On the up side, I’ve got a lot more upstream bandwidth, and a much greater sense of security. Worth it!

OTOH, I did upgrade mysql to 5.5, and wordpress to 3.2. Woot, I think.

Spain is a magical place. How do we know this? Because they apparently have a meat vending machine.

Said vending machine is located outside a 100-year-old butcher shop and allows customers to buy meat around the clock. The vending machine features meats, sausages, sandwiches and other goods on a seasonally rotating basis.

To Dr. George Blumenthal, Chancellor,
and Mr. Mickey Aluffi, Chief of Police:

I am writing to object in the strongest terms possible to the handling of today’s protests.

While I am not unsympathetic to the point made by the protesters today, I object to their method, and must equally fault the administration for allowing them to close access to campus.

Those who engage in civil disobedience must also accept the consequences, and I saw no sign whatsoever that those in authority intended to impose consequences upon the protesters. Absent that, the protesters’ actions were mere thuggery and those who turn a blind eye to them are complicit.

As far as I know, campus authorities have an obligation to enforce the law. I don’t know whether or not there is a legal obligation to assist students, faculty and staff in getting onto and off of campus, but it certainly seems like there should be.

Instead, parking officers blocked off the streets approaching the main entrance and in essence aided the protesters.

As a commuter student who had to work all morning, I was unaware of the protests or the reason for the road closure until I checked online while in stopped traffic on Empire Grade approaching the West Entrance. I know for a fact that several students in my class commute from work in Santa Clara or San Mateo counties, and they were likely caught in the same mess – as were hundreds of others as witnessed by the mile of traffic leading up to the west entrance.

At the west entrance, I was forced to turn around by a mob of students; the single campus police officer visible, while cordial, made clear that his instructions did not allow him to take any action to allow traffic through.

I missed half a day of work to attend class today, and was prevented from doing so by the actions of a small handful of misbehaving students. The responsibility for this does not lie solely with those students, but at least equally with the administration which coddles them.

I’m not sure that your administration is not more culpable: as a society, we make an allowance for “kids” like most undergraduates, while we expect responsible professionals to live up to full adult standards.

I strongly urge you in the future to take whatever actions are necessary to ensure that protests remain peaceful and do not disrupt the normal operation for campus. If student protesters will not cooperate, they should be subject to the normal legal and academic penalties.

Regards,

Nathan Edel
Student, UCSC Baskin School of Engineering
Resident and taxpayer, San Mateo, CA

cc: Congresswoman Jackie Speier
cc: State Senator Leland Yee
cc: State Assemblyman Jerry Hill
cc: San Francisco Chronicle
cc: City on a Hill Press

(also CC’ed, but not marked in the original letter, to the Governor)
(edited to fix line breaks)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods (and as an aside, this is probably the second most unpleasant SF/Fantasy novel I’ve ever read, after M.J. Engh’s Arslan)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune – couldn’t get through the sequels, though.
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The AeneidWatership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island (read an abridged version in elementary school. Ditto for Swiss Family Robinson, and then boggled my teacher by insisting on reading War of the Worlds from an unabridged copy I already owned.)
David Copperfield – gah, I hate Dickens.
The Three Musketeers

From Mexico, January 2008 photos

More to come, trying Google PicasaWeb

Yes, it’s the famous “in the [butt]” answer from the Newlywed game (and yes, they also have the exploding whale, Bush Sr. puking on the Prime Minster of Japan, and much, much more.)

A little over a month ago, I sat through our company’s open enrollment presentation discussing the benefit change for next year. Not many changes, and Guidewire has good benefits (just BTW, in case one of my readers is looking for a job. It’s a cool place to work.) That said, a big part of the presentation was talking about the combination of “High-deductible health plan” and a “Health (Medical?) Savings Account”.

Those seemed like a very broken way of providing health insurance to me, and inspired me to start a post which, until now, I’ve never finished; indeed, my original intent – arguing for single payer, will have to wait. But meanwhile I wanted to share the following news story with you in additional evidence that Bush’s goal, and that of the Republican legislators who were until recently in power, was to “reform” the employer based health care system out of commission completely.

Check this out: (Emphasis below is mine, quoting is selective, and I recommend reading the whole article.)
Bush Insurance Plan Gets Cold Reception

“Under the guise of tax breaks, the president is pursuing a policy designed to destroy the employer-based health care system through which 160 million people receive coverage,” the lawmaker said.

[The proposal] includes a trade-off. Contributions from employers toward health insurance would begin to be treated as taxable income. At the same time, a standard deduction for taxpayers with health insurance would be set at $15,000 for families and $7,500 for individuals

Giving a tax break to individuals who pay for their own health insurance, rather than only allowing it if it’s above 7.5% of total income seems only fair to me… after all, those of us who get it through our employers do so through either the employer paying for it untaxed or through a “cafeteria plan” pre-tax deduction. The fair way to allow people to deduct individually paid health insurance would be to do so through one of those special deductions that is separate from one’s regular, itemized deductions (as is done right now with student loan interest.)

Instead, what seems to be being proposed is just plain stupid. Fortunately, I think it is (as noted elsewhere in the article) a non-starter with a Democratic congress, but then again… didn’t the whole health savings account crap start under Clinton? Assuming that the Democratic party is on the right side of this issue ignores just how big a tent the Democratic party is, and how bad the Hillarycare proposal was (I vaguely recall my far-left friends/family calling it “corporate welfare for big insurance companies” at the time.)

If that’s not bad enough, we’ve also got the total fiasco that Governor Schwartzenegger (sp?) is proposing here in California. I’ve not been following that as well as I should, but I’ve been apalled by what I’ve heard so far (how, for example, will the individual requirement to carry health insurance be enforced? Filling the jails?) Calitics has had a good bit of coverage that I need to catch up on.

More to come on this issue, I hope.

Addendum: Here’s a link to the whitehouse fact sheet on the president’s actual proposal. Also mcjoan at Dailykos discusses this further, although with a rather different read on what the proposal means.