Category: Uncategorized

Had a very entertaining thanksgiving. I can tell Aunt Judy now knows I’m gay because she didin’t ask about gf’s. Granny made a bean soup, and put no butter or margarine on the veggies just for me. Awww, thanks Granny. Somehow confounding and reverse baiting uncle James Allen has gotten easier. I only wish I knew my Russian better (like at all), so that I could talk with Ina’s father (they’re Ukranian. She, like my Uncle Dennis and dad, is a doc). Mom said she’s Dennis’s girlfriend. She made tiramisu. I felt kinda bad not being able to partake of the efforts of my fellow cooks and compliment them on it. Particularly her, ah well.

Updating from my uncle Dennis’s qwerty desktop because it seems intent on not sharing the PPPoE dsl connection over the ethernet card.

I’m here, arrived safely despite a late start (left the house an hour later than I’d planned), and an inattentive cabby (sideswiped a parked car, but I warned him in enough time that he managed to avoid doing more than damaging the paint job. He left a note).

Enjoying my parents wireless, and I found out that Shannon’s bf is no longer interested in Tom’s spot given that we’re stuck with a 6 month lease. (perfectly understandable to my mind).

Gotta leave now for KY. Seems my uncle is desparate for programmers and the company is doing quite well. <cross fingers>

http://www.igs.berkeley.edu/events/homeless/papers/index.html

Well, the paper has started. It’s a fair guess that it won’t be done in the next two hours, but that it will be done before I get back from thanksgiving. There may be more for me to do in Albuquerque than in Zanesville. Hey, I’ve gone from Albuquerque to Zanesville this November. Heh. Anyway…

Thanks to , , and for a variety of reality checks. I’m still applying to Cal (and other places) for the fall. I’m still going to talk with Uncle Dennis about his software company.

When I started writing the paper (for which I must thank Aaron for providing some inspiration to actually start), it turned out to be much less painful than prior experiences writing papers. Perhaps because I’ve done so much preparatory reading. Responding to also reminded me why I like this stuff. It’s actually kind of fun. I’ll post it here when done. Right after I send a copy to my prof. There may be a happy ending to this story after all.

Thanks to Jay for reminding me that the first part of “deadlines” is often not literal. And thanks to Tom for encouraging me to step back and evaluate, (even though I disagree with your conclusion. =)

Oh, and as the sole tenant of our abode sticking around for the holidays, I get to screen for 4 different sublessors on short notice. Lovely.

So, my reading on homelessness went through it’s relentless list making (I’m currently reading, as I said, a ginormous summary of research in the field of homelessness) when it occurred to me that the big deal with fiscal zoning (a major element of zoning overall) is education. And educational funding is spent in ridiculously inefficient ways. There’s a fair amount of research showing that spending provides a cap on the expression of natural ability. Lots of money spent on educating someone without a great deal of inherent academic potential (as if such an entity were easily measured, but run with it) is wasted. This doubtless occurs with staggering frequency in the richest communities, and most funded schools.

A homogenous curriculum for heterogeneous students is incredibly stupid. The goal should be to have students pushing the limits of their current ability, continuously, in a variety of fields. This involves adaptive instruction. “oh, you did level x in field y with ease. Try level x+1 or x+2. But you showed no understanding whatsoever of level x in z. We’ll try x-1 or x-2 there.” Hopefully the latter part would happen basically never.

This thought led to the notion that my policy interests are primarily in things that are at the local/community level, though with higher level implications (I care about foreign policy, racial/ethnic and sexual minority policies, interstate commerce, and a variety of other such topics, but they aren’t where I feel I can make a difference). No real application to that thought immediately. Back to reading, hopefully less distracted.

Well, over the weekend, I ended up doing little of use. I did read a fair amount of an overview of scholarly work on homelessness, basically the part detailing the struggle with definitions of the problem. I also played Medina for the first time (with and Simon) which was kinda fun. Minorly competitive (I’ll place this here to screw you sort of stuff), but still fun, and buildy and amusing. By contrast, on Sunday evening (when I got the reading that I got done, done, and didn’t go to the clinic) Ro, , Simon and I played Game of Thrones. It’s an interesting balance of power game. It’s fundamentally oriented towards screwing the opposition, and thwarting everyone else’s bids for power. It seems to magically generate contention in ways that other games don’t. (like Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, Traders of Genoa (though I’ve found it to get a bit trying as well)). Instead of cursing one another good naturedly, we start getting irked. Maybe it’s a product of war games. Never did like ’em really. It’s been an entertaining couple of games, but I think I’ve explored it as much as I want to.

We’d offered Scott (Shannon’s new bf, the guy in the kilt in the halloween pic) Tom’s spot, and he accepted. Easiest roommate search ever.

So, the presentation last week went badly, and I’m rather screwed on writing the paper in time for class (by tomorrow at three). I’m still not sure exactly what I want to write about. I’ve done alot of reading. Which puts it a step up from what happened with “The Political Economy of Inequality and Redistribution” where I didn’t even do the reading. Even if I end up writing nothing, or turn in a total crap paper, I will console myself with the notion that I’m making progress.

I may not yet be ready for grad school. But to answer my questions about whether public policy is where it’s at, I think the answer is still yes. And if the answer is no, I always have time.

So, the dream.

It was kind of bizarre, I don’t remember much of it. We (a large group of us, though I was especially close to one, don’t remember who it was, no it wasn’t Ro, think it was a woman) were flying in two planes, one standard private plane, and the other a moderately larger private plane, cargo oriented. Both planes were overloaded. We were doing some sort of a survey flight over alaska. There was a strange town below us, looked kind of like a strip mine with houses built into the mine walls.

We somehow landed in there. Couldn’t take off back out, because, well, it was like a giant strip mine. When we got out, it looked more like some backwoods, modern day frontiersy town. Flat, no walls, whatever. (It was Alaska after all). White snow dusting everywhere. Cars pulled up on ill defined lawns, etc, etc. There was much rangling over transportation specifics, and weight vs lift, and getting out of there, I didn’t participate, but I knew it couldn’t be made to work.

Weird, eh?

I was kind of surprised. I really liked this one. Not like the original Matrix, but nowhere near the debacle that was Reloaded.

Here there be spoilers