fling93 loves fishies

I'm not dead! I'm getting better! I think I'll go for a walk!

Yeah, it's been a while since my last update. Those of you who know me in real life know that I'm still up and about elsewhere (mostly Flickr and writing friends-only posts at LiveJournal). I still plan to maintain and update this site, but it's going to be pretty sporadic for the foreseeable future (again, RSS is your friend).

But let me just clue you in on some changes.

I'm now a graduate student working towards a Master's in Economics at San Jose State University. What's a Berkeley alum doing at a school like San Jose State? To be sure, the convenient location was the reason I first started taking classes there. But then I started hearing good things about their economics department. It specializes in the Austrian School, which has been very influential in the libertarian movement. And I like a lot of the professors I've met so far (many of which got degrees from George Mason, one of the other schools I was considering). Yeah, my original plan was to take classes for a year and a half before applying to grad schools, but I think that was mostly because I was overly afraid of picking the wrong field yet again. I am pretty obviously an econ dork.

Being a grad student is, obviously, one reason I haven't been blogging. As Dan Drezner says:

Sure, some blogs burn out and fade away, while others become pale imitations of what they once were. Rather than think of these kind of inexorable trends, however, I suspect that blogs, like much of life, are cyclical. Attentive readers can surely point to days or weeks where it's clear that blogging has not been at the top of my priority list. This doesn't mean that I'm fading away… it (hopefully) means I'm acquiring new forms of substantive knowledge that trickle down onto the blog.

Okay, unlike Dan, I haven't written anything that's gotten published. But then again, he already has a Master's and a Ph.D. I'm probably not going to pursue the Ph.D. because I'm pretty leery of academia and instead have an eye towards working on policy analysis at a think tank, where a Master's would be enough. But regardless, less blogging now should hopefully mean better and more substantive blogging later. I don't want to write too much about topics I don't know very much about. So I'm expanding my knowledge. That's the plan.

Another excuse for lack of blogging: I never finished my planned WordPress migration from Movable Type. This means trackbacks are still disabled, which is somewhat of a disincentive for me to write brilliantly. I did start messing around with WordPress, but I ran into problems getting the Textile 2 plugin to render my old posts correctly. Anybody know Perl who wants to help me out? I'm willing to pay. I also want a site redesign. That stupid logo is cute, but unprofessional, and I no longer think I'll ever have enough spare time to actually draw a better one, even though I probably could.

And there's one more reason which surprises me the most. My stats (such as they are) haven't suffered. I haven't updated since April, and yet my stats since then have remained pretty steady. Yes, that's one reason (along with my starting school full-time) that I added Google ads to this site. It's not a lot of money, but hey, I'm not doing any work for it, so I can't complain. Note that I do not choose the ads, and I will make every attempt to continue to write my own thoughts independently of any financial incentives. For those of you who really don't like the ads, sorry! All I can suggest is to use Firefox with the Adblock plugin.

As always, I can't promise any regular updates. I'm tentatively planning on posting some of my better photos from the last year as well as some of the links of the better blog posts I've read as I've been slowly wading back into the blogosphere. But there's a lot going on in my life right now that is likely to intervene. E-mail me or friend me on LiveJournal if you really want to know.

A Daily Conflict of Interest

Update 6/14/06: Added point about hiring of editors, and clarified a few minor things.

I guess I didn't mention it here earlier, but I'm a staff photographer for The Spartan Daily at SJSU this semester. I wanted to see explore my recent obsession with photography, but I think this semester has all but confirmed that my true calling likely lies in economics (see my LiveJournal for more on that). I've always doubted photojournalism was the way I was meant to change the world. After all, only a small slice of it is visible to cameras (try illustrating comparative advantage or opportunity cost with a photograph). Because of that, photos in newspapers are often used merely to fill space or as eye candy to draw readers (it's telling that the best paper in the country by far, The Wall Street Journal, hardly runs any photos and indeed used to run none altogether). It's a useful function, but it's not the primary one of journalism, which is to inform and educate.

I still think my true calling will involve writing. Of course, I don't intend to write for the Daily, because to tell the truth, it's just not a quality publication. To be sure, it's a bit unfair to compare it to the WSJ (required reading for my Public Policy course) or even The Daily Californian (which I probably didn't judge as critically when I was there), but almost every time I attempt to read The Spartan Daily, I find it a poor use of my time. Erika agrees, saying that most of the stories read little more like press releases. Heck, at the Don Edwards Lecture featuring Terence Smith on Wednesday night, political science professor Terry Christensen couldn't resist making a crack at how far the Daily has fallen.

Given that I haven't worked on the writing side, my various theories as to what's going wrong and how to address them are probably not worth much to anybody (which is why I blog). But there's one thing that really sticks out as an obvious flaw. I may regret saying this, but I've generally been underwhelmed by most of the opinion columns (which tend to make up an unusually central role in this paper, for some reason). And I think there's one really obvious reason behind this. You see, the paper is currently in the process of selecting the editors for next semester. Once that's done, the editors then get to select the opinion columnists — inevitably themselves.

Interoperability

Man, somebody should tell LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga, Flickr, and Friendster (and del.icio.us too, while I'm at it) that they should really consider adding the feature where users can friend people in other systems. Not only would that be hella more convenient for the users, but it will drive more traffic to everybody's sites. Huge untapped market there. Tricky part is just how to display updated friends pages for friends in other systems, but at the very least a text link with an asterisk to show new activity should be fairly simple.

Yeah, yeah, I know. There's already RSS or Yahoo! 360. But it's a pain to track down all the feeds, and you've already done the work of adding them as a friend already. Besides, what percentage of the users out there know and use RSS?

Flinging Four Things at the Meme

Update 3/3/05: Whoops, I'd copied it from Rich's version, which was missing some of the categories. Added those in, but I'm sure I screwed up the order of everything.

Okay, when I get tagged twice, I guess that's a sign I really oughtta participate. So, without further ado:

The Four Things Meme

Four shows I enjoy:

• Mythbusters (oh, I suppose you knew that already).
• Lost
• The L Word
• Battlestar Galactica
• How I Met Your Mother
• Grey's Anatomy
• Weeds
• Robot Chicken

Oh, sorry. Television rotted my brain to the point where I forgot how to count! Or maybe it wasn't the television?

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• Finding Nemo (okay, truthfully I actually liked Monsters, Inc. better, but I can't hurt the feelings of the fishies)
• Garden State (this should not be a surprise to anybody)
• Aliens
• Beauty and the Beast

Four jobs I've held:

• Paper-hatted grill dude at McDonald's
• Word-processing/data entry temp
• Software Engineer
• Senior Software Engineer (which, come to think of it, is an awful lot like Software Engineer, but I haven't had any other jobs that I can recall).

Four cool toys:

• My Canon Digital Rebel (yeah, to me, it's still a toy).
• Astrojax.
• Magz magnetic construction toys.
• The hopes and dreams of other people, bwa ha ha ha!

Four of My Favorite Dishes:

• Tortellini pomodoro alfredo from Frankie, Johnnie, and Luigi Too!
• Halibut sushi (hirame). But don't tell the fishies!
• Couscous with Artichokes, Feta and Sun-Dried Tomatoes (well, Erika makes it without the artichokes).
• Caprese.

Four Web sites I visit daily (uh… not counting Gmail and my Sitemeter stats):

• Last.fm (powered by Audioscrobbler).
• LiveJournal.
• del.icio.us.
• And Flickr of course!

Four places I've lived:

• New Hartford, NY (next to Utica, which is not too far from Syracuse)
• Diamond Bar, CA (about 15 minutes north of Disneyland)
• Berkeley, CA
• Sunnyvale, CA (no, not Sunnydale)

Four places I've vacationed:

• Amsterdam (honeymoon counts as a vacation, no?).
• San Diego.
• Seattle.
• uh… does staying in a hotel in San Francisco count? Or Mountain View? We don't really vacation much.

Four places I'd rather be:

• Washington D.C., making a real difference in this world.
• New York City, living the urban life.
• The engine room of Serenity.
• Behind the wheel of a McLaren F1 car, kicking the arses of both Schumi and Fred.

Four bloggers I'm tagging.

Well, I don't know if they do memes or if they read me, but I'm tagging the four SJSU student bloggers that I know of. San Jose State reprahzent!! Yeah, yeah. This from a guy who was wearing a Cal hat today (well, I haven't bought any SJSU gear yet).

• Dan Esch.
• Dan Sato.
• Lawrence.
• Ryan.
• Shaminder.

Oops, that wasn't four. Yeah, me are an kollij gwajuwett. I suppose that's why I'm going back again to get it right this time.

Busted!

New favorite show: Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel (and not just cuz of Kari Byron).

Myths are debunked by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, two silly geeks who are special-effects experts and love building stuff. I mean, really love building stuff. They will not just debunk the myth, but will go to great lengths to build whatever it takes to show what it would actually take for the myth to happen.

For example, take the myth about the guy who overfilled his washing machine and then fell into the machine and got violently spun around. Well of course, washing machines won't spin if you open the lid, so they could've just stopped there. But no, they decide to override that safety mechanism, only to find that washing machine engines don't have nearly enough torque to spin a person. They could've stopped there, but no, they decide to hook up a car engine to the washing machine to see if that would be enough…

You get the picture. Best part, the narrator makes fun of them for all this! It's great fun for the viewers and the Mythbuster team as well, and they also do a great job clearly explaining the science behind everything with amusing animations (and yes, they do get the science right). Both Erika and I enjoy it thoroughly, and there are not too many shows we both love (although I finally got her hooked on Battlestar Galactica — but goddamn, they took their sweet time before finally doing another decent episode).

So check it out! It's just icing on the cake that Kari Byron is cute and cool beyond words (and quite a talented artist as well).

Oh, is she a redhead? I hadn't noticed.

Friday Cat Blogging, Special Saturday Edition

Yes, Miette. I know. I've been lax with the kitty cat pictures that I promised for Blogs Sweeps Week. I know that this is trying your patience. I already explained the extenuating circumstances.

Yes, your worshipfulness. I know that excuses mean nothing to you. Yes, I know fully well that you can kill me with your brain. I am correcting the issue as we speak. Yes, I know you are displeased that I am reduced to blatantly ripping off Fafblog! for my material.

My 2005 Mix CD

I think there are three kinds of music listeners. There are people who just shuffle their entire CD collection, people who create tailor-made playlists for every kind of circumstance and occasion, and people who listen to Michael Bolton because they like his hair. I happen to fall into the first category. When I use Windows, I use an old Winamp weighted-shuffler plugin RoboDJ (alas, no longer being maintained, but it still works fine). Similarly, when I use Macs, I use smart playlists to create a Do-It-Yourself Smart Radio Station. And if it happens to be 4:20 (which seems to be fairly often for some reason), I generally turn on the G-Force visualization (although, now that I have a new PC that can handle it, I'm giving Milkdrop a try).

Anyway, this was always reflected when I made mix CDs or tapes. I'd just pick a bunch of my favorite songs, mostly alternating the slow and fast ones to provide for a more shuffle-like variety. I never really put too much thought into the order or picking songs specifically to fit with each other, and I had no idea there was a whole art to that. And I suppose this showed on My 2004 Mix CD (although it still single-handedly propelled Howie Day's “Collide” and the Killers' “Mr. Brightside” into big hits).

Pitiful Sweeps Week Wrapup

Okay, okay. I didn't come close to delivering on my promised Blog Sweeps Week posts of kitty cat and Natalie Portman photos. Don't worry. I'll get to them later. Seems like my stats (such as they are) did okay anyway (you can check them out yourself if you're so inclined). Not too many hits on the photos themselves, so I'm chalking it up to the fact that I've been posting more frequently (especially compared to November or December), and everybody knows that search engines love frequent updates.

The economist-wanna-be in me of course would consider this a perverse incentive to write a lot — even if you have nothing to say and even about subjects you don't know anything about. While the political-scientist-wanna-be in me would notice that, like many politicians, I was rewarded for making bold promises that I did not intend to keep. And the journalist-wanna-be-in-me would notice that the blogging medium rewards post-frequency over credibility — much like how journalists are incentivized more by deadlines than really understanding the fields they're writing about. This reinforces the obvious fact that the blogosphere has a long, long way to go from becoming the ideal meritocracy that will unseat traditional media (which is something I admitted even when I pronounced journalism a dying field).

Anyway, I would like to point out that I did actually intend to post every day. I just knew that it wasn't bloody likely with my schedule. Indeed, I was a total idiot and added a class (Beginning Photojournalism) to push my course-load at SJSU to 18 units before realizing it was past the drop deadline. Um, yeah. I guess as an engineer at a startup, I got used to ignoring deadlines as being ridiculously unrealistic. So I get a rude real-world lesson after leaving the real world to go back to school. Go figure.

Also, I ended up spending the bulk of my allotted blogging time working on the write-up for my 2005 Mix CD, which is almost done. Stay tuned for that. No, really. I am almost done. Aw heck, who needs credibility anyway?

Nat and Cat

Yeah, I think I bit off more than I can chew this week. 15 units of classes at San Jose State plus I'm attending another class I'm considering adding (no, I'm not planning on taking 18 units, but I haven't figured out which class to drop yet so I'm still attending all of them), plus working part-time at my last job (well hey, it's a helluva much higher paid position than that of most of my classmates), and then spending a ridiculous amount of time on the silly 2005 Mix CD. And apparently, now I'm also on the photography staff of the Spartan Daily (although they've yet to run anything of mine yet).

So that's why no update so far.

Well, I promised the Top 6 of my favorite kitty photos, so you'll still get a Top 6. I just probably won't finish all 6 within Sweeps Week (“Oh, boo hoo!” you say). And as I have way too many favorite Natalie Portman photos, I'm not going to actually go through the trouble of ranking them. Instead, I'll just upload 6 of them in no particular order. I hope none of you mind (not like you got much choice in the matter).

So, in case you hadn't already noticed, here's a random photo of the hotness that is Natalie Portman. It's not a great quality scan, but I love the picture anyway. And of course, now that I'm obsessed with photography, I now can tell that this is a nice use of depth of field, having her dreamy eyes in sharp focus and the rest of her gradually getting out of focus.

Anyway, here's my number 5 favorite kitty cat photo (yeah, if you've already gone through my Flickr account, all of these will be familiar). Ready? One… two… three… Awwww!

That's all for now! Come back later! How much later? How should I know? That's why they invented RSS feeds.

Kicking off Blog Sweeps Week

Well, Blog Sweeps Week is upon me (banner courtesy of Ealasaid). Geez, actually it started yesterday, which doesn't bode well for me. I've never really tried to maximize my traffic, mostly using this thing as a place to put essays. I'm told that lists work pretty well, so I guess this week would be a good time for me to write up the post for my “My 2005 Mix CD” (especially since we're exchanging the CDs tomorrow) as well as “My Top Ten Films of 2005.” So stay tuned for those. And in case you were curious, here was my 2004 Mix CD and my Top Ten Films of 2004 and of 2003.

Aside from that, I know posting more frequently would help, and of course, kitty cats and sex are always money in the blog world (thus the banner). To tie this in with my first and my second obsessions, I think I'll also post my favorite photos my kitty cat, Miette, as well as my favorite photos of the hotness that is Natalie Portman (alas, none of which were taken by me). But to keep y'all coming back, I'm going to spread these out throughout the week. I would do a top 7, but because I'm a day late, I guess it'll be top 6.

So without further ado, here's my Number 6 favorite photograph of my adorable kitty cat, Miette. Click on the photo for a larger version. This was from a few years ago. Isn't she cute? She's soooo cute! Come back for more!

Speaking of cute, stay tuned later today for the Number 6 picture of Natalie Portman.

Gosh, grubbing for traffic feels so degrading.