I’m not certain if I’ve joked about it here or not, but recently I’ve taken to commenting that if academic politics are so petty because the stakes are so small, then what does that say about non-profit politics. The implication is that non-profit politics are even more petty because the stakes are even smaller. Well, after a rough couple of weeks with the non-profit I work with, I can confirm that the politics are definitely petty, I’m just no longer certain that the stakes are small. In one sense, sure - the budget for the non-profit I work with is smaller than any other budget I’ve dealt with in a work situation. But at the same time, the politics most often affects people’s livelihoods. It’s one thing to have a layoff due to lack of funds. It’s another thing for poor management and personal vendettas leading to a firing. ...

This is neat. Typealyzer claims to examine a blog (or presumably any webpage) in order to identify the Myers-Briggs type of the author. It correctly identifies me as an INTP, but doesn’t seem to get etselec.

Dear Amazon.com: After buying the collected works of Robert Johnson, blues guitarist from the 1930s, the man who was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest blues guitarist ever, I really don’t think I want albums by Robert Johnson the 70s power pop musician. I know they have the same name, but trust me, they aren’t the same person. kthxbai

Some recent (somewhat) technical notes: A while back, I swapped the dead harddrive from my ipod with a compact flash card. Unfortunately, at the time, the biggest (affordable) compact flash was 16 GB, so I lost about half the capacity from my ipod. Not a huge problem, but it became more of one as I added more music. Yesterday, a shiny new 32 GB compact flash arrived and now I’m back to the nominal amount of space on my ipod, except that it’s all solid state and cool. From the technical standpoint, this was something of a PITA, since I didn’t have a windows or mac machine around to reinstall the firmware. My ultimate solution: 1) back up /dev/sdb (boot record and partition table) and /dev/sdb1 (firmware) from the ipod using dd; 2) put the CF in my laptop and format it (a camera would work just as well), this just normalizes the card; 3) put the CF in the ipod (or in the laptop); 4) write the patition table using dd; 5) edit the partition table using fdisk, set the size of sdb2 to be 32 rather than 16 GB; 6) write out the firmware to sdb1; 7) format sdb2 using mkfs.vfat. Voila - a 32 GB ipod CF If you haven’t seen it already, check out projecteuler.net. They’ve got a bunch of mathematically oriented programming problems online of varying difficulty. Good solutions should all run in 1 minute or less and generally take 100 lines of code or so. It’s a good way to get familiar with a new programming language and to exercise your brain. So far, I’ve done the first 70 or so problems - they don’t take too long, maybe a half hour each on average. Finally, I got the clutch in my car replaced yesterday. The mechanic said that it was in pretty bad shape and that the (plastic?) bearing the clutch uses had worn completely away. This probably explains why I’ve had no acceleration for the past year (or more?). I had forgotten what it was like to drive a decent car :-)

Two weeks ago as Obama won a resounding victory both in the country as a whole and even more decisively in California, Californians also passed Proposition 8. Prop 8 was an amendment to the California constitution that defined marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. With the passage of Prop 8, 18,000 couples had their legal marriages dissolved. Supporters of Proposition 8 claim that the act was necessary to help defend the traditional institution of marriage. Specifically, they looked to the Bible and its condemnation of homosexuality. They claimed that recognizing homosexual marriage undermined the biblical concept of marriage. ...

I started taking photography more seriously about ten years ago. I put down my cheap point and shoot film camera and bought an SLR body, a few lenses and some slide film. The great thing about shooting film (slide or print) is that you aren’t constrained by the quality of your camera. My first SLR was a used Olympus OM-1n, circa 1975. The OM-1n was fully manual - no auto-focus, no auto-exposure. If you didn’t want to use the exposure meter then you didn’t even need a battery. It was a beautiful piece of equipment, but it was also about as basic as you could get outside of a pinhole camera. It was a dark box that held and advanced film with a mount to hold a lens open for a set period of time. That’s it. ...

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about getting a new guitar. I’ve been heading up to High Strung in Durham and have played with maybe a dozen different models, but the one I kept coming back to was a Blueridge BR-243. It’s got a beautiful sound and it’s very comfortable for me to play. The body size is “000” as opposed to the more common dreadnought size (like my first guitar) which means it’s easier to get my arms around and the shorter neck makes it easier to reach all of the chords. The back and sides of the guitar are mahogany ...

Still not official from the Election Board, but the AP has canvased all of the counties and found that there aren’t enough provisional ballots for McCain to overcome Obama’s 13000+ vote lead.

My mother tells a story about my first day in first grade (and sadly, I’m more likely to remember stories of my childhood than the actual childhood). I go off to school, probably all 70s style - plaid pants, mop haircut, etc., and when I come home she asks me about school. In particular, how did I like my new teacher (Mrs. Smith?)? I told my mom that she would like the teacher, that Mrs. Smith was just like her. ...

Polls just closed on the West coast. With that, everyone calls Washington, Oregon and California for Obama - Obama wins! And I’m heading to bed. I would still like to see who wins NC. It looks like it’ll be close, but we should know in the morning. If I’m doing really good, I might stay up for a McCain concession. We’ll see.