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headkick facsimile

By anders pearson •

just thought i’d let everyone know that i’m still alive. i’m still up in maine on “vacation” and shall continue to be for about another week.

maine is very cold.

other than that, there isn’t a lot to do here. i’m on an iBook on my parents’ kitchen table (the only available phone jack in the house is in the kitchen and i only have a 2m cable) working over a very slow dialup connection (the misery). but i guess that’s better than nothing.

other than sleeping, eating beaucoup mac+cheese, and drinking beer the highlights of my vacation have included:

getting contacts
having peripheral vision is something i haven’t experienced in over a decade. very neat. you really forget how much of a handicap glasses really are until you get rid of them. unfortunately, it’s taking me a while to get used to them. i apparently have superhuman blink reflexes. when i first got them, it took the eye doctor about 45 minutes of poking me in the eye and swearing to get them in. it was taking me an hour or so to get them in or out by myself until tasha let me in on the secret to getting them out quickly: just stick your finger in your eye and jab it around until they come out; surprisingly effective. now i just have to master getting them in.
new year’s eve
yet another spectacular party at Jere’s. got to see lots of friends who i haven’t seen in way too long (kara, zeb, anthony, matti, heather, tasha, nigel, elliot, jesse, etc), got to finally actually meet kim in person after having known her online for the last 3 years. and of course, we managed to consume enough alcohol to mortally wound a small herd of elephants. driving for six hours through “whiteout conditions” in the worst blizzard we’ve seen in a while was just icing on the cake.

right now i can’t feel my feet (the kitchen doesn’t seem to be as well heated as the rest of the house) so i will write more later.

over and out

By anders pearson •

i’m heading back to maine immediately after my last final tomorrow. i’m taking a laptop with me so i should have some internet connectivity over break, but in general, i wouldn’t expect much from me for the next 3 weeks or so.

i’ll see everyone that i’m seeing when i see you.

everybody behave yourselves while i’m gone.

tall, dark and...

By anders pearson •

i have progressed even further along my path to the dark side. with the help of my friends Julintip and Sheela, i purchased a nice black Kenneth Cole suit today. after seeing my combat boots, i received several threats to the effect of “if you wear those boots with this suit, i will have to kill you”. so i got some nice shoes too.

before you berate my silliness, go watch “American Psycho” and “Falling Down”. suits can be badass too…

and if any of you have any plans to be in midtown manhattan anywhere near the holidays, drop them now! crowds drive me nuts. i almost had to go postal.

wtf?

By anders pearson •

it’s 1 am and there is a marching band outside my window playing “living on a prayer”. shoot me now.

swarthmore cuts 3 varsity sports

By anders pearson •

dammit. i knew i should have gone to swarthmore. it’s nice to see a school actually place academics ahead of sports for once.

<p>when i was the online editor for the student newspaper at <a href="http://www.bates.edu/">Bates</a>, we came under heavy pressure from the athletics department to put the sports section on the back page (the back page is a desirable location since you don&#8217;t have to open the paper). they were pushing us because they wanted the copies of the paper that were sent to prospective students to show that Bates was really serious about sports. unfortunately, they had a lot of clout with the school and were able to basically give us the ultimatum that sports got the back page or we lost all of our funding. this threat presented three serious problems to the editorial staff: </p>
  1. by allowing outside organizations to dictate our content, our journalistic integrity would be seriously comprimised.
  2. for the entire history of the paper, the only thing which had stayed constant and could be considered a real “tradition” was the “question on the quad” section on the top fold of the back page; we considered it a part of our identity as a paper.
  3. the paper was funded partly by the school and partly by advertising. the advertising spot below the fold on the back page was our largest revenue generator; if it were to be moved to the middle somewhere, we would lose a significant portion of our income. since the paper was barely staying afloat as it was (actually we were $5K in the hole before any of this even started), this was not an attractive option. we were basically put in the position of deciding if we wanted half our funding cut if we stood up to them or a third of our funding cut if we submitted.
<p>we managed to resist for the rest of the year that i worked there (until i, and a few others, got laid off because of the vanishing budget) mostly because we had legally binding contracts with our advertisers that their ads would run on the back page for that entire year. sadly, the next year, the paper was forced to give up and the sports section is now on the back page. so the result is that now bates will appear &#8220;serious about sports&#8221; to the potential students but it no longer has even the most basic online version of its newspaper (for comparison, <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/">columbia</a> has 19 different student publications online).</p>

<p>at around the same time that was going on, Bates finally gave the athletic department the power to recruit and offer athletic scholarships. previously (and this was one of the reasons that i liked bates and chose to go there), the athletic department had a small amount of informal influence over admissions but were not explicitly allowed to recruit athletes. it seems clear to me that Bates is heading downhill now; destined to become just another of the schools which admit non-athlete students merely so they can be sure they have bodies to fill the stands at football games. </p>

<p>i have this fantasy about one day becoming disgustingly rich (we&#8217;re talking bill gates rich) and going back to bates and saying &#8220;i am willing to give you X billion dollars on the sole condition that you cut all sports and burn down the gymnasium.&#8221; just to see what they&#8217;d do.</p>

<p>i was eating dinner the other night and on the radio i heard them announce some essay contest aimed at high school students asking them to write an essay about how sports had changed their lives for the better. i missed the details on how to submit but i seriously considered, as a protest, sending in my own essay on how sports had taught me a valuable lesson about how fucked up our educational system and our priorities as a society really are.</p>

Martin Garbus seminar

By anders pearson •

tomorrow (2000-12-12), my employer is sponsoring a seminar by Martin Garbus, the lawyer who defended (and is defending) 2600 magazine in the DeCSS case entitled “Hackers, Napster, Free Speech, and Piracy: How it Will Change the Entire Communications World Including Entertainment and Education.” and, because we’re just so unbelievably /<-31337, we’re broadcasting it live on the internet. so if you happen to be in NYC, you should come check it out in person. otherwise, you should tune in from 16:00 to 17:30 EST.

emile and i saw him at 2600’s press conference during H2K. the man’s definately good at what he does.

FAQ

By anders pearson •

i finally made up a little FAQ for this site. i should really be sedated.

SVG

By anders pearson •

i’ve been playing around with SVG lately.

Scalable Vector Graphics are an image format similar to Flash but implemented entirely as XML. Adobe has a browser plugin available and new versions of Illustrator (as well as the new Flash generator supposedly) can save as SVG. now, the Apache project is working on Batik which aims to be a nice core library for dealing with SVGs and mozilla has (currently very limited) native support for SVGs.

i’m very excited.

Flash is nice to look at and all but has serious limitations for web use (it’s pretty much impossible to link to anything in an all flash site from outside, text-browsers and screen readers don’t stand a chance of being able to render anything remotely useful, etc) and it’s fully proprietary (eg, i can view flash on linux but i can’t make flash files on linux because macromedia hasn’t bothered porting generator).

SVG gets around all of these problems. first of all, it’s a W3C standard so there are no licensing issues preventing anyone and everyone from making viewers/generators and incorporating them into other programs (Free or otherwise). since SVGs are just XML (ie, plain text), anyone with a text editor can make them or tweak them by hand (trust me, i’ve been doing this all afternoon. there is something very cool about the idea of making graphics in emacs :) or write programs to generate them dynamically. it also means that you can simply apply different style-sheets to them to do things like just pulling out any textual data for the benefit of text-browsers and screen readers. and since any XML file can be parsed into a DOM, you can script it to your heart’s content. so currently SVG has javascript support that lets you do all the nice interactivity and animation stuff of Flash but i expect to see support for other scripting languages as soon as it starts to catch on.

now we just sit back and wait to see how microsoft is going to come screw it all up (there’s no way they’ll let any decent, open, standards based technology go unmolested for long).