January 2006 Archives

If you look at the social interaction styles of UT students today and ten years ago, they are vastly different. In today's student environment, we head home after a long day and turn on our computers. Almost instantly, IM opens up connecting us to many of our friends who are online at the same time. We then turn to Facebook and are able to see what new is going on in everyone's life.

We connect to the acaedemic world through Blackboard and e-mail.

All this while sitting at home.

Ten years ago, it would have been possible to use e-mail, if you were one of the people who add one of the very first accounts. Perhaps grad students? I'm not sure if undergrads had university e-mail accounts. Even if they did, you could only check it if you had Internet access and it is most likely that you had to be on campus to do that or perhaps use UT's old dial-in Telesys network. I'm not sure of when each of these things came online so I could be completely off.

Without the Internet, establishments like Spyderhouse or Metro or JP Java's or any of the number of coffee shops around Austin surely saw an increase of patrons. Libraries would have many more people slaving away trying to finish a report.

While the Internet opens up a world of information to us and can aid us in multi-tasking different projects- I'm switching back and forth from writing this and writing an e-mail now- it also greatly reduces our actual time of face-to-face social interaction.

For example, in a class I'm about to drop (no worries- I'm taking 17 hours and I'm reducing that load to 14), we are assigned to various groups. Long ago, these had to meet in person to work on various assignments. Through meeting, you're able to actually meet them and find out more about them. Today, all group work is done online and since the class is so large, I have no idea who in this class are these group members I am supposed to work with. Since we'll never meet in person, I'll learn nothing more about them besides their thoughts on sociological theory.

Well, I could Facebook them.

But, if I just Facebook them, I only see one aspect of them. I only see what they think of themselves and only what they want other people to see. Some of the best friendships are developed through sometimes seeing other people not at the top of their game and this new online world redues the chances for that.

In a related post, I speak of how technology is starting to control us and how we must prevent this from happening. This point is very true in social interaction. We can slowly remove ourselves from the physical society and attempt to exist almost only in the virtual world.

Speaking of, the professor just wanted in. Time to get back to the physical world.

In PA 326, Intro to the Non-Profit Sector, we are supposed to find and work 35 hours over the semester in a non-profit. While 35 hours doesn't seem like that much, the more I look at my calendar, the more I am unsure how I'll be able to do that.

I'm going to speak with the professor today after class and figure out if I can count any of the things I already do, but since she wants 35 hours for the same entitiy, I don't know.

A few months ago, the seat from my bicycle was stolen from in front of my apartment complex. Just the seat.

Today, my roommate calls me to tell me he found my bicycle seat in the laundry room of our complex.

It doesn't answer any questions but at least I can ride my bike again.

As you may know, the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, released his first Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, that is, God Is Love.

I haven't read all of it so I'm refraining from comment but I do have a question.

In Part 1, Section 11, the Holy Father refers to Adam and his way of finding love in Eve. The first paragraph concludes with "The biblical account thus concludes with a prophecy about Adam: 'Therefore a man leave his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh".

A prophecy about Adam? Is he referring to man in general and not just Adam?

In the next paragraph, he repeats this: "First, eros is somehow rooted in man's very nature; Adam is a seeker, who 'abandons his mother and father' in order to find woman; only together do the two represent complete humanity and become 'one flesh'."

If Benedict XVI is referring to Adam as the first human male, I'm confused. It doesn't fit at all with the document to suggest that Adam left his mother and father, that is his creators which in this case is God himself, to join Eve. Not to mention, that just isn't sound. God formed Eve to be with Adam in the original glory we had before the fall, according to the creation story.

Are both of these references to Adam correct? Is this a way of mentioning man that hasn't been used often? A simple proofreading mistake?

For STS 321, we were asked to record a "media log" of how we interact with media over a course of a day. Here are my results:

Thursday is not a good day for me to do a media log. I'm in class from 8 a.m until 12:15 p.m. with no break, except today I overslept and missed my first class. I grab lunch and go to work. I send some e-mails and am currently working on a large-scale database migration. I head back to class and then come home early, as the STS 321 class is cancelled.

I ended up going to sleep very late last night and I'm still tired, so I come home and take a short nap. Then I do a little reading, with no TV or radio, followed by a visit to the gym with my roommate. I get back home and spend a couple of hours on the phone. While on the phone, the discussion included some facts that required verification. I checked out a couple of web sites and looked up an old e-mail to check.

The hour struck 12 and the media log turned back into a pumpkin.

In short, on Thursdays, I'm isolated. Short of work and my nightly phone routine, I stay in my own world. On MWF, I engage more with the world. I stop by Wikipedia and sometimes edit an article or two and I'll watch a little TV after work. I'll read a hard copy of The Daily Texan and the soft copy of a few newspapers. But, on Thursdays, I'm isolated.

I have always had problems with Blackboard, the online course content system that UT uses. It contains a great amount of information and can be very useful, it is organized badly.

On the home page, they list every class you have taken since they migrated to Bb 6 in the Spring of 2005. There are no options to only show current classes or to even sort so that your current classes on top of the list.

Throughout the site, lables are confusing and clearly must be for professors too. There is a "Syllabus" tab for every class, yet perhaps only one of my professors have used that instead of the "Course Documents" tab. For each class, the student has to relearn where everything is at and when I'm in six courses, I spend half the semester just learning where my professor posts homework.

Last semester, I missed two deadlines because there is a "Digital Drop Box" to upload files to that is completely different than the "Assignment Drop Box". I sent the papers in on time to Bb, but there were various places for them to go. The professor isn't informed when a new file is uploaded so if you're in my shoes, you're only lucky that the professor has mercy.

The picture above is a view of the Announcements page. We'll ignore that I have asked for the last seven days and it displays the last seven months. There is no way to simply click into a course page. There are three or four courses that have announcements on this page. To access that course's content, I have to go back to the homepage, or to the "My Courses" page, in order to find a link to the content.

The site could be a much greater tool if there was better thought in place on how everything should work and how it all should work together.

I've had this idea for some time now and I think it is ready for a public forum. Being a full-time college student is a full-time job. We're in the classroom between 12, at the least, and 30 hours a week, depending on labs. Plus, we're expected to study at least an hour a day per class. That isn't including papers or projects.

When you have a job, you usually have an office. It may be a cubicle, it may be shared with other people but you have a work space separate from your home- unless, of course, that's part of the agreement and even then, you can deduct what you spend on paper clips.

Students should have this too. I propose a new building on campus, the Student Office Building (SOB), to give students secured workspace. Every floor have offices throughout with group study areas, the conference rooms of the academic world.

Plus, since will be called SOB on UT maps, students will soon start calling it that as well. The best part is once the building becomes old and start to have system failures, which will happen (look at ESB), you can take out your aggression in a fun way: "Argh! Damn the SOB!"

I think it works.

In STS 321, we were asked "What are blogs?" Below are the notes I scratched into Notepad before we started discussing it.

Blogs are a forum for individuals to share ideas and thoughts on any number of interests.

As with every forum, the credibility and usefulness of the ideas has to be questioned and examined.

Some people use blogs to share their thoughts and ideas about their personal life, some going into intimate detail.

Others use blogs are an academic-level clearinghouse. A place for them to present original research as it is discovered, prior to truly compiling it into a peer-review journal piece.

Still others use blogs to keep track of things they find interesting and hopefully in the process educate others. This is the case when many blogs link to other blogs or news stories. They aren't creating ideas or concepts, they are bringing someone else's ideas to an audience that may not have already been exposed to them.

This sounds like many other fourms- newspapers for example- only almost everyone can do it.

I'm now enrolled in STS 321: Intro to Science, Technology and Society. This is the fourth STS class I've taken [311, 331 (Wireless Revolutions) and 331 (Multimedia Writing-W)] and so I'm not all that worried about it. The course outline appears to be interesting and overall is looking at topics I haven't studied much if at all.

One of the other aspects of this course is the requirement of having a blog. When I took STS 311, I was required on using a Blogger backend with pages stored on the UT's iSchool's Echo server. Now, I have a bit more freedom but instead of creating a whole new blog, I am considering just using a category of this one. We'll see if the prof would find such things acceptable.

Hopefully having this blog serve for the course, it will give me an excuse to make some much needed visual and backend improvements on it. I started working on the "Reading" list awhile ago, switching it to MediaManager from handwritten template editing but I never actually fully made the switch.

In either class, a mound of homework is next to me and this blog, so far, is not it.

Feel free to visit the class website at http://www.smagula.net/321/.

I'm in my social stats class going over some very basic terms: nominal and ordinal variables.

Ordinal variables are one that are ordered, or could be ranked. For example, when a poll asks "how happy are you?", the answers are ordered: "Very happy", "somewhat happy", "neither", "somewhat unhappy", etc.

The professor then shocked everyone in the class.

"Nominal variables are ones that are not ordered or rank. For example, state of birth. There's TEXAS! and then all of these other stupid states. I know I know, you all must be thinking 'wait prof, state of birth is ordinal. It's Texas and then it's everyone else.' Nope, I'm sorry. We all have a star on the flag just the same."

He was instantly labled a traitor and the Texas Rangers arrested him. The University published a statement renouncing his tenure and disassociating itself from this "professor".

Now, we can get back to teaching the truth that Texas is better than everyone else.

Yes. After the quote, it's all a joke. No hate mail from anyone from puny states, okay?

I ran into this site today, Donors Choose, a site that connects teachers who need funding with donors.

Teachers can post project proposal and indicate the funding level they need in order to successfully implement it. Donors can choose from the various projects and opt to fund a project, either in part or in full.

So far, $5.1 million dollars have gone to serve student needs.

One random project that I found is for "Exciting Desktop Publishing". A low-income school's business technology class is now lacking a printer and funds to purchase a new one after their old one when to computer heaven.

The teacher would like to raise $1400 to purchase a color laser printer to help these low-income students earn skills they could use to help raise them into the next income bracket.

I like this program for a couple of reasons. First, it helps education. As many of you know, I believe that true education is the silver bullet that can help many of the social ills that exist. Second, it allows benefactors to connect in some way with the teachers and students they support. The more I learn about and reflect upon development as a ministry, the more I realize that building those connections is very important.

I would The Brandon Kraft Foundation to grow into something like that- a clearinghouse of people with ideas and benefactors that can help those ideas happen.

Alright. So I thought the problem I was having with my phone was fixed. This weekend, I find out that Vanessa and Stephanie both had this happen to them while attempting to call my phone.

I call Customer Care tonight, after leaving a voicemail with the engineer who called me after the December 11 phone call. The customer care said that my trouble ticket was still pending with tech and that, after consulting to tech, my problem could be fixed by transferring from the old AT&T network to the Cingular Orange network. She highlights what all that would entail: a slightly changed rate plan and new phones. The new rate plan is more or less what I have now. Currently, I have 400 anytime minutes plus 300 promotional minutes, plus unlimited night and weekends and unlimited mobile-to-moblie calling. The new plan would have only 450 anytime minutes, 5000 night and weekend minutes with unlimited mobile-to-mobile. While it is a great reduction in minutes, since having free mobile-to-mobile, I haven't needed all 700 anytime minutes, or anything close to it. In short, I was willing to forget about those minutes since they aren't that vital to me.

I wasn't ready to make the switch as I wanted to do a little more research on my options. My thought is if I can get roughtly what I have now for the same price, I'll undergo switching phones and whatnot to get myself in a working situation.

I call them back after deciding that I would go with it. I do have one question though: on the old AT&T network, it cost me $0.10 to SEND each text message and there is no charge to receive them. Is that the same on "Cingular Orange"?

No. It cost $0.10/event to send OR RECEIVE a text message.

But, as the Customer Care rep said in her very broken English, "you currently have a $4.99 text messaging plan that allows you to send 100 messages. With Cingular, for the same price, it will be 200 so it offsets."

As I pointed out to her, it doesn't offset. I limit myself to 100 sent messages but I am sent many many more messages than I send.

I don't have a problem jumping through hoops to make my service better (or in other words, save their engineers the work of fixing my problem) as long as that is all it is. I don't want to be charged for something that I get free now.

All of this while thinking that text messages are cheaper to send/receive for Cingular than one minute of voice traffic. Remember Hurricane Rita and how no one in Houston could actually talk on the phone but had no problem sending SMS messages? That is because a voice call has to create a dedicated digital channel for the call while a text message uses only one packet of the data stream. (I don't really know the details so I might be using the wrong words, but more or less, that is the case).

I'll be paying a visit to the Cingular store to speak with someone who hopefully can speak English and see what can happen.

As found in the Sacramentary Supplement, this is the tradtional announcement of the date of Easter to be announced on Epiphany. It comes from a time before calendars but is still important now as a reminder of how central the Easter celebration is in the life of the faithful.

Dear brothers and sisters, the glory of the Lord has shone upon us, and shall ever be manifest among us, until the day of his return. Through the rhythms of time and seasons let us celebrate the mysteries of salvation.

Let us recall the year's culmination, the Easter Triduum of the Lord:
his last supper, his crucifixion, his burial, and his rising celebrated between the evening of the 13th of April and the evening of the 16th of April.

Each Easter- as on each Sunday- the Holy Church makes present the great and saving deed
by which Christ has for ever conquered sin and death.

From Easter are reckoned all the days we keep holy.
Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, will occur on the 1st of March.
The Ascension of the Lord will be commemorated on the 28th of May.
Pentecost, the joyful conclusion of the season of Easter, will be celebrated on the 4th of June.
And this year, the First Sunday of Advent will be the 3rd of December.

Likewise, the pilgrim Church proclaims the passover of Christ
in the feasts of the holy Mother of God, in the feassts of the Apostles and Saints,
and in the commemoration of the faithful departed.

To Jesus Christ, who was, who is, and who is to come, Lord of time and history,
be endless praise, for ever and ever.

I was in Kansas this week for the Veritas Conference- a conference of the Big 12 Conference's Catholic Campus Centers.

While I was in the great and glorious state of Kansas, a "grey" state on my hot dog map, I had to find out more about Kansas hotdogs. Also, after the last day of the conference, we took Fr. Ed from the UCC to KCI Airport, just inside of Missouri.

We drop off Fr. Ed at KCI and head down I-29 toward Kansas City. We take the I-635 exit as a cut-off to I-35. We take the final exit before the state line in hope of finding a hot dog vendor.

After driving a few miles, we found it. A "PLEASE STOP!" gas station which proudly proclaimed "HOT DOGS!" on its windows. As it is with many of these hot dogs, it seems to work out just too well. I go inside and fix myself one of their jumbo dogs. Missouri is one of the states where gas stations can sell hard liquour- something I hadn't noticed anywhere else before.

I make the purchase and enjoy it in the car just before hitting the road. One more state out of the way.

We hit I-35 and head towards Texas. We see a sign for Dairy Queen around noon and we thought the should work out for us as well. We stop in the town of Ottawa, KS at the Dairy Queen on Main Street.

I'm used to Texas where smoking in food establishments just doesn't happen anymore; if it does, it is a section of the store. Apparently, this isn't the case in Ottawa, KS. There are people smoking everywhere.

Amelia, Maria and myself all order a foot-long chili and cheese hot dog and enjoyed them with various "cool treats".

With that, I am 15% along the way toward the goal of a hot dog in every state. Eight down, forty-two to go.

Since today is the World Day of Peace, below is reprinted the Assisi Pledge for Peace sent by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

1. We commit ourselves to proclaiming our firm conviction that violence and terrorism are incompatible with the authentic spirit of religion, and, as we condemn every recourse to violence and war in the name of God or of religion, we commit ourselves to doing everything possible to eliminate the root causes of terrorism.
2. We commit ourselves to educating people to mutual respect and esteem, in order to help bring about a peaceful and fraternal coexistence between people of different ethnic groups, cultures, and religions.
3. We commit ourselves to fostering the culture of dialogue, so that there will be an increase of understanding and mutual trust between individuals and among peoples, for these are the premise of authentic peace.
4. We commit ourselves to defending the right of everyone to live a decent life in accordance with their own cultural identity, and to form freely a family of their own.
5. We commit ourselves to frank and patient dialogue, refusing to consider our differences as an insurmountable barrier, but recognizing instead that to encounter the diversity of others can become an opportunity for greater reciprocal understanding.
6. We commit ourselves to forgiving one another for past and present errors and prejudices, and to supporting one another in a common effort both to overcome selfishness and arrogance, hatred and violence, and to learn from the past that peace without justice is no true peace.
7. We commit ourselves to taking the side of the poor and the helpless, to speaking out for those who have no voice, and to working effectively to change these situations, out of the conviction that no one can be happy alone.
8. We commit ourselves to taking up the cry of those who refuse to be resigned to violence and evil, and we desire to make every effort possible to offer the men and women of our time real hope for justice and peace.
9. We commit ourselves to encouraging all efforts to promote friendship between peoples, for we are convinced that, in the absence of solidarity and understanding between peoples, technological progress exposes the world to a growing risk of destruction and death.
10. We commit ourselves to urging leaders of nations to make every effort to create and consolidate, on the national and international levels, a world of solidarity and peace based on justice.