A Series of Tubes

I am never driving up to San Francisco again.  This is the second time that someone broke my window, looked through the inside of my car, found out that I don’t keep anything valuable in my car, and left me with a broken window and the contents of my glove compartment spread out on the passenger seat.

I can’t believe that I haven’t posted this yet:

A while back I saw this video and started to tie my shoes this way:

I decided to look up a better way to tie my shoes recently because my shoes would get really tight at the bottom and way too lose at the top.  I would keep adjusting my shoes but it was a never ending battle.  Eventually I found this website that has collected a ton of shoelace information in one site.  I would say that I’m surprised to see how much time someone spent putting up all this shoelace information, but when you consider how many pictures there are of things like kung fu cats you realize that the shoelace site is par for the course on the internet.

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I’ve been listening to some lectures from The Teaching Company.  Some of them are really good and some of them are ok.  I really liked the philosophy of freedom lectures.  Currently I’m listening to ethics and public policy, but the lecturer simply poses a bunch of hypothetical questions and I think has discussion sessions inbetween lectures.  As a teaching sytle that is fine except I’m listening to the lectures on my bus rides to and from campus.

The engineering honor society at UCSC recently became a part of Tau Beta Pi.  I recently joined and went through the initiation ceremony.  It was a little weird and the whole time I was there I kept thinking of the episode of the simpsons where he joins the stonecutters:

I ran into Jono Kinkade recently.  I had originally met him when the tree sit originally got started.  He has writes for the city on a hill press, the student newspaper, and has covered the tree sit and other disputes over the LRDP.  I guess I should help out and plug the fact that city on a hill press is looking for reporters, photographers, copy editors, illustrators, web designers etc. so if you’re a UCSC student and want a 5 credit internship then email them: work4chp@gmail.com.

Well Jono was able to fill me in on the happenings of the tree sit recently.  It has been difficult to find out what exactly has been going on because there used to be an encampment at the base of the tree sit where you could go and get information.  Currently you have to read the signs hung in the trees and those don’t change or tell you what the status of the tree sit is.  Jono has written up a really good recap of the status of the LRDP here but it looks like the webpage is a massive resource hog so I might try to repost it without the crazy background image or whatever it is that is slowing my browser down to a crawl.

It sounds like there is a little bit of a split in the protest.  Read more

What do the following two things have in common:

1) Grand theft Auto 4

2) Energy Conservation

Well not much actually but the editors over at the new republic try to make the case for a link between the two. If you’re like me then you will end up knowing that the Ambient Orb costs $150 (way too much for a glowing ball) and works mostly on the pager network, but I have a feeling that you’re not like me.

I want a crow vending machine. Then I can control them as my minions:

On an unrelated note you should check out this crazy animation.

So I borrowed a digital camera so that I could take my own pictures instead of grabbing other people’s pictures off the web. Here are Some of the pictures of the tree sit as it is today:

This is a picture of Mclaughlin Drive looking east from the engineering buildings. As you can see there is a banner hanging above. As you can also see that banner is a tangled up mess. The tree sitters underestimated mother natures ability to royally tangle a hanging sign. I was able to read the sign on the left earlier in the week in its untangled state. It read 4/22 and 5/1. I’m not positive but I’m pretty sure that these two dates are references to the anti military recruiting protest on april 22nd and 5/1 is in reference to the upcoming immigrant rights march and rally on the first of may.

I have a friend who participated in tent University at UCSC in 2005. He was dissilusioned with the process of tent University because the protest became a sponge for any greivance that any member could come up with. He was there to protest military recruiters, others were there for issues ranging from the UCSC budgeting process, increased fees, closing of departments, lack of educational programs, housing, lack of community at the University… You get the idea. They protested everything, and because there was no focus, there was no progress as a result of the protest. It’s pretty much official that the current tree sitters could essentially call their current encampment “Tent University 2: this time we’re in trees”. Read more