Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Nah, we just hate you

It’s always interesting to hear from new faculty members about “how it was” back at the university they used to work. Of course, this line of comment is typically accompanied with them complaining they’re not getting the same treatment here at San Francisco State University. To which I have to say they need to realize that our university is the second tier of the California public university system. We are not a UC. We’re not even a Polytechnic. Resources and support around here might not be as ample as that private institution they were at previously.

Besides, if their previous institution is so great in comparison, why the French did they leave in the first place? Let’s not forget: they applied for their faculty positions. That means they wanted to come to San Francisco State University. Perhaps some due diligence was missing if the quantity and quality of available resources (IT or otherwise) is proving insufficient. But hey, I get it: they’re probably getting paid more now than their old positions. It’s all about the money.

What really irks me is when certain new faculty get personal with it. As if our inability to fulfill their computing wants is a direct affront to their personhood. Right, because when the California Sate University system mandates certain requirements vis a vis computer security, it’s specifically targeting you. Same with us: we’re declining your request to dual-boot Windows and Linux because we hate you. Just you, not anyone else. (Obviously, my tongue is fully in cheek here.) Asking for my supervisor? Sure, I guess you like to be told the same thing twice by two different people.

As Michael Corleone famously says in The Godfather: “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.”

Shopping spree

Black Friday for our local Target store is not the Friday of Thanksgiving. Rather, it’s the weekend of move-in day before the start of Fall semester at nearby San Francisco State University. The horde of freshmen, with their family in tow (keepers of the credit card, obviously), attacking the shelves for their everyday dorm-life needs. That includes a SodaStream for one guy, and a whole vacuum cleaner for another person. The latter of whom is a guy I very much personality align with. A dirty room is simply unacceptable.

Whilst witnessing the purchasing madness going on (I was going to the Whole Foods at the same mall), I thought to myself, “Gee, I hope the crew at Target knew to stock up for this occasion!” “What if everyone wanted a coffee maker?” You see, our Target is not as big as the typical one. Under normal operation there is no way it can handle thousands of freshmen moving in and buying stuff. Heck, I can still remember going there not too long ago and was unable to buy the particular socks I wear. Not in stock.

The manager of that Target should be fired if the store were ill-prepared for Fall move-in day.

Seeing countless SUVs lining up towards the dorms with the entirety of a student’s living needs is a reminder that summer is almost over. I don’t know, it sure felt like a quick one to me. Work-wise it’s been bit of a lull since June, honestly. I am actually looking forward to having jam-packed days of action, and a bustling campus full of students and staff. The 2023-2024 school year is the first one since the official end of the pandemic, (Federal COVID emergency declaration ended in May of this year) so I am wondering if the campus can return to its former glory of packed buildings and halls.

Like back when I went to school at SFSU in the late aughts.

Stay off the weed

You know it’s nearing finals when the frequency of false fire alarms at the university library is increasing. These stressed kids are smoking joints to relieve the tension. Sadly for them, the library’s smoke detectors are sensitive and automatic. Students think it’s okay to take a few drags in the bathroom (and it’s almost always the bathroom) and then next thing later the whole building is evacuating. No gripes from me, however: I can use the walk outside from actually working.

Also during work yesterday I attended - via Zoom - my best friend’s dissertation defense. It’s kind of wild to do one of these things virtually, but it had to be done since one of his advisors is still working remotely (must be nice, says me who now goes to campus the full five days). That said, the ease of logging into Zoom meant people could attend without having to travel. It was nice to see basically the entire friend group taking time out of their workday to be there for our soon-to-be doctor. And congratulations, he is officially a doctor now!

Just not the kind that resuscitate people during medical emergencies. He should remained seated when they ask if there’s a doctor on a plane.

It’s getting to my favorite time of the year working on a campus: graduation season. Coming out of the pandemic I reckon this will be the first year that ceremonies big and small will return live on campus. Back in the day when I did AV support for some of the events, I always got tremendous joy seeing the students attain their degrees after years of hard work (and play, let’s be honest). It’s the culmination, the finality, and opening the door to the next stage, that’s so rewarding to see.

Looking forward to my best friend’s ceremony in about two weeks’ time.

I could use some chicken

Sometimes after getting home from work you just want to order delivery KFC and pig out. All because the work week has been hellaciously rigorous. I did exactly that today, as I was too tired to be bothered with making actual dinner. I unwinded to some music whilst waiting for the Grubhub driver to bring me the food from about a mile away. I did make a bowl of veggies though, because as a good Chinese boy, I cannot have fried chicken without some green stuff (not that kind) to balance it out.

Indeed it’s been a tough week at work. It’s the first week of fall semester on campus, and us IT folks are just running around trying to take care of everybody. Soon as we finish one thing, another is waiting for us, likely already overdue. Good news is the work day is finite: I put in my eight hours then I can go home and not think about it until the next day. Still ruminating over work stuff after dinner? That can’t be me!

San Francisco State is back to 75% In-person classes now, and it’s absolutely weird to have a bustling campus again after two and a half years of relative ghost town. The throngs of people during the hours when everybody is either getting out of a class or heading to class (such as the two o’clock hour) is amazing to see once again. Also amazing to see is a bunch of bible thumpers returning to the campus quad to call the rest of us devil worshippers. A student wearing a short skirt was simple walking by and got called a slut.

You can say things are back to normal. The only thing that isn’t is that SF State still has an indoor mask mandate. Though even that is scheduled to go away after next week, predicated on COVID case loads in San Francisco continuing to stay low and mild.

What’s better after a hard day than fried chicken? I struggle to think of anything else that isn’t sex.

Waiting for class

On my daily walk to work, I would see students parked along each side of 19th Avenue. Now that 50 percent of courses are back in physical session, there’s quite a few of them every morning. I would see the students sit in their cars whist waiting for their classes to start. It brings me back to my own college days. Instead of 19th Avenue, I would park at the other side of campus on Lake Merced Drive. I too have to get there early in the morning just to snatch a parking spot.

But I wouldn’t sit in my car to wait for classes to begin, however. Partly because I didn’t have a smartphone until my fourth year of college. The kids these days have it easy! Super fast Internet device at the palm of their hands. I too would chill in my Toyota Corolla if I had an iPhone back then. Instead I went to the library or the student union and sat there, listening to music on my iPod. Remember those?

Speaking of music, a few days ago the streaming service Spotify had an outage. One of my friends texted the group saying he now has to listen to his own MP3 collection, which only dates out to around 2010. I of course don’t have such problems. Unlike everybody else, I have not made the transition to streaming. To this day I continue to buy and download my music, stored completely on device. Not as a defense against Internet outages, but more like I’m a digital hoarder and prefer to have my curated collection.

179 gigabytes and counting…

But that’s the thing with streaming: there’s always this theoretical possibility that the services will go out of business and then you wouldn’t have access to your music anymore. Or your TV shows and movies. Videos I tend to watch once and forget about it, so losing access wouldn’t hurt. Music, however, I listen to constantly every single day. Therefore I would like some modicum of insurance in case shit happens. So long as I can still buy individual songs and albums on the iTunes Store, I will continue to do so.

Let's get on with it

I think it’s time to treat COVID like the seasonal flu: a virus we simply live with normally. Look at how Britain has opened back up completely about a month ago - zero restrictions - and they don’t seem to be any worse off. Right now, it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated: look at the data out of Texas and Florida. With vaccines widely and freely available in the United States, the choice is merely personal if someone wishes to die.

Those of us who are vaccinated, who have followed every guideline and restriction since the start of the pandemic, are getting rather tired of it. I know it’s only temporary, but to have to show ID and vaccination proof just to eat inside a restaurant is kind of insane. Breakthrough cases are ultra rare for those who got the shot(s), and at worse we likely to only feel some flu-like symptoms. Let us go back to our previously normal lives!

San Francisco State University - with a Fall semester on-campus population that’s 98 percent vaccinated - still inexplicably doesn’t allow public indoor eating. All the campus eateries are open, but you’d have to bring it outside to eat. This is fine and good during this time of the year when the weather is warm (for San Francisco anyways), but what about when it gets cold? I don’t see any heat lamps. What if it ever rains again? Where are the students to eat their lunch?

It all seems a bit draconian given nearly everyone on campus is vaccinated. It’s not the university’s fault: local policy dictates people have to be vaccinated to eat indoors. I suppose SFSU don’t have the resources to perform checks at the entrances to places like the student union building. Much like our local McDonalds, it’s cleaner and simpler to forgo any form of indoor dinning, and do carry-out only.

I hope the rules on that change soon. San Francisco itself is 80% vaccinated! It’s time to get on with it.

Last week of September

It is the last week of September, and yet it still feels as if the autumnal season has yet to sink in. If you’d ask me back in March - when this whole coronavirus saga began - that we’d still be in amongst the chaos come the Fall, I probably would’ve laughed in your face. Remember a time when we all thought life would go back to normal come the Summer months? Well, that has come and gone, and the horrible situation of nearly a thousand deaths a day in this country remains ever present. If it hasn’t sunk in already for you: this is going to take a very long time.

Indeed, my place of employment - San Francisco State University - have already declared Spring classes to remain remote. Some would say this is a bit overcautious, but I think in time the decision would prove to be correct and appropriate. It goes to show that the arbitrary end of this calendar year is not some magical boundary line between the mess of 2020 and the world returning to normal with the ushering of a new year. It’s rather easy to imagine and believe there’s only three more months of COVID to go, the same sort of thinking that motivates people to make New Year's resolution. If the past six month is any indication, the beginning of 2021 will be much of the same.

I reckon this quagmire we are in won’t be completely solved until there is a vaccine. In the meantime we’ll continue to be stuck in this sort of half-open, half-shut limbo.

That’s not to say we should lose hope or be pessimistic. Going through life with an optimistic mindset that things will improve is an immensely better way to live than the opposite. However, blind optimism is not the solution: you will only find disappointment if you hold onto the idea that this coronavirus situation will be over soon. That optimism will turn into cynicism and despair, because eventually you’ll get tired of waking up disappointed the world hasn’t yet return to normal.

This a reminder very much for me, by the way.