proved effective in fostering productivity during my six-week summer REU at Temple University, although the structure of the program itself had no small part in encouraging a strong work ethic.
I find self-discipline easier to achieve when my contributions are seen to have an immediate, tangible impact on a handful of outcomes, rather than a ripple effect where the resulting wave is a superposition of my contributions and those of other team members "dropping their pebbles in the lake". In large groups the diffusion of responsibility lessens the influence that any one team member can have on the outcome. For the generations that grew up before constant Internet connectivity and ubiquitous smartphones, the intrusion of these technologies between an initial conception of a plan and its eventual execution in the physical world represents a similar "diffusion of responsibility," since for us the assistance rendered by Internet-connected devices more closely resembles the collaboration with a host of colleagues than it does the augmenting of our natural corporeal faculties by such analog tools as ruler, compass, mirrors, lenses, wedges, and levers.
The younger generations seem to make less of a distinction between the tools that extend our mechanical reach and tools that extend our social reach. This dissolution of category boundaries is not without justification, since each tool that extends our mechanical reach is itself the product of an iterated refinement process that spans multiple generations and thousands of artisans/inventors. Evolution along these lines has until now been constrained to take place over much larger timescales than those associated with today's relentless, Internet-assisted obsession with innovation. Nevertheless, by dissolving the boundary between the two types of prosthesis, today's youth neatly sidestep the problem of Internet-dependent tasks creating a sense of diffusing one's responsibility for the outcomes among millions of other contributors.
By eschewing the use of certain technologies, and taking on more of the organization and calculation tasks myself, I was able in earlier decades to reverse the encroaching trend toward diffusion of responsibility and take more ownership of the final product. This intimate connection with the end product--be it a meal, a carpentry structure, or a mathematical paper--is stretched almost to the breaking point when we rely on technological aids for much of the procedure. Choosing to downsize our technological dependence can help restore these immediate (i.e., not mediated) connections.
Benefits of having no Internet connection at home:
Drawbacks of having no Internet connection at home:
Currently Reading: The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
A short discussion on programming languages broke out this afternoon at the TPSS math club meeting among a handful of club members sitting near me at the long table. I was reminded of how a comment posted to an online forum echoed the musings of the character Leonard Bankhead in The Marriage Plot.
The forum post claimed that a novice learning a new programming language can advance rapidly by studying deeply the native types/data structures that the language makes easy to define and address. The writing of the algorithm then flows naturally by expressing the desired real-world problem using those native types.
In the novel, Brown alumnus Leonard Bankhead, under psychiatric care for manic-depression, starts experimenting with his drug dosages while stationed at Pilgrim Lake on a biology research fellowship. He sends himself into full-blown mania, which culminates in a wild weekend of casino gambling, but not until making the astute observation that people's speech tends to follow predictable patterns: given the subject of a sentence, Leonard can often infer the predicate.
Having envigilated the final exam for my first summer session students last Thursday, I now only need their electronic submissions of a case study and an opinion paper before course grades can be computed. The deadline for these documents is close of business tomorrow, leaving me a leisurely three days to evaluate their work and enter the grades.
The low enrollment numbers this session, combined with office hours that I kept just before each class without ever seeing a single student, allowed more than a few days of last-minute grading, a luxury that probably won't extend to summer session II, with twice as many students and a start time almost two hours earlier in the day. Meeting with twice as many students in summer session II, only half as many hours each week, forces me to be that much more deliberate in learning their names and getting to know their strengths and weaknesses. It will be interesting to see the different dynamic that emerges when my second summer course starts next week.
Although my commute to work in summer session II will never require that I ride the bus, the death of my Sansa Clip media player this past weekend reminds me of all the trips I took to Rockville this past year without ever bringing along a source of music. I've had the Clip since 2010, a year in which long commutes by bus between Prince George's and Montgomery Counties for my job with MMYC were often accompanied by music from the diminutive media player. Since then the Clip has joined me on long airplane flights and train trips as well, most recently the winter vacation in Singapore, the summer 2013 visit to Michigan while my parents still had a house there, and the winter 2013 trip to Connecticut for my grandmother's funeral. The loss of this long-serving piece of hardware signals the passing of an era. Thankfully the past year of commuting to Rockville without background music has made it easier to let go of the Clip and not immediately seek a replacement, even though an alternative already exists in the still-functioning Optimus CD player that I bought at a Cary, North Carolina, Radio Shack in 1998.
In class this morning, Mr. Conde remembered to bring the Lasers & Nano pencil that he borrowed from me last Thursday. Even still, I probably should start carrying a backup supply of pencils with less personal significance. There's no way I'm making a second trip to Waco just to get a free mechanical pencil from the engineering department of Texas State Technical College, unless my institution volunteers to pay for the trip out of professional development funds.
Mark Sherman is on day six of his week-long trial living in the Long Branch neighborhood. "Inconsistent" is how he characterized his sleeping arrangements. Some nights were spent on Barron Street and others on Hancock Ave. Only two mornings this week have I seen him around the house, and the only afternoon he appears to have spent there was Wednesday, mere hours after he proposed the experiment. As a means of combating loneliness, this experiment has failed to deliver, at least from my perspective after long stretches of time in the house by myself. Would the result be much different if Mark actually gave up his Carroll Gardens tenancy and moved in with me? Or would his wanderlust and aversion to working from home prompt him to rent a separate office where he could go each day?
I recall in myself a similar need for a change of scenery in order to optimize my productivity. In graduate school ten years ago, I would use the daily commute to transition my thoughts from the concerns of home life to the mathematical problems I was getting paid to work on. Such a transition still occurs on my commutes these days, but with only part-time employment I'm not as uncomfortable letting the concerns of my job spill over into my home life, where they are unlikely to overwhelm me the way Mark's reporter duties have evidently tainted his home life by association.
When at the end of the summer I tightened the geographic radius of my teaching duties (by handing over the Rockville meteorology class to a car-driving colleague), I lost the frequent reminders that distance from my home kitchen serves as an effective appetite suppressant. (Distance in this relation incorporates also the psychological stress imposed by sharing space with strangers in public transit, and the logistical toll that exposure to unexpected precipitation takes on my laundry schedule.) Today I relearned that lesson, taking the C4/Q4 buses to the Rockville station, in order to be present in the event that a 10:15 a.m. district court hearing would shed new light on the fate of my neighbors, who apparently had been renting from an absentee landlord named Carl Farmer. I ended up staying in Rockville only through the early afternoon, but the rain today encouraged such consolidation of my engagements that I stayed several hours past sunset in the Long Branch library despite the proximity of a home kitchen where dinner awaited.
Before rushing off to catch the C4 bus on University Blvd, I stuffed into my bag several discarded items from my recently-departed AirBnB guests, including plastic pill organizers from a pharmaceutical conference and leftover circuit elements from a quadcopter. These items would find a better home if left on the free table in the Science Center building, just a fifteen-minute walk from the Rockville District Court. My only worry was the suspicion they might arouse in the guards at the court entrance, but that concern turned out to be unfounded, and by 10:15 I found myself waiting outside the courtroom and recognizing my former neighbor but nobody resembling his landlord.
The court proceedings went quickly, as I've learned to expect from landlord-tenant cases, many of them dismissed automatically if the plaintiff didn't bother to show up. Such was the outcome of my former neighbor's case, whose voluntary departure from the premises obviated Carl Farmer's need for a judgment of possession. Now I'll just have to be on the lookout for a moving van bringing the effects of whomever Mr. Farmer finds next to rent the house.
I walked in the rain parallel to Rockville Pike, passing the shops and restaurants I often told myself I should visit before the end of my year of teaching on the Rockville campus of Montgomery College. I never did get around to sampling the Indian lunch buffet, the Great Wall supermarket, or even the Rockville public library. I would, however, make use of the Rockville post office, an errand deliberately planned for in my packing this morning of unwritten Christmas cards, envelopes, and postage stamps. These letters would finally get written in the scenic corner window of the 4th floor corridor for physics, engineering, and geosciences faculty, a hangout I first used after one of my early orientations to the department.
It was in the natural light of this corner window that I started reading-more than a year ago-the first chapter of Deer Hunting With Jesus, a reporter's account of the rural-urban cultural divide in America, which had been left on the free table the summer before I started teaching meteorology. Today the view from that window revealed overcast skies and a steady light rain, nothing so devastating as the summer downpours that soaked my shoes to the point where they needed two full days to dry out. The uninviting conditions provided the perfect backdrop for writing Christmas cards in the comfort of indoor central heating. I composed three letters, inserted them into the envelopes that I had pre-addressed back at home while still connected to search engines that could figure out ZIP codes, and then got ready for the walk back to the Metro station by way of the post office.
The rain continued to fall only lightly. Despite an abundance of energy that could have fueled a walk into the unknown territory on the other side of I-270, I decided not to tempt fate and stuck with the well-trodden route back to my home territory of Silver Spring. I exited the C2 bus before Piney Branch Road, taking a back route to the Long Branch library across the creek. In the library I had about an hour to catch up on the latest newspaper stories before the chess club started its games.
My participation in the chess games tonight kept me until past 19:00, making it a full 12 hours between meals today. Supposedly this kind of fasting trains the body better than the regularity of "three square meals" every day, so I might want to try this experiment at least once every week in the new year.
All the movies I've seen this year were delivered on borrowed DVDs or over-the-air broadcasts, except for three symmetrically-distributed outings to the big screen: Mockingjay Part I on January 1, Kiss Me Kate in mid-summer, and Star Wars Episode VII today. Although I initially planned to make my debut visit to the PG Plaza Regal cinemas in Hyattsville for this event, at the last minute I had the idea to check movie showtimes in one of the theaters that normally doesn't appear on the list of nearby venues but is still a convenient bike ride away. It turned out that there were two Star Wars start times even earlier than my initial plan, the 10:30 a.m. screening in Hyattsville. Amazingly, despite living and working for years near PG Plaza, I never got around to seeing a movie in the Regal cinemas there, although my former housemate Dave Bourne saw something there between its construction and his departure for a postdoc in Germany. Continuing this tradition of avoiding the Hyattsville Regal cinemas, I chose to use my second trip to the AMC Loew's theatre in Beltsville (the first was for Borat featuring Sacha Baron Cohen) for Star Wars Episode VII.
First impressions of this movie:
1. Producer J.J. Abrams stayed remarkably true to the look and feel of the original trilogy, which itself appropriated leftover materials from the movie sets of the California desert and the ethos of a mid-20th century hot-rodding culture. He does well to make sure the starships appear grubby and perpetually on the verge of falling apart, despite the incredible feats of space travel they can attain. The shinier appearance of the Empire's starships is also consistent with the source material, but one might question whether the attention to surface appearances is the best use of limited resources that are no doubt stretched thin after 30 years of retreat from the expanding Republic. Perhaps the First Order leadership took their name too literally, emphasizing their contrast to the anarchy of a Republic at the expense of the ability to project military strength effectively. In theory a Republic, with long-serving elected representatives, is actually less chaotic than a true Democracy, but from the point of view of such dictators as are heirs to the Sith mantle, this distinction is as meaningless as most humans' grasp of the differences between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
2. Speaking of biological metaphors, I'm glad that Abrams and Kasdan steered clear of the prequel trilogy's biological "explanation" of the Force, opting instead for the more mystical descriptions given in the original trilogy. We are still expected to believe that Force-wielding abilities are at least partly inherited, although the mechanism is implied only in a Mendelian sense (Punnett squares for Han and Leia, anyone?) rather than a Watson-and-Crick sense (mitochondrial DNA --> midichlorians). If parentage is the dominant factor in one's Force-wielding ability, then the story of Rey's birth needs more fleshing out than I got from that one flashback sequence when she discovers Luke's old lightsaber. Maybe it passed too quickly for me.
3a. Abrams and Kasdan also hew closely to the framework of the Hero's Journey, but with almost as much emphasis on Finn's journey (out of a mindset of self-doubt and escape) as on Rey's journey (toward a new future harnessing the Force). The inner struggles of both characters echo the similar struggles of Han and Luke in the original trilogy. But here the writers are constrained by having characterized Luke at the beginning of this episode as the last Jedi and a hermit, making it impossible for Rey to develop her Force abilities under the tutelage of a light side mentor like Obi-Wan. The only other Force-wielders in this sequel are on the dark side, and they seem cartoonishly impotent compared with the Sith Lords of earlier episodes.
3b. Despite Kylo Ren's characterization as inferior to Vader, the writers require of us an incredible suspension of disbelief to entertain the notion that a Force-novice like Rey could-without training-withstand the mind-probing techniques of Kylo Ren and discover on her own the ability to bend the wills of weak-minded stormtroopers. We've already had to swallow the idea that Rey can understand droid bleeps and Wookiee grunts, after having lived her whole life on a junkyard planet not especially teeming with a cosmopolitan mix of species. Perhaps being in touch with the Force grants her some degree of telepathy, but again this would have to emerge in her without any training. Then in the lightsaber battle at the climax of the film, we're expected to believe that a self-trained desert planet scavenger of scrap metal could take on an apprentice of the dark arts trained by Luke Skywalker himself before being corrupted by Snoke.
4. This corruption of Kylo Ren serves at least to provide Han and Leia a more personal common cause intertwined with their fight against the First Order. Although this cause costs Han his life (in an Oedipal scene benefiting from Kasdan's light touch at dialogue rather than George Lucas's ham-fisted over-writing of the blossoming relationship between Anakin and Amidala), in the Han and Leia interactions on the "resistance base" one can hear echoes of the witty one-liners sprinkled throughout Empire Strikes Back.
5. Next, a quibble about terminology. If the Empire is supposed to be defeated, having shrunk into a shadow of its former self to become the First Order, why are we expected to use the language of a "resistance base" and "General Organa"? This supposedly peaceful republic apparently still has a military ruling class, just like Burma before the recent movements toward power-sharing with Aung San Suu Kyi's party. Of course a former stormtrooper like Finn can be expected to know only the language of "resistance" and "generals", but although he's present in nearly every major scene there's no indication that the story is told from his point of view. It's not even from his lips that we first hear the suggestion that his allegiances lie with the "resistance"; the question is posed to him by Rey when BB8's observation of his master's stolen jacket brings Finn under her scrutiny. So apparently the language of "resistance" and "generals" is quite natural on the tongue of an outsider like Rey, and it goes unchallenged when they finally do meet with the ruling military class of the Republic.
6. Finally, in the closing credits we see just how globalised the movie production business has become, with scores of Indian and Chinese names acknowledged for contributing to the visual artistry and sound effects. Of course a multinational corporation like Disney would have the networks in place to seek out the best talent from around the world, rather than interviewing only local talent in Los Angeles and Hollywood as Lucasfilms might have done a mere forty years ago. In this world of highly-mobile and outsourceable labor, everyone will have to compete much harder to make it to the top of the millions of names that cross the hiring managers' desks.