On The Road Again: Bidding Farewell to The Vato

Here we are, at the crossroads of history. For something like the three hundred twenty-third time in five years, my blog is moving, hopefully for good. The new address: http://joshhansen.net/

Weird. There's something strangely familiar about that domain name, but I can't quite put my finger on it....

You see, the recent economic downturn has hit the ¡Oye, vato! crew with unexpected severity. We've had to fire all the administrative staff, limit PR to Internet-only stuff, and cut the editorial department down to just one schmo with seniority. It's a dark time here at the office.

So, in order to economize and refocus the operation, we're combining forces with the folks over at the highly exclusive Ziggity Zam site to produce a new blog of epic proportions: monstropolitan. But yeah, the address is just joshhansen.net, the boringness of which required us to compensate with an exciting and incomprehensible name that sounds like some new Godzilla-flavored ice cream. What do we have to lose except our dignity?

Cutting through the pretenses, this new site allows me to combine my public blog (this one) with my family-only, private blog. Especially if they're my buddies or kinsmen, people who register and log in at this new site will get special privileges like access to posts I don't feel comfortable throwing out to the Internet in general ;-) But, for the most part, it's all public so you probably don't really have to bother.

I have, however, started putting up some of my poetry, and most of that will only be available to logged-in friends and family. (Like reading my poetry is really some great motivation to sign up!) I also plan to put up pages about school, research, and professional stuff. In that sense, joshhansen.net will be a lot like Josh Hansen: the online edition.

Hopefully I'll see you -- or, at the very least, you'll see me -- there.
P.S. All of the content (posts and comments) from this blog has been transferred over to the new one.

A Return to Blogism

My good friend Michelle pointed out with disappointment that I hadn't posted anything to my blog for months. I made her what I hoped wouldn't become a hollow promise: to post, or, in other words, to return to blogism. Well, Michelle, here it is.

The Past
I've been spending a lot of time lately transcribing my journal from my freshman year here at BYU. Some people think it's depressing to read old journals, and I admit that from time to time I do find that to be the case, especially if I'm really dissatisfied with the now. But in recent weeks it's been a very positive experience. Check out this long sequence (with some editing):

Saturday, October 6, 2001

General Conference!

Ben and Brandon came to Utah this weekend for General Conference, among other things. They had an extra ticket for the afternoon session, and their uncle Harold had an extra standby ticket for Priesthood session. So we got to go to both!

Waiting in line before the afternoon session, we met a girl from Pleasant Grove named Charlotte.... Anyway, we talked and after the afternoon session we ate dinner at a little diner on North Temple called Dee's. We laughed, we had fun - those precious human interactions that are both impossible and meaningless to quantify. Charlotte summed it up when she said, “You know, it feels like I've known you guys for years.” It's a pretty cliché line, but I totally agreed with her – it seemed like we were already friends, even before we met.

Before Charlotte left and we went to priesthood meeting, I got her phone number and cellphone number. Here's the final twist to the story: ... five minutes after meeting Charlotte, I just had this feeling that I should ask her to the Homecoming dance.

Tuesday, October 16, 2001

Quick update:

I asked Charlotte to Homecoming, which will be Friday night. Very stressful figuring this all out, but it will be fun.

I've been running with Michelle on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Tonight we were running on the track by the stadium and she told me about this guy who Christie is interested in. He is 25 and he's moving way too fast with Christie....

Friday, October 19, 2001

Tonight I went to Homecoming with Charlotte. First, I had to get some things done at school and otherwise, though. This morning I woke up later than I had planned, but I still wanted to take my Physical Science test before the American Heritage lab.

Charlotte was supposed to pick me up at 6:30, and Dan and Michelle, too. (On my recommendation, Dan asked Michelle to go to the dance with him.)

Charlotte ended up being about an hour late because I gave her 1460 N as our street instead of 1430 N. By the time we got to Macaroni Grill for dinner our reservations were long overdue, so we had about a 40 minute wait to be seated. In the meantime, the four of us walked around a little shopping center outdoors. Charlotte graciously blocked my view of “Victoria's Secret” as we walked past it. We meandered around Border's (a bookstore) for a while, then headed back to the restaurant just in time to be seated.

Our table was near a gas fireplace that was burning just enough to keep gas from building up around it. We could still smell the burner gas though.

On our paper table covering I drew in crayon a picture of a sun rising against a bold blue sky. In the bottom I wrote “Charlotte is my sunshine!” Of course, Charlotte had already written my full name in beautiful lettering on her portion of the paper. We cut our respective works of art out with my picket knife scissors and gave them to each other. (I left mine in the car though. I'll have to get that for her....)

After a delicious dinner, on, on to the dance! A crazy trip south on I-15 brought us to the Chillon Reception Center in Spanish Fork. We escorted our dates in the cool, gusty night to a large stone or brick building.

OK, pause. One thing I really noticed tonight was that because it was cold, when Charlotte hooked her elbow in mine it was like she cuddled in for warmth. When girls do that, and they cling to your elbow like you're a protector of sorts, it makes me so excited! It's amazing how awesome it makes you feel!

At the dance, Charlotte and I tried competing in the swing dance competition. We began dancing (quite well, in my opinion) but when the DJ started calling out couples' numbers we got confused as we didn't have one. So we weren't really that much in contention, but we had a great time – the swing music was very refreshing.

One time while we were dancing, I told Charlotte about my fears that she'd think I was stalking her when I called to ask her to Homecoming after just meeting her. She responded by saying that she didn't have to give me her phone number – that was optional. Good point!

After that dance – and some many great slow dances along with it – we rode home and said goodbye. Goodbye hug. Now a few hours later here I am.

I had an awesome night! I'm pretty sure Charlotte did too! Yeah! Woohoo! Victory! She had fun!

Saturday, October 20, 2001

Due to going to bed very late lats night, I didn't wake up until 11:30. That left me and everyone else in our apartment 2.5 hours to get ready for cleaning inspection. I was quite surprised how clean this place can really be if we work at it a little bit!

OK, the real exciting part of my evening was when I got home at around 9 o'clock I quickly got a message saying that Charlotte called. I called Charlotte and, after “Hello, how're you doing?” etc. she told me that the reason she called was to say “thanks” for last night. I said, “Oh, it was totally my pleasure. I'm glad to hear you had a good time!”

I also told Charlotte that I left the paper she gave me at the restaurant in her car and would like to get it from her – a convenient excuse for us to have to get together sometime, I say!

I really enjoyed talking to Charlotte tonight and look forward to seeing her again.

On the other hand, I need to be particularly careful not to get too serious with any girls before my mission.

Well, I'm off to bed!

Wow, I was bold! Nowadays I'm waaaay more hesitant to do crazy things like ask girls in lines on dates. Darn hard life experience has lowered my expectations for such craziness, which is a shame, as it seems like we really had a great time.

The Present
I recently started a poem that I want to share:

Dialectic

Behold the brilliant vista,
A world before us lays
Enswirled all by mist, a-
wash with golden rays.

Why weep ye now upon this sight?
You can't believe what see your eyes?
But it's here, it's real, it's true, it's bright!

I see naught but clouds below.
There is sunshine, but as well there's rain.
It's not that I refuse to know
The good; but that I've seen much pain.

But in spite of having seen much more,
Now I see much less than I could see before
And it chills me to the very core.

Light and dark:
They call, they know our names.
We cannot only to one hark
For our path will lead both ways.

Ah but what a sin you've found,
Such gloominess as you think on!
Turn your head up. Do not look down,
And soon your gloom will all be gone.

Think not of evil -- it is wrong.
Think not sad thoughts -- life's a song!
Think not -- or hearts will ache too long.

Naive - you don't understand.
In fact, I would say you're slightly blind,
You insolent, odious man,
For you think not of the mind!

It has full well the pow'r to crush you.
When you need to speak, it can quickly hush you.
To fight it is to watch it mush you.

To the friends at bitter odds
Then came another soul
Though by which lonely path he trod
We do not - cannot? - know.

He brought goodness, he spoke peace,
(Somehow knowing what our friends did seek,
But of which they never did speak),

saying

Peace is truth, goodness is real,
Not naively, but in actual fact.
It's obscured by the things that you feel,
'Times obstructed by the way that you act.

Thus you wander about in a cloud
Through your life as with a burial shroud,
But your goal will never be found.

Obviously the discussion amongst the friends and the inexplicably wise stranger is not complete, because the stranger has only barely introduced some of the themes of his position without really explaining it. There would have to be some exchange between him and the other two before a resolution could be brought about. Sadly, knowing my tendencies of starting and then abandoning poems, I don't really expect to see that happen. But the poem has already served its purpose of helping me to think through conflicting views of life -- both of which I have subscribed to at various points in my life, and both of which are clearly not optimal: the blindly optimistic view because it can't help anybody, the more pessimistic because it ignores great joy that really is to be found.

Oh, my sister recently introduced me to something that should be indispensable for anybody somewhat inclined to bookishness like myself: Shelfari.

The Future
I have one more month of school before graduating with a B.A. in Linguistics, and I'm terrified of facing The Real World once more.

Terrified? Not so much, actually. I was terrified. That was before I "just happened" to get some interesting ideas. They could be summarized as code, quill, and casa.

Code
Google recently announced the Android Developer Challenge, a contest for good new applications developed for their Android mobile phone platform. Entries for the first round are accepted from January 2 to March 3, 2008, which is right when I start to have nothing to do because of graduating and as yet having no job. It also so happens that the work I've been doing for Dr. Ringger in the NLP Lab for the past several months has almost all been in Java -- the primary language for Android development. Thus the relevant skills are very fresh at the top of my toolkit. And, once more, it just so happens that I've had an idea for a feature for mobile phones bouncing around in my head for almost the past year. Hmm....

Quill
I love to write. I think writing should be a part of my future. I've been getting lots of practice in the past year, and I'm getting to the point where I really just want to sit down and write a novel. You know, put in a couple of hours a day brainstorming, outlining, writing, revising. When will there be a better time in my life? I have no dependents, I have the luxury of doing so, why don't I just give it a shot?

Casa (Or maybe a better word is pueblo?)
I feel like I need to go home. This feeling came shortly before my older sister offered to let me stay at her house in Washington. So starting sometime after my rental agreement ends at the end of April, I'm going to do just that. I don't know if I'll ever return to Provo. I mean, I might, but I just as likely might not. Yikes! I've been living here for six years and have come to be very comfortable. But, at the very least for a few months, it's time to be home. And I'm such a romantic with regards to patria, my homeland. I really, really love it there -- there's something in me that only feels whole at home. I miss the wind, the smells, just those indescribable things that you would only fall in love with if you lived the first 18 years of your life there.

The End
No, not of my life, just of this post :-) It's been quite a grab-bag, eh? And there's so much more to think and write and say and do!

My life is quite good right now, and I can only say that it is such only as I really seek to do what I know the Lord would have me do. It's the seeming paradox of obedience: that as we voluntarily shift our activities from what we are naturally inclined to do, to what God wants us to do, we seem to be more able than ever to do the things that we really want to do. No, it's not always simple; but in being real the gospel of Christ naturally exhibits all of the complexities of the real world, and likewise turns out to have overriding patterns and principles that are very powerful.

'Tis true.

Point

I reproduce here an email I received in response to my previous post, “How to Tell Constructive Writing from Diatribe.”

Dear Josh,
After coming across your comments about our blog on yours, we thought you’d be interested in an update on the situation, namely that the author of Russia Blog has admitted that his post about the Wall Street Journal was inaccurate and misleading. We hope (actually, we expect) that you’ll post this e-mail as a comment to the post about us on your blog as it will undoubtedly be of interest to your group and provide us with a fair opportunity to respond to your statements about us and flesh out the factual record (be sure to let us know if you do).

The author of Russia Blog attacked the Wall Street Journal article about the Extremism Law in two different posts, the original and then a second piece about an alleged child sex ring in Siberia. He argued that Western press was failing to cover the sex story, wrongly focusing instead on issues of press freedom under the Extremism Law. However, he gave absolutely no source material about the Siberia allegations. Several readers called him on this, and he provided links to local news stories from the Siberia region. A reader then challenged him on his claim that the Western press should be reporting those stories, pointing out that since Russian newspapers are notoriously unreliable and the papers are issue were also quite obscure, expecting the Western press to take their accounts at face value and rush to print with them would have been irresponsible. At the very least, only national reports could be given credence, he argued.

The author responds by admitting he was wrong about the Journal and about several other points, and should have focused his ire elsewhere. Here is what he states in response to a commenter:

“I agree with the fact that the sources I listed are local. Also, I apologize for assumption that you “have” to trust RussiaBlog website. The readers who personally know me and other fellows of Discovery Institute do trust information on this website. I guess, what I am trying to say is, it’s not foreign media being guilty. There are think tanks and policy groups, which feed information to journalists and newspapers. The WSJ article was based upon information and report provided by Carnegie Endowment, which has a budget of over $7,000,000 a year for the work on Russia. 3 million goes to the Moscow office, the rest stays with the DC office. Khodorkovsky and Fund Open Russia [I don’t know for sure that the Open Russia link is right — ed.] have been generously supporting this organization.”

Unfortunately, however, the author of Russia Blog hasn’t yet posted a correction in the post about the Wall Street Journal, so a reader who focuses only on that item wouldn’t know about it.

As well, you might be interested to know that the author of Russia Blog works for a think tank which could be viewed as in competition with the Carnegie Foundation, so mixed motives might be present in formulating its analysis.

As you know from reading our post about the author (Yuri Mamchur), which was occasioned when this same commenter complained about Mamchur’s post to us (one of our self-appointed tasks is serving as ad hoc public editor for the Russia blogging community, so readers often bring this kind of concern to us), we exposed the fact that Mamchur grossly misrepresented the Journal’s position on the Extremism Law by failing to acknowledge a huge amount of reporting from other sources that had come to the same conclusion and citing/quoting NONE siding with Mamchur’s view. Our post provides a long list of quotes and citations to this material (this was the main reason we published it). We were very disappointed to see that your blog makes no reference to the citations and quotations set forth in our post, and no reference to the fact that Mamchur’s post is competely devoid of any citations to or quotations from published material agreeing with his view of the extremism law. This is a very gross defect in your comments about the issues, and we hope to see you correct it. (As an aside, you also seem to imply that Russia Blog is the work of only one person, which is not true, so you might want to correct that as well.)

Instead of fairly characterizing the source material offered by the two articles, your blog chooses to focus solely on the confrontational style of our rhetoric. We believe you’re entirely wrong to do so — but not, of course, because our rhetoric is free of “vitriol and attack.” We believe that the only reason Mamchur issued this half-baked correction was his knowledge that, if he didn’t, he’d face another assault on La Russophobe. We believe that radical political leaders from Malcolm X to Lenin to Rush Limbaugh to Don Imus have used the “vitriol and attack” style to great effect, and our blog has show exponential growth in the first few months of its short existence. Maybe you aren’t aware, as a white male, of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he said that people who asked him to change his tone and be less agressive and confrontational were more dangerous to the cause of racial justice in America than the members of the KKK. If you aren’t, you should read the letter before you suggest that there be only one style of writing allowed, or that only one style of writing can be effective. Even if our style of writing wasn’t effective, and had no role at all in prompting Mamchur’s admission (for the record, we believe the evidence is overwhelming that it is effective), we believe it’s a form of self-expression that should be nurtured the way all diversity is nurtured. Criticize us by all means but if, as is the case, you don’t recognize any of the positive aspects of our writing while pointing out what you believe are negatives, then we fail to see how your comments are, ironically, any different from what you accuse ours of being.

And there’s one other thing you ought to know about this situation, which you would have known if you had asked us (by the way, we’ll be happy to answer questions from your group about our post if you have any). It’s this: Some time ago, we published two articles on Russia Blog. Yes, that’s right, on Russia Blog. Both were written in the same vitriolic, attacking style that characterizes our blog, yet Russia Blog published them. The posts drew our customary high level of interest, for which Russia Blog publicly thanked us. Then we discovered some material published on Russia Blog by another contributor which seemed to contain questionable sourcing and factual assertions. We challenged the authors of Russia Blog to resolve the situation, and when they wouldn’t (at that time they were extremely reluctant to acknowledge any error) we broke off relations with them in protest (and outed the situation on our Blog in posts you can find in our sidebar section). To cover themselves, in a highly dishonest move (and a silly one, since our post outing the situation had already appeared), the authors of Russia Blog then buried a comment in one of their posts claiming that they had ejected us from their blog and totally ignoring our accuracy concerns. This claim was utterly false and was proved so, but we didn’t find out about it until someone notified us of the comment’s existence some time later (this too is documented on our blog and since you could have linked to the material, we’re disappointed that you didn’t).

So, in light of that, perhaps you can see why our post about Russia Blog was particularly acidic, most justifiably so. In the future, we’d advise you to check out a situation a bit more carefully before you rush to publish something that is, quite obviously, a half-truth.

However, we’re delighted to know that your group is discussing our post with interest and would be happy to receive more feedback from you. In particular, we’d be interested in knowing which post of the two your readers found to contain more source material and which they found more compelling to read. We acknowledge that if you truly gave a fair and careful reading to our post (which we doubt) then our style may have prevented you from appreciating the point it was making and from noticing the vast amount of citations and quotiations it contained, so that’s a valuable thing for us to think about. If we had it to do over again we’d do it the same way, since we don’t feel any correction from Russia Blog would have issued following your approach (we know Yuri a good deal better than you do, after all). But like all good writers we are always on the lookout for ways to improve our writing, so we always welcome constructive criticism. On the other hand, we think that if you were more familiar with the body of our work, both on La Russophobe and on other blogs, you’d see that in fact we can do your pet style too, and admire our range.

Very truly yours,
La Russophobe

Amigote vuelve a levantarse la cabeza fea

Ahhhhrrhrhrhrhhaarrrrhhhhhh! That’s the sound of a thousand joints popping and creaking as I stretch out my blogging muscles. Faithful reader (how can you be a faithful reader of a blog that never posts!?), surely you have observed that a burning VW van no longer graces the top of our beloved peasant kingdom. I did love that burned out terrorist conveyance, but our ways have parted like Hamilton and Burr, like Lenin and Trotsky, like a pizza delivery boy and his sweet pepperoni confections. Now the reign of the ostrich is upon us, and it’s time for another Blog Identity CrisisTM. No, I take that back. The last time we peered into the soul of The Vato, we unearthed an unbearable horror that ought not to afflict humanity again for another milennium.

Entonces… la cosa es que debo explicarles los acontecios de mi vida de los meses que he pasado sin blogear nada. First is that I passed my morphology/phonology class (Linguistics 427) with an A, giving me a 4.0 GPA in all of the classes in the major except for the Senior Seminar (490) which I should take in the fall semester. I’m very glad about that, and I owe the good grade very much to the Lord for helping me to stay sane and do my best, and to my study group, the legendary MorphoMasters.

Second is that the good ol’ español is suffering from serious neglect. Not a single class in the language since fall of last year! My little snippets of spanish in this and other posts are surely riddled with grammar errors that would make my 321 professor choke on his mole poblano (assuming he eats such delights with any degree of regularity.)

Third, I’m now retaking Computer Science 240, which I failed two years ago before I decided to bail out on the CS major. It’s going well so far, with two of our labs done, and the programming exam passed on the second try. The class is a basic course in C++ and advanced programming methodology. Being a great Linux user and fan, this is filling in an critical gap in my skills and knowledge. It’s a good feeling, although I doubt I’ll still be saying that when we’re in the throes of the reimplimentation of ‘make’ or the last project, a chess game. But at this point, with a big black mark on my GPA coming from my previous attempt at this class, I have absolutely nothing to lose (except for a bit of tuition money, of course). Hopefully all will go well!

Fourth, I’ve been following the situation in North Korea very closely, my main sources of information being the Korea Liberator and NKZone blogs listed in the “Liberation” section of my blogroll.

All my love to my friends and family, if I can ever persuade them to keep tabs on my blog!
- Josh

Wordpress 2

Hello! In addition to continued outrages in Russia and China, there’s another change going on that you should know about: ¡Oye, vato! is now running on Wordpress 2, just in time for the New Year!

Performancing - What’s the License?

The folks over at Performancing are offering a pretty nifty Firefox extension that allows blogging integrated into the web browser. Here’s a screenshot. But what license is it released under? Is it open source so I won’t have to worry about it suddenly not being free anymore? If anybody knows, drop me a line.

Amigote: a blog identity crisis!

Ok, I’ve begun the process of developing my own theme for this blog. It’s ancestry goes directly to the c3ro theme, and basically it is exactly the same… for now! The name of my version of the theme is “Amigote” which as we all know is Spanish for “big jerk friend” (approx. translation). I figured, Hey, the name of my site is “¡Oye, vato!” for as-yet unexplained reasons, so why not make the name of the theme be “amigote” for similarly unexplained reasons?

Which leads me to a much needed digression: it’s time that “we” here at “¡Oye, vato!” suffer our first blog identity crisis! Everybody cheer!

The first problems are, What the heck does “¡Oye, vato!” mean? and ¿do you always have to write the upside down exclamation point? From the lovely website Pachuquismos we get this definition of ‘vato’:

Vato: Used instead of “homeboy”, “dude”, etc.

So pretty much this blog could be retitled en inglés, “Hey, Dude!” Except that’s not nearly as cool and was the name of a ridiculous TV show on Nickelodeon a million years ago (does anybody else remember that?)

Moving on (without addressing the exclamation point issue)…. “We” “staff member(s)” here at ¡Oye, vato! are realistic about the amount of exposure our astoundingly insightful commentary on world events and the state of software receives; so far, we know of one semi-regular visitor: The Shark. You know, the fellow who brought you such moving posts as Russian squirrel pack ‘kills dog’ and… Anyway, «the editorial board» here, while grateful for the consistent high quality of The Shark’s contributions to the ¡Oye, vato! community, acknowledges that a greater diversity of worldviews and a greater number of eyes looking for psycho news stories are both in order. For this purpose, we are now listed with Technorati in an effort to increase The Vato’s sphere of influence.

So, as we wrap up this identity crisis, let’s review:

1. always refer to the first person singular using the first person plural

And that’s pretty much it. Thanks for tuning in, and sorry if the sarcasm was a bit too thick. Good night!