Author Archives: Alan V

Wow

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My respect for Obama grows by the day.

This one in particular is awesome. It basically forces all presidents (former or current) to consult with the AG before taking executive privilege.

There are also some orders about FOIA that return the interpretation to the Clinton days, except this time with an executive order backing it. All of this in addition to the stuff you’ve probably already heard about, such as banning torture by the CIA, closing Guantanamo, and restoring funding to abortion-friendly institutions.
Also stuff about lobbyists serving on his staff (they can’t) or former staff members lobbying former colleagues (they can’t).

Consider me impressed.

Edit: Here‘s a good summary.

Public meme

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Edit: Life has received an update. Just FYI.

The first three people to respond to this will receive a photograph, dedicated to them. It could be of anything, but it will be something that reminds me of you, that is symbolic or meaningful in some way.

The catch is, you have to post something similar to your journal, tailored of course to fit your particular area of ‘expertise’: poetry, prose, art, whatever floats your boat.

Please include an email address in your comment, or somehow otherwise get an email address to me, if you are one of the first three. I’ll post smaller versions here, but I want to email you the full version.
Also, it is possible I will not get to these in the next week, as I am on release duty this weekend.

Photo Firsts (Keith)

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Here’s my first photo of Keith: November 13, 2004

It was taken before I knew him.
I suppose it makes sense because our lives never intersected (he was a MechE at the time and lived in Morewood) until Tim introduced us at one point when he was walking in the hall as we were going to Tim’s for games… and also because this was the first Kiltie game that I went to.

Also, life has gotten a small update… I filled in the missing gaps in the “August 14 and earlier” dates. Probably not something you’re terribly interested in (although David at Michael’s surprise birthday party is rather awesome). I’ll try and work forward ASAP so there’s more CMU photos posted.

Photo Firsts (Al-Tim, Tim, Greg)

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I took a detour from tagging CMU today to get to the non-school (AKA not CMU nor PPA) folders. Since I’m now doing a chronological posting of things in life, there’s a chance I’ll miss dates that haven’t been tagged yet if there are photos outside the CMU folder. These would be annoying to go back to later, thus I’m going to finish up all the remaining folders before going to tag CMU junior year.

Got a lot of tagging done today though. Managed to tag 5001 photos, for a total of 60238. I’m up to “MsEarlSeniorParty” alphabetically. It was rather interesting going through folders of photos from middle school (most of which I probably haven’t looked at since then) and realizing how few names I remember now. I’ll have to pull out a yearbook at some point to tag them properly.

Since there are people actually following life, I’ll post on here the next time I make an update. With any luck, I’ll have updates to it again starting the end of this week.

In any case, today’s post is the first in a series of “first photos of X” where X is a person. Yay for tagging software making it easy to do random things with your photos! At some point when I’ve tagged everything I’ll post a graph of photos by month and then by camera, for curiosity’s sake.

My first photo of Al-Tim: September 2, 2004. Sitting outside the Physics I for Science Students room before recitation.

My first photo of Tim: September 10, 2004. Sitting next to me in 15200 lecture.

I love how I have a photo of Al-Tim 8 days before having a photo of Tim, despite not knowing Al-Tim for a long time after knowing Tim (which I believe would be after the CS halloween party when we went back to Tim’s room for games).

My first photo of Greg: September 9, 2005. During the KGB Underground Tour. Can you spot him?

Maybe you can spot him easier in this one… this would technically be my second photo of Greg.