10.24.2006

Finally!! Saved sessions in emacs


For a while I have been bothered by the fact that I have these multitude of buffers with two, three, four, or more windows with specified sizes in emacs and whenever I have to go home and work from there, I have to open up all those files.. so I was wondering if emacs had something like the firefox extension for saved sessions (which I believe I first saw on opera a few years back). Turns out that emacs does have it.. and believe me, its a gift!! Funnily, the GNU Emacs manual for the latest version does not seem to include this,... I had to find the manual for an old version to find out how this works. Anyways, without much further ado, here's the page explaining how it all works.

Leaving Nebraska

[Looking east on 168th and Pacific (10/22/2006 3:04pm)]

Last weekend was my last as a resident of Nebraska.

I had mixed feelings: can't count the number of times I drove through this intersection hammered. Heck, Vishal even drove me home through this intersection once.

Here's one to all the good times. Glug.

A couple for Lincoln and UNL. Glug Glug.

And here's a few to the riverfront crowd. Glug Glug Glug Glug.....

10.06.2006

On our times

I was on a flight back to Omaha last weekend when I found a copy of the Oct 2 Newsweek in the seatback pocket. As is usual with most news these days, the ongoing wars in the middle east took up most of the space. But what caught my attention were 2 stories.

The first was about the resurgent militancy in Afghanistan and how after 5 years, things were actually getting more serious and nasty. But what really caught my eye was a chart that showed the amount of money being spent on the two wars and everything else surrounding them -- $540 billion. What was more ominous were the bars that signified the amount spent each year, and each bar since 2001 was increasingly higher than the previous. Can anyone count the number of better ways there are to spend $540 billion?

The second, more disturbing story was of two Vietnam war veterans, one of who served as a marine photographer. Both came back from that war with more mental damage than physical, but the marine was declared a 100% victim of post traumatic stress disorder. He came back to his wife and children and spent the next 20 years of his life getting in and out of psychiatric care. Finally, he started to attain a semblance of normalcy during the mid-nineties. But the wars in the middle-east, especially pictures from Iraq, brought his traumatic experiences back to fore and he was back in rehab. One afternoon, he called his old friend to come over and spend a few days together. His friend started off that evening but was tired and stopped at a motel for the night. That night, the marine woke up, hastily awakened his wife, pushed her out of the house, locked the door, and set himself on fire.

These new wars will ensure that there will be more survivors and sadder stories.

I read a lot about censorship in the middle-east, China, and even India. But I think the biggest act of censorship is actually happening right here -- in the US media. How many such stories are told on the 24 hour news channels and the primetime news bulletins? Not that they aren't happening, you just need to look really hard for them and the stories are all there,... sometimes on CSPAN or NPR, but that is it. It is as if people don't want to hear about the sadness that war brings.

People have somehow been sold the idea that the best way to tackle terrorism is by letting thousands die and let tens of thousands of others get maimed.

I was reminded of Howard Zinn quoting someone in Original Zinn -- his conversations with David Barsamian (a book from which I am going to quote extensively and which I really ask everyone to buy and read even if you may not agree with what I write here). He says that we are all just engineers, businessmen, plumbers, and doctors; few of us if any, are really citizens anymore. Citizens, he says, have the responsibility of keeping their governments under check, make sure that their leaders remain accountable to the decisions they have been elected to take, and organize and rebel when bad decisions are made.

What moved me beyond anything was the Afterword. Barsemian included the full text of the speech Zinn gave at Spelman College in May 2005. Zinn was fired from Spelman in 1963, where he was chair of the history department, for "insubordination." He had supported his students with whom he had been active in the movement against racial segregation. In May 2005, he was invited back by Spelman to receive an honorary degree and to give the commencement address.

Here are parts of that speech (I hope will motivate at least some of who read this to buy and read the whole book):
My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times, which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the United States. This was horrifying to me -- the realization that in this twenty-first century of what we call civilization we have carved up what we claim is one world into two hundred artificially created entities we call "nations" and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it leads to murder -- one of the greatest evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? ....

... My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. ...

Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, .... wrote in one of her first published poems:

It is true --
I've always loved
the daring
ones
Like the black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to
swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.
I am not suggesting that you go that far, but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly but also of nationalism; that you do what you can -- you don't have to do something heroic, just something, to join the millions of others who will just do something because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together and make the world better.

That marvelous African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn't do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn't;t do what black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun -- you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap. My hope for you is a good life.

-- Howard Zinn.