Flying Gogoplata

For those of you who noticed, the downside is reliability. OCF was down earlier today for no good reason I can think of. I’m still awaiting a MOTD from the OCF sysadmins with news of the outage. It was likely that it was unannounced scheduled maintenance or something, but after the whole disk array failure fiasco I must admit I’m a little shaken at every “Server Not Found” error I get when accessing my blog. I’ve gotten one comment on my last post ( thanks! ) but I apologize if the OCF managed to lose any comments you may have intended to write due to being entirely unavailable.

Meh, I suppose you can’t complain too much if you’re getting free webspace, free MySQL and Postgres databases, free shell access…

For some inexplicable reason, I’ve been getting the urge to post about the Daily Cal. I’ve been fighting the urge mainly because I’d hate to give any attention to that paper at all if I could avoid it.

Let me make a few things clear. I actually honestly hate very few things. I can count the number of people I currently hate on one finger, and most of the things I bitch and complain about have more to do with the fact that I romanticize being a bitter, grumpy old man. I hate the Daily Cal. Hate. Hate beyond words or actions or anything else I can actually do with my body and mind other than seethe. I’ve hated individual columns and columnists, but mostly I hate the whole fucking paper and the fact that it exists at all. The sad thing is, because they don’t actually sell papers, I have no way to have any impact on their existence other than pretending they don’t exist at all.

Naturally, seeing Miguel’s advertisement of The Daily Clog, the only thing I could think was “Dear God, No. Why?” But, as I can’t help but look at a gruesome auto accident, I gave in and peeked at what they had to offer. And I saw this. A half page blurb, written in typical Go-Bears fashion, mocking The Stanford Daily for printing an article with inaccuracies, printing a retraction, and then firing the managing news editor, who happened to be the source of the misinformation (a response by Daily’s Public Editor can be found here).

I will say this as calmly as I can: People in glass houses should not throw stones.

Usually when people hear me expressing my frustrations with the Daily Cal, they don’t understand why I would expend so much energy on them. “I mean, they’re a bad paper but they’re harmless.” I wish that were the case. I’m willing to live with the fact that the paper is miserably written, entirely uninteresting, and probably the worst student paper in the Pac-10. But the danger of the Daily Cal is that though most people I know agree with the fact that they frequently print inaccuracies and misquotes, everyone underestimates their influence. Let’s keep in mind that the entire DeCal system was entirely restructured into a much more restrictive system, and that the Male Sexuality DeCal was completely destroyed based on blatant, flagrant lies that were printed in the Daily Cal. DeCal’s are what they are now because someone decided to lie about connections between someone’s harmful behavior and the Male Sexuality course. This isn’t small stuff, folks. It got national media attention.

It gets particularly personal with every story they print about the USCA, an organization I hold very close to my heart. I happen to live in a very clean, very functional, very safe, and very loving Student Housing Cooperative off of Durant and Piedmont. I am very confident that most of the members of the USCA would describe their living situations very similarly despite their reservations about the way the organization is run, whether they live at Wolf, Rochdale, Kingman, or that most frequent media punching bag, The Cloyne Court Hotel and Casino. The fact of the matter is that I often have to convince friends and potential co-opers that we are not havens for smack addicts, rampant drug use, filth, disease, vermin, and all-around destruction. At least not any more than any other housing operation at our scale. I’ve had friends who have refused invitations to dinner at Wolf because they were afraid of the food. That really hurts. That’s my house, and those are my homies. And this all comes from the lies, rumors, and misquotes that were either read directly out of the Daily Cal, or because of circulation of that bad information.

So I must admit, to see a Daily Cal staff writer (as the Clog purports in its logo) go out of their way to bash the Stanford Daily for retracting an ill informed news article and then act to save their credibility by firing those on its staff responsible for the misinformation, thoroughly sickens me. The Daily is actually a decent paper in my experience. The Daily has taken measures that most major papers would take in such an event, despite the lack of any pressing need to do so. They seem to pride themselves on their journalistic integrity. It is behavior that should be applauded. The unnamed Daily Cal staff writer clearly disagrees:

It would be easy to castigate the Stanford Daily for shitting on journalistic standards, but we’re inclined to cut them a little slack. Clearly, the Daily’s staff remains too traumatized from their Ink Bowl loss to properly run a student newsletter, let alone scrutinize a self-aggrandizing news story.

Journalistic standards my ass. Any decent paper would have gone bankrupt from libel suits for the shit the Daily Cal has pulled. It’s a miracle of pure apathy that it even has a space on the web to throw those kinds of stones.

Please, for my sanity, my genetically disadvantaged blood pressure, and all our sakes, do not read the Daily Cal. Do not fucking pick up the Daily Cal. Let them sit there and rot in their distribution shelves and maybe with time and luck they will fade out of existence.

I can’t even begin to thank all of you that made my birthday so awesome. From the totally surprising surprise lunch with the piraty themed cupcakes, to the coincidental room-2-room party themed room, the phone calls, the hugs, the love. If there was any way I could even begin to explain exactly why it was so awesome, I would, but just know that you all made me feel incredibly special. I can only hope that I can give that feeling back to you.

Some of you don’t even know me, so I can’t imagine why you would have put in the effort you did. Some of you know me deeply and knowing what and when I am, gave me exactly what I needed. Some of you did so entirely unintentionally.

I have an endless amount of gratitude towards you all.

So I think I’m still two posts behind. For some reason I assumed my semester would feel lighter what with only 13 units, class only 4 days a week, and no employment. I have this awful habit of fooling myself into believing lies…

So it looks like I’m one behind considering I didn’t post yesterday. Hopefully I can make it up this weekend.

I keep reading my classmates’ blogs and am astounded at the amount of material they have to write on and the little I seem to write. Of course, as a cognologist, I would have to explain it in terms of my perceiving the collection of writings from 10 other people (so far) as a unit, which outnumbers my work, and that pairwise I’m not that far behind. I’ll grant that explanation validity, but that doesn’t undo the fact that I frequently think of topics to write about, but rarely have the URGE to write.

Maybe I’m just a man of few words. Anyone who knows me (myself included) should be able to immediately call bullshit on that one. I come from a long line of endless talkers. My father and his 9 siblings, his father, my great-grandfather, we all have this funny habit of telling the same long stories over and over again. What’s worse with me is that this extends beyond stories. It’s facts, thoughts, arguments (most often it’s the useless facts) and other forms of massive information that constantly crowds my head. I tell it, and I re-tell it not having realized that I have said the same thing to the same person several times before.

I clearly don’t have a lack of material (if we define the amount of material to be the noise in my mind), and that’s evidenced by the amount of talking I do. I only really tend to think of things to specifically write when I have no one immediately available to talk to (which is fairly frequent) or when I’m actively thinking about writing. But it’s never an outright urge to express myself in this medium.

Maybe it’s just, as Chris said in his post that it’s merely a matter of finding my voice. I’d like to think so. I know that I’ve had moments where I’ve had the URGE to write and stuff just spewed out almost as reflex, like with my open letter to Wolf House. I also know that I’ve had the urge to write with absolutely no words to write with. At the very least, in writing this often I will be able to start looking for a voice, which is guaranteed to tell me more about my writing than never having looked.

This must be short and sweet because of the loads of other crap I need to have done by tomorrow…

Berkeley High is having a wrestling tournament and the attempting-to-form Cal Wrestling Club will be volunteering to work the tournament in the hopes of finding a good scrappin’ space with mats. If you’re interested in Rasslin’ at Cal or helping out with the tournament or in Berkeley High’s tourney, please let me know, or check out the facebook event.

Until tomorrow…I still have reading and a résumé…

First things first: As promised, apologies for my apathy.

I started my blogging workshop DeCal class today, which means I will be able to fulfill my promise of writing more, as it is required by the course. I figure blog posts about the class will be popular among my classmates today. As much as I have the urge to be original, I will be no different here today.

One of the first things this class has spurred from me is an upgrade from WordPress 2.0.somethingorother to today’s 2.1 release. As some of the OCF members may recall, there were miserable disk array failures sometime in October that caused all kinds of funk-nasty happenings. At the time the only effect on me was the inability to access my blog. Today, as I was making some updates in anticipation of at least 20 new readers of my blog, I noticed that WordPress would spit out a page of frightening debugging messages every time I clicked on one of the admin links. I checked the offending source code file at the location specified in the debug output to find about several hundred characters worth of absolute garbage where concise and functional source code should be, with no logical way of piecing together its functional units. It turns out that this one file of in my account had become corrupted in the array failure and was apparently unrecoverable. I had deleted my local backup of the source and when I checked the website to download a copy, I found that WordPress 2.1 “Ella” had just been released several hours ago. I figured a) the hassle of finding my version of the source to replace my corrupt file would be roughly equivalent to the hassle of upgrading and b) I would have to upgrade eventually anyway. So I took the plunge.

The upgrade was extremely quick and fairly straightforward. The web instructions actually made it seem more difficult and frightening than it was, but they were definitely necessary to read. Any major improvements? None that I can see out front. There has been quite a bit of spit-and-polish added to the UI and aesthetics of the admin site. Advanced options are hidden but accessible, common options are prominent. Flow of information has been cleaned up extensively. It looks nicer and feels nicer to use without a complete rewriting of the front-end. This is in every sense of the word and update to an already good piece of software, and a very satisfying one. My current favorite feature is the new and improved autosave which does just that, unobtrusively, automatically, at regular intervals. This feature update, as well as many of the User Experience updates, are a good example of how good AJAX can add to the usability of a webapp of this sort and scale.

Performance-wise, the site feels like it’s running a little faster. When I first started blogging on OCF, WordPress was morbidly slow, and I had attributed the speed up to some kind of server-side caching. If that was the case, the update would have seen a similar initial slowdown with increasing speed-up with each use. This has not been the case. It stayed quick and nimble from the beginning, and feels just a little faster overall. One of my previous complaints about WordPress was the source code. I have not yet looked at the source due to lack of time and energy, but I’m hoping to see some increased readability at least.

My final thoughts so far: the upgrade is small, but worthwhile. Do it now!

Some unrelated info: I’ve posted some new links to some old friends blogs. The DeCal Blog will have a list of all my classmates’ blogs, but that list will be repeated in my blogroll. I will post links to their posts from time to time, particularly when someone’s writing is up for critique. Please don’t read any of the stuff outside the blog portion of my webspace. It’s thoroughly embarrassing. You have been warned.

That’s all for now. You should be hearing from me 5 times a week now, one of which will be lengthy. Prepare your RSS aggregators for a hefty beating…

Though the Beast is much more simian like (and later cat like) he’s furry enough to represent a return to wolf (though far more in my personal life).

Apologies will come for the apathy, I promise. And maybe more blogging as well. Good luck with classes tomorrow!