a thaumaturgical compendium

And you thought PATRIOT II was bad? You don’t know from bad…

So, I have a new course I’m teaching in the spring that attempts to give non-programmers enough programming background to either do some simple stuff or effectively hire and talk to programmers who can do it for them. In other words, enough to get their feet wet and have them think systematically about web systems. It will be a new part of the curriculum in both the online and offline interactive masters programs.

I have mostly settled on teaching Python, and while it used to be easy to look through the two or three Python books out there, the field has exploded. I was, at least initially, excited to see a Python textbook designed specifically for teaching Python to non-programmers, and that it had a focus on the manipulation of media: Introduction to Computing and Programming in Python, A Multimedia Approach.

I was a bit daunted by the price tag. With a few exceptions, I’m not usually a fan of textbooks. They tend to systematize things for students, rather than allowing students to systematize themselves. But for structures that already have some accepted system—stuff like law or programming—a “textbook” type text is sometimes helpful. And while I won’t assign a text just for the sake of having a textbook, if there is an exceptional textbook, I will happily assign it. Nonetheless, nearly $100 is a big chunk out of a student budget, particularly if you won’t be using the whole text. There is an online version of it available for a bit less. Anyway, I figure I’ll at least get a review copy and see if it is good enough to assign to my classes, despite the price tag.

I click the button asking for a review copy. It asks where I teach, what course it’s for, and the expected enrollment—all standard questions. About a week later, I get an email from a Pearson rep asking for contact information for my university and for my dean or chair.

OK, the letter was polite and all, but I’m thinking, do I really want to be the one who ended up eating into the schedule of my chair (who, by the way, is one of three people right now!) or dean right before classes start? Nope. Frankly, if they want my bona fides, it’s all right out there on the internet. Oh, and if that didn’t work, they could look and see that I had actually refereed a text for them in the past. They had sent me money to look over one of their books, but they weren’t sure if they wanted to let me do it for free. I already told them where I teach, and while our university web site is an unmitigated disaster to navigate, it’s not impossible to find out who I am. It would be easier, I said, to buy and return from Amazon.

Now, I wouldn’t do that. It’s crummy to do that to Amazon (even if they aren’t a ma & pop shop), and it actually ends up costing Pearson more money than had they just sent me the book. But when it came right down to whether I was willing to part with $100 to review the book, I just figured we’ll go with a publisher that actually opens its arms and tries to be flexible for teachers, like O’Reilly.

The irony, of course, is that the whole idea of giving profs review copies is that it drives them to force students to buy a book. The reason they can afford to give me access for free, is that if I decided to adopt it, they would see thousands of dollars in sales come their way over the next year or two, not to mention the fact that use in one course is often the best way of encouraging profs in other universities to use the text. (Admitedly, I’m sure their prime market is large undergrad classes with hundreds of students, but even if we aren’t a cash cow, our small grad classes are at least a cash cat.) But they were so worried that I was not really who I said I was (I presume) that they end up losing that possibility. It’s a bit like turning down a scruffy looking customer when he comes in for a test-drive of a car: you do it at the peril of your margin.

Caroline Winter writes in the Times today about the idiosyncratic use of the majuscule “I” in the English language. (She neglects to note that we also capitalize the name of our language, which is unusual, though not as singular as our I.)

At the end, she recommends that we try an experiment: capitalizing “You” and writing “i” with a “sweet little dot.” I do try to think about how i use language—I decided in grad school to forego “he” except in the case where the subject is male, for example—but her suggestion that lowering i and capitalizing You might be a “humbling experience” strikes me as wrong. As she rightly notes, students seem prone not to capitalize the first-person pronoun in their emails, and so that piece of it might be sloppy. But more importantly, changing a language that has evolved over centuries to your own whim, while it may be fun, interesting, and potentially enlightening, is anything but humble.

Sign me up for the Aptera Typ-1. Wonder if I could get Quinnipiac to install plug-in parking spaces…

7:30am in the Halavais household, light seeps in through the soupy July morning air.

Jamie: Good morning, Darling Husband!

Alex: Grumble… mrf. Why are we up?

Jamie: What day is it?

Alex: Monday?

Jamie: Yes, but what Monday?

Alex: Too-early-in-the-morning Monday?

Jamie: Today’s the 21st, your birthday!

Alex: It is? Cool! What am I getting this year?

Jamie: [Dramatically indicates her own personage.]

Alex: Um. didn’t I get that last year?

Jamie: Notice anything… different.

Alex: Well, I’ve been meaning to say, you’ve been really packing on the pounds lately…

Jamie: How old are you again?

[A subtly cruel question, since she knows he hasn’t been able to keep track for about a decade.]

Alex: I’m gonna be 40.

[A graceful allusion to pop culture that nonetheless dates him.]

Jamie: Well, we’re off to the hospital for pictures.

Alex: What, have you been listening to the Vapors?

[A less graceful, overly obscure, yet still out-of-date pop culture reference.]

Jamie: I’m sure you’ll figure everything out eventually…

Our first child is due on December 8 of this year. I’m furiously reading various parenting books and trying to figure out who I’ll need to knock off to get him into a decent pre-school on the Upper West Side.

Don’t worry, this blog will remain unfocused, intermittent, and boring. But soon, with more baby!

(The sonograms are in order: April 22, May 6, May 22, July 21, and many more are over at flickr.)

I certainly like the idea of MyGallons, which is that you are able to pre-purchase future fill-ups of gasoline at today’s prices (though this is not a “future,” the company is at pains to tell you). I presume it means that they are buying futures, however. While betting on the fact that gasoline will be going down might be a good way of providing a downward pressure on prices, by hedging future increases, this contributes, in some small way, to the speculation that is driving gasoline prices up.

So, what are the problems? Well: it’s a start-up. Leaving aside the possibility of fraud, it might just end up being mismanaged, and given that they are in a position to deal with a lot of cash flow right out of the gate, this is a problem. Nowhere on the site does it indicate precisely the process by which they are buying fuel. If they get the balance wrong, and don’t hedge fuel prices correctly, there is always the possibility of a graceless exit, leaving consumers holding worthless IOUs.

Also, they determine your purchase price by where you live. I live in Manhattan, but have only purchased fuel here once or twice over the last several years. The closest station is charging $4.33 a gallon for regular, and as you go downtown, the price creeps up toward $4.75. I don’t know if they average by zip or by region, but either way, the price they assess for me is likely to be silly. Across the bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, regular gasoline is going for $3.95. I usually fill up somewhere in Connecticut, which is between the two in terms of cost. The problem is that if I buy gasoline at Manhattan prices, I’m already paying more of a premium than I would otherwise.

Secondly, while my car is not as much of a fuel hog as some (and yes, I considered a Prius, and it looks like it would have been a wise decision), it does require premium gasoline. The agreement says that they tag on 30 cents a gallon for premium, but it’s not yet clear whether you buy premium gallons, or they make the adjustment when you purchase gas. They apparently make a lot of adjustments when you purchase, according to the type of gas, the locale in which it is purchased, changes in taxes, etc. As a result, it’s difficult to predict exactly what you will be paying for gasoline. If it were a simple matter of five gallons purchased now results in five gallons of gas in six months, that would be great. As it is, there appears to be a lot of wiggle room on their end.

Finally, they are launching at an advantageous time for them. Historically, fuel prices peak around August and then tend to depress through the end of the year. Hard to say, in this overblown market, whether that will have any effect at all.

All that said, it seems unlikely that we will see a long-term drop in gasoline prices. The US has long enjoyed ridiculously low fuel prices, and I suspect that $5 a gallon fuel (or more) is not only inevitable, but here to stay. And I am locked into a six-hundred-mile-a-week (at least) commute. So, all the above caveats aside, I figure I’ll give them a try, and report back here how things go. I won’t see my fuel card from them for several weeks, and I probably will not make my first fuel purchase until September or October, when prices may have dipped a bit.

I wish I could go to this. Tons of really good speakers. But $700 worth? I don’t know. Of course, this includes “unlimited networking,” and I don’t think they are talking about WiFi.

Is it at all ironic that a conference on decentralized and networked government is in-person, expensive, and in New York City?