The Blogg

My task, should I choose to accept it, is to locate potential places for Rachel and I to live starting in May. Well, I have accepted this task but I did manage to put it off until the last minute. We are hoping to look at potential residences on Tuesday February 28, and I did not start my research until today.

Perusing the information kept by the graduate student life office of Lehigh University, I was able to find a total of 47 residences that were at one time advertised as available for rent. Of those, I called the landlords of each of the 6 properties that allowed cats. Each of those 6 properties had already been rented to someone else, although 1 of the landlords had an additional property for me to look at.

I get the feeling this is going to be a difficult search. Our criteria are as follows:

• Rent in the range of $400 – $800. Lower than that would be great, but I can’t imagine any place large enough for two people to live in costing less than $400. Higher than that would be a budgetary strain, although we are willing to consider costs up to $1000.
• General proximity to Lehigh University and Lehigh Valley Hospital.
• Rural or suburban community. Both of us lived most of our lives in the middle of farm country. Obviously we aren’t going to find something quite lack that here, but we would like to be in a less populous area than my current residence.
• Laundry facilities on-site. Travelling to a laundromat just sucks.
• Cat-friendly. Rachel would really like to have a pet.

Know any places? Please share.

This evening while keeping a friend company and monitoring some experiments on my computer I happened to watch The Shawshank Redemption . Approximately this time last week, in very similar circumstances, I saw The Green Mile . Two movies with similar topics and the same writer and director just happened to be showing when I happened to be in a home with cable television. If you haven’t seen either of these movies, you should probably stop reading immediately. And then you should go rent them (or at least Shawshank). Hey, I told you to stop reading!

For those who choose to ignore my advice or who have seen the movies but have memories as bad as mine, here is a brief summary of each movie. The Green Mile is about a prison officer, Paul Edgecomb, who is responsible for monitoring the death row cell blocks and administering executions. Several plots run together, but there are two primary threads. The first documents the conflict between the compassionate, efficient Edgecomb and another guard, the cruel Percy Wetmore. The second thread is about a particularly extraordinary inmate, John Coffey, who is innocent of the double murder for which he was convicted and who has a supernatural gift to remove illness from people and animals. The primary character of The Shawshank Redemption is Andy Dufresne who, like Coffey, is wrongly convicted of a double homicide. The story follows his life from trial to eventual escape, focusing on his relationships with other prisoners and prison staff.

There are quite a few poignant moments in both films, but what really caught me this evening was the character of Brooks Hatlen, an elderly inmate who serves as the prison librarian before he is paroled after 50 years of time served. When he becomes aware that he will be paroled, Brooks tries to remain a convict by assaulting another inmate, confusing most of the people around him. After his parole he is given a new suit and a briefcase of his belongings. After 50 years any friends he may have had before his conviction have either forgotten him or died, and he wanders the streets confused and frightened by the changes that have taken place while he was serving his sentence and the openness that surrounds him. At an age of at least 70, he must take a job bagging groceries to support himself, and arthritis leaves him ill-equipped for the job. After considering different means of getting back into prison, Brooks writes that he is “tired of being afraid all the time” and hangs himself in the halfway house where he had been living.

Of course, the movies have much more substance than that. Shawshank ends with another prisoner paroled after many years who nearly follows the same path as Brooks but is redeemed by the spark of hope placed within his soul by Andy. The prison inmates are transfixed by the sounds of a Mozart aria at one point, and I do believe music can reach into a special part of the soul beyond any hardness of heart. In The Green Mile, Edgecomb must preside over the executions of inmates whom he knows to be harmless, and who he might even consider friends. Through both movies, the senseless cruelty and viciousness of most of the prison guards is enough to foment outrage in anyone. It would be nice to assume this type of behavior is simply a hollywood exaggeration, but I am afraid this is not the case. Psychological experiments such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Experiments demonstrate a chilling side of the human personality that is difficult to believe and impossible to accept.

One of the strange things I’ve learned from my fiance, Rachel, is that for some people crying can be a necessary periodic release, regardless of emotional state. In times like this, I feel like it might be really nice to cry, but it seems I don’t know how. It is remarkable how different genders can be. I feel sad for the fictional character of Brooks, for all people who grow old and find themselves alone, left behind by the world, and for convicts around the world who are slowly forgetting their humanity. I am angry at the unnecessary suffering, the prison rapes that are overlooked, the cruelty that is deemed necessary for the job or somehow deserved. I am awed by the power of hope, or music, of film to move me. I am lonely, having not seen Rachel for several weeks, including both Valentine’s Day and her birthday, because of her strict schedule. Too many emotions for someone who is rarely emotional.

I am not generally much of a drinker, but it seemed appropriate for the mood I am in. I intended to write much more about this and perhaps complete my evening of disillusionment with the criminal justice system by listening to the soundtrack of the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables , but unfortunately it seems the Irish Cream in my hot chocolate is getting to me, as my eyelids seem significantly heavier than usual. I don’t expect to have an easy time falling asleep tonight, but I suppose I might as well try. “Get busy living or get busy dying.” For now, I shall get busy sleeping.

The average post here will be interesting and thoughtful commentaries, I promise.  But for now, time to rant.  I have managed to earn 6 parking citations during the 18 months in which I have lived in Bethlehem.  Having lived the majority of my life in rural America, where every home has a driveway, every school and business has a parking lot, and street parking is unrestricted but rarely necessary, I have a difficult time understanding the fact that parking spaces are a scarce resource.

Three of my violations have been parking on a Bethlehem city street during the time set aside for street cleaning.  For anyone who is not familiar with the practice of street cleaning, it is a process by which a large specially-designed vehicle with an appearance not unlike a Zamboni drives throught the streets, sweeping debris away.  Rather, I should say that this is the theoretical version of street cleaning.  In practice, I have never seen the operation performed in this manner.  In South Bethlehem, at least, the street cleaner simply drives through the center of the street behind the Parking Authority vehicle that writes tickets for the vehicles that inevitably block the cleaner’s access to the curb.

On my street, cleaning is scheduled for 8:00 AM on the first and third Thursdays of each month for one side of the road and the first and third Fridays for the other side.  It is a known schedule, but my tickets stand as a testament to the fact that people simply are not going to remember to check their calendars while parking.  In the unlikely event that all the residents of my street would both remember that cleaning is occuring the next morning and be more willing to leave their car several blocks away than pay a fine,  I cannot imagine what effect the street cleaning might actually have.  Sure, there is some dirt on the street. IT’S OUTSIDE.

Moving on, my other Bethlehem citation is for a far more ridiculous reason — parking within 25 feet of a stop sign.  [Note: I am not absolutely positive about this distance; it has been several months.]  My little sedan was by no means capable of blocking anyone’s view of the sign, and I had seen a vehicle parked in the exact spot where mine sat nearly every night.  I really wanted to protest this one, showing that in a typical intersection there are 3 or 4 cars parked within that distance of a stop sign, but laziness and recognition that the absurdity of a law is not a valid defense prompted me to just pay the fine.

My fifth parking ticket came from Lehigh University Parking Services for the infraction of parking in a fire lane.  In this case, I cannot really complain.  Although, to be fair, I was unaware that the line of vehicles I was joining was blocking a fire lane, I do accept a responsibility for verifying this.  Of course, I only needed to park there because the parking spaces I had paid to use had been temporarily given by the university to fans of a sports match to be held on campus.

The final ticket I received today, from the university and because I parked in a visitor’s space.  For reference, the university owns several parking lots on the academic campus.  Faculty and staff members such as myself may pay a fee for the privilege of parking in these lots, and I have done so.  Finding a spot to park has always been rather difficult, but it became much worse when a combined faculty and visitors lot was removed several months ago.  To compensate for the faculty spaces that were lost, a new temporary lot was created in what had been an open lawn.  To compensate for the visitor spaces that were lost, a large section of an existing faculty lot was marked visitors only.  The loss of these faculty spots was not compensated.  Parking has continued to be quite difficult, but the promise of a new parking garage opening by February 2006 made it bearable.  Here we are with the larger half of February 2006 behind us, and this project is still not finished.

Today the city closed parking along both sides of the street through the main section of campus, removing another 30 or so of the needed parking spaces on campus.  When I arrived today, I made my usual rounds through each of the faculty parking lots that could be considered walking distance to Packard Lab — Maginnes Lawn, Packer Ave. & Broadhead Ave., Webster Street & Morton Street, Packer Ave. & Taylor Street, etc.  At each location, as usual, I found every regular faculty spot filled and nearly every visitor spot empty.  Despairing of finding any place to leave my car so I could get to class on time, I eventually decided to park in a visitors spot in the middle of a long line of empty spaces.  Although there was definitely noone denied the opportunity to visit the campus, I was charged $35 for this.

Suppose I were to operate a restaurant, and that I offered frequent diners an opportunity to purchase a year’s worth of dinner.  If I were to sell 200 of these, then server the first 100 patrons each night and send the rest away hungry, I would find myself on the wrong end of a lawsuit very soon.  So why do we allow parking regulators to use this ridiculous business model?  I suppose it is less confrontational (and much more profitable!) to sell many more parking privileges than there are spots available and to simply deny service to those who do not arrive first than to only sell privileges to a number of people that can actually be supported by the available facilities.

Argh.  Enough ranting.  Suffice it to say that I yearn for a society that has an inexpensive and convenient public transportation system.

Can I condemn this man to slavery? Pretend I do not feel his agony?

Oh, sorry. Back to writing.

“Stop telling me what you do and start telling me who you are!”

I do not recall what that is a quote from, but it points out the difficulty in defining oneself. Luckily, my intent is not to make a philosophical statement but rather to provide a bit of context for any readers who may not know me personally.

My name is Chad Hogg. I was born and lived the first 18 years of my life in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania , one of the best places I can imagine to experience childhood. I then attended Ursinus College for four years. When I left the college I took with me a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a girlfriend (currently fiance and soon to be wife!) in the lovely Rachel Zeigler. I am currently a graduate student at Lehigh University , where I am currently working on autonomous, heterogeneous database systems and hope to work soon in the area of web search or generalized machine learning.

I consider myself a Christian, although the term is used of people with so many different belief systems that it hardly has a useful meaning. (There will be much more on this topic.) Politically I consider myself a moderate, simply because neither of the reigning political parties in the United States has much of a position on issues that matter to me. (Lots more on this too!) I am a geek by any modern definition, an academic, and rather shy. It would not surprise me to find that I have a very mild case of Asperger Syndrome . My interests include computers and algorithms; card, board, and video games; and classic rock, heavy metal, and jazz music. My professional goal is to teach at a university level.

So there it is; a brief description but hopefully an accurate one. Now go forth and read my opinions on many things.

A friend sent me a link to his blog today, and inspired me (hopefully) to actually write something here. I have so many things I would like to say on so many topics; I just have difficulty taking the time out of my day to write about it. That probably is not going to change any time soon, but I hereby resolve to make the time to write something at least once a week.

Among my friends at Lehigh, I have become virtually the only one who does not either own a recent computer made by Apple or at least have a strong desire for one.  In fact, my disdain for their fascination has earned me a reputation as a “mac hater”.  This reminds me of a great quote I saw, most likely as a signature on slashdot:

It isn’t the Macs I hate; it’s the Mac users.

Obviously this doesn’t perfectly describe my position.  There are several Mac users whom I consider to be good friends as well as noble people.  However, the spirit of this statement closely resembles my own view.

Of course, it isn’t that I have nothing against the Macintosh.  On the contrary, I find its proprietary hardware/software combination detestable.  For me, part of owning a computer is the ability to fix, replace, and upgrade the machine as necessary with commodity parts that I can purchase from one of many competing manufacturers.  Of course, I don’t really get this with PCs either, as you must choose either AMD or Intel and stick with one to avoid excess costs.  But in most ways the PC architecture fits my needs well.  Another problem I have with the Macintosh is its insistance on the single-button mouse.  I understand that this forces software developers to use better interfaces, but it still makes for quite a pain when one cannot perform multiple functions without utilizing both keyboard and mouse together.

Perhaps my memories of the Apple Computer that created the colorful iMacs are too harsh, but it seems to me that Apple has always designed and marketed their machines for an audience that cares more about aesthetics than usefulness and simplicity than power.  The newest Apple television commercials illustrate this quite well — the point of the commercials is that the Intel chip has been for years “stuck in dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks” and that they will now “be set free to live life in a Mac”.  Sorry, but I would rather have a dull little box that meets my needs than a pretty and fun computer that doesn’t.

And finally, we come to the users.  You see, there are things I don’t like about the Macintosh, but the same is true of every hardware platform and operating system.  What bothers me is that people who use Apple computers seem to be incapable of seeing the problems with the Macintosh or the benefits of other systems.  When people begin following a company and its products as if it were a religion, something is wrong.

In truth, I am quite glad that Apple has its market share. Choice and competition are always good for the consumer.  If I was recommending a new laptop to someone who had little experience with computers, wanted something intuitive to learn, had few software requirements beyond web browsing and word processing, did not care about self-maintenance of their system, and did mind paying a premium, then I would probably suggest that they buy an iBook or one of Apple’s other offerings.  Someday if and when Apple allows me to run their operating system on other companies’ hardware and has a more complete set of software developed for it, they might have the right system for me as well.  But I will choose it because it is the best tool for the job, not because I have some unfounded brand loyalty or think everything Steve Jobs touches turns to gold.