… can now be seen to the right on the front page, or via this link.

The Times-Picayune reports something I noticed on my Friday trip to the Uptown post office: streetcars are being tested on the line between Lee Circle and Napoleon Avenue, although apparently not without minor hiccups. Alas, although there’s been a little visible work around Tulane, the odds of me still working there when the streetcars make it to Audubon Park seem slim.

What I did today:

• I spent most of the morning reading Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Recruiting by Bruce Feldman, which is Feldman’s behind-the-scenes account of spending a year on the recruiting trail with The Orgeron and his staff. You can almost read it as a sequel to Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, which featured the other side of the process—Ole Miss’ recruitment of genetic freak Michael Oher. Definitely a good read, although it’s the second time I’ve seen or heard the term “grayshirt” without a definition.
• I went into the office to finish working on the second batch of job applications for next fall; I am now caught up except for one job I can apply for without a post office visit. The Spreadsheet of Death™ is now up to 53 entries. I still need to email my contacts at a few places to let them know applications are on the way. Maybe, after four years, having cultivated a social network in the discipline will finally pay off—although I’m not holding my breath.
• I went to the post office to mail all of those applications. The USPS is now $30 richer. I suppose it (and killing off most of an “off” day) beats making Interfolio $130 richer, though.
• I took my 7-month-old refurbished MacBook in for a warranty repair at CompUSA. Until yesterday, I didn’t even know there was a CompUSA around New Orleans. I also picked up one of those snazzy new Mac keyboards.
• I watched last night’s Patriots/Bengals game at between 20× and 60× on my TiVo. I don’t think I missed much.

Quoth Megan McArdle:

John Quiggin asks why Americans vote on a Tuesday.

Louisianans apparently vote on Saturdays, at least in state elections. Indeed, the only elections in Louisiana that are held on a weekday are federal general elections, which are on Tuesdays pursuant to federal law. (Yes, this means working at the polls this fall means I will miss seeing two football games, alas.)

So, all Americans don’t vote on Tuesdays—indeed, the modal American doesn’t vote at all in most elections. Or maybe Louisianans aren’t real Americans.

If only they’d done it a day sooner, I’d have been able to avoid scheduling manual recordings for Earl and The Office. All zero of my NOLA readers can see the announcement here.

Using the SWIPE Toolkit, I found out what Big Brother knew about me in Chicago due to the barcode on my name tag:

103396//CHRISTOPHER/LAWRENCE//TULANE UNIVERSITY/309 NORMAN MEYER BUILDING//NEW ORLEANS/LA/701185698/UNITED STATES/5048628309//3149771462/C$N$LAWRENCE@GMAIL$COM/APSAPM07/

Nothing you couldn’t have figured out with Google, I suppose.

Alfie, as one of my sole remaining commenters, requested that I post the following photo.

My other pictures from Saturday are here.

Via Jonathan Rowe and Timothy Sandefur: one of my favorite writers and early blogging influences, Virginia Postrel, was recently diagnosed with breast cancer; the royal we here at Signifying Nothing will, like Mr. Sandefur, be keeping her in our thoughts.

Via Megan McArdle: are you smarter than a freshman at Harvard?

My OTB co-blogger Alex Knapp writes:

I am still baffled and amazed and thinking about “Blink”, which is not only the best episode of Doctor Who that I have seen to date, but also stands as probably the finest one-hour episode of television science fiction that I have ever seen…

Indeed, it’s probably my favorite episode of the series thus far. More Sally Sparrow, please.

I found out last night that the faculty party I was planning to attend tonight was cancelled due to a family illness, so today I was left with the choice of whether to use my ticket to see Tulane play Houston or stay home tonight to listen to Ole Miss play Vanderbilt on XM. Then I found out the game is on pay-per-view… but apparently there’s no way for me to order it, since Cox’s sales office is closed after 5 on Saturday, the website only lets you sign up for a season subscription, Cox doesn’t give me access to ESPN360, and the stupid cable box Cox gave me doesn’t show it as a pay-per-view event.

So I’ll be listening on XM 232 instead, and Cox just blew its chance to sell me the game (or upsell me to the GamePlan season package).

The big football news this week is that everyone’s (well, everyone except Bill Simmons’) least favorite football coach, Bill Belichick, was caught having an assistant coach videotape defensive signals in Sunday’s Patriots victory over the New York Jets. Speculation about a penalty ranges from draft picks to a Belichick suspension, but to my mind Roger Goddell should be looking to how the NCAA, NASCAR, and soccer leagues around the world punish cheaters: hitting teams in the only thing the Patriots and their owner Bob Krafft really care about—standings and the win-loss record. Make the Pats forfeit their win over the Jets, or force them to—at best—be the #6 seed in the playoffs, in effect forfeiting a potential bye and playing all their games on the road (assuming they qualify), and the sartorially-challenged self-declared football genius will curb his misbehavior much more quickly than if threatened by mere fines or a meaningless sideline ban.

The big higher education news is SIU president Glenn Poshard’s apparent plagiarism in both his master’s and doctoral theses. If SIU‘s board of trustees had any guts, not only would they can the guy, they’d also revoke his degrees. Unfortunately, being an administration stooge seems to be an essential qualification for board membership at many universities, including at SIU and now at Dartmouth too.

The sample ballot for my precinct next month’s state primary is giving me a headache… and I study this stuff for a living.

I finished up some revisions to a manuscript and sent it out for review today—one down, two or three more to go.

Any apparent correlation between this burst of productivity and my need to send out job applications in the next couple of weeks is spurious at best.

You know, if someone had told me earlier in the week that Ben-Jarvus Green-Ellis would run for 226 yards and Seth Adams would pass for 305 today, I’d probably have been happy. But zero execution in the red zone and missed conversions = a loss to Missouri. I’d have consoled myself with a Mississippi State loss to Tulane, but no such luck, despite the game being tied at 17 at the half. What’s even worse is I was sitting next to a kid, so I couldn’t even shout profanities at the State fans or the referees.

So instead I consoled myself by seeing Superbad. That did the trick.

It was a busy week in gadgets around the homestead:

Cell phone: I replaced my aging and bulky Samsung A940 with an LG Musiq LX570. I was originally tempted by the fancier RAZR2, but couldn’t justify spending the extra $150 for stuff I’d never use.

Motherboard and CPU in my office computer: I ditched the mysteriously-crashing (and also aging) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.15 GHz) and Soyo motherboard in favor of an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 (2 cores at 2 GHz), Intel DG965RY motherboard (I went with integrated graphics, since I have no plans to do anything fancier with 3D stuff than run Compiz Fusion), and 2 gigs of memory. I still need to figure out how to get Windows to boot again, but that’s not all that critical since the computer spends 99% of its life in Linux anyway.

I got back from APSA in Chicago last night, after a relatively uneventful conference; most of the highlights involved locating the best bar specials on Goose Island 312, although I think I had a few good interactions at the meat market and got a couple of leads on other jobs. It was nice seeing a few old friends here and there, mostly all-too-briefly; with the exception of Frequent Commenter Scott and his grad school buddy John, I didn’t spend much time with anyone except Marvin and a few of his grad students at dinner Thursday, and Dirk and his family, who hosted a nice lunch for me and a couple of friends out in the ‘burbs on Sunday. (Particular apologies to Michelle, with whom I only interacted via cell phone.)

Alas, nobody seemed to take me up on my suggestion of creating a scene at the registration desk when their name tag appeared bearing the mark of the beast. One of these days I’ll figure out how to create mass mischief at APSA, but not this year.

If you’re as confused by the state’s evacuation map as I was when I first looked at it, this website is for you.

I’m appearing on OTB Radio tonight in about 55 minutes, talking about Michael Vick, the latest electoral college shenanigans, and why Americans don’t read (or something like that); you can listen in here during the show or catch a replay any time at the same link.

Via Ralph Luker: a warning on plagiarism from Dan Todman that begins thusly:

In 1641, William Ward, a Catholic priest, was executed in London:

He hanged till he was dead for he was ript whilst he did hang & being cut downe his members being cut off & cast into the fire, the Executioner ript him up and tooke his heart & threwe it into the fire which lept out againe & no man toucht it till the Executioner a goodwhile after threwe it in againe, his head and quarters were brought backe to Newgate & boyled & are to be set upon 4 gates of the Citty. (1)

Anybody who could inflict this sort of suffering and despoliation on another human being was plainly motivated by enormous passion, anger and fear. Yet most historians would consider this too light a punishment for those found guilty of plagiarism.

It almost seems Old Testament enough to fit in my southern politics syllabus, the latest iteration of which is online here (how’s that for a segué?).

I’m still working on my Introduction to Politics syllabus, but finishing that—and all the rest of the ambitions I had for a productive day—went down the tubes when I got stuck trying to diagnose why my office computer keeps hanging up completely. What I’ve figured out so far:

• It happens in both Windows and Linux, unpredictably.
• The computer spits out a bunch of weird USB errors on startup in Linux.
• I originally thought it had something to do with my USB KVM switch (how I switch my keyboard, mouse, and monitor between the Dell junker provided by Tulane and my computer that actually has the power to do anything beyond web browsing), but I didn’t hit the switch the last time it crashed.
• I don’t think it’s the hard drives. Diagnostics on them have turned up nothing.
• It only seems to crash in Windows or in X; I have yet to see it crash at a Linux console prompt (which would probably be the only way to diagnose the crash from error messages, alas).

I think it’s probably something hosed in the on-board USB controller, which probably means I’ll be investing in a new motherboard. Lucky me.

I’ve been trying out Cameron Dale’s debtorrent, a BitTorrent-based package distribution system for Debian packages, for the past few days, and while it’s been a bit rough around the edges it has worked quite well so far. Cameron has just made a new release which promises better performance all-around; I haven’t had a real opportunity to test the performance yet here, except I can say that apt-get update is markedly faster in this release.

In the bad news department, the Hale Boggs Bridge on I-310 is falling apart faster than previously thought. In the good news department (sorta), LaDOTD has awarded contracts for widening the Huey P. Long Bridge, which has to be about the most terrifying bridge I’ve ever crossed as a driver in my life, not that I’m likely to be around here to see it finished.

While I was off the Internets, Simon Jackman took note of a New York Times Magazine article last Sunday on the typeface that’s sweeping the nation, Clearview, the replacement set of highway sign fonts which was authorized for widespread use a couple of years ago by the Federal Highway Administration after field experiments in Pennsylvania and Texas.

Clearview doesn’t seem to have caught on around these parts yet; the nearest installations I’m aware of are in Houston and a few sporadic signs in Arkansas, most notably at the rebuilt I-55/U.S. 63 interchange north of West Memphis.

I think we’re back up and running. We’ll see how this goes…

Update: Apparently, I originally spoke too soon. But now I've done what I should have done in the first place, and sprung to have Signifying Nothing hosted on a virtual private server; if the VPS seems to be working well, the rest of my web empire will follow soon enough.

Due to the annual ritual of Chris moving to another city, and Chris being too lazy to make alternative hosting arrangements during the move, Signifying Nothing will be down for a few days starting sometime Friday. See you on the flip side!