I want to have done this experiment.

Something just reminded me of these. Uncrustables. Pre-made peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. Some of my summer-camp kids brough these, and I was totally baffled. Horrified. Frightened. People buy PBJ sandwiches. Pre-made. In four individually sealed packets. In the frozen food aisle. What the hell has happened to the world?

I hope John Kerry gets elected, and I hope he follows through on his promise to refocus the War on Terror. This “war” badly needs some refocusing. Recently I obtained a copy of the 9/11 commission report from my local college bookstore (at even less than the bargain list price of $10!) It is interesting reading, and it indicates just how important foreign intelligence is in fighting terror threats. The solution to a war on terror isn’t attacking other nations. The US needs to be funding covert missions to gather intelligence, infiltrate terror cells, and shut them down. Ultimately, the United States has wasted billions of dollars of taxpayer money on a war which hasn’t made us any safer, instead of providing needed resources for improving our intelligence efforts. I see this as a significant failure in policy by the Bush administration.

My father sent me an email mentioning his student Azure, who took BBSpot’s “What OS Are You?” quiz. Normally I don’t participate in these, but:

Which OS are You?

I’ve been watching Google’s stock price since it went public several weeks ago. Despite commentary indicating otherwise, google seems to have played its IPO very well. Unlike many technology stocks, it has remained relatively stable. However, only time will tell if Google will be a good investment.

I have once again returned from a busy week. Unfortunately, I have been sick with a cold ever since sunday night. On top of that, I’ve had a bunch of stuff to do. Everything is now done on time, and hopefully my cold is on the mend.

I have been a supporter and user of Norton Antivirus for several years. It has always worked well for me, and I’ve always kept a subscription to the older version (2002 or 2003), which is perfectly legit. Norton uses a subscription business model, where purchase of their antivirus product gets you one year of virus updates. I haven’t been particularly impressed with their 2004 base product. It seems to make the system run significantly slower and adds more complexity. 2002 with updates has always worked as well if not better than the more recent versions.

With the introduction of Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows now monitors the status of virus protection products in the “Windows Security Center.” With this feature Windows can alert the user if their virus subscription lapses or if the product does not update automatically. However, Norton Antivirus did not support this feature until several days after XP SP2 was released. Even now Norton claims that the WMI update for Service Pack 2 will only be available for Antivirus 2004. Thats right, the people who have carefully renewed their subscription every year since 2002 are now getting shafted by Symantec.

Fortunately, I am a student at UNH. This entitles me to a free copy of McAfee AntiVirus Enterprise Edition and four years of free updates. McAfee didn’t need any updating to work with Service Pack 2. I think I can learn to love it.

In the MUB this morning someone had placed several flyers entitled “Common Sense” on the tables. The flyers are a conservative newsletter, so to speak. There are several articles in it, each written from an clearly stated conservative viewpoint. The flyer has two articles which reference Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. This first faults the University for showing the movie in the MUB theatre, claiming Fahrenheit 9/11 contradicts the University’s academic honesty policy. This weekend the MUB theatre is showing Kill Bill 2. I am fully prepared to leaflet the MUB food court claiming the movie dishonestly portrays the life of a professional assassin! Seriously, I see several problems with the “Common Sense” viewpoint. A) Fahrenheit 9/11 is being shown in the MUB theatre on the weekend to students that pay to see it. B) The MUB does not endorse a film by showing it, just like a commercial theatre. Businesses supply demand, and if there is demand for Moore’s movie the MUB will show it. C) People who claim Moore’s film is not a documentary because it has a viewpoint should watch some other documentaries, including the recently released Super Size Me. Super Size Me was widely accepted, and although it covers a much less controversial topic it still comes from a biased position.

The second article bemoans low voter turnouts among young people and points out that politicians rarely care about apathetic students. This is a worthy cause! All young people should be encouraged to vote their mind! But this article spoils itself by blaming low youth voter turnouts on “the liberal media bias” and gives several examples: sitcom shows, rock compilation albums, and “ridiculous propaganda films like Fahrenheit 9/11.” I can’t bring myself to trust the supposedly neutral intentions someone who claims these examples constitute a liberal bias in the media. It sounds more like the author does not understand the difference between an individual’s expression in the form of art and news reporting.

As an independant, I urge people to inspect the issues in this election, weigh them, and come to an independant conclusion. Consider monitoring several different news sources and opinions. Inspecting both sides of an issue is crucial to understanding it and arriving at a conclusion that works. If you don’t like Bush or Kerry, consider third party candidates. More important, if you are registered with a party and find yourself disagreeing with some of their actions, let them know what they’re doing wrong. I suppose I’m preaching. Take the world’ss smallest political quiz and make up your own mind. But don’t forget to vote in November!

Jason Kottke has some strong words about the current election issues which really resonate with me. I challenge everyone to move this campaign beyond Vietnam and into the present, where the real issues lie.

Our Calculus professor writes X → ∞ on the board when she meant to write X → 0 on the board, then does it again. Somebody points it out.

Professor: “Ah. Theres something wrong with the chalk.”

This weekend aelscha attended Noreascon and I went camping in Acadia National Park with her family. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing some biking on trails, and it was nice to spend a weekend with ael’s family. Abby’s sister Gennie took some photos which you may find enjoyable. I especially like this picture of me eating an onion.

On August 20th, I wrote about the Swift Boat Veterans organization. The post I wrote has received quite a bit of unexpected popularity, and it currently tops the list of search terms in the webstats. It has also attracted numerous comments, including one from a someone who seems to think I am a news organization. I am highly amused. I also suggest contributers consider the basic rules of grammer and netiquette (IE, not “yelling”). This is especially true for those writing comments that argue a viewpoint. I like to read differing opinions, but I like them best if they’re well written.

In the MUB (UNH Student Union) basement there is a student computing lab. Since I don’t currently have a laptop I need to use these labs occaisionally. The labs have been improved this year, with new computer equipment and flat panel displays. This is good. Whats bad is the way these machines are configured. They authenticate to the WILDCAT Windows domain so any user with a UNH email account can use them. This is good. However, there is no roaming profile support and the machines are configured to discard any changes at logout. Users can access files stored in their CISUNIX accounts, but this is the only method of saving anything.

This means there is no way to save any settings in any application. Everytime log in to check my email, I need to reconfigure the SSH client for usable colors and settings. Everytime I use a web browser I have to reenable popup blocking. No browser settings are saved. I cannot save bookmarks. The SSH host keys are not cached, which removes a critical part of SSH’s security features. The upgrade webpage proudly proclaims that users can now save files on their desktops and those files will be saved on the network. Great. But if I can’t save any other settings, the machine’s utility decreases drastically. I shouldn’t have to spend 5 minutes configuring the SSH client and browser to bring them to a usable state every time I log in.

Recently someone asked me why I needed a laptop. This one of the biggest reasons why a laptop is important to me. Fortunately, a replacement for Gryphon will hopefully be arriving sometime next week.

This semester I have what I think will be one awesome class, two good ones, and one that I think I’m going to skip fairly often. *watches her parents flinch*

Calculus 1 is repeat material, and I’m not entirely thrilled about having to waste a semester on it. I know I could use the review, but I don’t need to be doing this for an hour every day. It’s a waste of time, and of precious morning sleep. The prof moves really fast in lecture, which is nice. None of this pampering the liberal arts majors (yay!). The TA, however, is an Indian woman whose English is a little weak and who doesn’t seem terribly comfortable being in front of a class, which makes lab kind of boring.

Honors Principles of Bio is going to be good. It’s more cellular and molecular bio than I expected, and I keep thinking to myself, “I don’t wanna learn about this, I wanna learn about animals!” Next semester, they tell me. Still, it’s background I know I’m going to be glad of if/when I want to take more neuroscience. The professor is actually a chemistry guy, and so this particular section is also aimed at helping people to survive organic chem (highest fail rate on campus), which all the freshmen bio majors in my class have to take next year. Oh, and there’s an HBHSer in my class,w hcih is kinda cool.

Psych Research Methods should be at least okay. It’s the last of the required-for-everyone classes in the dept, and the first one that can’t be taken as a gen-ed by people in other majors. So there should be a slightly less silly mix of people (I hope). The professor is Mexican or Central American, and has a Spanish accent that’s strong enough that I have to pay attention - my usual trick of spacing out and half-listening won’t work here. A big part of this class is that we are going to walk through doing an actual research project, which should be cool. Now to come up with some ideas…

And Society and the Arctic looks to be wicked cool. That’s another Honors course, a seminar so there’s only 18 people in the class, and it’s just going to be neat. I mean, a class where one of the required texts is a Lonely Planet guide and another is a wall map can’t be bad. The prof is a socioloist (the percentages on the syllabus he handed out added up to 110. Not to perpetuate stereotypes about sociologists or anything), but we’re going to be talking about a bunch of different issues, a lot of climate stuff especally, and yeah. Really cool.

So that’s that. The only one of these classes that kind of worries me is Bio, just cause at the moment it’s pretty heavy on the chemistry, and while I have taken high-school chem (Honors Chem, no less), it was six years ago. I feel old, and insufficiently prepared. Other than that, it looks like it’ll be a good semester. Oh, and I want math to be interesting again, but that may have to wait till next year when I can take proofs. Once you’ve taken proofs, then you can take almost all the 5/6/700-level courses. Someday…