CJC.org

Dell Computers has a computer recycling program that will pick up boxes of old equipment at your home. Details can be found at http://www.dell4me.com/recycling, which was mentioned in this New York Times piece.

Basically, for $15 per 50 pound box, Dell will send someone over for home pickup. Computers, old scanners, printers, monitors, etc., will be processed. Hard drives should, of course, be wiped prior to packaging. If you participate in the recycling program, you get a 10%-off coupon off Dell peripherals and software. There’s also an option to donate the equipment to a charity, though I guess that has to be working equipment.

These programs may be where my old Sparc 5 goes. And that old laptop that doesn’t work anymore. And that other old laptop that doesn’t work. And the SCSI enclosure….

I started the co-op purchase application form last night. Except for a few small details, it’s fundamentally done. The application form is only one part of the package, though. Here’s the current (shockingly lengthy) to-do list for the package:

I’ll also need reference letters:

The signed contract of sale should be in my hands this week. The financial statements are no big deal, as I’ve just done something very similar for the mortgage application. In any case, I scan all such documents, so it’s just a matter printing them out.

I have to call the bank to see if they can get me a commitment letter sooner rather than later. I’ll also have to talk to HR at Random Walk; I think they have a standard letter for that sort of thing. The statement of financing will take about ten minutes to write.

I’ve sent email to the co-op board president about the reference letters, but haven’t heard back. In the worst case, I’ll dig up the old co-op application, mainly to get the style/form of these letters, and get people to sign them.

None of this is a big deal. It just takes time. I think if I were doing it for the first time, it’d be more intimidating, but this is the second time around, albeit the first time by myself. The real estate broker representing the seller provided a lot of help the last time.

Hopefully, this will be done in the next two weeks, so we can shoot for a quick June 1 closing.

Yes, the cardio was good. It was also interesting to note that my lungs weren’t left gasping for air at the end of it, after an hour of more-or-less constant movement. The bodily failure was more anaerobic, actually: my legs were closer than not to giving out after the first fifteen minutes of running around, doing squats and jumping up and down. My arms are a bit tired, too, but not as much as the legs. So, for the sankyu test, my lungs will probably be fine; I just have to worry about standing (which shouldn’t be that terrible; we won’t uke for the test, so the ultimately exhausting getting-up-repeatedly-after-being-thrown shouldn’t be that much of a factor). I’m tired, but as Sensei notes, you just go to sleep that night, and you won’t be tired the next day. Being tired is not being injured.

I really hate boxing gloves they make you wear in the gym classes. They fit badly, and punching form goes out the window. I feel it in my right hand in particular: the metacarpals below the pinky and ring finger got crunched because it’s much harder to keep the punches aligned on the first and second knuckles. I think it might actually have been better to go without the boxing gloves, and strike with sho-te if the knuckles get rubbed a bit raw. I didn’t have my gloves at one point, and that worked well. I have to remember to keep my hands loose, since that’s what we’re supposed to do on jujitsu technique, and it’s harder to do that with gloves on.

It was a very small class — five people total — so we had a chance to do what they do in the boxing class: you work combinations with the instructor, who has focus mitts. I think I was the only one there who stepped in as if to throw, since during my second round with him he kept saying “don’t step in”. Arguably, I should be stepping in and out, but the pace was a bit quick to back away. Anyway, kickboxing concentrates on the middle distance, not close in, like grappling arts.

Here’s an interesting statement about European, specifically Norwegian, perceptions of America during this war. It all leads back to 9/11:

As I see it, 9/11 made Americans realize two things, (as it made me realize them): 1) The Middle East is deeply rotten. 2) Their problems are now our problems. Nothing that has happened since can be understood without these two things in mind – certainly not the willingness of the American people to support a war on Iraq without court-solid evidence that Saddam is a major threat to the world.

Europeans and some Americans haven’t understood this. Fundamentally, the anti-war protests fail to address these two things and propose sound alternatives to military action. I recall signs posted around lower Manhattan in September 2001 arguing that “Your grief is not a cry for war!” This slogans captured the utter failure of those opposed to war in Afghanistan to propose a peaceful alternative to dealing with Al Qaeda, and an utter failure to understand that it was not grief or anger bringing us to war (though grief and anger were not absent from America’s understanding of war), but an acutely perceived and rational need to protect ourselves from anything on the scale of another 9/11.

The reasons for war in Iraq are more abstract. It’s not about a clear and present danger in Saddam Hussein’s arms or the peculiarities of his totalitarian regime. It’s about the aforementioned realization that the Middle East is rotten, and that their problems can no longer be ignored. A good argument for or against this war would have to deal with these issues. Regime change in Iraq is being undertaken as the first step in the grand transformation of the Middle East. Is this attempt at transformation the best way to address the centuries-old political, economic and social failure of the region? I actually believe it is, though this will be a decades long project, comparable to European reconstruction after the Second World War.

It should also be noted that support of the war does not imply support of the Bush Administration. It may be that it required something like the Bush Administration to advocate a fundamentally Wilsonian vision of the world — after all, only Nixon could go to China — but this stridently ideological Administration may be the worst people to run this war. My hope is that a decade or two from now, we can look back at Bush’s diplomatic and political blunders and see them as only minor speedbumps on the road to a liberal, prosperous, stable Middle East.

April 28, Monday.

Things to work on:

Wow. That sounds like everything. Yes, I have to work on everything.

I wanted to go to the gym this morning for cardio work, but I have nothing to read (the current TNR is printing out very slowly) (Really, it’s because I feel exceptionally lazy this morning. Sensei tried to tire us out at the end of class yesterday. I was actually OK at the end of that, which gives me some hope that my cardio isn’t in too bad a shape for the test.) But definitely tomorrow in the morning.

Actually, there’s a kickboxing class at the Wall Street NYSC this evening at 7PM. The class is only useful for cardio work anyway — you don’t hit people (and get hit by people, which is just as important), and they really don’t show proper hitting and kicking technique — but it’s usually a good cardio workout. I’ll try to go to that. We’re making pesto tonight, so that shouldn’t take very long.

The server’s been hanging intermittently for the past few weeks. It’s not clear what’s wrong: there’s nothing interesting in /var/log/messages, Red Hat kernels should be sufficiently stable nowadays and I keep up to date on patches. Probably, it’s hardware, something along the lines of bad RAM or a flakey motherboard. There might be a dead fan in the computer; I have to swing by and take a look at the back of the thing. The server room is cool, though I suppose a bad fan in the wrong place will make the rest of it heat up. I don’t believe it’s a bad hard drive, or I would have seen something in the logs by now. When I have time, I’ll swap memory or maybe move the drives to another machine.

But since I’m somewhat short of time this month to do these necessary repairs, there might be intermittent outages.

Update:
Correction. I did get an Oops last night. It was just a few hours before the last entry in messages. Looking further, I got a similar Oops before the last crash, again some time before the last entry. Here’s the most recent one:

Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000104
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: printing eip:
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: c0148833
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: *pde = 00000000
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: Oops: 0000
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: sd_mod scsi_mod 3c59x ipt_REJECT ipt_limit ipt_LOG ipt_state ip_conntrack iptable_filter ip_ta
bles ext3 jbd
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: CPU: 0
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: EIP: 0010:[] Not tainted
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: EFLAGS: 00010256
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel:
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: EIP is at prune_icache [kernel] 0x93 (2.4.18-27.7.x)
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: eax: 00000000 ebx: 00000000 ecx: 00000000 edx: c11ae000
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: esi: fffffff8 edi: 00000000 ebp: 0000a80a esp: c11affa0
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: Process kswapd (pid: 4, stackpage=c11af000)
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: Stack: c11ae000 00000395 c232ddf8 c0de7c48 c02da360 00000000 00000000 66666667
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: c0148900 0000217f c012f5a8 00000006 000001f0 c15230b0 000001f0 c7fd1f9c
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: 00010f00 c7fd1f9c c0105000 0008e000 c0106eaa 00000000 c012f2c0 c7fd0000
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: Call Trace: [] shrink_icache_memory [kernel] 0x20 (0xc11affc0))
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: [] kswapd [kernel] 0x2e8 (0xc11affc8))
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: [] stext [kernel] 0x0 (0xc11affe8))
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: [] arch_kernel_thread [kernel] 0x26 (0xc11afff0))
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: [] kswapd [kernel] 0x0 (0xc11afff8))
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel:
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel:
Mar 31 01:12:53 fincher kernel: Code: 8b 86 0c 01 00 00 a9 38 00 00 00 8b 7f 04 75 5a 0b 86 cc 00

Time for google. Time to look at memtest86. Alternatively, I can just swap out the RAM and see if that fixes it.

Sensei Ivan chatted with us after class, and noted that one reason my right wrist is a bit sore from kotegaeshi because I my ukemi isn’t as quick as it could be. My weight/butt hangs back (bad posture) and it takes a half second longer than it should to start ukemi. Again, it’s a matter of following lead better.

One way to do this is to become a more active participant as uke. The uke is not a passive recipient of technique. Uke should move with the technique, so that it becomes difficult to tell who does the technique, uke or tori. Something to work on, and keep in mind. It should also help in keeping my energy up as tori, under the theory that if you’re turning your energy on and off as uke, you won’t be able to easily bring that energy up as tori.

I was also attacking Sensei’s arm instead of his body. This just results in uke’s arm being waved around rather than his body being thrown.

Lastly, after the wrist is no longer sore, he recommended getting a boken and doing one-handed cuts, mainly to strengthen the wrist and arm. Say, ten a day and steadily more on subsequent days. Since we’re supposed to spend at least one Saturday morning doing boken exercises with Shihan before the sankyu test, I probably should finally get a boken. They’re about $15 at Honda.

Slate has an article on websites talking about the war, ranging the gamut from the antiwar camp to the jingoistic-bordering-on-self-parody.

Interesting ones:

Slate unfortunately missed the very good Command Post, which is basically a compendium of a number of bloggers posting about the war.

PBS has put up the very good documentary I saw bits and pieces of last Monday. It’s about the development of America’s current national security policy, in particular the transformation of the Middle East.

While I’m in favor of military action in Iraq, I still want the anti-war crowd to come up with good arguments. Such things promote necessary debate. Discredited Leninist sloganeering, on the other hand, reduces the quality of debate to that of a shouting match. I cringed when watching Michael Moore go off on his rant at the Academy Awards. It only served to devalue the legitimate arguments of the anti-war camp; Adrian Brody was far more effective in his appeal for peace. Similarly, hearing about “street theater” and “puke-ins” makes me wonder how the protesters actually expect to persuade middle America.

Just a note on “no blood for oil” sloganeering: Iraq produces some 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. This may seem like a lot, but let’s do some math: Assume $25/barrel, which is a reasonable post-war price. This leads to $62.5M per day in oil revenue, which is about $22.8B per year. We should observe that the current estimates for this war will be around $80B for combat operations and minor reconstruction, with much more costs to follow. Compared to this, $23B doesn’t look like much. $23B is in fact less revenue that Wal-Mart turns over in six weeks. It’s in fact less than two quarters of gross profit at Wal-Mart. True, this speaks as much about Wal-Mart’s awesome size as it does about the relative smallness of Iraqi oil revenues compared to the US economy. The war isn’t for oil or colonization. Oil is one of the many reasons for this war, in the sense that oil undergrids the world economy, and prevents us from disengaging from the region. But it is not nearly the primary reason. The war is for national security, and even then this is national security in an abstract future. It’s good to debate security policy, but, please, don’t rely on the slogans of unreconstructed Marxists as your arguments.