Latent Frustration

I’ve been feeling sort of frustrated lately. I suppose this is mostly because I’m taking a fifth year at Evergreen (and further enjoying the status of super senior-dom) — it feels like my work over the last four years has been unfocused. Perhaps I am falling into the trap of feeling like I should have a major in a school that doesn’t in any way support majors. There’s nothing technically wrong with having skipped around in disciplines and studied so many different things; such is the essence of a liberal arts college, and, indeed, the essence of a liberal arts degree.

Yet still, it feels as if I should be able to point at my degree and be able to say that I earned something specific. Currently, my résumé suggests that I am graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with a focus on Writing — my transcript and my credits seem to back this up, but it seems a flimsy argument at the moment because I have yet to write my summative evaluation, the document which will, once and for all, settle what my Evergreen education allowed me to learn. Perhaps this is what’s bugging me — I can’t be sure because it’s hard for me to translate it into words.

Just to give an idea of the range of the work I’ve done:

  • Fall/Winter/Spring 2001-2002: Trash with Cynthia Kennedy, Sonja Wiedenhaupt, and Sharon Anthony — environmental studies, psychology, introduction to writing, business, ethics
  • Fall/Winter 2002-2003: Taking the Pulse with Cynthia Kennedy, Toska Olson, and Dean Olson (now retired) — business, statistics, business ethics, writing of ethical case studies/thesis-based writing
  • Spring 2003: Algebra to Algorithms with Judy Cushing and Allen Mauney — mathematics, philosophy of mathematics, thesis-based writing, Logo programming
  • Spring 2003: Practice of Professional Tutoring with Sandra Yannone — philosophy of tutoring writing
  • Summer 2003: A Writer’s Feast with Evan Shopper, Nancy Parkes — fiction writing, writing workshops
  • Fall/Winter/Spring 2003-2004: Data to Information with Brian Walter, John Cushing, and Neal Nelson — computer programming in Haskell and Java, philosophy of computer science, thesis-based writing, ethics, computer architecture
  • Fall 2004: Power in American Society with Larry Mosqueda — political science, history of the U.S., thesis-based writing
  • Winter 2004: The Novel: Life and Form with Thad Curtz — literary analysis of British/French literature, written literary analysis, thesis-based writing
  • Spring 2004: Inkslingers: Creative Writing with Michael Radelich (independent contract sponsor) — fiction writing

I guess I’m waiting for inspiration, and it’s not working out too well.

autumn departs

R.I.P. autumn
August 29, 2001 – April 5, 2005
My trusty Dell Inspiron 8100, autumn (service tag GFVVT01), departed me today via DHL for equipment recycling. She served me for a trusty three years and seven months. When she arrived, she was a 900MHz machine with 128MB RAM. Over the years, she was returned twice for Dell rapid repair response, had her DVD-ROM drive replaced at least twice, and was upgraded to a humble 512MB RAM. I’ll miss that laptop — she served me well, and might have made it a little longer if her LCD hinge hadn’t broken…

Thank you, autumn. I’ll miss you, little tyke.

Laptop Named

I’ve decided to name my laptop calliope, which felt to me like it fit this little computer perfectly. This isn’t named after the music, but a Greek muse — from Wikipedia (original entry linked above):

In Greek mythology, Calliope (Greek: Καλλιoπε, beautiful-voiced) was the muse for epic poetry. She had two sons, Orpheus and Linus with Apollo. She was the oldest and wisest of the Muses. She was the judge in the argument over Adonis between Aphrodite and Persephone. She was represented by a stylus and wax tablets.

Well, I am a writer and writing tutor, after all, and much of my work involves writing, so this makes sense.

Why Buy a Prius

I’ve talked a lot about the Toyota Prius, but since many other people (most notably John Fagnant over at john1701a.com) have already made a very strong case for the Prius, I haven’t dived into this realm of writing about the car. Indeed, most of what I’m about to say here is repeated copiously elsewhere on the web. I put it here both for my own reference and for enlightenment.

As most know, there are several hybrid cars available today: the Honda Civic, Accord, and Insight, the Ford Escape, and, of course, the Toyota Prius. Also joining the line this year through Lexus (Toyota’s luxury division) is the RX400H SUV and Toyota’s new Highlander hybrid SUV, due out in June of this year. Of these, the Toyota Prius is the most well-known, due to extensive marketing by Toyota and a fiercely loyal supporter base that has kept a number of Internet sites going (like John’s and priusonline.com, a massive forum for Prius owners and interested parties).

There have been a number of people who have observed that the EPA rating for the Toyota Prius at 60 miles/gallon (in city; 51MPG highway) is wildly inaccurate, but according to the EPA itself, this is an average number. The Prius’ rating is uses a ratio of “45% highway driving, 55% city driving, 15000 annual miles and a fuel cost of $ 1.91 per gallon” in EPA tests according to fueleconomy.gov. Since this is an average (and not a median) value, we can’t say anything about whether people will definitely get a higher or lower value. Average values can be incredibly misleading — for example, the average of {1, 1, 1, 1, 9} is 13/5 = 2.6, whereas the median is actually 1. The real-world experience of drivers of the Prius seems to be between 35 and 50MPG (lifetime value). It all depends on how you drive the car; either way, this is far more fuel efficient than any other unleaded model out there, most of which are lucky to make between 20 and 25MPG.

A very closely related argument to the higher fuel efficiency is the lower overall cost of ownership incurred by less frequent trips to the gas tank. The fuel tank of a Prius holds 11.9 gallons — fairly comparable to a standard car — but uses that amount of gas up much slower than other cars because of smart utilization of the electric and gas engines. Again, the rate at which drivers must fill up the car depends on how they drive it, but for the most part, driving the car does result in fewer trips to the gas station and higher return on ownership.

In addition, through 2006, there are various tax incentives for buying a hybrid. The government’s Fuel Economy web site shows the details for these. [Edit, April 3, 12:10AM: The IRS web site also has a brief notice on how to correctly file this deduction on Form 1040.]

The final reason — for many eco-conscious consumers, this car is a perfect fit with their values. My first year at Evergreen, I took a course entitled Trash, during which I became fascinated with the ideas of sustainable economics and sustainability in general. That has become a part of my own studies and interests, but has yet to have any real substantial expression in my own life. In addition, it’s a great way to help with the raging debate on climate change, and it’s a nod towards the sustainable future we seem to be headed for. That’s why I’m looking at the Prius seriously; I have always been taught to stick to my own values even when those values are questioned, and the idea of sustainability has become a value of my own.

Toyota Announces New Hybrid Pricing

Toyota has announced new prices on the Toyota Highlander hybrid and the 2005 Prius:

The base MSRP for the 4×2 Highlander Hybrid Limited will be $37,890. The Highlander Hybrid Limited with 4WD-i will carry an MSRP of $39,290.

The Highlander Hybrid will begin arriving in Toyota dealerships in June 2005.

The groundbreaking Toyota Prius midsize sedan remains the best-selling gas-electric hybrid vehicle in the United States and the world. The most fuel-efficient midsize car in America, the Hybrid Synergy Drive powered Prius delivers exceptional fuel efficiency without compromising performance, comfort and safety.

Beginning April 4, the 2005 Prius will receive an adjusted MSRP of $20,975, a slight increase of $100, or 0.5 percent.

The $100 increase in 2005 Prius models is presumably to offset the increase in production allocations for U.S. models. Seems fair to me.

I’m For Raising Local Gas Taxes

The Seattle Times reports today that Seattle-area Democrats are looking to raise area gas taxes by 15 cents over the next twelve years. This is a great idea, because not only does it fund repairs of two of the region’s major transportation arterials, but it also has an interesting possible side effect: as gas taxes go up, people will begin to look for cheaper alternatives.

In a word, hybrid cars.

But the problem is that the phase-in time is too slow. If we raise gas taxes that slowly, we run the risk of having funding cut off by people who don’t understand the reasoning behind the project now. In addition, it spurs complacency. The true problem in the world today is that people do not realize the true costs of the things we buy. In a consumerist society, we are not encouraged to understand real cost versus projected cost — projected cost being what we think the object is actually worth, versus the real cost of production and environmental impacts. This ties in closely to the debate over opening ANWR — opponents (like me) say that opening ANWR will damage a precious national wildlife refuge while only yeilding an oil supply equivalent to about three years. The proponents of such a plan argue that we don’t know what the yield will be because no oil exploration has been done. Both sides ignore some rather devastating cultural impact for local tribes who would be directly affected because their way of life keeps them in ANWR most days out of the year. The invasion of oil companies would be a drastic cultural impact for them and completely change their way of life.

Granted, this situation is nothing like ANWR, since there is little chance of this being construed as a bad proposal. It fixes transportation problems before they occur (sort of), rather than the DOT’s current pattern of “try to fix the problem that we should have designed for five years ago, only to attain five years later what we should have attained today”. The Alaskan Way Viaduct is already problematic, but it isn’t quite dead yet — everyone in the Seattle area knows it needs replacement. This gives us money to act on that.

Here’s hoping this doesn’t go to the myopic voters of Washington State.

Edit (1:19PM): In an odd coincidence, the Alaskan governor has written a position piece in the Seattle Times about ANWR drilling.

700M Initialization Ct’d

This morning, I got up, ran Synaptic (apt graphical package manager) to update the system, then tried once again to get onboard wireless working. As it turns out, I had forgotten to add the new laptop’s MAC address to the wireless MAC list, so the router was prohibiting the connection. Figures — you always miss the obvious. After tweaking the network scripts to get the key right, the connection works.

Up to this point, I’ve been following a lot of the instructions provided here, since this is a pretty good set. For safety to make sure that DVDs would play, I ran

ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd

Just to make sure the link existed. To verify DVD functionality, I popped in my copy of The Reduced Shakespeare Company and started xine. Changing the configuration’s experience level to “Master of the Known Universe”, I started the player, then accessed the volume control and turned off the muting on the PCM line. Sound works, video works. I also managed to get CRT out working using this driver, then wrote a little shell script resident in the driver’s directory so all I have to do is type crt on and crt off.

Going into Applications > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts, I set the volume mute, volume down, and volume up buttons to their appropriate Fn+F5, Fn+F6, and Fn+F7 key combinations, respectively.

After that, I transferred all my settings over from autumn to this computer. I’m now using this computer as the primary for all my work and holding on to autumn for a while until I’m certain I don’t need anything else off of her. The 700M has a much lower resolution than I’m used to, but hopefully that will do me some good in terms of eye strain. It’s also cool to be able to carry it around.

I did have to install the mozilla-j2re package to get some Java applications to cooperate with me, but that’s been the only major tweak required (not even really a major tweak). Other than that, it’s functioning very, very well.

Dell Inspiron 700M System Initialization

My new laptop arrived a few minutes ago (5:41PM, according to UPS tracking, after being loaded at 5:20AM — poor baby…).

And the assimilation process begins…

Step 1: boot from System Rescue CD and run the command run_qtparted. Autodetect the mouse (option 1), then select the hard drive. Delete all the existing Windows partitions, then split the drive in half by specifying 50% of the unallocated space. Two partitions are created — one is ext3 for the Linux filesystem and one is FAT32 for the Windows reinstall. This left about 8MB free at the end of the drive for me — no issue, since I don’t even use 10GB regularly, much less 30. Commit the changes, exit, and reboot.

Install order matters here — because I want to use Fedora Core 3’s boot loader (GRUB), I’m installing Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 first. This takes a while, even with a 1.6GHz processor, though I did fully format the FAT32 partition to an NTFS partition (I started at 6:10PM and ended the install at 7:15 or so.) I then started the Fedora Core 3 install.

My hard disk now has a partition layout as follows:

/dev/hda1 (Mount point /, ext3, 27588MB)
/dev/hda2 (NTFS, 28608MB)
/dev/hda3 (swap space for FC3, 1028MB)

I enabled the firewall software and configured it for web server access, then disabled SELinux. Selecting package groups, I chose:

X Window System (no changes from default)
Gnome Desktop Environment (default minus at-spi, gnopernicus, gok)
Editors (default selections)
Graphical Internet (firefox, gaim, gftp, thunderbird only)
Text-based Internet (lynx only)
Office/Productivity (default minus openoffice.org-i18n, planner)
Sound and Video (plus xcdroast)
Graphics (no changes from default)
Web Server (minus httpd-manual, webalizer, plus php-mysql)
MySQL Database (no changes from default)
Development Tools (no changes from default)
X Software Development (no changes from default)
Printing Support (no changes from default)

After formatting and installing, a reboot. I finished the install around 8PM. I set up my own FC3 account, then immediately switched into console. Logging in as root, I changed the init level to 3 to shut down X. I then modified the X configuration to match this xorg.conf, which was generated from another Inspiron 700M.

From there, I type init 5 and get back into X.

Now, I follow the Yum installation instructions posted here, then:


yum -y install libdvdcss
yum -y install xine xine-lib xine-lib-devel
yum -y install apt
yum -y install synaptic
yum -y install fortune fortune-bofh-excuses fortune-hitchhiker fortune-tao
yum -y install totem-xine

The wireless still isn’t functioning, and it’s time for bed, so more tackling this tomorrow.

25th Anniversary of Mt. St. Helens

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning of volcanic activity at Mount St. Helens. Yesterday, March 27th, marked the beginning of a series of explosions on the mountain that led up to the May 18th eruption and devastation of the landscape in that area. The USGS has an interesting timeline of events (the link points to the timeline of events for March 22-28, 1980).

It is strangely appropriate that Mount St. Helens is active again today, marking her own 25th anniversary with another round of rebuilding eruptions.

The local NBC affiliate, KING 5, has an article on this as well.