Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

It's a year, a Van Halen album, and a novel (made into a film). As for the year, it was pretty good despite the fact that I was an angst-ridden teenager with a weight problem and no girlfriend. As for the album, it was one of their best and it was their last...Van Hagar debuted a couple of years later. As for the novel, well, that's what this post is mainly about.

The novel 1984 was one of those "government watchdog" activist books that gets the conspiracy theorists blathering on about Big Brother like they had a few too many cappucinos at the local Starbucks. It was a warning that, in the future, our civil liberties might be at risk because of technology and the general trend of government to become ever larger at an ever-increasing rate. Since the novel came out, some of that has come to pass. On the other hand, privacy issues rank high on the list of most people's unalienable rights.

In the past, there was a push for more intrusive technology but it was beaten back by those who still value freedom. Think of the Clipper Chip, for instance. However, in post-9/11 America, the pendulum has swung the other way. It's a long-acknowledged fact that people will trade freedom for security, and while much of the security put in place is beneficial, some of it is over the top and some of the things that are getting past people these days are going to haunt them later on. It's always easier to stop something before it's put in place than to stop it after it's entrenched.

You may wonder of what I'm speaking. Little black boxes. Automobile manufacturers are starting to put little black boxes in vehicles akin to what are in aircraft. The idea is that, when the computer in the vehicle determines that there might be an accident in progress, the box starts recording all sorts of data. It then holds onto it for something like 45 days before it gets wiped out. This is meant to be a record of what happened in the accident to help people reconstruct it. However, this box can be triggered by swerving to avoid something. It can even be programmed to record things like speed and such.

People, including law-enforcement agencies, have been speculating about how they can use the box to their advantage. Think of a checkpoint in the highway with a scanner in the road, something nondescript that you just pass over as if it weren't even there. It scans your vehicle as you pass and quickly downloads the last hour of your driving. Did you speed? If so, by how much? The ticket is now in the mail to your door.

It doesn't stop with law enforcement. Insurance agencies have started giving discounts for vehicles with boxes installed. There has been speculation, backed up by some hinting by the agencies themselves, that in the future insurance might go up for vehicles not equipped with a box. Right now, they can only examine the recent history of "emergency maneuvers" but as these boxes become more prevalent in vehicles the data streams recorded can multiply.

The boxes are tightly integrated into the onboard systems of the vehicle, so removing the box without disabling various systems like the airbags and antilock brakes will be tough. Also, imagine what exists when you tie the box into a GPS-enabled service like OnStar. Now you can track where someone is located and how they're driving all at the same time. In fact, a GPS-enabled network connection one day could be used to transmit your driving habits to law enforcement and/or insurance agencies on demand. Of course, OnStar says that they won't allow this, but I can just imagine a network-enabled black box one day. If not OnStar, then someone else.

Fortunately, privacy advocates are up in arms over the box and legislation is being considered in several states that require owner consent or a court order to get black box data. Now, insurance agencies can always get around that by denying insurance to those who don't sign away unlimited consent, but hopefully legislation and/or litigation can put a quick stop to that if they try it.

I'm scared of a day when someone can look up my records online and see what I bought that day, how I paid for it, and what routes I took to get there and back again. I'm really scared of the idea that one day I might get mail or spam sent to me based on places I frequently drive past. I don't want people to know that much about me. I don't violate traffic laws, I don't speed, and I'm not a criminal. On the other hand, I don't want to be tracked and recorded. I like my liberties and I consider the freedom to go where I want, when I want, using whatever means I want, and not have someone looking over my shoulder the whole time to be one of the primary liberties that we all enjoy.

If we start giving up our liberties -- or allowing others to take them without a fight -- we're selling the Constitution and its amendments down the river for pennies on the dollar. If we, metaphorically speaking, just wander around like Moses in the desert then, before we know it, what the government hasn't snatched away big business will have. Think about the efficiency and honesty of government. Think about the honesty of big business. Do you really want them to know where you are and what you're doing at any point in time? This is how American citizens are being turned from people into cattle. Do not moo gently into that bovine night!

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm just another one of those conspiracy theory crackpots. Well, not actually. I got some of this information from Slashdot the other day and read the rest online after researching the topic a bit. The speculation on my part could be off-base, but given my past experience with government and business I wouldn't bet on it...

By the way, California and Oregon have bills in the state legislature regarding taxation on citizens based on how much they drive. To quote from NewsMax.com...

"According to the L.A. Times, her [Joan Borcuki] scheme would require each car be fitted with a mileage tracking device that beamed a signal to a GPS satellite. A driver's tax would then be calculated based on total miles driven."

This is real legislation in progress right now. It's not a box, but it's a disturbing trend. If that isn't scary, then what is?

I just did some reading about The Passion of the Christ, that film Mel Gibson made that chronicles the death of Jesus Christ. I haven't seen it myself but have surmised that it basically is two hours of seeing Christ getting worked over and dying. Where's the entertainment value here?

Oh, I know. It's supposed to deepen my religious beliefs. Well, I don't fixate on the hell that Christ went through in his final days. I think if Christ were around he'd say that the things to remember are peace and love, not him getting worked over by Roman guards, getting nailed to a cross, stuck with a pike, and allowed to hang there until he died.

I had the same problem with Platoon. It was another one of those movies that people said they saw because "they owed it to the veterans to see what it was like." Oh, please. It has Charlie Sheen in it so it can't be realistic. If people want to honor veterans, go to a VFW on Veterans' Day. Don't line Oliver Stone's pockets by watching Sheen and Tom Berenger dance the two-step in Bolivia or wherever they filmed it.

I feel the same way with The Passion. If you want to honor Christ then go to church, read the Bible, or just try to act like less of a jerk. Don't go see Mel Gibson's rendition of Christ getting his ass kicked for two hours. The Passion is nothing more than a religious pseudo-snuff film. In fact, many are calling it "Gibson's Folly".

Now I commend him for the courage of his convictions and making such a controversial film, but at the same time I think some of those Lethal Weapon stunts left him a few Fruit Loops short of a full bowl. In the period following the release of The Passion Gibson has publicly stated that his wife is going to Hell because she's Episcopalian instead of Catholic. I guess Gibson is trying to prove that love really doesn't last forever... Well, I'm Episcopalian and I'd sure like to know why I'm going to Hell. They just built a new $40 million or so Episcopal Church in the Galleria area of Houston -- I'm really sure that the congregation there would like to know that they're doomed to Hell after having filled up the collection plate with a few hundred pounds of gold bars.

At the same time as Gibson's revelation about his doomed better half, Gibson's father has come forth as the latest holocaust denier. Say what? Aside from the evidence that it happened -- witnesses, confessions, bodies, etc. -- there's the motivation for denying it. What motivation? That's right, you get the point. I think that some people just resent Jews for some reason and this is an extension of that. I've heard people say that they're too defensive. Well, they've had the snot beat out of them for the last 4,000 years. Now they have their own country and a military and they're really defensive and a bit nervous. Well, if I'd had my ass kicked for 40 centuries I'd be a bit twitchy myself.

Gibson and his dad are two good reasons why high-profile people or folks related to high-profile people just need to be quiet unless they're doing whatever it is they do professionally. I've had barking dogs make more sense than these people do.

It's that time of the quarter again, the time when everyone is starting to sweat and hands across the campus are getting clammy. Students are carrying a change of underwear in their backpacks just in case a final is tougher than they think, and I'm getting barraged with questions about bonus points, dropping material for the final exam, and the generic "how are we going to do all of this in x days?" question.

I remember my days as a student very well. Finals in graduate school, albeit it each one being individually harder than an undergraduate final, weren't that bad. I was better equipped to handle them and I didn't have as many courses. The undergraduate finals were rough, though. I routinely took 18-19 hours each semester and that meant 6 final exams in one week. I have vivid recollections of my desperation at those times. One such memory I have is during my freshman year at Southern Miss. I was taking honors history with Dr. Lawrence-Kot and her final exam was going to be a whopper. She gave us 6 questions that she could ask so that we could research them, and she would ask 2 on the final exam. Back then there were these small blue books you could buy to do essay-based final exams; they had something like 10-12 pages in them if you count front and back. I filled up two of those blue books, cover to cover, on that final exam and still made a B in the course.

I also remember honors economics. Now I'll be the first to admit that economics for me was a real sleeper course. I was unmotivated and skipped class a few too many times as a result. I came out of that course with a C, which I deserved, but the final exam was a bear. I commuted for the four years I was an undergraduate from about 30 miles away, and I remember on the day of the final praying to God the whole way down there that I wouldn't screw it up. It was actually more like a ritualistic chant than a prayer. In the end, though, I got what I deserved. And I never took another economics course again.

I also remember Christmas 1988, studying for my Circuits I final. It was an EE course taught through the physics department of all places, and the teacher was an industry veteran and a real interesting fellow. My problem is that, for me, circuits aren't intuitive. The whole "think of a pipeline with water" analogy doesn't wash with me (couldn't help the pun) so I spent a good deal of the time leading up to the pre-Christmas final by sitting in the living room with my nose in the circuits book bathed in the light of the Christmas tree. The final wasn't that bad, but the studying for it was. In some cases, I was so far out of my league that I just resorted to memorizing schematics. That was also the first Christmas after my grandfather died, so this was another reason for it being so memorable.

During another Chrismas -- 1987, if I'm not mistaken -- I was doing the treelight studying routine again, but this time with linear algebra instead of circuits. Linear is a tough course, being completely abstract with no real connection to anything that can be visualized. My instructor was Dr. Giovannetti, who was a wonderful teacher but an incredibly hard one. Students accuse me of being hard. They haven't had this fellow. We had to learn all of the theorems and proofs in the chapters we covered and be able to state and/or prove any of them. The textbook, Introduction to Matrices and Linear Transformations written by Daniel T. Finkbeiner III (with a name like that it's gotta stick out in my memory), had about 50 or so theorems in the material we covered for the semester, some a few lines long and some a page or more. I made a B in that class with the second-highest average -- there were no A's -- and wear it to this day as a badge of honor. This made up for the slacking off in economics in spades.

Oddly enough, no computer science final exams really stand out. I guess that's good since it means that I must have picked the right major. I guess one might stand out a bit. My first operating systems course was taught by Dr. Burgess and he gave a final with either two or three questions on it, of which we had to only answer one. The first said "Discuss the meaning of virtual in the context of an operating system. Be specific." I answered that one and got a B in the course. As anyone who took or taught OS can tell you, virtual and operating system go together like peanut butter and jelly. It would be like asking someone to discuss the meaning of the word flake in the context of Hollywood.

So I can symapthize with my students a lot more than they give me credit for doing. But we all have our own crosses to bear and it's their turn to pay the piper, not mine. I've ponied up enough of my sanity and my soul already to get out of school. Anyway, after having been a teacher I can say one thing about tests -- I'd much rather take one of my tests as a student than have to grade them as an instructor. With a class of 10-25 people it's manageable, but I've taught many a course in the past with 50-70 students and those tests can take 20-25 hours on-task to complete depending upon the level of the course. Hoo rah.

Well, regardless of which side of the table you look at, it's all going to be over by the weekend. After that, we get about 1 1/2 weeks off followed by 2 weeks of the Winter quarter and then we break for Christmas. The semester system was better...I liked that month off at Christmas. Oh well, when in Rome do as the Romans do; when in Ruston just suck it up and endure...

Tonight I lost my profile. I don't know how I lost it. I don't know where I lost it. All I know is that Microsoft Windows told me that my profile was corrupted and that I was being logged in with a temporary profile. How dare it! I may not be a saint but to even hint that my profile is corrupted...

In all seriousness, pray on bended knee with sweaty brow that you never experience this problem. Being only marginally better than dealing with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, the corrupted profile requires one of those long, painstakingly agonizing processes to get it fixed. In essence, you have to create a new user and copy everything over to the new user except for the profile files. Now if that's possible, why can't we just regenerate the profile files in the first place? Probably because that's too easy.

The bummer in all of this is that in my panic I only half-read the directions. I thought the new user was to get the new profile files so I could copy them to my profile. It was the other way around. So when I created the new user I just named it Dummy, not in homage to intellectual ineptitude but to underscore the fact that this was a blank account that would be deleted. Then I found out that Dummy was actually going to be my new account and suddenly I realized that it was appropriately named. The funny thing about renaming your account is that it changes the username -- so I'm back to Edwin instead of Dummy -- but it doesn't change the name of the home directory, and I can't change that since it would leave certain applications clueless about where their configuration files are. So I now have a home directory of "Dummy" to remind me of this glorious experience.

By the way, all of this only took me 3 hours to do, and even with the data copying I still had to reinstall Outlook and Firefox. This ranked right up there with watching animals die, attending funerals, and visiting the dentist.

The Road Warrior, Part I: Driskill Mountain

[This was originally entitled Driving Mr. Lazy but I felt that this baseless and slanderous attack upon my person by myself lessened me as a person and, fearing litigation, I decided to change it. --Edwin]

Having recently learned that the highest point in the state of Louisiana is but a paltry 15 minutes from my home, after teaching this afternoon I made the trek to Driskill Mountain. It's a nice ride in the country -- you head out Hwy 80 west to Simsboro and then turn south on LA 507. After a few minutes' ride through the hills, I was there. It took a while to figure this fact out, but I knew from looking on Terraserver that this was the place -- the antenna on the topological map was right there in front of me.

What threw me for a loop was that it barely looked like a big hill. Then I started looking at the terrain around Driskill Mountain and it's actually pretty high up...well, for Louisiana at least. Remember, we're the state where the #1 city (New Orleans) is below sea level. So the mountain was only about 135 feet higher than where I was, which was enough to at least show me that it was there, but I was rather nonplussed at the entire experience. The drive in the country was nice, though.


Before you dog me over the size and color of the picture above, bear in mind that it was taken with the digital camera in my cellphone. Cellphone cameras aren't known for their resolution and quality.

Of course, we call it a mountain in Louisiana, but I think something has to be at least 1,000 feet high to be a mountain. Driskill "Mountain" is actually only 535 feet above sea level. I guess Driskill Hill doesn't sound so impressive for the highest point in the state. It really sounds like a runt when compared to Mount McKinley in Alaska at a whopping 20,320 feet above sea level, 17,000 of that being actual slope and not base altitude.

For those of you interested in seeing our state's highest point for yourself, take Hwy 80 or I-20 west to Simsboro and then turn south on LA 507. If you take Hwy 80 then don't speed through Simsboro, especially through the 2-4 PM school zone, unless you feel like making a hefty donation to the local coffers since a cop just sits there waiting for the next kill.


Follow 507 south out of Lincoln Parish and into Bienville Parish, and watch out for a lazy curve to the right that conceals a highway number change. A Louisiana tradition, we seem to be the only state where going straight changes the highway number and turning keeps you on the same one. Right after the parish line and the curve to the right you'll need to turn left to stay on 507. Take that for a few miles, cross the highway at the 2-way stop sign, and keep going. You'll now be in a fairly hilly area where the road curves a good bit. Look for the very large antenna sticking up in the air. You won't see it for a while, but your first good glimpse of it will be directly ahead so don't worry about missing it. That's Driskill Mountain. You can't get to the summit by car, but the closest point to the summit that you can reach by car is a small brick church with an adjoining cemetery on the right side of the road.

About the only thing that irks me more than a sore loser is an overly-happy winner, and we have a plethora of both now that the presidential election is over. Every news channel has the political analysts lined up for their take on the events of Tuesday and everything that led up to it, and these folks don't mind giving us their political slant on things.

Now that might offend me a bit more than it would others, mainly because as a computer scientist I'm a very fact-based individual and "angles" don't figure into what I say or what I do. One wouldn't come to me to deliver a persuasive argument. So when I see an analyst being interviewed I expect to hear the good and the bad, an impartial account of what was done right and what was done wrong. Ha! Fat chance.

Let's start with the sore losers. Kerry himself was very dignified and conceded with both grace and eloquence. As I heard someone say, he may have lost the election but gained the respect of a nation. Some of his supporters, especially the analysts, weren't nearly so dignified. The vitriolic diatribes directed toward Bush or the other GOP election winners in many cases bordered on sheer unprofessionalism. Now I don't think Bush is a saint by a long shot, but there's not much worse than listening to people whining and moaning because they didn't get their way. Seeing these people with their furrowed brows, waving hands, and loud voices is just irritating. There are many decaffeinated brands that taste just as good as the real thing, folks...

Now let's move on to the gleeful winners. Bush himself was a gracious if somewhat confident winner, attempting to reassure the 50 million people who didn't vote for him; time will tell if his pledge to earn their trust pans out. However, plenty of GOP-slanted analysts were all over the television with ear-to-ear grins and I-told-you-sos flying around like mosquitos in the swamp. Nothing makes a Kerry supporter feel more bitter than seeing a conservative analyst or talk-show host with a huge overbleached toothy grin talking about how Kerry just sank his own ship and how Bush's election was a mandate by the people. He won -- that should be enough for the conservatives.

So another election is over, and despite some complaints about Ohio the "disenfranchised voter" problem from the 2000 election wasn't carried over to this one. This is perhaps the best outcome of the election. The indecisiveness of the 2000 election, the accusations, and the (necessary) intrusiveness of the courts detracted from the dignity of the proceedings and made a mockery of our election process to the international community.

Speaking of mockeries, the idea that in the 21st century that the popular vote doesn't directly elect the President is ridiculous. For those who don't know, our Founding Fathers decided that the general populace back in the 18th century were just too ignorant to elect the fledgling country's leaders; Thomas Jefferson himself was a strong advocate of Congress electing the President. To that end, the electoral college was born. Consisting of one vote per congressional electee, today it accounts for the electoral votes each state has. For instance, my state of Louisiana has 7 electoral votes -- 5 for each of the congressional districts in the state, each with its own representative in the House, and 2 for the senators. So the popular vote in each state determines who gets all of the electoral votes for that state. As a result, we can get into situations like in 2000 where one candidate won the popular vote and the other won the electoral vote. Granted, this can only happen when the election is neck-and-neck, but the all-or-nothing electoral college process is outdated and outmoded. Fox News' website had a poll on voting reform and at the time I cast my vote in it the majority (68%) supported a change in the electoral process to make the popular vote directly elect the President.

As I hinted in the previous paragraph, this change would have altered the 2000 election. Now while I didn't suport Gore in 2000, my belief in the correctness of the popular vote as the definitive electoral process stands. I can't say that the electoral college is okay just because it suited my wishes in 2000; what's right is right despite the ramifications of it.

I think that we're on the cusp of a period of strong voting reform. Arising out of the ashes of the 2000 election, modernization of the actual voting process has been under way for several years and, while we have a long way to go, at least we're on the way. Along with updating the mechanics of voting, I think that the process itself will be considered and updated. Other nations have been using the popular vote for years and I think it's time we updated our process as well.