1. Unhappy with current expected graduation date.

My old advisor quit. When I went to meet with my new advisor for the first time, we started out by making a graduation plan together so that we could be on the same page. Unfortunately, the timeline that she made for me had me graduating at the end of 2014. This is not the impression I’d gotten from my old advisor. I had been expecting late 2012 or early 2013 prior to the meeting.

I’ve been in touch with my new advisor, and we’ve been able to wrangle it down to late 2013. I’d have a heavier load, but it would be achievable. Graduating in 2013 is a lot better, but still, the can of worms has been opened.

2. More specialization.

I was originally a Digital Arts & Communications major, which was great. When it was announced that my major was being merged with the much larger Computer Arts department to create Web Design & New Media, I was disappointed because it seemed like a lot of the stuff that I wanted to avoid (3D animation, video editing, audio design, etc) was now being shoehorned into my college experience.

The new director personally assured me that Web Design & New Media would still allow me to specialize in what I wanted later on in the degree. Maybe that’s still to come, but I’m now midway through my third year of college and I think that I could get more of the specialization I want at another school.

3. Live in different cities before I settle down.

Before I went to college, I actually had a plan of doing my first half at AAU here in San Francisco and my second half at SVA over in New York City. The idea was that since I loved both cities, I wanted to “try them both on” before I graduate from college so that I could better know where I wanted to live. Since then, the plan changed because it turned out that SVA didn’t have an undergraduate program I wanted after all (ironically, what they’ve got sounds similar to what I’ve ended up in here at AAU), but if I did transfer somewhere, then my old hope of experiencing new places would be revived.

4. More social possibility.

AAU doesn’t have a lot of clubs, doesn’t have any athletic programs of interest to me, and doesn’t really have a lot of events designed to help students meet each other. In the years I’ve been here, I haven’t really made a lot of new friends in my classes either, at least not compared to other people, or more importantly, compared to how many I’d like to have. For this aspect of the college experience, it’s great that others have done well here at AAU, but maybe I need to go elsewhere to thrive.

5. Moving time.

There’s a very good chance that I’ll be moving out of this apartment soon anyway, so the timing is good. Pretty simple.

The Reservations

1. New graduation date is acceptable, and San Francisco is great.

When I was able to get my expected graduation date back down to 2013 here at AAU, that was very, very good. I love living in San Francisco, and yet only recently felt like I’ve got an idea of how much fun I can have here. It makes sense that it takes a while before you know your city well enough to get the most out of it, and I’m just getting there now!

2. My academic performance has been outstanding here at AAU.

I’ve been doing very well here at AAU. I have a GPA of 3.75 (all A’s except for two B’s so far, woo!), I’m on the President’s List, and there are a lot of great teachers here who remember me and will definitely write glowing letters of recommendation when/if I try to get into grad program later on. Would I academically kick ass at those liberal arts schools the same way I have here? I’m used to having giant projects all the time, and that’s hard stuff, but I know that the type of work I’d get would be different if I was at a liberal arts school instead of an art school. Different and unknown is scary.

3. I’d miss my biological family.

They were a factor in my deciding to come here, and I want to see more of them. We’ve gotten really close, but my father has spent the majority of my time here unable to do stuff because he was switching jobs and is now looking at new homes. It would be really sad for me if I left just when he was ready to start regularly spending time together again. Also, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my Aunt Toby, and she’s a ton of fun, so it would also be really sad to not get to see her often. Uggh. Just thinking about them makes me want to come up with more rationalizations for staying.

4. Moving is daunting.

When I moved out of the dorms, I got to experience how big of an operation that really can be. As smooth as it was, it was still very unpleasant. And then when I moved into this apartment, my roommate wasn’t around to help for the first few weeks, so I also have the memory of what it’s like to move in to a new place pretty fresh in my mind. If I’m going to be leaving this apartment regardless of transfer though, then I suppose it’s not terribly relevant, but moving within the same city and moving across the country to a brand new place are pretty different.

The Possibilities

I want to be a user experience designer, which is a pretty specialized focus. Here are links to the programs around the country I’m most interested in:

University of Washington

• Interaction Design
• Visual Communication Design
• Informatics with Human-Computer Interaction Option

Carnegie Mellon University

• Communication Design

UCLA

• Design Media Arts

There are other schools on my list to check out, but right now, those are my favorites. Of these, I’m leaning most toward the Interaction Design at UW and Communication Design at CMU. UCLA gets some special points though because my mother specifically asked me to look at them, and also I remembered that I have a close friend from back home who is thinking of moving to Los Angeles in the near future.

The Likelihood

So in closure, let’s say that I’m 60% leaning toward transferring to a new school. It could go either way, but it’s a very real possibility.

One web site that I found particularly useful was California Choices. I had gotten started making a spreadsheet of various organizations’ endorsements when I came across it. I used it to narrow down groups that I like (and also groups that I specifically dislike) to see where they stand, and then I could click the links to read their arguments. If I see all the groups I like go one way and all the groups I dislike go another, then that makes it pretty easy. It’s when the groups I like disagree that I spend most of my time investigating, so to speak.

Groups that I like are the ACLU (only the Northern California one is listed on the site, and interestingly, they don’t agree 100% with the other two CA chapters), League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, League of Women Voters, National Organization of Women, Courage Campaign, Equality California, NAACP, and AARP. And of course, I don’t weight them all equally. As a quick aside, if the EFF was endorsing anything, I’d care a lot about their opinions too, but as far as I could see, they don’t.

Newspaper endorsements that I look at include the Union Tribune, SF Gate (not listed on the comparison site), Los Angeles Times, SF Bay Guardian, SF Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News. I like to see what they say and hear their brief explanations, but I don’t “award points” for the endorsements.

I also look at what all the political party endorsements are. Of course I do this because I can see what people of various ideological platforms go for, but also, getting to see how the smaller parties feel about matters of redistricting is a unique perspective, I feel. In that sense, I am counting on them to each be selfish.

Also, another site to help you pick some candidates that have similar beliefs to you is Project Vote Smart’s VoteEasy. It only covers senate and house candidates, but I thought it was both fun and useful.

2. My Candidate Endorsements

Governor: Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown
Lieutenant Governor: Gavin Newsom
Secretary of State: Debra Bowen
Controller: John Chiang
Treasurer: Bill Lockyer
Attorney General: Kamala D. Harris
Insurance Commissioner: Dave Jones
United States Senator: Susan A. Davis
53rd District Representative: Susan A Davis
State Senator 40th District: Juan Vargas
Member of the State Assembly 79th District: Ben Hueso
State Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tom Torlakson

3. My Proposition Endorsements

Time for school again now. AAU messed with my schedule a bit right before the start of classes, so here’s the final result. They’re all 3 credit courses, which is normal at my school.

Tuesdays
Developmental Psychology, 8:30 am–12:00 pm
Book Arts 1, 3:30 pm–9:50 pm

Wednesdays
Designing Careers, 12:00 pm–2:50 pm

Thursdays
Digital Imaging 2, 12:00 pm–2:50 pm

I hear a lot of people complain about how cell phones and Facebook are taking over our lives, creating the expectation that we should always be available. But is that true? I think that hinges on whether or not these things force us to do anything. Since they don’t, I think we might need to reexamine the problem.

People might feel pressure to check their email every five minutes, but that pressure is internal, not external. Before the internet, people felt pressured to stay near a telephone. Before that, they eagerly awaited the mail courier or religiously went to gathering places to stay in the social loop. The pressure isn’t new.

To show how the pressure to always be on call is actually something of an irrational social anxiety that comes from within, consider this: when is the last time you got mad at somebody for not responding to your email or Facebook message within five minutes, or got angry because your call went to voicemail instead of being answered immediately? Thankfully, that kind of entitlement mentality is rare, or else we wouldn’t be able to turn off our mobile devices at the theater, which most people manage to do without a problem. You probably haven’t decided to shun anybody for those things, so you shouldn’t worry about the world conspiring to shun you.

In short, the problem is our own insecurity, not the technology.

Another interesting complaint that Kate mentioned in her post that got my attention as a user experience designer was her statement that “The profound satisfaction of getting to know a machine is something that disappears with ease-of-use.”

Her opinion reminds me of the one held by a lot of Gentoo Linux developers. They resisted making the installation process easier for a long time because they wanted people to learn all about their system, which they felt the difficult manual command-line interface installation would make people experts in. And I suppose that it’s a good sign that a computer scientist or a programmer feels that way since in a way, that shows that they really love what they do.

However, as a user experience designer, I’m interested in a different sort of profound satisfaction. My field is all about making technology and information more accessible. I enjoy tinkering with Gentoo Linux and other “advanced computer geek things,” but if everybody that made them felt the way that Kate and the Gentoo developers felt, then a lot of people wouldn’t be able to use technology.

It might be fun for some of us, but computers weren’t invented so that people could sit there and figure out how they work or how to use them. They exist to enable us to do things, and the harder a computer is to use, the more of an obstacle it is to accomplishing things with them. I don’t fear complexity, but I do think that unnecessary difficulty is undesirable.

Graphical user interfaces, mouse and keyboard interfaces, and sites like Wikipedia all come together to make it easy for everybody to access all of human knowledge, not just an elite group of users. I think that’s wonderful, and that kind of thing is why I hope to be a part of helping even more people take advantage of all the things that computers, the internet, and the rest of modern technology enables.

And rest assured, plenty of people will still be interested in the computers themselves. I sure am.

Some resources I used when making my decisions are SmartVoter.org, DailyKOS, and the Union Tribune.

I’m a nonpartisan, so I got to choose what ballet I wanted. I selected a Democratic ballet. If you have a different ballet, then we’ll still at least have the propositions in common, so I’ll start with those.

Hours after my last class of the semester got out in San Francisco, I was stepping off the plane in Portland. My longtime friend and roommate, Mason, is from nearby Tigard, which is basically Portland but pretends it isn’t.

I had a blast running all over the “City of Roses” with Mason. I got to meet some of his friends, who I really think would fit in perfectly with my own crew back home and look forward to seeing again. Also, his family was about as gracious as hosts get.

Thursday

1. Flew into Portland
2. Met Mason’s family and his friends Donovan and Marcus
3. Hearty spaghetti dinner and birthday cake (belated celebration for Mason’s 21st)
4. Bannigan’s Pie House

Friday

1. Mason’s dad made breakfast
2. Walked around Washington Square Mall
3. A gallery/toys/lol place I wish I could remember the name of
4. Theo’s Sandwiches
5. A comic book shop I also can’t remember the name of
6. Saw MacGruber near Pioneer Courthouse
7. Mason’s dad made steak dinner

Saturday

1. Met up with my old pal Zach at Rocco’s Pizza
2. Powell’s Bookstore
3. Deschutes Brewery, then said bye to Zach
4. Met up with Marcus and headed to Saborro’s Sushi
5. Tea Chai Te
6. Joined by another guy named Jon on the way to Ground Kontrol Arcade Bar

Sunday

1. Elmer’s Diner
2. Saturday Market
3. Voodoo Donuts
4. Widmer Brewery
5. Max’s Brew Pub
6. Ordered from Pizza Caboose
7. Hung out with Donovan and Marcus

Monday

1. Another amazing breakfast made by Mason’s dad
2. Sushi Hana
3. House of Reptiles
4. Bounty Hunter Saloon
5. Bannigan’s Pie House again
6. Flew back to San Francisco

Portland was fantastic. It’s definitely on the list of places I can see myself living, and I can’t wait to go back again.

Today, I had my last English Composition: Creative Persuasion & Argument class. I turned in my final paper, and also did an optional presentation that was pretty funny.

The paper, “Thou Shalt Not Impose,” is a proposal argument about how religion has intruded into our government, why it’s a problem, and what specifically we should do.

Don’t forget that you can change the text-viewing options at the top of the page to make it easier to read.

The visual argument (teensy-weensy PDF) I presented is the same topic, but with my sense of humor poured all over it. Parts of it might not make sense without knowing what I was saying while I was presenting (you can probably figure it out if you read the paper), but that’s alright since I’m uploading it because it makes me laugh. I had fun with it.

The first paper is “Ethically Insufficient.” It’s an evaluative argument that highlights some moral problems with the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

The second paper will be uploaded next week.

Remember that you can change the text-viewing options at the top of the page to make it easier to read.

I love hearing your thoughts, so please leave a comment after reading.

Well, I’m happy that Flash isn’t going to be such a crutch anymore. If a concept for a site can be executed with HTML instead of Flash, it should be built in HTML about 99% of the time.

Right now though, a lot of developers don’t do that though because they like making things in Flash more than they like coding with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and so on. To them, the important thing is the final product, and if they think it’s easier or more enjoyable to do it in Flash, and if Flash is perceived as an acceptable standard on the web, then that’s what they’ll use.

But now that their sites flat-out fail on the iPhone, they’ll be forced to build in HTML again. Frustrating for a lot of developers, but in the long run, it benefits consumers since they’ll get faster-loading, less buggy web sites. In the short run, it frustrates consumers too, but there hasn’t been much of a revolt since Flash web designers have always been supposed to at least build really simple non-Flash versions of their sites.

The trouble is that there’s a lot more than just web sites on the web, so while I’m happy to see this put the upcoming HTML5 into such a great position, HTML5 is just for building web sites while Flash isn’t. All the other things that Flash can do—programs, games, interactive animations, and so forth—aren’t really answered for by HTML5 because that’s not what it’s for. Sure, programmers can build programs and games for the iPhone, but what a hassle for all the people who learned to be Flash developers. It’s easier to make programs and games in Flash, and when completed, they’d work on any device that had a Flash plugin without any more work. I don’t consider myself a Flash designer, but I do feel a little sorry for my friends who are.

I can’t help but think that the biggest winners are people with phones running Android, WebOS, and other alternatives to the iPhone. They get to have their cake and eat it too. They’ll enjoy all the benefits of a web that’s built more on HTML5, and if Adobe’s latest press releases about plug-ins coming soon for them are to be believed, they’ll also get to keep enjoying all the cool things that will only ever be made in Flash. In other words, they get to eat the fruits of Apple’s labor while still being pampered by Adobe. And so to them, I say enjoy it.

Display in browser – You can change the text-viewing options at the top of the page to make it easier to read.
Download PDF – Formatted oh-so-nicely in Adobe InDesign because I had some extra time.

There’s a lot of meat in this one, and every bit of it is honest. It contains:

1. The way I think and why I’m an atheist.
2. How we’re treated by others (and how I used to think of atheists too).
3. The questions that got me started on the road to atheism.
4. Meeting with my old priest about those questions.
5. What it felt like to go from proud Catholic to ashamed doubter to unashamed atheist.
6. Telling my mom.
7. How different friends reacted.
8. What I hope to prove to others.

I tried to make “Good Atheists” as interesting and insightful as possible, especially for people who aren’t atheists. Let me know your thoughts.