I have to admit that I don't really understand the position of the people in California.  They are facing the worst energy crisis in state history, during a winter when people all across the nation have had utility prices increased by more than, in many cases, 100%, and there is almost no talk of raising electricity costs in California.  In fact, there haven't been any electricity price changes in California in three years, and that change lowered prices by 10%.  Now the utility companies say that they need to increase prices by 9%, which would keep prices lower than they were before deregulation 3 years ago, but this is unacceptable to Californians.  Why do the people of California think they are exempt from market fluctuations?  They deregulated utilities three years ago, but their deregulation only seems to allow companies to lower prices, and not raise them.  Now the state is on the edge of a recession; their are rolling blackouts across most of the state, including the tech-heavy silicon valley; and the state is preparing to spend all of the state's surplus, and possibly more, to ensure that the citizens do not have their electric bills go up.

Am I the only one who thinks these Californians are deluding themselves?  Someone needs to sign the entire state of California up for some intro level Econ classes.  Maybe then they'll realize that while deregulation will cause prices to be, on average, lower than the regulated prices, free markets require that prices occasionally fluctuate.  I'm tired of hearing the Californians whine about their energy problem; they brought it on themselves.  I just hope they don't take the entire US economy down with them.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 30 January 2001 at 5:00 PM

Fifty years ago yesterday, "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, was first published.  While "Catcher" is a critically acclaimed book, I'm not sure that it is worthy of all the praise that has been given to it.  In fact, I feel that a lot of the of the book's press comes because of its author's notoriety.  J.D. Salinger is a known recluse, who abhors even having his name in print.  He has become so notable that he (or someone who is eerily similar to him) has begun to show up in literary works.  He is the basis for the character played by James Earl Jones in "Field of Dreams" (in fact, in the novel "Shoeless Joe," upon which "Field of Dreams" is based, the character really is J.D. Salinger), and the writer played by Sean Connery in the new film "Finding Forrester" seems to also be based on him (although I don't believe that Mr. Salinger has won a Pulitzer).

Today, I would like to draw your attention to an author who should be getting as much press as J.D. Salinger; an author whose one novel really is, to borrow a phrase from "Finding Forrester," the "great American novel of the twentieth century;" an author who, while not as reclusive as Mr. Salinger, is just as mysterious.  That author is Harper Lee.

In 1960, after 2 1/2 years of revision, and having never published any other works of fiction, Harper Lee's classic novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," was published.  That year, Harper Lee published two essays, one in Vogue and one in McCall's, and then never published again.  In 1961 "To Kill a Mockingbird" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

While not as reclusive as J.D. Salinger, Ms. Lee, a descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, leads a very private life.  Ms. Lee has been awarded four honorary doctorates, but has declined to make a public address at any of the degree ceremonies.  In fact the last record I can find of any public address or interview given by Ms. Lee dates from 1987.  There is a rumor on the Internet that Ms. Lee is "working on a book about the Reverend Maxwell of Alexander City, Alabama. He was a local black preacher who murdered several family members in order to collect their life insurance, and who was murdered at the funeral of his last victim."  However, I was not able to confirm this.

Is "To Kill a Mockingbird" the quintessential American novel of the twentieth century?  I certainly think so.  From its engaging characters, with their descriptive names, to its vivid portrayal of the mid-1930's Deep South, there is little to dislike about the novel.  However, even if you disagree with my assessment of "To Kill a Mockingbird," you must admit that Harper Lee, and the mystery of what she has done since writing her only novel, are worthy of the same amount of media attention that is directed at J.D. Salinger.

[ For more information about "To Kill a Mockingbird," please follow this link. ]

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 January 2001 at 11:55 PM

I don't really understand why everyone is getting reminiscent about the Challenger explosion.  Seven people died.  I don't think that that is enough people for us to continue to remember the explosion 15 years after it occurred.  I mean, 6,000 people died in India two days ago.  The time people spend talking about Challenger would be better spent in trying to help the survivors of that earthquake.

If you really want to reminisce about people dying, I have a better anniversary for you.  Fifty-six years ago last Saturday the invading Russian army arrived at "the site of a Polish artillery barracks in the Katowice district at Oswiecim (pronounced ohsh-VYEN-cheem), a remote location at the fork of the Sola and Vistula rivers served by good rail connections."  Auschwitz.  "By the time Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and its subcamps, an estimated 1.3 million people had been shipped there and at least 1.1 million, including 960,000 Jews, had died there, the history establishes. Because fleeing guards burned millions of documents the exact toll will never be known."

The discovery of Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration camps are events that should be marked on everyone's calendar, but very little attention is paid to them.  The holocaust has shaped US foreign and domestic policy for the last fifty years (for example, President Clinton spent his last days in office trying to broker a peace accord between the Palestinians and the Israelis, whose country was founded by holocaust survivors), yet many people seem more concerned about a technological breakdown that left seven people dead, than a societal breakdown that left more than one million dead.

[ The only news article I could find about the Auschwitz anniversary is this one, from the New York Times.  Free registration is required to view some articles at the Times' web site. ]

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 January 2001 at 10:03 AM

449 lbs.  Damn.

I spent this evening doing nothing.  I should have read some econ, or worked on my 441 problem set.  Instead, I made a homepage for myself (I'd link to it, but it has my hotmail passwords built-in) and played some MegaMan X4.  Tomorrow will be interesting.

On a different subject, please drop us a line if you have any design ideas/suggestions for this site.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 January 2001 at 1:11 AM

The more sites I visit, the more I agree with this.

I spent a good part of the morning trying to set a counter up here on negtive273, but I experienced a number of difficulties in trying to place it and have it blend in with the rest of the site.  As a result of all of this trouble, I've decided not to put a counter up just yet.  Perhaps if I give it more time, a solution will present itself.

While I'm on the topic of improvements to negative273, I should mention the changes to the header at the top of the page.  We've provided you with a few of our favorite links, as well as an archive of past postings.  The archive still needs a bit of work, but it's all very functional.  At some point, we may make a bio page or something, but don't hold your breath while waiting for it.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 28 January 2001 at 11:17 PM

we now have a play station.

that is all.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 28 January 2001 at 7:17 PM

we here at negative273 (read: michael) have decided to hold a contest to honor one of the greatest nintendo games of all time.  the first person (other than dave) to email me with the name of the video game these sound files came from will receive a prize of some sort.  theres no official deadline, but I dont expect the wav files to be up for longer than a week, as they are fairly large files, and dave might get mad.  [The files have been taken down due to disk quota restrictions. -dgw]  anyway, it was hard to pick just my favorite three, but here they are:

     one
     two
     three

(oh, and Ill make sure the prize is much much cooler if you can actually tell me what stage each of the three sound clips is from.)

okay, good luck.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 27 January 2001 at 1:20 AM

Beware of using the :-( ® (registered trademark symbol added to avoid being sued) emoticon in the future.  According to this article on Despair's website, Despair plans to sue 7,000,000 email users for using their trademarked emoticon.  Now we know why AOL's Instant Messenger converts emoticons into yellow smiley faces: to avoid litigation.

[Of course, the press release does read rather oddly.  Almost like something out of the The Onion.  But don't let this stop you from adding the registered trademark symbol to all of your frowning emoticons in the future. It's better to be safe than sorry.]

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 January 2001 at 3:18 PM

Vertical keyboards scare me.

I received an email with the subject "sweet beautiful friday" today.  While Fridays may be sweet and beautiful in the figurative sense, today is anything but sweet and beautiful in the literal sense.  It sleeted and rained for a good part of last night and this morning, and while there is no precipitation currently falling, the day is very gray and overcast.  I have a lot of errands that I should take care of today, but the weather outside makes me want to stay in my room all day.  Unfortunately, I'll have to go out soon, because I am getting hungry.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 January 2001 at 12:35 PM

I cleaned and rearranged my room last weekend.  I purchased a table at Sam's Club to put my Sparc 10 on, moved my dresser to a new location, and rearranged my computer equipment.  I now have a lot more desk space, but very little floor space.  If I had a digital camera, I would take a picture for you, but I don't.  I'm pretty happy with the way everything in here turned out, even if I did end up spending three hours filing various papers from last semester.  In hindsight, I probably should have thrown the lot of them out, but I didn't, and all is well.

On an unrelated topic, I think I persuaded Joe to write the backend for an online library check-out program I want to put on the ACM website.  I was prepared to write an ugly Java™ applet, but Joe is going to write a CGI backend in C or C++ for me, with the condition that I write the html form stuff.  I wonder if this will actually happen.  I hope so, as it would help in the website portion of the ACM Student Chapter Excellence program.  Last year, the top ACM chapter website got $500.  Our website is much nicer.

Tomorrow I begin my campaign to get neomail installed on the CEC mail servers.  Being able to access my school email through a web-based system would be much nicer than using telnet (or SSH) and pine (or mutt).  I have a bad feeling that I'll be unsuccessful, but I'll give it a go anyway.

I had a great deal of fun playing with stortroopers today.  You will, too.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 January 2001 at 2:04 AM

damn it.  I never win.

sigh..  today has been an all right day.  I got my tech writing final paper back, the one I mentioned from time to time in some of the posts below, and my final grade in the class ended up being exactly 90.0.  if Id have lost one more point on that paper Id have had a B.  I just barely scraped by.  so Im happy about that. but mostly Im happy to have it behind me.  god, when I stop to think about everything that Ive put behind me in the last year, its incredible.

this weekend I was thinking about getting a new super nintendo game for our suite.  we've already tired of super mario world, super metroid, megaman X, megaman X2, and megaman X3.  I was thinking about maybe getting mario kart, but dave doesnt seem too enthusiastic about it.  any suggestions?

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 25 January 2001 at 3:34 PM

Isn't it amusing that, in the entry below that faults me for not using the spellchecker, there is a misspelled word?  A misspelled word that the spellchecker will catch.  Especially since it appears in the phrase 'consider the name "negative273" synonomous with "quality." '  I just thought I would point out this irony.  Oh, and I fixed the mistakes in my low-quality post below.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 January 2001 at 11:17 AM

I am faced with a dilemma of sorts. you see, it is my sincerest wish that our readers should consider the name "negative273" synonomous with "quality."  I truly believe that is the key to an unparalleled weblog viewing experience.  and yet, I find in the post below at least four easy to spot typographical errors.  what message does this send to our readers?  if we do not take the time to spell check, how can we ask our readers to take the time to seriously consider the deeply important issues we raise daily on this site?

but what can I do?  it would be unethical for me to modify one of daves posts, even if it was just correcting errors.  its simply a line I refuse to cross.  and yet, if I do nothing, our thousands, our tens of thousands of daily viewers, will see these errors and take their hits to more conscientious weblogs.  and everything we worked so hard to build will be lost.

god, something has to be done soon.  its nearly morning.

Id better go wake up dave.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 25 January 2001 at 4:51 AM

"Yesterday we stood on the edge of an abyss.  Today we took one step forward."

I saw the above phrase on a whiteboard outside someone's door today.  When I read it, I wasn't sure what to make of it.  Am I supposed to feel happy that they are doing new things (or perhaps I mean going new places), or am I supposed to feel sad that they are now plummeting to their deaths (in the bottomless, or at least immeasurably deep, pit that is an abyss)?  What purpose did whomever wrote this on the whiteboard think they were accomplishing?  It's just stupid and meaningless.  Can you explain it?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 January 2001 at 1:41 AM

Hi.  I have a number of things to get share with you today, so please bear with me.

1.  The ACM Lounge
Yesterday I told you I would share my opinions on the ACM Lounge with you, so here we go.  The lounge is dirty, poorly (or not at all) managed, and contains a lot of out-of-date equipment.  All of the equipment that we do have that is less than 10 years old is locked up in a room and the only people who have keys are Rob Fitzpatrick, a past president who nevr comes to meetings anymore, and Sean Leather, who, through no fault of his own, is not on campus very often.  ACM also has a library of over 200 hundred computer-related books, but most of them are old, and they are not organized very well.  On the plus side, ACM has recently aquired or been given use of, a numbe rof cool computers, like an SGI O2, but we don't have enough desk space to set them all up.

What would it take to fix some of these problems?  Well, it would take a decided effort by the ACM leadership (of which I am a memeber, so I bear some responsibility for not addressing this sooner).  If two or three of us could devote just one weekend day to the lounge, I think a lot could be accomplished.  We might not be able to paint the lounge, but we could probably get the furniture arranged, all of the computers set up, and a library catalog made.  We might even have time to go through the closet and spare room, and do some discarding of unneeded crap.  This would be a major step in the right direction.  Then we could go about getting a lock on the closet door, and perhaps arranging for some painting to be done over spring or summer break.

2.  "They say that change is the only constant."
I heard this phrase on a New York Mutual Life ad today, and I realized that change is not constant.  In fact, it is anything but constant.  A better phrase would be pi is constant, or e is constant.  Because of course, for example, no matter where in the universe I am, a circle's circumference divided by its diamter is always pi (3.1415926535897932384626433832795...).  I can say this with mathematical certainty.  It's a universal constant.  It's kind of reassuring to think that this is an operation that you can perform an infinte number of times, in an infinite number of locations, and you will always get the same result.

3.  negative273 design
What do you think of the design of this site?  I'm of the opinion that we should put some links at the top of the page, under the site name.  This is a decision that needs to be made soon, as we are getting to the point where we will have to start archiving some of these entries.  This entire page requires that you download about 55k bytes, and that was before this entry (I'm afraid to look at the file size now).  I pity our modem users, so an archive setup needs to be done fairly quickly.

I also think we need a better way to display the date, and perhaps the time, of the entry.  I tried something new on this entry.  Please send us any input you may have on this topic or on the previous paragraph's topic.  Thanks.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 January 2001 at 12:31 AM

Ben chided us today for never updating, so I guess I should post something.

I'm kind discouraged about ACM.  While we have a group of people who are very interested in promoting the organization, and who seem to have really great ideas for the club, there are very few of them.  Meeting attendance is very low.  Joe is trying to arrange a speaker for an upcoming meeting, and I'm glad he's doing it, because I would feel embarassd to invite someone to come speak to a group of <10 people.  Advertising would probably help, but we never seem organized enough to get our meeting planned far enough in advance to get flyers made and posted a reasonable time before the meeting.  In fact, we have a meeting this coming Monday, but we don't have any flyers.  The pattern repeats, I guess.

Speaking of ACM, I'm kind of pissed that no one seems to visit the chapter website that michael and I spent a lot of time working on.  It took me days to get that damn message board working, much less looking nice, and no one ever reads anything posted there.  On the other hand, we have had four or five people add themselves to our mailing list since Winter Break, which is nice.

Sean wants to get a "big name" speaker like RMS or ESR to come to a meeting.  While I think it would be really cool, I'm also kind of worried.  What if we get one of these people out here, pay for their flight and hotel, and then only 20 people show up to hear their talk?  It would embarassing and bad for the club.

Well, that's enough of a rant about ACM for tonight.  Perhaps I'll bitch about the lounge tomorrow.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 23 January 2001 at 12:01 AM

"Now is the winter of our discontent"

I go back to school tomorrow.  I don't really want to go, but I, of course, will.  I don't really have a choice.  Aside from school, I have some familial obligations that require me to be in St. Louis next week.  I'd be a much happier person if I could stay home next week.  Preferably longer than a week.  I have much to do before I leave tomorrow at noon.  I'll elaborate later.  Maybe.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 January 2001 at 12:01 AM

I have problems with the holodeck on Star Trek.  Specifically, how does it account for the fact that someone might be far away in the holodeck world, but still visible?  For example, if you and I are in a mountain climbing simulation, and you start climbing the mountain (which is higher than the height of the holodeck) while I stay at the bottom and watch you climb, how does it make you look further and further away from me (or me look further and further from you)?  At what point is the real version of you replaced with a holodeck version that can get smaller and smaller?  And how does that happen?  More on this to follow in a bit.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 January 2001 at 12:01 AM

The sleeper has awakened.

hi, its michael.  I know, its been a while.  Id apologize to our readers for such a long absence, except we dont really have any readers.  so itd be kind of pointless.  besides, dave has been holding things down pretty well on his own, so it was hardly a tragedy.

but Im back now, and Ill try to do a better job.  as for catching up, theres not much to catch up on.  lets see... well, irwin has started making new dragonball z toys, and they are pretty cool.  Ive got four of them so far.  and since Im only three gundam toys away from completing my collection, you can guess what Ill be after next.

I should also mention that comedy central has picked up one of my favorite television shows, sports night.  its a really great program.  it had two seasons on abc, and then it got cancelled.  I dont know why it never caught on.  it was a really good show.  it was by the same guy who writes the west wing.  aaron sorkin, I think.  Im too lazy to look it up though, so if I got the name wrong, Im sorry.  anyway, its on thursdays at nine central if you want to check it out some time.  that is, if youre not a big ER fan.  (sports night is better, by the way.)

anyway, the snow is melting here, and I cant say Im sorry to see it go.  even if theres only cinders and mud underneath.  Im just tired of all the white.

Ill post again soon.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 5 January 2001 at 12:01 AM

A few minutes ago I thought of a great topic to post about, but I can't recall what it was.  However, I can assure you that this post would have been awesome if I had been able to remember the topic for the post.  As things stand, I'll just have to make something up.

Nothing much is going on here.  I spent New Year's eve at Luke's house with Luke, Polk, and Cuz.  I had a pretty good time, and made some money by betting on pinball games.  Today I did almost nothing.  I watched a bit of the Rose Bowl and some of the Fiesta Bowl (ND really gave the impression that they weren't in the same league as Oregon).  Tomorrow (today, really, I guess) is College Night at Diamond Lanes, so I'll be doing some cheap bowling then.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2001 at 12:01 AM