Trinity should be ashamed of itself

“Trinity should be ashamed of itself”.

These are not my words. These are the words of Richard Stallman, the famous and most vocal person advocating the need of free software in the world. Why did such a person of international fame, who played a critical role in the development of GNU/Linux (do not simply say Linux, he’ll come after you) say such unkind or rather strong abusive words towards the reverent and the most unwired campus, Trinity University? His arrogance is definitely a good candidate to be blamed on. Please take note that he said this phrase not once, not twice, but for a total of maybe five times or possibly more. The source of his wrath in this case was neither Microsoft nor George W. Bush (for whom he had special distaste), it was our ITS.

It is no secret that ITS (Information Technology Services) of Trinity University maintains a log of the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses each Trinity student uses while surfing the web. (I am not sure if ITS maintains a record of even the websites that each student visits.) Richard Stallman fiercely debated against this policy of Trinity University to keep a record of each and every student whenever they surf the internet and rendered it as acting against the spirit of an educational institution. Richard Stallman stated flatly that by doing so, Trinity University indirectly hands over those students over to the RIAA (if such thing exists, he said). He further said that Trinity University is not obliged to keep any record about the students’ web behavior. Trinity University should be ashamed of itself since it prevents the rightful share of information since software should be free. He said that peer-to-peer sharing of information is good since sharing information acts for the welfare of humanity. By preventing this, Trinity University is not doing a rightful thing.

His arguments do carry some weight since many of us would agree that sharing of information is not bad and also that software should be free instead of making us pay ridiculous amounts of money. Richard Stallman rightly also pointed out a very critical point that every institution should consider about the use of proprietary software that are provided at a subsidized rate to the institutions. He aptly linked this to the case where drug dealers first give out drugs for free but once the drug-in-takers become dependent, they start charging high amounts of money. The main motive of proprietary software developers is to make students dependent so that once these students enter labor market, the same software can be sold to fetch high prices. Those professionals who gained familiarity with only that particular software as a student would have no alternative but to buy it through their company paying exorbitant prices. These ideas must have struck some minds earlier too; he acted to remind us of that gloomy possibility.

Richard Stallman presented himself as a staunch supporter of free software and his commitment to this can be seen from the fact that he did not hesitate to humiliate Trinity University in its own ‘home ground’. His arrogance and despise for monopolies like Microsoft and Apple emanated from his every sentence, explicitly or implicitly. But I was rather surprised that he discouraged us from using Google’s free word processing software, Google Doc. He was too hard bent on GNU/Linux but he was very passionate about free software ethics nonetheless. It was very sad to see that man of his stature auctioning GNU mascot, starting from a bid of 40 dollars which no one wanted to buy even for 40 dollars. With his talent, his few programming lines would be worth few hundred dollars in the least, so why would he spend time selling $2/$3 stickers, $20 mascots or bidding $40 mascots which no one wants to buy?

Winner of the Losers

Obviously, I am trying to be sarcastic here. I repeat to warn that this should in no circumstances be interpreted as humor. 7 votes. 7 more votes were all it would have taken to get me elected as an ASR Senator. And yes, I would be lying if I would say it’s fine and that it was just an election. I was very passionate about this ASR and I felt strongly about the issues that I had raised.

I do not know how much legitimacy or authority I will have as a common Trinity student but I would like to push for my ideas nonetheless. The severe inadequacy of institutional positions at Trinity is one major issue that I would want to bring to the attention of the concerned authorities. I am not very sure if this kind of dichotomy between institutional positions and federal work-study positions exists at other colleges or institutions too, but I would be surprised if it did. I remember randomly surfing through some of the elite universities websites to browse about summer opportunities and I had stumbled upon their human resources websites where several students were wanted for various kinds of positions and none of them made any distinction about the citizenship of the student. What conclusion I drew (it could be an immature and early one though), was that such universities must have decided to stick to their equal opportunity ethics and allocated their institutional funds for hiring students without capping the maximum amount.

To keep these kinds of workings internal is a good decision in many ways. First, the university shows that it truly values equality and equity. Trinity’s human resources website proclaims in bold letters, “Trinity University is an Equal Opportunity Employer.”
I stared at this statement for few seconds and started thinking about it. True. It is true that Trinity does not discriminate against students while employing them but the number of positions available under institutional aid acts as a disguised discriminatory force. Foreign students have to compete fiercely to get those scarce positions so, how can this be justified as equal opportunity? To access the available institutional positions at Trinity, you would have to go all the way to the bottom of the Human Resources website which lists 4 or 5 positions at most compared to scores of federal-work study ones. The nationality of a student determines the chances of getting an on-campus employment more than any other factor such as how well prepared or how suitable one is for that particular work.

Anyway, let’s hope the authorities will receive this matter positively and things will change for better.

Running for ASR Senator

Politics is dirty, but I am not.

I have a good piece of news to share. I am running as a candidate for Association of Student Representatives Senator. I always wanted to run for an election and go through this election euphoria. I have very strong interest in politics; my dad too knows this since it is clearly written in my ‘janmakundali’, a document that learned scholars prepare for every person based on the position of heavenly bodies such as stars and planets. And this document was prepared when I was less than a year old. I know what you are thinking now. I do not believe so much in it but coincidentally or otherwise, all of the events mentioned in that document seem to be coming true one after another. I do not want to talk about it, it scares me; my dad believes in it very strongly.

When you get a lot of attention, you know how uneasy of a feeling it is, don’t you? Well, when you run for an election, you become the center of attention and when you walk by your election poster and see other people looking at it, lots of things run in your mind. This is a wonderful feeling. It does not really matter so much to me whether or not I win. Of course, if I win, it will be great, my ‘self-confidence will be boosted’ and all, but if I don’t win, I will not be dejected. For me, running as a candidate and standing before everyone to let them know that I am there too, means as much as winning does.

 I am strange, strange in the sense that when I feel about something, I feel very strongly about it and want things to happen in certain ways. For instance, when I see a device, a simple or common one such as trash bags and spot designing errors or can see that the design can easily be improved, I feel sorry for all the people who use those trash bags and feel a little dissatisfied with the engineer who possibly designed it. I want to fix things if they need to be fixed. I want to change things if they are not in the best of their forms. My strong desire for working to make things better came from the sorrow situation of my own country Nepal. Right now, it is in a situation as bad as it could be. Lots of things need to be fixed and improved. New and rational policies need to be formulated. A leader needs to be born. Some of educated Nepalese need to sacrifice their fantasies to become leaders. I will need to step up front. I will need to start this from Trinity.

If you want, you can check out the Facebook Group Vote Puru as ASR Senator

Life in a Mess

If I were to stare at the mirror for half an hour, I would still be surprised with the way my life has been moving in the last few weeks. The way I have been acting, I will tell you, it is not me. To make the long story short, my life is in a mess. I have been suddenly pounded by tonnes of assignments and projects. It is not that others do not have assignments, the thing is whenever I have a choice for my paper or project topic, I often choose the one which I have absolutely no idea about or is too hot to handle or difficult to get information about. For instance, for my economics country project, I chose Nepal, my country. At first, the choice seemed obvious to me but then later as I set down to do research, I realized retrieving information about Nepal was more difficult than I had thought. There are very very few books on Nepal at Trinity Library, one I found on Nepali politics was from 1970s. Data collection in Nepal is not very scientific and is done mostly by UN groups, the government rarely collects any statistics.

You would not believe that I missed a lot of deadlines for my assignments. I do not have any record for doing so. Even though GPA does not mean much to me personally, I give a heck lot of attention to it since that is how everyone judges a student’s performance and knowledge. And missing exams, which usually happen only thrice a semester could permanently strip you of the prospect of landing an A. If there is any class that I hate so much then it is Ancient Science & Technology. No, Calculus III comes second. And, Macroeconomics comes third. Wwww…is there anything that I even like? It seems no. I am a complainer. I don’t like this system. I want to be on my own and read and study what I want. What do I want? If you ask me what is my favorite subject or discipline, my blank stare at your face might make you uneasy but yeah that is what I would do. I love a lot of disciplines. I have interest in politics, international affairs, stock market, rural and urban planning, all physical sciences, mathematics, philosophy, psychology and many more. I want to gain knowledge and read about all of these areas but no college education, not even those like Brown which do not have a mandatory Common Curriculum requirement would cater to my ‘unusual’ style. I guess, for this you could call me a complainer since I am very hard to be pleased.

I kind of drifted away while writing this. I wanted to talk about the mess my life is in right now. On Monday, I decided I would get some work done on my Ancient Science & Technology Project, which is supposed to be about a dozen pages long and so skipped the class to be in the library. A consequence of bad ‘karma’ you can call it, an important exam was scheduled and an assignment was due the same day. I had not marked my calendars and so I had no idea about these. When I think about it now, I can’t tell if skipping the class did more harm than good since if I had gone, I would have failed it, and that’s for sure. You know who wrote de Architectura Book VI? I didn’t know. What’s a sambuka? What am I talking about? Just few of the terms common in my Ancient Science & Technology class

Things are moving too fast. I am working on my Writing Workshop Paper which is about Federalism in Nepal. I chose this topic because it was interesting and I wanted to know more about it since this issue of federalism is being discussed in the Constituent Assembly in Nepal and is the hottest debate in Nepal right now. I could have easily got away with an easy topic like abortion, gay marriage, capital punishment and other common topics that we have been writing essays on from secondary school. But no, I want to learn about new things. Very Inspiring, I’m impressed you would falsely say. Now, I have got to do a lot of research about this topic. And guess what, there is not a single book in our library on this topic. With the inter-library book loan program that directs you to a page where you have to fill a long form that I do not like, I am all left to the internet. Hope Google Scholar helps. I LOVE Google. Google is such a sweetheart, the BKG (Big Kind Giant); Microsoft is such an evil monopolist and Apple is only for certain type of people, those who can afford big bucks. (As you can tell, my opinions on Microsoft and Apple have nothing to do with this article. I just wanted to say it out.)

Who is the Owner of the Ruler?

Saturday Morning. I walked towards Murchison Computer Lab, a 24 hour quiet study area with my Vector Mechanics for Engineers and Calculus Transcendentals, each of which are nowhere less than five pounds to spend the next several hours computing and understanding nonsense mathematical equations and 3-D graphs. Not having a graphing calculator aggravates the mathematical pain. Unlike last Saturday, the study lounge was relatively vacant and much peaceful, there weren’t any couples there. At least that appeased the mathematical torture that was to come. No sooner than I unpacked my bags and sat down to work on Calculus first, my eyes fell on a shiny metallic ruler left unattended on a table beside me. My initial reaction was a sense of annoyance to these careless kids of rich parents who have plenty to spend on Trinity's outrageously priced stationery items at Barnes and Nobles Bookstore. Next to that table was a pencil that was left behind. Every time I walk in a study lounge, I know I am in the United States because something is left behind and no one cares.

My initial annoyance towards the careless owner of the metallic ruler changed to an uncomfortable feeling when a little unnerving realization came to my mind about how much it resembled my own metallic ruler. I checked my bag and saw the ruler was missing from its usual place. The insinuation was not positive and I didn’t want to believe that the ruler was mine. I did not have a history of carelessness. My memory added some details by recapping the two days earlier scene when I had walked in and had sat on that same table to do my economics assignment. Obviously, I had used the ruler to draw graphs that make little practical sense to me. I checked my bag and realized pencil, eraser, sharpener, few pens and other items were intact but one item was missing- my metallic ruler. It was hard for me to believe that even if I had left my ruler, it would not have remained there for 2 days; it was shiny enough to lure the laptop-thieves if luck had not been on his/her side and could not get his/her hands on any laptop. It was an unpleasant feeling that I could have been careless enough to leave it there. Furthermore, it was a quirky feeling to lay my hands on a ruler that been left behind in a study lounge. My dorm is the second closest dorm to Murchison Study Lounge and it aided my otherwise threshold motivation to go to my room and see if I have left my ruler in the drawer.

It added to my embarrassment when I realized that the ruler was mine. I felt stupid and childish for making generalizations about careless people being rich, I was careless but I am far from rich. I learnt a lesson. And I am glad I am at Trinity since I learn something every day.

Dream. Inspire. Achieve.