Out of my hat

So it’s been nearly a week for me without a working laptop, and four days since I dropped her off at the shop. It’s cliche, but I really do feel like there’s a part of me that’s missing. This whole experience is making me feel eerily post-human.

In other computer news, my desktop at work continues to degenerate by the day. Fortunately, reinforcements are coming in the form of a new G5 iMac; once that arrives, I can bid my current clunkety Windows machine adieu, and not a moment too soon.

I’d blog longer, but I have to go tell a class of calculus students that no, it turns out that they don’t know what they’re talking about after all.

Some weeks ago, the Vice-President of the United States told a Senator of the opposition party, while on the Senate floor, to go fuck [him]self. This was excused by various pundits as being unimportant since the Senate was not actually in session at the time; the VP himself issued a non-apology the following day.

Earlier today, the Prime Minister of Canada inadvertently swore into a live mic today (Jesus Christ!) while at a conference with the premiers. (Note to my non-Canadian readers: a provincial premier is sort of the equivalent to a state governor.) His aunt Claire in Pembroke called him to scold him shortly thereafter, and upon resumption of the session the PM immedaitely apologised to the gathered officials.

Milady Powerbook is causing me problems right at the moment. Problem 1 is an inability to accept discs in the SuperDrive; problem 2, which manifested spontaneously while I was taking the recommended steps to solve problem 1, is that it won’t boot.

Well, that’s not quite true. It boots just fine in single-user mode, which means that at least my filesystem is still in place and all. In verbose mode, almost everything seems to go fine — all the network services and everything — but there seems to be some sort of problem with the hard drive, because I keep getting the message disk0s9: 0x8 (UNDEFINED) popping up.

Anyhow, the upshot for those of you that care is that my access to my usual e-mail account is likely to be sporadic for the next few days, and I’m probably not going to be visible online much. If you need to reach me, either my work address or the one described to the right of this post should work fine for that. Or phone. The possibilities, while not endless, and certainly manifold.

(Oh, and those of you reading who are more l33t than I am about such things: any idea what’s going on? Is this something that I can fix in single-user mode, or am I going to have to find a service provider?

There’s a cricket in my apt. It’s drIVinG mE MaD…

You know, my life would be a lot more fun if I got more enjoyment out of seeing confusion on the faces of others. Because it seems to me that significant parts of my job result in the confounding of those around me.

Just today, for instance, there was my morning calculus class, where someone wanted me to cancel the uncancellable, and didn’t seem to get why I said I couldn’t. In my afternoon class, one of my students asked about how I worked out (x+a)⁴ so fast, and seemed quite nonplussed when I told him. And shortly afterwards, I got to walk into a colleague’s office and ask him what he knew about tensor products of linear programs. (His answer, after a moment of blankness, had something to do with differential forms… which I suppose only goes to show that what goes around comes around.)

I tell ya, if you want to baffle the unwary, a math prof is what you want to be.

Normally I try and arrange matters so that if there’s a long weekend, I’m off doing something with it. The way things have fallen out, though, has left me in the Midwest for this one. And if I had anything like an attention span, maybe I’d be making good use of it.

OK, that’s not entirely fair. I’ve been working for a while on a bit of home-brew web software to power a new (or a second, actually) weblog, this one in conjunction with Wendy and possibly others. It’s seeming like that code is unlikely to see the light of day, but aspects of it are going to survive; I’ve recently taken a look at Blosxom and found that it is good. So watch this space for news on that front.

On the research front, I’ve got three papers that are done or nearly so, just crying to be sent off somewhere to get published. If I get nothing else done this weekend — a strong possibility — I hope to get those squared away. I’m up to five publications on MathSciNet, or I will be once the latest JCMCC gets indexed. But that leaves nothing currently in the queue, which is a bad situation for a young and hungry academic to be in.

Otherwise, it’s a long, lonely weekend here in the Nutshell. Sometimes I think I need to cultivate more vices; a good drug dependency might do wonders to allieviate the tedium.

So suppose that you’re the leadership of a political party. Your party has done fairly well for itself in recent years, to the extent that you control not just the executive, but both branches of the legislature of your country. There’s a big election coming up, you’re holding your party’s convention, and so naturally you want to trumpet all of the great things you’ve done to remind voters how good life is, and hence why they should re-elect your party.

That seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

So why, then, has almost every speech coming out of the Republican National Convention this week consisted of trying to tear down their Democratic opponents, instead of building a case on the merits of Republican leadership? Don’t vote for them, they’re evil seems to be the average level of discourse here. Why can’t the Repubs do any better than that?

(Obvious answe: the Rs can’t make a case from their accomplishments because their accomplishments are either not all that stellar, or actually contrary to the will of the electorate. I can’t say how true that is off the top of my head, but that’s certainly the impression that one comes away with.)

So put that way, we’ve got a party in charge of nearly the entire government that can’t run a positive campaign on their own accomplishments. What possible reason could there be for re-electing them?

Apple has unveiled their new G5 iMac.

The page headline is, Where did the computer go? And that was pretty much my first impression from the photo.

Sweet.

I wonder: when the sign says Automatic toll lane — coins only, does it take an act of supreme deviousness to interpret this as meaning:

• Toll must be paid;
• Toll must be paid in coins;
• Bills will do you no good.

…or am I right in being irritated by the guy who has to call over an official and have him make change from paper money? The guy’s plates were from Michigan, and this was happening on the Canadian side, which implies that he’s already crossed the border once and thus has a reasonable basis for knowing better.

Not much else new in the Nutshell. Pursuant to some books I’ve been reading and some spirited discussions the other night at House Eco-Monkey, I can feel a post about sociobiology coming on, but that’ll have to wait for another day.

Today’s choice bit of weirdness:

I’m sitting out my office hour for the afternoon flipping through the internet, and the Dean of the college I work in stops outside my door, glances in, and says to whoever he’s talking to: I’ll just be a minute… I have to fondle something.

Now as it turns out, he was refering to a rather nice chess set I keep in my office. And, true to his words, he walked in and weighed a couple of the shiny metal pieces is his hand, chatted with me for a moment, and then left to go and do important Dean things.

For a second, though, it felt like there was a sitcom moment waiting to happen, and I’d half-braced myself for the laugh track.