Ernest Alba's Blog

no rainbows and sprinkles on this cupcake

Second update: It seems like I have been given a second chance. I've got until the end of January to fix my paper and pass the class. Whaddya know - people at MIT are alright.

Update: I might be given a second chance to turn this baby around during the break. More later.

I've been getting a lot of congratulations for my last post. But things aren't all rosy.

I received a brutally terse email from my TA in Research Scopes & Methods - a tedious class on carrying out a political science research experiment.
"Ernest, Your submission under no circumstances meets the minimum requirements for the Final Paper."

That paper constitutes most of the course grade, so, in effect, I've failed the class. I expected as much, having told this to Joshua a couple of days ago. That 20-page final paper was intensely hard to write, and the 10 pages I turned in ultimately amounted to little more than a feeble attempt at engaging the material.

ahhh sweet ego stroking

The misery of this weekend paid off. I got an email from my lit professor about an hour after I submitted my ethnographic study. All it said was PS - great paper. That she would take the time to send a congratulatory email when she has to finish reading all of the papers by 4:30 today, I was taken aback. I queried her for more details and she sent me her comments on the paper:

Dear Ernest – Great work. I hope you present this at a conference soon – perhaps next year’s Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) at MIT? If you want to practice delivering it, I’ll help. Thinking about a publication is also a good idea. Grade: A+

Publication? Presenting at a conference? Oh, this was sooo worth it!

Word Fixes

As my mind turns to mush, I find inane things more and more interesting. This is a sentence I just wrote and the loop Microsoft Word took me through to finally make it "right."

Sentence: It is a more well-known expression for intelligence.
\/
well-known - problem with grammar
\/
It is a more well known expression for intelligence.
\/
more well - problem with grammar
\/
It is a better known expression for intelligence.
\/
better known - problem with grammar
\/
It is a better-known expression for intelligence.

Jeez.

Tycho's "My Belruel"

(from left to right: Gabe, Tycho)

I've been working with very little sleep since Friday and the only thing that has gotten me through is occasionally writing on this blog and this song.

Tycho is a great blog writer. That much is obvious to Penny-Arcade readers. But as a writer of lyrical prose, his skill is fearsome. The lyrics are here.

Masculinity and the NYSOftPDV

We who claim to be men define masculinity. No one else. What are we going to teach our children about what masculinity means? Respecting women is at the core of a feminist's definition of what it means to be a strong, good, and honorable man. It looks like more people are beginning to agree. These posters are part of a new ad campaign by the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence.

Domestic violence is a serious issue that poses severe threats to the lives of women across the world. Statistics show that 1 in every 5 American women and likely even more than that have been violently abused in their lifetime. Including all women across the world, the stat rises to 1 in 3 women.

Superhumans don't exist.

It's so comforting to know that people are never as great as we think they are. That is, even the greatest humans are still just human. There is a student in my globalization class who is well-spoken, knowledgeable, and persuasive. In a class of twenty-something students, she stands out above and beyond the rest. This, despite the fact that we have philosophy graduate students from France, Harvard graduate students, and even a government official taking this class - people whom you would expect to have insight into globalization and economic liberalization and to lead the conversations. But, no. This graduate student, named Gabi, with whom I had previously taken another class and looks to be no more than 23 or 24 years old is the star of the show.

I decided to look her up on Google. At first, I was impressed because the first link that came up was an Amazon link to a book, in which an article of hers has been published. Then, I saw other links to newspapers and journals in which she has been interviewed. In my head, Gabi was rapidly becoming a superhero. How could a graduate student already be able to impart such wisdom? I decided to get to the bottom of the whole thing and dredged up her curriculum vitae (her academic resume). It turns out she is no younger than 29, she has a Master's Degree in City Planning, and she began her Doctoral Studies only after spending several years working in the field. Everything made much more sense now. Her alertness, her poise, her hand gestures all were indicative of someone who knew what she was talking about. Now that I think about her in this new context, she really isn't as impressive as I had imagined, though she remains a person I respect for all the reasons I just described. Nevertheless, I hope that by the time I'm her age I'll be much better at what I do then she is at what she does. I can imagine that when she was an undergrad she was worse off than me. Not talkative at all. Shy. Dutifully doing work, but not wanting to create a network of business friends. Yet, she managed to get where she is now. With my not completely anti-social nature, always improving, and real determination to create something out of myself, I really hope to be at the point she is within the next three or four years.

Holiday Spending

 

OK, I need to take a break from writing about globalization. How are you spending money this holiday season? How much is going to treat yourself? How much to friends? How much to charity?

I usually spend money on myself during the year. This year, I bought some books, some films, and some music for myself. Bigger items that I bought were a TV tuner ($150) and a DS ($125) and a few DS games ($80).

Each year, I give between $25 and $75 to Penny-Arcade's Child's Play. Any respectable gamer should give at least a little bit of money to Child's Play, I think. However, a new website on my donation list is Feministing. This is a great blog for anyone interested in race and gender politics. Interestingly, I found out about this site through Tycho of Penny-Arcade who apparently reads (or has read) it, too.

MIT:

IHTFP. and it hates me.

Film Review: The Golden Compass

Along with Watership Down, Redwall, and The Hobbit, The Golden Compass and the rest of the books in Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy formed some of the best memories of my childhood. Getting to see the magic on screen should have been as much a magical experience as reading the books. It wasn't. The reason boils down to a problem of medium. Films cannot convey information in the same compact way that text can. The adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is less true than it seems. Two hours can't provide nearly enough images to retell the wondrous story of the Golden Compass. The result is that the film has to use tricks to convey the gravity of certain elements of the story. Without giving too much away, the act of intercision is a horrible, penetrative act - equivalent to rape in its seriousness. The film utterly fails to capture the egregiousness of the act.

What's fun about this film? Certainly the race of polar bears is awesome, but I vividly remember the polar bears from the book as much more mysterious, more powerful, and more intelligent. These polar bears were portrayed as dumb ruffians. Also, the North Pole is not nearly as beautiful and enigmatic as I remember it from the book. The one question I have for the movie is where has all the magic gone?

The film succeeds on a couple of points. First, the girl Lyra is wonderfully developed and portrayed by the English actor Dakota Blue Richards. She precisely fits the bold, brilliant, and inquisitive character I remember from the book. Second, the special effects are first rate. I have never been convinced by CGI animals, though Peter Jackson's King Kong came close. The CGI daemons are unbelievably realistic, especially Lyra's daemon. Certainly, it looks better than Aslan from Chronicles of Narnia. Beyond that, the cityscapes, the vehicles, and the buildings all look spectacular.

The music is a bit intrusive and at times heavy handed. Sometimes it can be uplifting, but in general it adds to the feeling that the director is trying too hard to please.

The nature of the books yields inevitable comparisons to two other heavyweights in children's literature brought to the big screen - Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia. Interestingly enough, all three come from Britain. In terms of literary merit, there is little dispute among academics that Pullman's series is miles above and beyond the works of Rowling and Lewis. The profundity of the novels is something to behold. Sadly, this profundity has been stripped almost entirely from the film. Except for a couple of awkward conversations in which the reasons for the occurrence of all of these events are hurriedly described before moving onto a new piece of artistry, little of the books' real issues are raised. The reason is quite obvious. In fact, the creators have specifically mentioned the reason - fear of alienating Christians. Though it is probably not something that children can glean from the novels (as I didn't when I read them), it is probably clear to adults that these books attempt to create a world in which religion is the "bad guy" and the religious only desire power. Pullman wrote the books in large part to counterbalance the unbridled Christianosity of the Chronicles of Narnia. All of that is gone from the film version, and as a result it suffers. How much gutsier - and how much better - would it have been to include all of the anti-Christian rhetoric? Much, much better.

My Apple fails me, or I fail it.

My Macbook, one year ago.

Last week, I put my Macbook to sleep by closing the screen. The next morning, I opened the screen and rubbed the touchpad to wake the computer up. It never woke up. Well, I shouldn't say never. It woke up days later, after I took it to the Mac store to get fixed. But, that day, even after doing all of the main troubleshooting procedures, I was unable to wake it up myself.

This had happened on a Friday, and the next day I went to the Apple store to have them look at it. Unforunately, they couldn't fit me into their schedule until Monday. I nearly went mad with despair. How could a computer that I had bought a little over one year ago already be failing? More importantly, how could an Apple computer be failing me? I had placed so much faith in this company, and now this is how they were repaying me? I silently brought the curses of the gods down on the heads of those in charge of this treasonous company. What poorly constructed part built by the lowest bidding manufacturer was malfunctioning in my laptop? What corner that Apple had cut to reduce overhead was making me now pay the consequences?

Turns out, this was anyone's fault but Apple's. I took it in Monday morning and was promptly attended to. After performing essentially the same preliminary troubleshooting procedures I had done, the Apple guy told me that they would repair it and I would have it back, good as new, in 3-5 days. That timeline posed a problem for me. See, because of all the faith I had placed in Apple, I had neglected to backup my files. Precious school documents that had to be turned in that week were trapped inside the hard drive. They offered me a $100 Pro Care plan to ensure a 72 hour turn-around. I agreed to the ransom demand and left my laptop with them.

Two hours later, sitting in class, I got a phone call. Since I couldn't answer it, I let the machine pick up. As soon as I got out of class, I checked my messages. It was the Apple Store. My computer was fixed and ready to be picked up. The woman who left the message seemed pissed. I later found out why. See, when I bought my Macbook, it came standard with 512 mb of memory. That's not much RAM. So, like most, I wanted to expand my memory. The problem is that each 1gb stick that Apple offers costs almost $200. That's an insane price for memory. So, like most, I bought third-party memory for a quarter of the cost. Instead of paying Apple $400 to upgrade to 2gb, I paid Fry's $90 to upgrade to 2gb.

The problem with buying third-party memory is that it might not work and you have to install it yourself. The first risk is one worth taking. Apparently, the second one isn't. When I got to the Apple store, they told me that I had improperly installed the memory, and it had come loose. Clearly, they were pissed that I hadn't told them about the third-party memory. They said that they normally charge an $80 fee for even touching third party products, but since I had paid $100 for the Pro Care, they'd let it slide. How gracious of them.

So, for a few days, I thought my Macbook and Apple, by extension, had failed me. My faith in them is now fully restored. Of course, it is annoying that they take such an elitist stance on third party materials, but I suppose that is their right. Most importantly, I can continue to say that neither my iPod nor my Macbook have ever failed me. Though I've dropped and scraped my iPod tons of times and have subjected my Macbook to third party materials, both work as perfectly as they ever did. It's good to be a Mac user.

P.S. I don't think I've ever written about my history with Macs. That would be a good post. It might surprise you, unless you're someone that knows me well, that, for most of my life, I have hated Macs with a passion. It sometimes surprises me (like right now) that I've so completely changed my stance. Then I think about the complete change in Apple's trajectory over the past years, and I see why it actually isn't that surprising.