As for the MSST program itself, it’s going very well. Our first course, dealing mainly with the psychology of terrorism, is already over, and it was very interesting. Ron Krebs, the instructor for the majority of the class, handled the class exceptionally, with a very good balance of lecture and group activities, as well as engrossing readings. I and several of my classmates were interested in taking a course he is teaching in the fall, but the workload just isn’t something I could handle while working, planning a wedding, and electioneering. Our current two courses, on critical infrastructure protection and science and technology in security, are also very interesting. They are pretty broad courses with a number of guest speakers lecturing on their particular expertises (cybersecurity, biosecurity, food security, pandemic preparedness, and so on) and they will provide for a good base upon which we can expand in later classes. They are also great at scaring the crap out of us.

In a little more than a month, the summer semester will be over and I’ll be 25% done with my degree. Not bad. Next on the to do list: thinking of a capstone project.

• Current Mood: Hump day
• Currently Listening To: "Let It Bleed", The Rolling Stones

I moved my computer over, plugged everything back in, and turned it on. Windows 7 refused to boot, halting at a blue screen. When I tried to boot into safe mode, I could see that the problem was with a file called CLASSPNP.SYS. I found this thread with a similar problem, but unfortunately replacing the file didn’t help. All the other searches I did turned up people with the same problem, and no solution. Eventually, I had to reinstall Windows to get it working.

Fortunately, though, I had backups of all of my data, and so I didn’t lose anything, most importantly the paper I was working on for class. It did take several hours to reinstall all of my programs and get everything looking right again, but I didn’t have to spend many more hours recreating documents. Remember: always back up your files, and back them up to more than one place!

420 kilocalories (1 kilocalorie = 1 food Calorie, yes, it is confusingly stupid) is about 1.8 million joules of energy. My car gets around 22-23 MPG in mixed driving, so let’s pretend that my trip home uses 0.4 gallons of gasoline. One gallon of gas has around 125 million joules of energy, so my drive home uses 50 million joules. That’s over 25 times as much energy expended as biking, which is needed to move all that extra weight around.

Another fun fact: if it took 50 million joules of energy to bike home, that would require using about 4 pounds of body fat as energy. If our bodies used as much energy traveling as cars, people would have a far easier time losing weight! Considering how much waste heat would be generated in the process, though, we’d have to have huge radiators attached to our bodies somewhere.

• Current Mood: Sore
• Currently Listening To: "Red House", Jimi Hendrix

I got an Android-based Motorola Cliq XT from my current carrier, T-Mobile (an iPhone was out of the question, both because I don’t much care for Apple and because I hate AT&T with a passion). I was very interested in Android, being an open development platform as opposed to Apple’s closed system, and the Cliq XT seemed to be a pretty good choice, so that’s what I picked out when my contract was up. Aside from a few minor annoyances, I love it.

The phone itself is a good size, about the same as an iPhone. It doesn’t have a keyboard, only a touchscreen, which works fine. Motorola’s MotoBLUR, which takes your contacts from everywhere and puts them on your phone, took some getting used to. I typically did not have 400+ people on my phone, but when you add up Facebook, Twitter, my Google contacts, all of which I now have access to, it’s a lot. I miss having ringtone profiles, which means to put it on silent mode I have to turn the volume down all the way: this is a pretty big oversight, one that I don’t get considering that my past two stupidphones have had it. But it’s not a huge deal.

What’s there to love about the phone? Plenty. Widgets, for one. Calendar widgets (actually, two calendar widgets, one for work, one for Google calendar). Weather widgets. Time widgets. Widgets everywhere! Then, of course, the app store. Not as full as Apple’s app store, but still more than enough to keep me occupied. There’s Sportypal, which tracks where you go when biking or jogging via the GPS. There’s Google Sky Map for looking at the sky. There are silly apps. There are thousands to choose from.

I’ve only had the phone for a few days, so I’ve only begun to see how I can use it in my daily life. Given how much I’ve used it so far, though, it’s pretty clear that my life with a smartphone will be significantly different, and better, than life without it. I’m not sure if I can go back.

• Current Mood: Mesmerized
• Currently Listening To: "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", CSNY

The book itself was a pretty quick read. It wasn’t exactly the best narrative I’ve come across, but it worked well enough. The story does a pretty good job of explaining Wall Street culture, and though my own personal experience with those who work on Wall Street is very limited, it did back up my gut feeling about the general atmosphere. These traders and investment bankers truly are different from the rest of the world: I’d compare them to teenage frat boys who suddenly come into boatloads of money, with all that entails (it’s not being sexist to call them boys: least back in the 80s, it did consist mainly of males, and what few women traders existed had to fit in or be crushed). Frankly, given the recent tone-deaf comments from AIG workers who think they still deserve bonuses, it’s pretty clear that they still believe they are made of a different stuff. Are they truly deserving of the accolades they shower upon themselves, these people who claim that they make the machinery of the free market work? Lewis makes a pretty convincing argument that, in fact, they are not the brightest of the bright, the personification of the “invisible hand” that makes our economy run.

It was also very interesting to read all about the invention of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), the very same instruments that were at the root of the recent meltdown. The way that CDOs were used and abused in the 80s by Savings and Loans was, when you get right to the heart of it, much the same way that they were used and abused in the aughts. It was eery to read about the damage caused by CDOs back then, although that’s probably because a feeling of “We knew all this and didn’t do anything to stop it?!” would have been too depressing to acknowledge.

“Liar’s Poker” shows that investment banking can, at times, be exactly what opponents think it is: nothing more than a middleman that makes money by screwing over people who are unsophisticated. The book posits no solutions, however. For that, we have to look elsewhere

• Current Mood: Decrepit

First, a bit of background. I started thinking about continuing my education around four years ago. While not nailing doing a specific focus, I find the issues of data security and data privacy to be very interesting, from the gadgetry of security like encryption algorithms (On my bookshelf sits Applied Cryptography, written by a renowned security expert) to the legal aspects of collecting, storing, securing, buying, and selling all the data that corporations, governments, and other groups collect about people. I knew that I wanted to educate myself in that field, as it combined my interests while also being very desirable from a career point of view.

I looked at Masters programs in Information Security and Information Technology, but I found them to be lacking. For one thing, many of these programs were offered by online-only universities, about which I could find very little information. In addition, these programs tended to be far too tech-oriented: while I would be okay with learning how to better configure a firewall or utilize SSL, I wanted to learn about policy as well.

I thus went in the other direction completely, and looked at law school. Being a political science major/philosophy minor, law school seemed to be right up my alley. It would give me the legal and policy knowledge I was looking for, and could set me up for any number of careers. I even took the LSAT (twice!) and moved to Boston to attend law school.

What stopped me from attending law school was the significant downsides. First, there is the time commitment: almost three years. Second was the enormous expense involved, which would have put me into six figures of debt. Since I wanted to do public interest law or some other kind of non-lucrative position, the debt would have really put me under a lot of pressure. Finally, and most importantly, I didn’t really want to be a lawyer. I wanted to learn all about it, and use it, but I didn’t want to do all those lawyerly things that aren’t on TV but make up 90% of the job of a lawyer.

That said, the time commitment wasn’t too bad, but the expense and not really wanting to be a lawyer were the major issues. Had I been able to go to a good school on a full-tuition scholarship, that would have eliminated objection two (and, indirectly, objection three, because I wouldn’t be forced to try to be a lawyer to pay off my mortgage-sized debt). Unfortunately, although I came close to that scholarship, I just couldn’t pull it off. Blame my two Fs during my junior year of college.

That left me back at square one last summer, and I didn’t know what to do next. Then one day, Julia heard a story on MPR about the new MSST program. It sounded exactly like what I was looking for: a balance between the technical side of security and the legal/policy side. It threw in other areas of study that I find interesting, such as the human psychology of security. I went to an information session in November, and learned even more: that the program was one of its kind in the Midwest, that it allowed students to choose which areas of security to specialize in, that it would be taught by the best professors from all the schools at the U….in short, I was hooked. The fact that it was part-time, allowing me to work, and took only 14 months didn’t hurt either. I put in my application, had my interview, and I’m happy to say I was admitted.

It took me longer to find a program than I had hoped, but I think the end result will be worth it. Although I had become discouraged at several points in my grad school search, I kept on looking and didn’t lose sight of my goal to find the right program for me, not just a program that was close enough. Classes don’t start until June, but so far I feel safe saying that patience definitely paid off in this case.

• Current Mood: Full
• Currently Listening To: "The End", The Doors

I’ve also gotten sick of the health care debate in Congress, but if you really want to cut health care costs, use a neti pot. I started using one two years ago and haven’t been sick since. Some studies show that it isn’t my imagination that it actually accomplishes something. Give it a try.

• Current Mood: Full of holiday cheer
• Currently Listening To: "The Man In Me", Bob Dylan

We started off at WA Frost in Saint Paul, where we had an absolutely delicious dinner of scallops, filet mignon, and three different desserts, accompanied by a great pinot noir. The staff there was great as well, as they gave us a very nice table right in front of the fireplace after I tipped them off to what we were doing.

We then went to the St. Paul Hotel, where we had champagne and strawberries dressed up in little tuxes. The brunch Sunday morning was great too.

The wedding is set for October 9th, 2010 at the Minneapolis Public Library downtown.

Take those pesky double white lines. Drivers in Minnesota seem to believe that they need to merge onto the highway within 100 feet of the entrance ramp. Stopping, slowing down, disrupting traffic, it’s all okay to make sure you move over immediately, despite that half-mile long merge lane. Unsurprisingly, this is bad for traffic flow. So MnDOT decided to put double white stripes at a particularly bad location for this idiocy, the merge from 35W north onto westbound 94 before the Hennepin/Lyndale exit.

Seeing as how there is almost a mile between the entrance ramp and the exit, there is no need to either immediately move from ramp over to the left, or move from the left over to the lane that will soon exit. But do drivers obey the lane markings and multiple signs telling them not to? Of course not. They still try to make that merge within 10 yards, slowing down traffic for everybody. All my honking at these idiots does nothing.

Budget deficit? Please. New Vikings stadium? Piece of cake. All the state needs to do to raise as much money as it needs is put a state trooper at that ramp and ticket every moron who breaks the law by crossing over that double white line. You’d get one ever few second during rush hour. It’s a no-brainer, much like most Minnesota drivers.

• Current Mood: Chilly
• Currently Listening To: "As Tears Go By", The Rolling Stones