Blog

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

A few to remember with

Spring graduation is the best time of the year to be around campus. There’s so many graduates roaming about in their caps and gowns, capturing graduation photos to remember. Shoutout to the budding photographers following these graduates around. I guess in a world of smartphones capable enough to capture the moon (Samsung fakes it, apparently), the value of a “proper” camera is still pretty evident. For a once in a lifetime thing, you’re not handing off your iPhone to a cousin to do the job.

You wouldn’t hire a wedding photographer that shoots with smartphones, right? (Or maybe you should…)

It’s good to see the pro-Palestine protest camping has come to an end, after reaching an agreement with the university. Before this, some of the protesters defaced the San Francisco State University signage at the corner of 19th Avenue and Holloway. This tiny monument thing is where graduates like to take pictures in front of (during graduation week there can be lines). How awful it is then to have that beautiful scene ruined by graffiti. Though I guess any good photographer can photoshop that out (or those A.I. magic erasers in Android smartphones). Moot point: the markings have since been painted over.

I wonder what is the popular photographic aesthetic these days, vis a vis these graduation photos. If I had to guess: retro is definitely in. Technical perfection is out of style. People buy older iPhones to take pictures with, simply for the “vintage” look (modern iPhones do over-process the image, I have to say). Fujifilm absolutely cannot make enough X100VI to keep up with demand, because the TikTok/Instagram crowd has hyped its film simulation to the sky. Heck, I bought a Fujifilm X-T5 because I wanted the retro film vibes.

Photographer: “What picture style would you like?”
Client: “I would like the photos to be slightly shitty.”

Parenting is hard

It is the start of the Spring 2024 semester on campus. Nice to see a bustling campus once more, though the only downside is the bathrooms will certainly be dirtier. The flu and cold virus is also going around, so we've got to protect ourselves the best we can. Wash or sanitize your hands often, and try not to touch your face. Even post COVID pandemic, people can’t seem to stay home when they are sick. Supposedly, the area around the eyes are potently vulnerable entry points for viruses.

Was there a chance the Spring semester was going to be delayed? The CFA - the union representing faculty and librarians - were on strike just last week. But on that Tuesday, the two sides came to a tentative agreement. CFA basically got the same deal as we, the employees union - got: five percent raises last fiscal and this fiscal year. Equality is great, isn't it? (The CFA was asking for more.)

Also included in the new contract is an increase of paid parental leave from the current six weeks to 10 weeks. As a housemate to two new parents with five months-old twin boys, I must say parents deserve all the time off they can get from their employers. Parenting is truly another job onto itself. It's not like folks on parental leave are at home playing videos games. In fact, some are happy to return to work, partly to escape the baby responsibilities for just a few precious hours. (Who knew that eating an entire lunch undisturbed can be so precious?)

Anything to encourage and incentivize people to have babies should be pursued. The education industry - the one I am employed by - is predicated on having an endless supply of replacement pupils, year after year. If the population is having fewer babies, then that supply will naturally dwindle. And with it the future stability of this job. So in a totally self-servicing way: good for the CFA in getting an increase in parental leave!

Varying viewpoints

On campus recently I passed by a flier for an event advocating for protecting women sports. I guess the subject matter pertains to a discussion of whether or not trans women (biologically born men who now identify as women) belong in women athletics. This particularly group seems to be advocating for exclusion.

It’s good to see this type of discussion being allowed on campus. Let’s face it, college campuses skew heavily to the left, and this one is in San Francisco of all places. It’s rare to see other viewpoints out in the open. Straying from dogmatic left positions leaves one open to ridicule at best, cancellation at worst. No conservative-leaning student would risk showing up to campus with a MAGA hat. The “speech is violence” crowd would pounce immediately.

Yesterday, the campus community received at email from the VP of students to the affect the university has a duty to protect the first amendment. To allow free and open discussion on varying topics, from varying sides. You have a right to protest speech you don’t like, but you do not have the right to shut it down. I have to think this is in response to the protecting women sports event. I sure hope that event happened without fuss.

Because I think it’s very important to have open discussion on a college campus. A marketplace for ideas to duke it out. A gathering of information from all sides so students can critically think for themselves. What I don’t want is for campuses to become an echo-chamber of far-left ideology. These kids are then taught what to think instead of how to think. Those who oppose are effectively silenced due to the crippling social costs of speaking out.

I’m glad my campus is a place where an event on the other side of the trans right discussion can happen.

What? Oh nooooo

As someone who’ve stopping working from home since the beginning of 2022, it is fun to see people complain about coming back to the office full time. Mind you I work in education, on a campus where teaching happens in-person. Therefore it’s only appropriate for the support staff to be there as well. Because the university just spent a lot of money on a new arts building, and is currently constructing a new science wing. So damn it, there had better be people using these new facilities!

A coworker of mine is a steward for the union. He’s been fielding complaints from people being asked to work in-person the full five days a week. Of course, those complaints go nowhere, because whether or not you get to work-from-home is up to your supervising manager. Nothing in our contract stipulates mandatory remote working days. California’s COVID emergency is expiring this month, the Federal one in May. Things are going back to the way it were on campus before the pandemic, folks!

The obvious pain point of coming to campus is the commute. Traveling from San Jose into San Francisco five days a week - like a coworker of mine does - is just brutal. I shall never take for granted my living proximity to campus, and the ability to simply walk the 10 minutes to work. But those are personal choices, right? The employer have zero duty to acquiesce and account for how far you live from the workplace. Again, a university isn’t that sort of job anyways.

Back in January, our supervisor informed the team we will be working on campus the entire work week. I replied with gleeful nonchalance that I’ve been doing so for well over a year now. The low-key griping from some is schadenfreude-ic music to my ears.

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.

No power here

We were having a team meeting at work yesterday morning and then the power went out. To the entire campus. We’re in the basement of the library building, so it was absolutely pitch dark for about 10 seconds. The backup generators then kicked in, turning back on about 20 percent of the lights. Our colleague living in nearby Daly City also reported an outage, so this blackout didn’t seem like the quick fix type.

I immediately sent a text to my housemate to check on the power status at our house. I live incredibly close to campus so it wouldn’t surprise me if we lost electricity as well. Fortunately, our side of 19th Avenue was unscathed. After hanging around campus for about 30 minutes just to see if power will come back soon, I walked home to wait out the rest of the blackout. That’s the flex of living so close to work.

Turns out they sent almost everyone home in my department. It took about three hours for power to return to campus. I of course volunteered to come back. In fact, the three people that live closest to campus came back, which is kind of funny in a way.

The intermission caused by the power interruption was very nice. I got to move my car back to its usual parking spot after the street cleaning from earlier in the morning (no need to do it after work). I ate a proper lunch at home, and I read for about an hour. A sort of Spanish siesta in the middle of the work day. Had the power outage gone on longer, I would have done some grocery shopping at Whole Foods.

A welcomed deviation from the normal everyday work routine.