The Flow of Consciousness

Happy New Year!

I’m going to share my professional goals for 2008 with you, interested reader, but before I do so, I need to revisit last year’s list.

• Graduate
  • Mission accomplished. I graduated in May with a Bachelors’ Degree in Computer Science and a minor in Writing, focusing on journalism.
• Go to grad school.
  • I’ve got one semester remaining at Robert Morris University before I finish my Masters’ Degree in Business Education, and another year before I finish the teachers’ certification.
• Keep writing
  • I haven’t written as much as I would have liked, but I did keep momentum on this blog. Actually, I’ve been doing more reading than writing, mostly on political things. I read Lew Rockwell columns daily and find myself on Wikipedia and other sites researching politics. I’ve written a number of letters to my senators and congresspeople regarding various bills and whatnot.
  • I’m still writing for ThinkComputers.org and other sites operated by Bob Buskirk. I’m going to CES under the ThinkComputers banner on Sunday.
  • Obsidian and I got BIOS LEVEL off the ground, and we’ve had a lot of traffic as a result of the review of the OLPC XO and the articles on uShare and the Xbox 360 and extending uShare.
• Keep coding
  • I did not code as much as I would have liked. I worked heavily on a web site design one night this month, but even then it was just modifying someone else’s design and implementing a few small WordPress plugins. I did, however, learn a lot about MVC from Jon, so I hope to use that this year. Hopefully, Jon and Zack and I will get back into development when we work on our replacement for Autonomous LAN Party, a once-great GPL project which recently went Qt-licensed and is a terrible mess of coupled and incohesive code.
• Learn more Esperanto and German
  • My Esperanto vocabulary is growing, and I’ve joined Esperanto-USA, a group which fosters Esperanto advocacy in the United States. As for German, I’ve picked up a little bit here and there. I’m not able to speak much of it, but I can read a little. I may be headed to Germany, Norway, or Sweden for a part of my student teaching in May 2009, so I’m sure that I’ll pick up even more if that becomes a reality.

Now, this year’s list.

• Keep writing
  • I love writing for ThinkComputers and BIOS LEVEL. I’d like to get back into fiction writing, but we’ll see where that goes. I’ve also had a little bit of interest in playwriting, but I’ll have to hold off on that until I make a Debian package of Celtx, an open-source screen/play-writing package.
• Get move involved in the open source community
  • I recently joined the ubiquity team for Ubuntu. Ubiquity is the live CD’s installer tool. I don’t like it very much, mostly because of its network usage and silly crashes without decent error messages. I’ve also said that I’d package a few things (celtx, firefox-sqlitemanager). I’ve been using Ubuntu nearly full-time since the end of October—I never realized the awesomeness of the product which I’ve been pushing for years.
  • Hopefully, Jon, Zack, and I will resume work on the Pittco LAN Administration System, which will be open-sourced.
• Improve social networking
  • CES will be a great opportunity for me to network within the computer and consumer electronics field. While I don’t intend to make my career in this field, I do plan to keep writing about it and maintain my enthusiasm for it. Perhaps if teaching isn’t what I thought it would be, I could make it my career.
  • Grad classes at RMU have built my professional educator network, and I’m sure it will continue to grow as I meet more people.
  • Unfortunately, the New Castle/Youngstown area isn’t wonderful for this, so I may consider moving toward Pittsburgh if I can find a roommate or a job which pays enough for me to afford it without affecting my graduate studies.
• Lose weight
  • I lost 30 pounds in the spring of 2006. I’ve regained 10 of that, and I hope to lose 25 this spring, putting me at an even 200 pounds. Living at home hasn’t helped, but I’ve advised my parents of my wish to lose weight, and they pledged their help.
• Read more
• I need to read more often. I have a book list longer than I’d like to admit.

I dispatched this letter today, and I urge you to send a similar letter to your own member of Congress:

Congressman Jason Altmire
1419 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman,

I just heard about a bill called the “College Opportunity and Affordability Act” which was introduced into the House of Representatives, or at least a committee of it, this past Friday, November 9. It was brought to my attention by a C|NET News article by Declan McCullagh entitled “Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else.” I have included a copy of this article for your perusal.

While I would have liked to have read the entire bill, it is 747 pages long, so I had to skim and search using keywords such as “copyright,” “theft,” and “digital.”

The parts of the bill which are of great concern to me—and concern is an understatement—are the entirety of Section 487 part A (found on approximately page 381) and Section 705 part A paragraph 10 (approximately page 475).

The former amends Section 485(a)(1) (20 U.S.C. 1092(a)(1)) , and, from my understanding, requires institutions to publicly post or otherwise remind students of the existence of and penalties for copyright infringement, as well as the steps the institution takes to prevent and detect digital copyright infringement. While it is good citizenship for an institution to remind its students of its own policies and state/federal law backing those policies, a law requiring it is outside the bounds of the federal government’s responsibility.

The latter reads

(10) the support of efforts to establish pilot programs and initiatives to help college campuses to reduce illegal downloading of copyrighted content, in order to improve the security and integrity of campus computer networks and save bandwidth costs;

My concern here is that the copyrighted content which is most often illegally trafficked is comprised of primarily music and movies, both of which are produced by major donors to political goings-on, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. I do realize that textbooks are also often illegally trafficked, but I do not recall any publicly announced civil or criminal lawsuits against traffickers of digital textbooks, or at least ones that garnered significant media attention from even independent news outlets.

Liaisons with corporations aside, the “security and integrity of campus computer networks” is not threatened by music and movie sharing. Audio and video files are data files and contain no executable code. This means that viruses, spyware, and other malicious programs do not enter campus networks by means of music and movie sharing, but possibly through security holes in software produced by companies such as Microsoft and Apple.

Additionally, bandwidth costs are ephemeral. Internet service providers to institutions bear the responsibility to raise prices if the institution itself does not upgrade its service of its own accord and distribute the difference in price to its students. That upgrade would raise students tuition at a medium-sized institution by perhaps two or three dollars per year, much less than the cost of implementing a system—in both raw money and man hours—to reduce bandwidth usage or punish students for misuse of the network.

However, I find Section 494 (approximately page 411) in its entirety to be wholly overbearing and excessive, and a needless intervention of the federal government in the matters between two industries. The federal government is taking the side of a for-profit giant with bottomless pockets and questionable motives and methods instead of the side of the mostly non-profit industry responsible for the education of young adults, or a better side to take: neither.

It is my understanding after having read the entirety of Section 494 that institutions which do not post policies and do not “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrent to prevent such illegal activity” (494(a)(2)) will lose or be ineligible to gain federal funding for all students, regardless of whether or not a student has committed copyright infringement, or owns or even uses a computer. This provision is entirely atrocious. Revoking a student’s ability to get federal financial aid because the student’s institution lacks a plan to protect the interests of a private industry is simply ludicrous.

I hope that you, Congressman Altmire, understand the outrageousness of these sections and paragraphs and will work to strike them and related provisions entirely from the College Opportunity and Affordability Act authored by George Miller of California and Ruben Hinojosa of Texas. I also hope that, when it is about to be voted upon by the entire House, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act will be read in its entirety so that the members of congress will know exactly what they are voting on.

Thank you for hearing my concerns.

Sincerely,

Colin Dean

Enclosure: Copy of aforementioned article (two pages)

Ars Technica has excellent coverage of this atrocity.

I’ve had my diploma from Westminster College for a day more than a month, now. I received my diploma on May 19, and have been mostly taking it easy since then.

I look back through the past month and see how I’ve changed. At the end of the semester, I was fantastically stressed, almost neurotic. I was finishing out The Holcad and trying to keep my head above water in my classes, all while ill with bronchitis. While I knew my grades in calc and capstone were solid, I was not so sure about my history/English cluster. I had scored high on the papers I’d written, but I was not proud of my test grades.

This launched me into a fit of uneasiness that remains unparalleled in my life. I found myself pushing away from people and concentrating on nothing but the work for the class.

Often I’ve thought, “What would be different had I not cared as much?” I ended up with a B+ in the class (two classes, actually, for those who aren’t familiar with Westminster’s interesting curriculum). Would I have gotten a B? Would I have gotten lower?

I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a week—a pretty impressive feat given my inability to read fast when reading for purposes other than pleasure. I read a few other shorter stories that I’d not read because I was too busy trying to finish capstone and read them in a day before the final exam.

I know I’ve been able to relax, not only as a result of graduating, but simply as a result of finishing that damned cluster. Undergraduate graduation is only a waypoint on the mission of life goals. I knew that I’d be starting grad school in at most three months, whether or not I had a job.

I guess I’m rambling. I wish that I could have built last summer some of the friendships I built this semester. I’d love to have another year around these people; I’d love to have another chance to show them that I care about them and that I’m not as cold and concentrated as I felt I had to be this semester. I wish that I had one more year to hang out and be cool at Westminster.

Not to be, unfortunately. I started grad school at Robert Morris University this past Monday. My class is comprised of students mostly older than me, but not by more than maybe five years. I’m certainly the youngest in the class—something which I think is a little unnerving considering my all but three or four of my classmates have been either teaching or substituting for at least a year. Those three or four are making an early career change or are like me and wanting to teach computers after having received a IS degree.

The class I’m taking is basically a graduate-level ed. psych. class. I like it. I enjoy psychology, so I find it interesting. Perhaps I just like being a guinea pig

I still don’t have fall plans ironed out just yet. I’m going to be living with JD somewhere in or around Pittsburgh. We looked earlier today at an apartment in Moon Township—not far from RMU. I liked it, and so did he, but we want to keep looking to see if we can find anything better.

I’m waiting for a call from a company on an interview, too. If I get the job, I’m pretty well set for the fall and can register for fall classes and getting the annoying “hurry up and wait” weight off my shoulders.

As for those friends, I’m going to have to see what I can do from a distance. I have a feeling, though, that I’ll be up to Westminster often, but not so much that I’m a creepy alumnus :-p

Colin Dean, son of Tom and Jane Dean, recently graduated from Westminster College in New Wilmington with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a minor in creative writing focusing on journalism. He was editor-in-chief of The Holcad, the college’s student newspaper, and served on a number of committees and was a member of a number of scholastic and social organizations.

Colin will be attending Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pennsylvania for a Masters of Education in Business Education. This degree and certificate will enable him to teach high school computer science classes. He hopes to earn eventually a communications certificate so that he may teach journalism, as well.

In the mean time, Colin is working as a writer for a computer hardware and software web site while searching for jobs in Pittsburgh and living at the Phi Kappa Tau house in New Wilmington.

I will be so relieved when this week concludes. I have never had so much stress in my life, and all of it because of two classes that aren’t even required for my major! Stupid intellectual perspectives (core classes in non-WC terminology)!

I’ve been swamped with capstone, The Holcad, classes, and fraternity things like Greek Week. I’ve got post almost ready—it’ll be up in a few days.

I’ll be able to write more once school’s out.

A detachment of brothers from Phi Kappa Tau appeared at my front door Jan. 28 and handed me a bid.

I accepted it the following day.

Pick-Up Day (yesterday, Feb. 3) was one of the most fun days I’ve had in college.

Even though I’ve only got a semester with the guys, I’m gonna make the most of it and have lots of fun.