I apologize for the irregularity of this blog entry. I make a point to have a blog post up every week by Tuesday at 12:01 in the morning, and the most reliable way to accomplish this is by trying to update every Sunday evening, and updating Monday morning or Monday evening if the situation does not allow a Sunday update. I say this now because as a PhD student I am prone to being swamped in quality, rewarding work, with a little drudgery here and there, and as such will sometimes not meet my unofficial Monday morning posting time that I know many of you have come to expect.

This past weekend I have been, actually, eschewing my schoolwork in order to meet a demanding research group deadline. I've been doing this for about a month now, although it wasn't until this weekend that I genuinely did no schoolwork.This is not to say that I am neglecting my homework. I am fully aware of when my homework will be due and what I will need to do to prepare for it, but for the moment my priorities are elsewhere. We have a Leonardo study happening on the twenty-sixth, for which we need to go from essentially scratch (in December we finally caved to the education folks' demands for a completely different UI than the one they wanted before) to five fifty-minute guided activities on Electricity and Magnetism. I have been building the infrastructure to support and present the question-and-answer and text portions of these activities on my own while my colleague Andy works on the interactive labs and our erstwhile team leader Rob is occupied with an entirely different project.

Despite working double, sometimes triple-time on this infrastructure, I'm very pleased with my work, which helps me not to become frustrated with the myriad issues that slow me down. I may mention that for the first time ever our education team's Mike has been genuinely pleased with how the product is turning out. He also expressed how impressed he was that we had managed to get so much done in so little time. Well, yeah. When you have to rebuild a system from scratch andpopulate it with five hours of education content in a month and a half... well, you do.

This week I picked a pseudonym for myself. "Black Bear" is good. Bears are my favorite animal. Unfortunately I already knew a Black Bear on Facebook, so that was out. "I have to pick something original," I thought. So, I picked "Red Fox," which I later learned was the pseudonym of hundreds of other people on Facebook. It was too late by then, so Red Fox was born.

If you haven't already friended Red Fox on Facebook, do so. Soon enough all evidence of Samuel Leeman-Munk will be supposedly deleted, and I will be one step closer to freedom from corporate surveillance. Not that it's much of a step. Especially after having to announce it to the whole world who Red Fox really is in order to even get people to "friend" me, I suspect I'll only succeed in throwing off the dimmer of computer programs. Nevertheless, inspired by Su... er, Hatchi Slim's pseudonymous Facebook rebirth, I feel liberated by my own. Apparently I've inspired someone myself. If you've been paying attention on Facebook, you'll know who. Otherwise, I'll mention his new name when he's chosen one. Here's hoping for another small mammal.

On the week of January fifteenth 2012, Hell froze over. Cats slept with dogs, huge corporations, slackers, libertarians and socialists joined forces, and major republican candidates became briefly indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton.In one brief turn of the Earth the lobbyist chokehold on power in the United States government vanished like so much smoke, television news conglomerates' pulled on their puppet strings to find them dangling loose, and for the first time in memory for most of America's future leaders, Democracy was ruled by the people.

What happened to cause this? Wikipedia, the fifth most visited site on the web, blinked. People trying to find out, for example, the gestational period of a dog were informed what was happening in congress and given means to express their opinion. That opinion, as it turned out, was that Wikipedia in particular, and the Internet as a whole, was too valuable to endanger. Plenty of other people were informed by other sources and protested for other reasons, but the end result was that the vast, immutable government bureaucracy flipped on its head.

After the Republican Candidate Mitt Romney said of SOPA, "The law as written is far too intrusive, far too expansive, far too threatening to freedom of speech and movement of information across the Internet." Something I would never have imagined a republican saying. Whether it's hot air or not, it was nice to hear him saying what he thought I wanted to hear for a change of pace.

All it took was waking people up. The difference between this and the Arab Spring, rather one of many, is that the waking up didn't require setting anyone on fire and didn't provoke a violent repression. That is the beauty of the non-violent protest in the United States of America. I love this country, and I love the Internet.

Chances are good that this was just a beautiful fluke - the Internet companies notifying the Internet users that the Internet needs protecting - something on which they can all agree. Maybe, though, after this wake-up call, some people will stay awake, and join the fight - the nonviolent fight, that is. Who knows?

This entry is delayed pending approval of political content. For those of you new to the scene, The Shodor Foundation provides my webspace, and their internet connection is provided by the federal government, and is not to be used for politically partisan purposes. I'm a very politically partisan person, so this results in a lot of self-censorship, but with the events of this week, I'd like to make sure I really, truly, definitely can't say political stuff on my blog.

Just yesterday I discovered that there is a Whole Foods Market directly up the street from me. It's markedly further than Food Lion, and the route is primarily uphill, but it's more or less a big chain version of Weaver Street Market. When I arrived I spent a few minutes just walking around the store basking in the quality of the products. Then I got about .4 pounds of a Brie equivalent and ate a regular-size supper there to celebrate. The total came to a somewhat shocking $20.

This expensive meal reminded me that I've been meaning to start keeping track of my finances. Fortunately, my bank (Bank of America, although I plan to switch to the State Employee's Credit Union soon) has a built-in expense tracker complete with automatic categorization. The following summary is based on a pie chart of my last six months of spending. Vastly dominating at 56%, as they should, are my "other bills" which represent my housing costs and a few fees my assistantship doesn't cover. Groceries are next, since I eat twice as much as a normal human being, it only makes sense that my grocery bill is 15% of my total expenses. Entertainment is next at 5% of my expenses, but don't be too alarmed (if that's something that might alarm you). For some reason Bank of America includes textbooks and ATM withdrawals from Wolf Village's ATM as entertainment expenses, so really entertainment falls closer to 2.5%. Restaurants are a mere 4%, which is good, I think. "Home Maintenance," which is what Bank of America calls bicycle maintenance, accounts for 2% of my budget. In any case, I hope that the State Employees Credit Union has as helpful an expense report when I switch.