I am not, as most folks who know me can attest, particularly good at making new friends. As a result, I tend to make a reasonable amount of effort to keep in touch with old ones, at least until I’ve suitably buried myself in late coursework that even a phone-call seems to require time I don’t have. Christmas vacation is particularly useful to this end because everybody tends to return home to their folks for a bit, so almost all of the ex-Coastsiders I know wind up back in the area at some point or another around Dec. 25.

While a few are notoriously good at slipping away without detection (namely U-, who has extended her run of evasion to the tune of four years straight now), most I end up locating sooner or later. Today was the turn for V- and W-. First, however, the car had to be deposited with the mechanic, who was helpfully able to diagnose the vehicle as in need of front brake pads. As the problem in question is a high-pitched screech from the rear wheel, it is not clear if we can consider this progress or not. In any case, I met up with V- for breakfast, along with V-‘s friend. Hence the experience became less about reconnecting, than about connecting in the first place. Queue above comment about my friend-making abilities.

A bit later, W- and I went up to our former high school. It’s curious how small the place feels now. While I could (easily) pass for a high school student, I felt quite alien to the folks their. They could almost have been from another country. The mannerisms, the lingo and the outlook (what little of it I overheard) recalled no memories. Meanwhile the number of teachers whom I’d had that are still teaching there has shrunk to perhaps 7 or 8 (out of an original 20+). They too seem different. Less imposing or authoritative, while more quirky and easier to relate to. For instance, we had a lengthy conversation with a former teacher (and newly appointed administration) on the efficacy of teaching kindergartners how to cut down trees.

Is it we or they who have changed? I’m not sure. Suddenly, though, high school seems part of another lifetime.

The rest of the day centered around a battle royale between me, rsync, and rpm and has no impact on the price of tea in China, or really much else for that matter. I think I conquered, but hopefully, I’ll never have to learn for sure. The best data backups are the ones you don’t end up needing.

So, once again my journal seems to have been passed by events. Or as a (the only?) reader said, “I keep going there for updates, but all I see is that silly pirate.” Well, umm… yes. Jack Sparrow is indeed a silly pirate, and I am indeed, behind on my writing, having consistently failed to post updates since the September 29, 2006 posting that features master Sparrow so prominently. Still, here’s a proposal of sorts for 2007 (this is in fact somewhat after the fact, since this entry is actually being composed on Jan. 21):

– More frequent updates
– Better writing
– Fewer words

In short, less of the quotidian and more of the variety, or at least less emphasis on the fact that I always go to bed late, get up late, and am invariably somewhat behind in one class or another. We can take these as givens, and move on to the other stuff.

The motivation for this change stems from two things actually. Firstly, writing consistently boring stuff is depressing, and in any case, I get plenty of practice doing that with my classes. Secondly, my two favorite bloggers have quit (Billmon of Whiskey Bar and Michael Berube of his blog by the same name), so the quality of potential distractions has taken quite a hit. Long story short: expect either great things here, or an overpopulation of giant North Korean rabbits. Either one should be an improvement.

—————

The New Year is one of the many holidays I am ambivalent about, mostly because the weather precludes my preferred holiday pursuits (hiking in the Sierras, traveling to underpopulated areas, intergalactic snooker), but also somewhat because me and my folks never do anything all that exciting. In fact, I’m pretty sure that up until the point that I was 15 or 16, I regularly slept through the New Year without thinking anything of it.

In that grand tradition, 2007 actually began quite well, with me not merely conscious, but engaged in heated disagreement. It was the sort of argument that one can only really have after about 11PM at night, provided that one has gotten into the habit of going to bed before 10. Consequently, I think we (me and The Parents) didn’t actually notice the ’06-’07 changeover until at least two or three minutes after the fact. Quel dommage. A few minutes later, I returned to cursing my seemingly newly dead iPod (revived upon subsequent reformatting) and ditched 2007 for a world of immediately forgettable and forgotten dreams. Such is life.

The real day in fact began sometime around 8 hours later and probably meandered on for another 15 or 16 until it collided with Jan. 2, at which point it was rudely retired to some place farther west. As for me and The Parents, we wound up spending the daylight hours disrupting banana slugs and staff-length sticks at the Purisima Open Space preserve. It’s amazing how much more exciting a place can become when visibility can be measured in miles, not feet, and everything isn’t tinted gray. I’m also a big fan of the color, which has an unfortunate tendency to leave these parts between, oh, about July and December. Me like springtime. Even if in January.

Following shortstanding tradition, we also had a sort of special dinner/gift exchange doohickey in the evening. Consider it the poor atheist’s version of Christmas. No tree. Few decorations. Just a big dinner, and some gifts not sporting red and green wrap. Helps to spread holiday spirit and whatnot. I may have to rethink my policy on fireplaces though, as the living room was positively hot by the end of dinner. There is such a thing as too-effective heating. Even around Half Moon Bay.

Having manifestly gone beyond the limits of brevity imposed at the outset of this post, that, my friends, was how we welcomed 2007.

Another helter-skelter semester, another vacatopm for the dear old blog/journal/whatever. In other words, October-December are missing.

First order of business this morning was to finally get down to the post office and mail some things. It was embarassingly close to the Apple store, so I don’t know how I missed it when I was down there yesterday, but I did. Seems like every time I send something, stamps cost a cent more. $0.39? I remember $0.25.

Speaking of the Apple Store, I did pop in. I fiddled with one of the Macbooks. Problem is, I don’t particularly care for the keyboard. It also doesn’t have a docking station, so even when it eventually comes out with a Core 2 Duo processor, it may not do so well replacing the Compaq. Meanwhile, I test pi_css5 again on the Mac Pros. Quite fast, and this time I’ve recorded the results. May need a new benchmark again, it’s becoming too fast. 16 million digits, perhaps?

Another item on the list was my flickering monitor. Took it back to Best Buy. Of course it wouldn’t flicker. Took my computer down to demonstrate. Still didn’t flicker. Very weird. My roommate was there this morning when it was doing it, so I’m definitely not imagining. Fine now though. I realized that the laptop does DVI, so I’m using that cable now. Maybe it’ll help.

I walked about a bit in the afternoon too. A nice day all around, so I even paid the Trader Joe’s near Union Square a visit. They deliver! Hooray! Surprisingly, their selection was a bit more limited than the one in Menlo Park. Space constraints I suppose. Boy was it crowded.

I’m a big fan of mail, so it was with interest that I discovered a package, addressed to me, from Tel Aviv. Odd, I didn’t know I had friends in Israel. Turns out it was a book my uncle ordered for me (thanks!). Arabic stories, you see, with a good glossary, compiled by the last British commissioner of education in Palestine under the mandate. The book itself is the original 1948 printing. A genuine classic. Hopefully it will survive well here.

I had an exceedingly long sit with a biography of an Ottoman bureaucrat, though I’ve still got plenty to go. Trying to avoid doing all my readings at the last minute. Should make for better results, I trust.

Dinner was potatos, bread, cheese, olives, hummus and pickles. It was actually a pretty good combo. After dinner, I decided on a whim to get a movie from Apple’s store. I’m a fan of “Pirates of the Caribbean” (the first one), so there was no difficulty choosing. The movie downloaded fine (weighing in at 1.3GB), but playback was disappointingly choppy. Even after upgrading to iTunes 7.0.1, it was still a bit unsteady.

Admittedly the movie isn’t quite a classic, but something about the way Johnny Depp struts around and talks just fascinates me. A beautiful combination of inappropriate bravado and wit. Sailing in on a sinking ship, making smartass comments waiting for the noose, and so on. All good fun.

Plus with the torture and spying laws Congress is passing, we’ll need all the humor we can get to survive the next few years. That and a one way ticket to a more civilized part of the world.

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.

For the morning, I finished my readings for my other seminar, dealing with the question of how Islamic jurisprudence (law) developed. The particular question surrounds the use of the ‘hadith’, the narrative of the doings of the prophet, Muahmmad. The problem is that none of these were written down until several centuries after the event in question took place. As these narratives serve as the basis for Islamic law, there is naturally interest in establishing their authenticity.

The traditional way to establish authenticity of a hadith is to examine the line of transmission (isnad), prior to its being written down. Since each hadith begins with something like “recorded by A who received it from B who received it from C who was with the prophet on this occasion,” the obvious method of checking is to establish the bona fides of those alleged to have transmitted the hadith. Was B a trustworthy person? Did he live at the right time? Is he known to have met A and C? Etc.

Obviously, this has some limits. What one scholar we read, Joseph Schacht, claims, is that most hadith were essentially created by jurists later on, to support their beliefs, and then the isnad for each was gradually extended backward, in order to establish credibility. He makes some more elaborate arguments, along with evidence he claims supports him, but this is really the gist.

I’m not quite sure I buy it. There are an enormous number of hadith. There are moreover a certain number which scholars agree, by the above method, are manifestly fabricated. But to assume that they are all fabricated, is to in effect assume a gigantic conspiracy of jurists. Schacht is in effect claiming that large numbers of scholars who lived in a vast area, with widely differing beliefs, all engaged in a massive fraud. Which is quite an extraordinary claim.

Oddly enough, class discussion was mainly focused on the present theory and practice of Islamic law. Relevant, no doubt, but not exactly touching deeply on the readings.

In the other course, we discussed Fanon of course. A fun discussion, but one that got occasionally airy, courtesy of a lack of general knowledge of Algeria itself. Context, as we are always told, is everything.

Dinner and sleep followed.

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 was more of the same. I guess I spoke too harshly of the nationalist historians. Consider the following two (paraphrased statements): “There is no evidence of significant Greek opposition to the practice of devshirme,” and “The practice of devshirme was invariably opposed by Greeks.”

Not really the same thing is it? Doesn’t quite help me with my paper, but it does illustrate that even straightforward historical questions don’t always yield straightforward answers. The two authors in question, one Greek, one British, are writing within about 10 years of each other. The first statement is actually the later one. Very odd.

Meanwhile, the monitor has begun to flicker most annoyingly. Not sure quite what’s up, but the gray background in Photoshop is enough to illustrate the problem. On another note, my new bank is sending me ridiculous amounts of mail.

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?

As the setup of my apartment has proven exceptionally difficult to explain over the phone, this will perhaps be of interest.

I wasn’t planning on making an Ikea advert, but given that the desk, office chair, bookcase, lamps, trashcan, and even blanket are from said Swedish monstrosity, I suppose I didn’t quite succeed.