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)

The one very amusing thing that Cuil DID find was a recent LJ/blog post critiquing a graph in the first of my two grad school papers: Your Graph is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

As an aside, there is a rather lame blogmeme sitting in my lifejournal (cubicle_hermit) which will probably be erased, but for those interested, you might look now.

As we reported last week, Samsung will also start shipping NAND-hard drive combos with 128MB and 256MB of NAND during the third quarter.

The authors go on to note that Intel is releasing it’s own Flash-caching technology, called Robson.

This is very much related to the MRAMFS work I did; I mean, I doubt they read my compression papers, but it’s all based on the same underlying concept. Very cool.

What is it with job seekers who also write blogs? Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.

That’s when the committee took a look at their online activity.

In some cases, a Google search of the candidate’s name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn’t fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.

If I head back to grad school, I will take this seriously into account in terms of whether to keep this site live. As long as I’m in IT, I don’t think it matters. Heck, some eccentricity is expected.

(Passed on by an friend.)

via Lawrence You on the SSRC mailing list.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/17/169200

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday March 17, @01:38PM
from the everyone-make-balloon-animals dept.
initsix writes “Break out your party hats. According to
http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm , Unix time is supposed
reach 1111111111 on Fri, 18 Mar 2005 01:58:31 GMT That’s only 1036372537
seconds from 2^31 (ie Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:08 GMT)!!”

i.e. 5:58 PM PST tonight

$ perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1111111111), “\n”;’
Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 2005

Yes, it can, if the coding projects are for classes, as pointed out in an email sent out to my former research group at UCSC.

I can’t decide if this is ingenious of the students in question, or a sign that the end is nigh.

(Link sent out in an email from Darrell Long)