Lunch Shoppe

Today I used Twitter to update and to understand what was going on at the Wheeler Hall Barricade Strike. I finally understood what the fuss is over twitter! It was a great way to disseminate information and be able to follow others who were also spreading information. I was able to understand what was happening because of people who were able to tweet within Wheeler Hall as well as people who were close to the information. I was able to understand what people wanted us to do even when the megaphones sucked and I wan't able to hear what the speakers were saying. I was able to read about what happened on different parts of the barricades when things go rough. All of these were important in giving me an accurate portrait of the protest even when the word on the ground was inaccurate. 

Being able to see a picture from the inside of an occupation from as student who is part of that occupation is pretty powerful!

 

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As I have been building abooklog I realized something, the most important need that it fulfills is for simplifying my notetaking of books. I can add all the social networking features I want and call it asocialbooklog, but I am taking a different approach. Abooklog right now fulfills the utility of an individual and has zero social features as I haven't been focusing on them as of yet.

I have been working on getting those features which make an individual's life much easier. I am thinking about how to convey information as simple as possible to the user. I am allowing the individual to set goals (especially if your a bad a reader as I am). All this in the end will I hope make interacting with abooklog quite easy to use.

There is something to be gained from this. With all the focus on social this and social that people forget that there needs to be a core idea on which to build a social network on top of. There needs to be a core idea which has to be done right and you can bolt as much social soup on top as you want.

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In the last two to three years I have been much more inclined to use services like last.fm and Pandora for listening to music. They do a great job of giving a variety of choice to actually listen to music. Further, I have also gone to using Hulu for watching TV shows (which are all of Simpsons, Daily Show, The Office) where before I used to download the torrents. It has just become easier to use these online sources to attain legal music and video. It just seems that it's a lot more convenient to wait for the show to come online and then watching it, even with advertising, than it is to download the thing off BitTorrent. For BitTorrent, I have to find the correct torrent and all that jazz, where I can just find the correct one easily on Hulu.

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I quit (excessive) drinking of alcohol for a while but this summer led me to return to it. I kept on asking why I was being drawn to it as I was consuming it? What was the root cause of this consumption? There is no need to actually drink. I realized that even one beer tends to give me a feeling of filling a void and that void tends to gets smaller with each additional beer. But what is that void?

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Time is money, time is relative, time passes. I feel that I am bound by time especially when I am working. This is a ritual I find myself under. When I work I tend to wear a watch, but when I am not working a watch doesn't become necessary. Work is not a condition under which we sell a product or even a service, but it's time we sell. It is seen that a person who does not work is not bound by time, but someone who is not bound by time is seen as unproductive, a bum, a person not fulfilling societal needs.

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I find that it's easier to just code something up than to constantly think about coding something up. That is just get something working and interate, don't worry if the code is shit and looks ugly. Just get it working even if it does the bare minimum and add features based on that. This is especially great with tools like git which allow you to iterate rapidly, test out features in new branches and try out new things. By constantly thinking about coding you don't really accomplish much and have nothing to show for all that thinking. However, that isn't to say there isn't a place for thinking especially when dealing with hard algorithmic problems, but when I define coding here it is stuff that scratches a personal itch not something that will solve the Traveling Salesman problem or creating Hal. (Though in most cases you can get away with 2^n algorithms with those...)

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GM is filing for bankrupcy and thus has huge symoblic significance for a
generation of Americans. The company which once had 50% of the market
for cars has been declining since the 80s due to many factors including:
lack of innovation, poor quality cars, mismanagement, too many brands,
and the unions.
 
It would have been great if the company were allowed to fail, but it
also falls under the too big to fail criteria that is given. The shitty
products that have been coming from that company does not deserve being
saved and hopefully the bankrupcy will allow foreign companies which
tend to be better run to salvage the company for parts (e.g factories,
etc.).
 
In this case the lack of concessions that the unions themselves were
unwilling to take caused the company to be too bureaucratic, relying
heavily on expensive gas guzzlers to fund the pensions of workers.
Further, most people nowadays buy foreign cars as the stigma of an
American car as poor quality has been stuck. It is interesting to note
however that more "foreign" cars are actually manufactured in the United
States itself mostly through nonunionized workers in the South.
 
GM signified an ideal of Americanism which is now gone. It was an
arrogance bred through Reganomics (man seriously that guy was a dumbass,
yes, I say it again Reagan is a dumbass) of deregulation, winning many
little wars and considering them successes to larger wars (seriously the
wars that really mattered after World War II, the Korean and Vietnam War
can hardly be considered winning), further the fall of the Soviet Union
left a weight of dominance of being able to do anything in the world.
Well that view is quite misplaced. al-Queida, the group that Ameria
funded to fight the Soviets turned on us, the Chinese own most of our
debt, our education is going to shit with other countries leading the
way in science. All of this is coming back to bite us in the ass.
 
As we were in our eyeglass view of the world with an us versus them
mentality of being a big bully, the rest of the world was growing up. We
can't even get our European "friends" to help us in Iran and Afghanistan
how are we going to bully around now. Even Russia has been regaining
some of its clout.
 
If GM signifies anything it is American overspending, of living above
ones means, in a fake gaudy luxury which is unreliable and expensive and
which signifies a big "Fuck You!" to the rest of the world. If GM
signifies anything it is that there are needs and there are wants, we
were fulfilling the wants by overlooking what we actually needed. If GM
signifies anything it is that even the big can fall.
 
America needs to realize we are not the big bad boy in the lot and that
we live in a multipolar world where we can't just start fights and do
anything we want. I hope that eight years of Bush and Dick has led us
realizing that. Obama has 3.5 more years to go, unless the world ends
like the Mayan say in 2012 hopefully we stand better.

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