All done!

It's the last day of NaBloPoMo and I didn't miss a day. I guess it was good to do it, but I'm also glad to go back to just posting when I feel like it--that will hopefully mean better quality, too. Sometimes that's two posts in a day, sometimes two in a month. Next year I think I'll sit it out and just try to read some of the blogs and leave comments. A lot of it comes down to how much time one wants to spend online vs. other parts of life.

In any case, the next couple weeks are going to be very busy for me, so I'll be posting less.

Grad school is like this:

my iBook turns two

A few days ago made 2 years that I've had my iBook (14" G4 1.33 ghz). I can't imagine ever going back to the headaches of the PC world. It has served me very well, and I've helped convince at least four people to switch. I have my eye on some of the new macs--they're almost twice as fast--and wonder about when to upgrade. I don't know if my next Mac will be a MacBook or a Mac Mini. One thing to think about is that I'll be doing field work in Latin America in two years so I'll want a laptop but it might be nice to have it not be a brand new one as far as getting stolen, etc. So perhaps a Mini as my new primary computer 6 months to a year from now with the iBook for travel will make sense. To help fight the urge to always have the newest thing (in addition to the monetary cost) I remind myself how much water computer chips pollute--so it's good to wait as long as possible before getting a new computer. Really the iBook is doing great for everything I need it for, so I may wait longer than that. It's interesting how some people upgrade every year or year and a half and others wait 5-6 years.

Tower Records goes out of business

Good web only piece on The Nation here. People blame digital music and the iPod, but it's not that simple:

...the CD isn't really dead. In fact, in the first half of 2006, CD sales still accounted for nearly three-quarters of all retail music sales, out-earning digital sales better than six to one. And despite the growing popularity of online music sellers like Amazon.com, nine out of every ten CDs purchased so far this year were sold in brick-and-mortar stores. Just not Tower stores.

Over the last decade, big-box retailers like Target, Best Buy and especially Wal-Mart have accounted for a steadily increasing share of CD sales, and by 2003 Wal-Mart had become the largest music seller in the world. David Porter, who oversees music merchandise for Wal-Mart's American stores, estimates that the company today controls roughly one-quarter of the US market. Succeeding where Tower has failed in recent years, Wal-Mart and its ilk have extended their low-cost business model to music retailing, using their clout to bully record labels and selling CDs that would go for $15 to $18 at Tower for less than $10. Wal-Mart has even established an online presence, undercutting iTunes at 88 cents per song for digital downloads.

But the good deals come at a price. Although stock size can vary by store, a typical Tower carries somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 CD titles (the larger ones can stock up to 40,000 more); while an average Wal-Mart, for which CDs make up only a tiny fraction of overall sales, carries 5,000 or fewer. Greater size means greater diversity as well--one industry executive estimates that Tower sells as many as 100,000 titles that cannot be found in the stores of any other chain....

For fans who enjoy rifling through Tower's inexhaustible collection, the prospect of a Wal-Mart-style makeover for the music industry is daunting; for smaller record labels--particularly those that specialize in "niche" genres like classical, jazz or roots music--the loss of Tower's combination of size and diversity is something even more dire. Tower's market share in specialty genres approaches 50 percent, and in some cases Tower can account for as much as 25 percent of an independent label's overall business.

So the divide is not just between digital and CDs, but also big vs. small and corporate vs. independent.

Monk on iTunes

My cousin Hilary gave me a gift certificate to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) for my birthday and I used it to buy episodes of Monk. I only have one episode before I'm caught up on Season 5. I think that for me it's a cheaper alternative to cable, since I don't watch that much TV. Also I can watch them whenever I want, pause them, and there are no commercials. My monitor is 19" vs. my 20" TV, so it's pretty much the same quality. Monk is just so funny, and I also enjoy the crazy plots. I don't think I'd buy 30 minute shows on iTunes, though. $1.99 seems a little pricy for that. My gym has TV's on many of the cardio machines, so sometimes I try to time my workouts to catch an episode of Scrubs or Colbert Report.

On the subject of Monk, these cleaning tips are funny, but some of them also seem useful... (Katie cringes).

Wish List

A month from today my mom and Annie will have flown in the previous night and we'll be celebrating Christmas! Crazy.

I've set up an my Amazon Wish List to put things I want for Christmas. Of course, buying them elsewhere is fine. I was looking at using a Froogle list, which is linked to my Google account, but I had a couple problems with it.

• I couldn't add comments to items. For example, I have a set of knives on my list with a comment that I don't necessarily want that particular set, just a decent set of knives. Without that you have to be sure to pick exactly the right item.
• I'd added an item to my Froogle wish list a while back and yesterday the link was broken.

I'll have a link on the sidebar by the time this post is no longer on the top page.

I also took a look at a site called Kaboodle, but it seemed to have too much else going on, including a networking feature. I feel that would overly complicate things. I want a list, not a new online community...

New Fair Trade Flavors!

Equal Exchange has three new kinds of fair trade tea (link). They look good. I need to ask my co-op to carry them.

Back to MySpace?

On campus waiting for articles to print. The printer needed to warm up because all sane people are taking the day off.

I used to have a MySpace page with my music on it and I deleted it because MySpace annoys me. I currently manage a MySpace page for my folk singer friend Stephan Smith. I go on every Friday to approve people who've added him as a friend, reply to messages, etc. It seems as though every musician is on there. So, as I've been mixing the songs for my new CD (see this post) I've been wondering if I should create a new page to help promote it. I could use it to distribute a free "single" with two songs--the "A-side" and the "B-side."

Thoughts?

Day After Thanksgiving

So, an astute reader may have noticed that my numbers in the last post didn't add up. We had 5 Turks, a Dutchwoman, a Czech, a Palestinian, Katie's family (4), Katie's friend Joy and me. One person was sick and couldn't make it. It was quite the international dinner. Conversation and food were both excellent. Katie made great pies: pumpkin and chocolate pecan. Yum.

Today I'm observing Buy Nothing Day (I may eat out, but I won't shop), not so much because I think it'll make a political difference but more to maintain my sanity...

Thanksgiving

Having dinner tonight at Katie's house. We'll have 14-15 people: her family (4), me, my friend Jan, four Turks, two other Middle Easterners (not sure where exactly), and probably Katie's friend Joy. So half the people there will be from abroad (Jan is Czech). My most international Thanksgiving ever (I guess the ones I've had abroad were international in a different way).

Jan and I are responsible for the sweet potatoes. He'll come over and we'll cook this recipe.

I listed a bunch of people for whom I'm thankful here. I'd add Katie and her family and the friends I've made in the past year. A year ago I owned neither a home nor a car and now I have both, so I'm very thankful for that. I'm of course also thankful (1) to be among the more privileged portion of the human population and (2) to have the opportunity to pursue justice for those left behind (the two go together).

Yuck

Cold, rainy and windy here in Carrboro. Helps me sympathize with people in the UK. No wonder they conquered so much of the world--they're weren't after tea, spices, etc. It was the weather.

It's the busy time in the semester. By Monday I need to:

• Finish reading a book and write a 5-page review.
• Research and write a 2-page summary of social policy in Venezuela.
• Prepare to lead class on Monday night.
• Write an 8-page paper on political cartoons from 1898.

By the end of the semester I need to

• Grade fifty-some 8-page essays (all handed back by the Monday after next)
• Write a proposal to present at a local conference next semester.
  
• Write a 20 page research design (It'll be on trade liberalization and hunger).
• Write a term paper (research on anti-hunger policies in Venezuela)
  
• Write a 15-page reflection on the course on 1898 (no additonal research required, thankfully).

Sounds like I'm a grad student or somehting. There's also the marathon of grading finals, but everything else will be done by then.

So, I was thinking I'd complain about all of this, but as I was in the library tracking down books and articles I was having fun and was reminded how lucky I am to do this for a living. No promises how long that attitude will last. I think it's not that I don't enjoy my work, it's just that I'd like a little less of it. But plenty of people are in the same boat and the rest just hate their jobs.

Bush = history major

According to the Biography of President George W. Bush on the White House website, Bush "received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1968." [my emphasis]. Interesting. I'd never heard what his degree was in.

Oh no, must post before midnight...

Played Settlers of Catan with Jan and Katie. Katie won. It's a great game and I picked it up a few weeks ago. First time I've played in years. I'm very much posting to get my daily post for the month.

More on digital music

A few days ago I wrote a post comparing the costs and advantages of buying a CD vs. buying an album on iTunes. A few things I neglected to mention:

• For most people CD's are more convenient. You can play them on any stereo in the house without any additional technology. This isn't a problem for me since my place is 500 sq. feet and my only stereo is attached to my iBook, but it is for other people. Also, playing mp3's in the car requires and iPod and an iTrip or adapter.
• Plus if people don't back up their data they can lose all their music with a hard drive crash. It's appalling how bad people are about backing up their data, but that's another topic entirely.
• You can buy digital music even cheaper than iTunes. I just signed up for eMusic again. You have to sign up for a plan, but it comes out to around $.25 per song. The basic plan is 40 songs a month for $9.99--but hurry because they're changing the plans on the 21st (Tuesday) and the basic plan will only be 30/month. That's still cheap, but if you sign up now you'll be locked in. You can try it for free with 25 free downloads, and if you like it you'll be locked in. If you don't you can quit without spending anything. They tend to mostly have independent music. There's some overlap with iTunes. For example, I could have gotten the Dan Bern album from them. I look at it this way: For the price of that one CD I can download six ten-song albums...

Close save

So I was frantically writing my history paper and Word decided to freeze (because that's what Microsoft products do). I wanted to save what I'd written and it was still vi sable on the screen. So I used OSX's screen capture utility (called Grab) to take a screen shot of the frozen Word page, getting almost everything I'd written since the last save. Then I drug the image to my iBook screen (to the right of the external monitor which is my primary workspace when I'm at home--I love screen spanning) and relaunched Word so I could re-type what I'd written. Some time lost, but much less than if I'd had to come up with it again. Somehow even with the freeze I wrote close to five pages in a little under three hours this morning. Amazing what pressure will do for productivity.

So the moral of the story is: screen shots can make freezes less painful (PCs can take screenshots too).

Three times is harm

I love Back Porch Music (out-of-town folks can stream online Friday and Saturday 8-12, Sunday 8-11 Eastern Time). It's one of the main reasons I'm a member of NPR. But it drives me crazy when the DJ does that thing where he plays three versions of the same folk song in a row. Yes, it's neat how many different ways people can interpret a song, but at some level it's still playing the same song three times in a row and it drives me batty.

OK, time to write a paper responding to Fighting for American Manhood by Kristin L. Hoganson. The subtitle is "How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars." It's nice to see this stuff is getting let off the Women's Studies reservation and into general course work (it comes up quite a bit in the welfare states class, oddly enough, as well as in Intro to European Politics, which I TA).

Dan Bern's New Album

So I picked it up the other day. It's called Breathe. It's good, but I like Fleeting Days, New American Language and his self-titled albums better. Someone wrote it takes time to grow on you, so I'll have to give it some more listens before my final verdict.

I decided to support my local CD store (School Kids Records) and it came to $16.04 with tax. I imported it into iTunes and will listen to it via my computer (plugged into my stereo) as I do with all my music.

The iTunes music store has it for $9.90. So I paid an extra $6.14, for which I got the following additional benefits:

• Access to the album at full CD quality (even though I import it at the same bitrate as iTMS downloads I could play the CD or import it at a better bitrate)
• The physical CD--I can play it in my car without burning it
• The CD case, art, liner notes, etc.
• Support for a local business
• Support for local government services via sales tax
• Possibly having Dan Bern collect more in royalties. I don't know. I bought him a beer once, so I feel that supplements any royalties he's collected from my purchases of his CDs...
  

Is all that worth paying 62% more for an album? Why don't I just get it on iTunes and donate a little bit of money to the local government, etc.?

Funny Cartoon About Italy

The Prof. for whom I TA showed it in lecture. So funny. I've never been there, but people who have say it's pretty true (it's made by Italians).

http://europa.tiscali.it/futuro/speciali/cartoon.html

Conversation

I've had some good comments and wanted to reply to some of them.

In a comment on my post about talking too much and listening too little Isabel writes:

I see NaBloPoMo from the opposite perspective. I'm using the list as an opportunity to visit as many as possible and "listen" to some new voices.

That's a good point. I'll try to read some new blogs this month. I'll let you know if I come across any gems. So check out NaBloPoMo if you haven't yet.

Katya asks:

congrats on being so productive on your non-work day! I usually do absolutely nothing on non-work days and thus always have cleaning, laundry, dishes and errands to do on every other day. Grr. So do you ever get a do absolutely nothing day? or is that forbidden in PhD land?

The thing is, if you count up how many hours I'm actually working it might even be under full time (this may change as I mover through the program...). Part of the problem is defining when I'm working though. People with 9 to 5 jobs are working when they're at work, even when they're chatting with co-workers, playing solitaire, etc. So how much of the time I spend distracted from work is the equivalent of that and should count as work time, even though I'm not productive? It's hard to be your own supervisor but I'm getting better at it. Of course there's a huge freedom there, too. The thing I need to avoid, and one of the reasons for enforcing a day off to play and keep house, is time where I'm not getting work done but I'm trying to make myself work so I'm stressed out from unproductively worrying about work, if that makes sense.

Photos From Saturday

I've posted some photos from our trip to Hillsborough here. Katie took a lot of the ones of the Eno River. I'll add my 23hq.com site to the sidebar eventually. I'm off to bed.

Upgrades

Blogger just added support for Blogger Beta for blogs not hosted at blogspot.com, so I made the jump last night. About time they support categories (they call them "labels"). That was the main reason I went with WordPress for my more serious blogs. I actually have a bunch of reasons I like WordPress better for those blogs, but Blogger is fine for this one and it's fun to see what features they ad.

I finally added the side-bar thing with my most recent posts from my other blogs. Right now it's set at three posts. Is that too few?

My mom said she misses the link to Rulablog right at the top right-hand corner, so I'll add that back along with links to my other web projects, etc.

Back to my grant application. It's nice to have work I can do while listening to Back Porch Music (which you can stream online) instead of reading.

The internet saves me again

Wanting to put up a shelf in my dining area for kitchen-related stuff. I lost the directions. It only took me 10 minutes to find them online, even though I didn't know the brand going into it.

Edible Politics

Don't really feel like spending the evening on the computer, so I'll just post a plug for my food politics site. I don't post to it as often as Rulablog, but I hope to gradually build a good list of good links. Leave me comments if you have stuff I should add.

Bring Democracy Home

Ten suggestions from Katrina Vanden Huevel on how to improve our elections. Worth thinking about as we follow the results from Tuesday.

After the Election

The Nation has good coverage of the election, as is to be expected. Not as shallow as what you'll get some other places and willing to ask some hard questions.

home

Good to be back in Carrboro, sweet crazy Carrboro (watch rap video here).

long day, far from over

Just a crazy few days. Wrote a paper all day today which I present in class tonight. Need to move out of the house where I'm house sitting tonight and then read to lead class in my International Relations class tomorrow. Then I'll have a moment to breath...

Only posting because I promised...

I'm not sure what I think of this one-a-day thing. I feel that in our society people often like to talk too much but are bad listeners. I struggle with this a lot. I wonder how much of blogging is people talking without having a conversation since we're more interested in saying what we have to say than reading what others have to say. And the pressure to post often--to have something to say--makes it worse. For Rulablog it's been a while since I've had/taken the time to read some of the other Latin American politics blogs and see what they have to say. So it's like there's this isolation even though it's supposed to the the web. As I write this it's reminding me of my reflections about how the debate team shaped people's communication styles, but that's a topic for some other time. I'm going to eat.

voting machines = bad

Guardian of the Ballot Box (The Nation)

Killer Voting Machines (The Daily Show)

I Don't Understand Willie Nelson

I like his music and his politics (environmentalism, campaigned for Kucinich, Farm Aid). His song What Ever Happened to Peace on Earth? is great. Worth reading the entire thing, but here's a segment:

So I guess it'’s just
Do unto others before they do it to you
Let'’s just kill 'em all and let God sort em’ out
Is this what God wants us to do

(Repeat Bridge)
And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we'’ve been told from our birth
Hell they won'’t lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liar's word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth

Now you probably won't hear this on your radio
Probably not on your local TV
But if there's a time, and if you're ever so inclined
You can always hear it from me
How much is one picker'’s word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth?

When I heard about him getting an award for Beer for My Horses a few years ago, which he recorded with Toby Keith that seemed weird to me given Toby Keith's politics. In Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue he sings:

Oh, justice will be served and the battle will rage:
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage.
An' you'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A.
'Cos we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way.

Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,
And the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.
And the eagle will fly and it's gonna be hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.
And it'll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you.
Ah, brought to you, courtesy of the red, white and blue.

I recently quoted this as the introduction to a paper I gave in my graduate history seminar on the (mistitled) Spanish-American War. I compared it to jingoistic songs from that era (the assignment was to analyze the lyrics from a stack of sheet music from around 1898).

Last night I was driving and the local country station played Beer for My Horses. I'd never heard it before. The title sounds like maybe it's a nice gentle song. So I was surprised to hear this:

Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street for all the people to see that

(Chorus)
Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune
We'll all meet back at the local saloon
We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces
Singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
We've got too much corruption, too much crime in the streets
It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send 'em all to their maker and he'll settle 'em down
You can bet he'll set 'em down 'cause

Kucinich voters for capital punishment and frontier justice?

Sometime I'll write about why I listen to the country station.

Blog Juggling

My post for today is merely to say please read my Urgent Nicaragua Stuff post from Rulablog. Sometimes when I post on one of my other blogs my post-of-the-day-for-November on this blog will pretty much just be to link to it. It's too late to call, but Ortega will most likely make it into the run-off (if he doesn't win in the 1st round) so we need to watch U.S. meddling.

I've often wished I had a way to post to several of my blogs at once. Like when one clicks categories, there'd be a place to click multiple blogs. That way when someone with multiple blogs needs to post something like "I'm going fishing for a week and will be totally unwired" s/he need only do it once. Off course I doubt there will ever be a way to do that with some blogs on Blogger and others on WordPress...

One thing I've been thinking about doing is putting together a feed digest of my blogs on the sidebar of this bar so people could see my most recent posts in once central place.

P.S. Others have commented on this, but will Blogger add the word "blog" to its spell-check already?

NaBloPoMo

For some reason I've decided to participate in this, where I commit to post at least once a day for the entire month of November... We'll see what I come up with.

Boo!

Halloween here is a big deal. Katie went as Raggedy Ann. I went as a wizard trying to dress up as a muggle (like in Goblet of Fire when they go to the Quidditch World Cup): dress slacks, tennis shoes, Hawaii shirt, bath robe, floppy hat.