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Began the morning with the usual, too-early French class. Apparently I’m not the only one who gets caught up by things being so early. The instructor forgot the homeworks in her office…

The rest of the morning was pretty hazy. Tried to finish off a number of things, including administrativia stipends, my still missing housing deposit check, my now defunct web server account, and my previous cell phone. At $10 a month, I might have just kept the darn thing for my dad, but the battery’s dying, they won’t help us replace it, and they’re adding a $5/month fee to ‘encourage’ us to upgrade. Which is what I did for the summer. My bills went from $10-25/month to $40/month. Thanks, but no thanks.

Lunch was with my grandmother, who came down for her weekly physics colloquium, at an Afghan restaurant called Khyber Pass. Good food, but a lot of it seemed decidedly Persian.

Discovered, in the process of trying to straighten up my domain name, that all of the address/e-mail info in the registration is public in the whois database. Urgh. No wonder my gmail account has been getting spammed. Back to using yahoo as the address when I buy stuff on the web.

For dinner, I wound up trying to cook a different type of spaghetti, with less than ideal results. The by now sprouting potatos worked out a bit better. Combined with steaming the broccoli, I spent almost 2 hours in the kitchen today. Hopefully no more cooking needed for a while.

Oh, and I’ve officially graduated from my old school. Owing to some paper complications, I went to the ceremony back in June of course, but I didn’t actually officially graduate then. A kind of silly situations, given that I’m already in grad. school, but that’s how end-of-summer degree conferral goes, apparently.

The morning was spent finishing the paper on Ottoman Greece. Not really satisfied, but I’m definitely out of time. As for the seminar, we each gave 5 minute presentations on our region of the Ottoman empire. I was actually a bit disappointed, as most people seemed unable to give a very good historical summary, let alone a broader analysis of the incorporation of their particular region in the empire. Summarizing is difficult, true, but the least we can do is be linear, and (on the other hand) not repeat every single battle, right?

For the evening, I was going through various works by Frantz Fanon, including an excerpt from “A Dying Colonialism” on the political implications of veiling in the Algerian Revolution, that I read last spring in Paris. The chapters on “National Culture” and “National Consciousness’ from “The Wretched of the Earth” were new though.

In “National Consciousness”, Fanon offers a very compelling analysis of postcolonial states. Essentially, the native elites use nationalism to stir up the masses and force the colonizer out. This achieved, they immediately take the place of the old colonial rulers. The new ‘nation’ remains essentially colonial, run by a corrupt native elite that basically uses national unity and nationalization as a means to line their pockets with the monies that were formerly taken by the colonizing power.

He says much more of course, but this scenario has played out many times, most of them after Fanon’s death in 1962.

The problem is that analyzing the problem and solving it are two different things. The supreme irony is that the Algerian Revolution that Fanon was so dedicated to, and had so much faith and praise for, played out largely along the lines he had described (and claimed the Algerians were not following): nationalism becomes a cover for dictatorship, corruption, and the rule of an intellectually barren native elite.

So today, I figured I’d try and resurrect this journal. What with having my desk finally set up, and having a screen I can read (even if it does flicker on occasion), it seemed like the opportune time.

The funny thing is that I can actually remember events that happened 3 or 4 weeks ago far better than those that happened only a few days ago. I think that’s because class days for me wind up being rather similar, and hence hard to differentiate. They all kind of merge together. Going to the beach or hiking, or visiting someplace special, they all tend to stick.

Beyond that, I think I’ve given up on lighttpd for this site. I’m just too tired of having simple things not work. For instance, recursive includes in server-side html required a special patch, because the source doesn’t normally support it. Now I’m in a position where a very simple cgi script, a hit counter, won’t run, because include-virtual only works in a very particular way, and exec isn’t implemented for shtml. Blah.

As for less technical matters, I had a large quantity of French to review, and an even larger quantity of research to get through on Greece under the Ottoman empire. It appears that the library here has a decent Greek collection, but it’s almost exclusively in Greek. A bit difficult for somebody like me to take advantage of. Those few things that aren’t in Greek tend to largely regard Ottoman Greece as a ‘Dark Age’ in need of little or no explication. Bloody ahistorical nationalists. Something must have happened from 1450-1550. What?

So the highlight of the day was a quick visit to Best Buy, happily only a few blocks away, to finalize on a new monitor. The idea was to finally stop squinting at the laptop’s screen, which for all it’s perks, has a native resolution of 1600×1200 on a 15″ screen. Wonderful for details, unreadable for fonts.

It’s become quite a challenge to avoid getting these ‘widescreen’ monitors with the 16:9 aspect ratio, or in other words, 20″ LCDs offering 1680×1050 resolution. Since height, not width, is usually what bugs me when viewing documents/webpages/photos, this isn’t a trade-off I wanted.

So with a little advice from a friend, plus the surprising discovery that Best Buy can actually have lower prices than Newegg (though not often), I am now the proud owner of a Samsung 204B 20.1″ LCD monitor. Aside from a somewhat limited vertical viewing angle, it looks pretty good. My desktop background has reverted to IMG_3104.jpg, the highly saturated Swiss photo (Lac de Moiry) that I used to use before deciding the computer wasn’t doing it justice.

Otherwise, it was a quiet day, mostly spent ensconced at my desk reading. I even managed some good old-fashioned paper correspondance, though of course the post office was closed by the time I got there. I also picked up some long neglected groceries, though after looking at the bill, my first thought is that I need to stop by Trader Joe’s more often. $27 just doesn’t go as far as it ought.

The document I got from the Grad Office on taxes might as well be written in Greek for all the help it is. Whoever does the actual writing at the IRS clearly was unable to get a job doing technical writing in the real world. In terms of poor organization, lousy sentence construction and general abstruseness, the paper is a masterpiece. It is however just about useless for actual reference.

Meanwhile, the Despotate of Morea has fallen to the Ottoman Turks, and I have massive quantities of French to do tomorrow.

Getting up for French isn’t the hard part, although I dropped my alarm clock on the floor yesterday, and it seems to now only work as a clock (the alarm part is basically inaudible). The hard part is staying awake after French. Still 8AM class is 8AM class, so I arrived as usual at 7:59AM, having only finished about 2/3 of my cereal. Blah.

After class, I verified that my $1000 deposit check (for housing) is still AWOL. Nobody seems to know where it is, or has received it. Clever. My checkbook from the new bank arrived though, so I’m still at least as solvent as Uncle Sam.

Had lunch at a nice little Thai place on 4th St. near 6th Ave. with my grandmother. In the process, we wandered a bit in the village, passing a chess shop, where I bought my last chess set, about 10 years back. Also played in a kid’s chess ‘tournament’ at a different chess place across the street around that time. No wonder ‘the Village’ seems slightly familiar.

Afternoon was a mishmash of reading and wrestling with CSS. I’m trying, per somebody’s request, to get the sidebar here moved to the left side of the page. Unfortunately, my skills in the department are a bit lacking, so after almost 3 hours, I was forced to admit defeat. At least now, all the ugly hacks on the original wordpress theme have been pretty much tidied up. The diff against ‘kubrick’ is down to maybe 50 lines.

“Orientalism” on the other hand was slightly more successful. Some of yesterday’s discussion is finally beginning to click. Not for the last time, I’m sure.