I was happy enough with mine when I first bought it, but within six weeks it was powering off erratically, including while I was in the middle of a conversation. So I sent it in and got a replacement, which had a more disturbing behavior: it would lose the ability to send or receive calls, without any indication that anything was wrong. As I don’t often place calls, it sometimes takes a while for me to notice this happening–the first time, once I had it figured out and fixed, I then had to go through a week’s worth of increasingly agitated voicemail messages.

I like the form factor; it’s nice to be able to put it in parallel with my wallet without cramping my pocket. Every other feature turns out to be secondary at most. If I could find a reliable phone of similar shape, I’d happily trade it in. Suggestions?

In other news, today brought the money I’ve consumed in food up over $2 for this week. Until about half an hour ago, it was slowly growing to a grand sum of something less than 50 cents… I was actually kind of proud that I’ve been able to do with so little. It’s not that I’ve been starving myself (though I did only eat one meal per day, for two or three days); it’s more that I’ve been subsisting off of very inexpensive food, and have been invited to eat by my friends a startling number of times.

Anyhow, time for more work.

It’s also in the public record that I live in New England, which tends to be a fairly ethnically homogenous area. So, in any given group of kids, maybe 1 or 2 in 30 will be black, a rare person of asian descent, and the rest are straight from europe.

Finally, I’d like to say that I hope that I lack racial prejudices; I like to consider myself a modern, enlightened person who judges people on their own merits instead of their skin.

So, why is it that, with rare exceptions, every black kid I’ve ever had to deal with seems to be actively trying to reinforce negative stereotypes? Almost always, they’re the ones who are the troublemakers, the belligerent ones, the ones the counselors warn each other about because they’re hard to deal with? This isn’t to say that there aren’t white kids who act equally poorly, just that–and mind you, I don’t especially like drawing this distinction–the white problem kids (that I’ve met) are only maybe 10% of the population, and the black problem kids tend to be closer to 80 or 90% of the ones I’ve met.

Today was the first day I worked at an elementary school; I’ll be working there for the next three or so weeks. So, the other counselors were telling me about the various kids, who I should look out for, who tends to cry and who’s always getting scraped up. There were several kids who they said would be a handful, but are typically manageable. But as the kids started filing in, only one had his backpack in a garbage bag carried by the guidance counselor, with the accompanying story that he had taken to leaving it about the school in various places because he had discovered that it disrupted classes. The most recent place it was found was in the urinal, damp.

It belonged to the one black kid in the group.

Last summer, as a camp counselor, similar circumstances: a tiny percentage of black kids among the overwhelmingly caucasian majority. Jr. High and High School age kids. I disagreed with many campers, but only one ever tried to start brawling with me. A black kid. Many people complained about the mountains while hiking the appalacian trail, but only one faked an injury to hold us up so he could rest for a while. A (different) black kid. How do I know the injury was faked? He was bragging about it later, on the ride back.

Is it that they feel some compulsion to be the ‘bad boy,’ to be stronger and tougher and more out of control than their peers? Is it some twisted sense of black pride which says that to maintain respect, they’ve got to defy whatever the white guy says?

I wish that I could say I was just leaving out the rowdy white kids, that I was attaching undue focus on the black kids. But that is not the case. And when I look at articles which cry out against the police and judicial system because the prison population is primarily black, I can’t agree. Because their premise is that every person is equally likely to commit a crime, to simply do what they’ve been told not to, but in my experience as a person expected to enforce Authority, the unfortunate truth is that they aren’t.

I hope that there’s some proof, something that I experience in the future which suggests the opposite, that people of every race are equally likely to shine out or be stupid, because right now, with the experiences I’ve had, I have to come to the conclusion that they aren’t. And this flies in the face of everything I’ve been taught in my life about the nature of people and what constitutes right and just behavior and expectations of a person.

When the clerk of a small store watches black people more carefully than whites, I feel honestly sorry for the good people, who feel harassed and put under pressure because they don’t conform to the stereotype; they’re honest. At the same time, for the storekeeper, it’s simply safer to run things that way, and telling him that he shouldn’t do so would be bad advice.

Which leads to a chicken-and-egg type question: if the kids grow up misbehaving because the stereotypes say they should, and the stereotypes grow out of their misbehavior, how on earth do you get them, collectively, to behave? So that the stereotypes go away because they no longer contain a grain of truth?

It looked like this:

When I got to college, one of the first things I did was format my hard drive and reinstall the OS in an attempt to make the network work. It didn’t fix the problem, but it did get rid of the convenient webcomics directory. I discovered around January that I had managed to preserve some backup files, but by that time I had learned to read all the webcomics in under 15 minutes reliably. Being on a T1 line helped a lot towards that end.

I didn’t rewrite the webcomics directory for several reasons. The biggest was sheer laziness: it wasn’t strictly necessary anymore, as the network here loads the average webcomic homepage in approximately 0 seconds. But more than that, it didn’t look nice. It was very basic HTML, and it had many, many red Xs where the comic didn’t update for that day, or had a different name than usual, or basically any other anomaly. It was very fragile code, and I’m not terribly proud of it. I’ve had it in the back of my mind for quite a while that I would rewrite it when I discovered a way to eliminate those problems.

Now, summer is approaching, and I’m feeling the need to rewrite it in anticipation of a much slower internet connection. What’s really making this possible, though, is the fact that Tau Ceti had much the same idea as I did, but he’s implemented it in a way that I haven’t used before: php. What’s more, he’s letting me see the source, so I can figure out how to turn his idea (which is similar to what I had in mind, but not really what I want) into mine. It seems I won’t be able to keep the page on my local machine if I do this though, which is where the issue comes up.

If I post this directory to a php-enabled server, which is easy enough, all of a sudden anyone in the world can view it. I know that many of the artists that I like depend on ad-banner revenue for a significant portion of their income; at the same time I know that losing the fraction of a cent that I contribute may penalize them perhaps 2 cents over the course of a year. I’m pretty sure they can accept that loss.

What I don’t want is for other people to start using my directory for their own purposes, because this is where the artist starts getting penalized. An unnoticeable loss suddenly becomes significant if you multiply it by 10, 100, 1000…

I’ll do what I can to prevent this. By not linking to it from any of my own webpages, I restrict the address to those I tell. What’s more, so long as none of them links to it, it’s securely hidden from browser crawls…

I know it’s not ethically perfect. But it’ll have to do.