Now let’s assume that you want to close the first six tabs.

First you position your mouse on the close button of the first tab and you click.  The tab closes but you realize that you cursor no longer points over the close button of the next tab.  You have to move your
mouse a bit to the right to click on the next close button.  And again, and again, and again…  You can see the shifting of the close button in the image here.

I’d rather be able to click on the same spot a few times rather than having to click and move.

Boeing miscalculated two things, in my opinion: first that passengers in the economy cabin really have no room to use a 12-15″ laptop computer and surf the net during the flight. The space situation becomes even more challenging when the person in the front reclines his seat, further reducing the available space.

The second thing that Boeing miscalculated is that passengers in business class would often use their time in the comfortable setting to rest and relax, not to send emails back to work. Even if everyone in business class used the service, the customer volume is not sufficient to sustain the service financially.

Boeing also neglected to take into consideration the limited power capacity of laptop batteries and the unavailability of power ports in the economy cabin.

Finally, Boeing failed to engage major US airlines to offer the service.

Personally, I’ll miss Connexion. I used it on a few occasions flying on Lufthansa (I was lucky enough to be bumped to business). Objectively, however, it was a good idea that was transformed into a poor product with very little forethought about the environment in which the product was offered.

Another annoying feature is the highly reflecting glass on the screen. What were they thinking? It reflects even the reflections off my eye glasses!

While in the whining department, I should  express my disappointment with the transfer process of user stuff from the old laptop to the new one using the firewire ports. Apple should give up on the timer that informs you how much time is left to complete the transfer. If they cannot get the algorithm to work right, they should not implement it at all. The company’s credibility goes down the drain when the machine informs the user that there is “less than a minute” left to complete the process and then the user has to wait upwards of 17 minutes. The transfer process also failed to copy the modem settings and dialup numbers from the old computer to the new one.

Speaking of modem, I think it was premature for Apple to drop the built-in modem port in favour of yet another dangling accessory. In many parts of the world, dialup remains the primary mode of connectivity. The modem adaptor can be misplaced or lost, leaving a traveling user with no access to the network. Again, what were thinking?

The new power adaptor is cute but out the window goes backward compatibility with existing hardware. I wish someone will come up with third party product so that older adaptors to be used with the new computers.

A few days before our arrival to Wicklow we were driving around Connaught, the Western province that suffered most from the famine. There I noticed the juxtaposition between the overabundant seafood that must have been available back in the 19th century, and the suffering of the Irish people desperately seeking blight-free potatoes for their daily meal. Today the seaside villages of the Western and Southern provinces boast numerous restaurants and pubs that local fishermen supply with superb fresh food every day.

How and why did the Irish people in 1845 ignore the highly nutritious food that came from the rivers and the sea?

A famine, I realize, is not just the effect of food scarcity. Famines occur today in our world in spite of infrastructure that enables, say, a restaurant at the top of the Rocky Mountains to serve fresh Maine lobsters within hours of pulling the crustaceans out of the water.

Famine, I understand, is the failure of infrastructure and policy. Famine is an issue of cultural misconceptions as well. To the Catholic Irishmen, fish was Friday food. It was the food of penance and contrition, of bodily punishment to some extent, as they were cleansing their souls and bodies in preparation to receive communion on Sunday.

In Christian tradition, fish was blessed by Jesus. Why were the Irish (Catholic in their overwhelming majority) so avert to fish that nearly one million of them perished in the famine, and about 2 million took the boat to America — many dying along the way? What caused such an aversion? Was it church dogma about Friday meals? Only an organized religion could have orchestrated a cultural distortion of this magnitude.

The Popery Act, the Penal Laws, and other instruments of oppression inflicted on the Irish by the British conquerors, combounded the situation beyond hope and recovery. The famine of 1845 was neither the first nor the last to hit Ireland. But it was the worst. It launced the Irish Diaspora that depopulated the island and altered the Irish psyche for ever.

Driving in Connaught one can imagine emaciated people searching the fields for one healthy potato. A few yards away, trout was jumping in the streams, salmons were defying gravity and river flow, and the coast was full of cockles and mussels.

The tragedy is not only in the famine itself. It’s also in the inability of the Church and the British rulers to show to the desperate population how to survive on sea food. Ironic it is that the root symbol of the christian faith is the ichthys. Just as ironic as the emergence of fish and chips as a British institution in the middle of the 19th century.

An Gorta Mór in Irish means the great hunger.Â

Related: photos from Ireland Summer 2006.

Thus, President Poshard’s message is that cheating is acceptable, or at least not punishable, as long as the cheaters do not stand to benefit from their misconducts.

I do not share this view, though I consent that when cheaters do not benefit from their misconduct, it is more difficult to uncover the cheating, investigate it, and determine the severity of the violation.

Nonetheless, President Poshard is making a crucial error, in my opinion: by associating the severity of the misconduct to the benefits gained by the cheaters, he draws a line on the sand that can be moved accordingly to accomodate subjective views about the ethical implications of cheating.

Does cheating that result in 1% increase in GPA is also dismissable because of the tiny benefit gained by the cheater?   How does one determine that a cheater gained no benefit from the misconduct?

For years after Proust’s death Celeste honored her promise to him to be discrete and not divulge details of his life. But near the end of her life she published Monsieur Proust, trying to set the record straight about the literary giant. It was her book that Mary Zimmerman used as the background for this powerful play.

This was a play about memory.

First it was Ms. Peil’s impeccable memory in reciting her role for 90 minutes. Her performance was a tour-de-force. The single actor on the stage, Ms. Peil gave flesh to the different individuals Celeste was talking about.

Second it was Celeste’s memories at the very center of the play. Celeste wrote about her 8 years with Proust during the author’s most productive phase, both in quality and in quantity. The volume of information that Celeste received from Proust was enormous and she preserved him and his life in her memory.

Third, it was Proust’s memories at the center of Celeste’s remembrances. Memories extended telescopically from Ms. Peil to Celeste to Proust to his life. To find his humanity he had to dive to the darker corners of his psyche and face the landscape. He emerged wounded but strong enough to write about his battle.

Near the end of the play Celeste recounts Proust’s death and his resurrection: a few months after he died his book was published. It was memory, again, that effected the resurrection of Proust. And carrying forward through time it was Celeste’s memory that amplified the resurrection. During the play Ms. Peil celebrated that dual resurrection through her own memory.

May in memory we find our immortality or, at least, some illusion thereof.  Amen.

The intimate Theater Upstairs, was the ideal setting for this play. I felt as if we were at the center of the stage and the acting was taking place around us. The modesty of the setting powerfully conveyed the refugee camp in Thrace,where Hecuba, her daughter Polyxene, and their small entourage sought shelter after the fall of Troy.

Marsha Mason’s performance as Hecuba was exhilerating and heart wrenching. Hecuba’s tragic figure was balanced by the strength and pride of her daughter Polyxene, played by Monet Butler, an alumna of DePaul’s Theater School.

Across this dipole, defined by the superb performances of Mason and Butler, balanced the characters of Odysseus, Talthybius, Agamemnon, and Polymestor.

Juan Chiordan brought Odysseus’ cunning character to life and added the veneer of humanity that Euripides bestowed on the ruler of Ithaki. James Harms, as Talthybius, offered a brief but remarkable performace as the old servant, full of respect and compassion for Hecuba’s drama.

Euripides was fascinated by the drama of the women of Troy, following the fall of their city. Hecuba was only one of his plays based on the flight and despair of these women. In his Trojan plays, Euripides painted the dark picture of a people abandoned by their gods, whose fate grew gloomier by the day. The war, as a military operation, may have ended, but its ravaging repercusions gave it the aura of immortality: as far as the women of Troy were concerned the war never ended.

A military campaign that started with the sacrifice of Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, ended with the sacrifice of Polyxene, daughter of Agamemnon’s arch-enemy Priamus. This cyclic symbolism in Euripides plays Hecube and Electra is accentuated by the focal point of the war: Helen of Troy.

The Trojan war was a war about women and it was the women who despair in the war’s aftermath. Helen’s (voluntary?) abduction triggered this war, that was enabled by the sacrifice of Electra, and was ended with Polyxenes’ sacrifice. Ultimately the Trojan war was rendered absurd in Helen, when Euripides suggests that the war was fought over a phantom. Yet the losses of the war lingered in the memories of the women, while the men of Greece marched (or sailed) victoriously back to their homes.

A woman caused the war, a woman had to be sacrificed to get the armada to sail to Troy, and yet another woman had to be sacrified to get the armada to sail home. Are these seeds of misogynism scattered around by Euripides? My interpretation is yes, they are. Greeks in the 5th century BC were fond of misogynism. Herodotus, the pressumed first historian, writes as much at the very beginning of his first book:

Now as for the carrying off of women, it is the deed, they say, of a rogue: but to make a stir about such as are carried off, argues a man a fool. Men of sense care nothing for such women, since it is plain that without their own consent they would never be forced away.

It is plain then, that women are the cause of all misfortune, as Herodotus suggests and Euripides depicts. Men are just the bystanders, available to obey and follow orders without any critical thought. Right!

Absent from the playbill is a credit to Savina Yannatou, the remarkable vocalist, whose music was heard briefly during the play.

The constitution of Greece forbids the establishment of private universities. Higher learning in Greece is a state business under the oversight of the Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs. This state business is now in trouble and plagued by unprecedented unrest.

The cause of the unrest is an anticipated constitutional amendment that will allow the establishment of private universities in Greece. The amendment is supported by the center-right governing party and the center-left major opposition party. Together the two parties represent nearly 90% of the Greek electorate.

The federation of university teacher unions in Greece (POSDEP) has called an indefinite strike, but only a small number of academic departments have been affected. A much larger number of academic departments, however, have been shut down by student sit-in protests against the prospect of private universities. As of this writing, over 200 academic departments have suspended their operations because of the sit-ins.

The Greek government claims that the student sit-ins have been instigated by the teacher unions. Faculty, says the goverment, are achieving their goal of shutting down a department, without going on strike (and losing a portion of their salary). According to the Greek press, no evidence of student-teacher union collusion exists. However the website of the Greek federation of university teacher unions maintains a detailed account of the sit-ins and related student activism.

A student sit-in has paralyzed the medical school at the University of Athens, since early May 2006. Student patrols are keeping professors and staff away from their offices. It is worth noting that the Greek law governing student unions and their role in university governance is quite arcane. Student unions are not required to establish a quorum during their meetings. A very small minority (less than 10% of the student body) can inact a sit-in occupation of a department or entire college.

As the semester draws to an end, there is a real risk that students will miss their final exams. The student union at the medical school in Athens is considering a proposal from the school’s administration to allow faculty access to the school to administer final exams. Some professors have objected to this because students have missed over a month of classes. Professors Moutsopoulos and Roussos wrote an op-ed in the daily Kathimerini, questioning if the university is reduced to an examination center granting degrees without much regard to teaching or research.

More than 30 years of goverment and political meddling with academia has left Greek universities in a lamentable state. Greek schools rank very poorly in comparisons with other countries. In the Shanghai ranking of the best 500 universities in the world, only two of Greece’s 21 universities appear (in the 200s and 300s respectively). Public funding for research and higher education in Greece ranks among the lowest in the European Union and the OECD.

An arcane legal framework gives student unions an absolute majority in the academic electorate that elects the university rector (president), deputy-rectors, deans, and department heads. As a result, candidates’ political affiliations carry more weight than their academic accomplishments. At four universities professors with fewer than 5 publications in peer reviewed journals, were elected rectors.

This arcane framework also grants university campuses a unique asylum status, forbidding law enforcement agencies from stepping foot on campus. The asylum can be suspended for brief periods only after a faculty senate vote and it’s usually too late by then. Campuses become havens, not only for free speech, but for petty crime and, occasionally for more serious crime. Intruders often take advantage of a student sit-in to break into university buildings and loot computer and other equipment while police watch from a legally proscribed distance, unable to intervene and protect the property of the public university. A few months ago a student who was patroling a building seized by a sit-in was seriously injured when he tried to stop looters who attacked him while carrying away laptops and other high-tech equipment from the facility. Ironically, the asylum status was instituted as a free speech measure by a dictatorship in the early 1970s to appease mounting international pressure for human rights in the country.

In recent years, the Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs has opened several new schools and departments around the country. In Greek-style pork barrel, these schools have their departments scattered over several towns in a region. For example, the University of Thrace has its engineering school in one town, its medical school in a town 80 miles to the east, and the law school in a town in between.

The government in Greece expects that the proposed constitutional amendment in favor of private universities will boost the quality of higher education in the country by making public universities more competitive. Maybe so. Still, the state will continue to be responsible for the welfare of public universities, where the vast majority of Greek students will pursue their educational endeavors. The government must develop a competitive and realistic plan to support and improve higher education at public schools.

In the same issue of the newspaper Kathimerini where Professors Moutsopoulos and Russos published their op-ed, Mr. Andreas Petroulakis, one of Greece’s sharpest cartoonists, portrays the absurdity of university asylum in a caustic cartoon. A Turkish fighter jet resting on the rooftop of a Greek university building where the students are having a sit-in, while the pilot radios back to his base: “Don’t worry, they [Greeks] cannot intercept me … they have something here called university asylum”.

Leo Irakliotis teaches computer science at the University of Chicago. He spent four agonizing years at a Greek university prior to emigrating to the US in 1990 to complete his studies and earn his PhD.

For the rice (or rice and beef), for 6 peppers you need:

• required ingredients
• 1.5 cup of rice (I really like basmati)
  or
  1 cup of rice and 1 lbs of ground beef
• 1 cup of chopped parsley
• 1/4 cup of chopped spearmint or mint
• 1 cup of diced onions
• 2 garlic gloves, minced
• 2 cups of diced tomatoes (canned work perfectly)
• salt, pepper
• 1/2 cup of olive oil
• optional ingredients
• diced mushrooms (to taste about 1/2 cup)
• diced jalopenos (to taste, about 1/4 cup)
• 2-3 tablespoons of pine nuts (not chopped)
• 1/2-1 cup of crumbled feta

(note on the ingredients: optional ingredients reflect my modifications and experimentation over the years; I am probably using about 1/4 less oil that grannie’s recipe!)

Preparation:

Use half the oil in a large sauce pan to cook the onions in medium fire until translucent. Add beef and let it brown. Add a pinch of salt and pepper. Add the herbs and the garlic, steer over medium fire for 5 more minutes. Add optional ingredients (except for feta), steer 2 minutes. Add tomatoes, still in high fire for 5 minutes. Return fire to medium, add rice. Steer occasionally until rice soaks up juices; you may want to add 0.5-1 cups of water (drop a beef cube if you wish in the water first). Let mix rest for a while, and prepare the peppers. Now is also a good time to preheat the oven at 400F. Cut them on top, preserve the caps. Rinse and remove the seeds and, if necessary, do some careful deveining with a small pairing knife. Mix the feta in the rice. Stuff peppers but do not top them off; stop 1/4 inch below the rim. Arrange them upright in a baking pan, drizzle with the remaining oil. Bake for at least 60 minutes (optimal time 75 min, you should see the top rice grains blackening).

Serve with the caps on but warn people that caps are just decorative (though edible).

The typical greek dish, at least at home, was stuffed tomatoes and green bell peppers. We use large beef tomatoes, scoop the meat out, use it in the saucepan with the rice and the ground beef and baked in 375 for 1.5 hours. I am more font of the peppers though because the rice remains fluffy; the tomatoe, even with its meat removed, continues to release water in the rice while baking and the rice softens up too much.

This is a summer dish. You can refrigerate and serve cold for days.

If you want to be fancy — in the traditional greek way — serve the peppers on a plate adorned with a few anchovies or another salt curred but not smoked fish.

The stuffed peppers with cheese, is a bit different.

Stuffing:

• 2 cups of crumbled feta;
• 1/2 cup of mozarrela
• 1 egg
• 2 gloves of garlic, minced
• 1 cup of mushrooms diced
• 1/2 cup of finely diced bacon, or ham, or anything similar you like
• 1/4 cup diced jalopenos (optional but *good*)
• 1/4 cup chopped mint or spearmint
• 1-2 tablespoons pine nuts (not chopped)
• 2 table spoons olive oil
• pepper

In a frying pan, medium heat, sautee the mushrooms with the garlic, add a pinch of pepper. Cook until mushroom juice is gone. In a bowl mix the rest of the ingredients, add the mushrooms and mix a bit more. Stuff peppers and with previous recipe. Cook 400F preheated 1 hour. In this recipe, more so than the previous one, you got to make sure that the peppers stay upright throughout the baking, otherwise the cheese will leak away. Snuggle the peppers in a baking pan that will hold them up — no slack space between them in the tray.

People complaint that this is very cheese and overwhelming dish; like eating chicago style pizza. To cut down the cheeseness I’ve modified the recipe a bit to add more veggies: in the frying pan with the mushrooms I add chopped carrots and after all the mushroom juice is gone I add 1 can of diced tomatoes and a tablespoon of oil and cook at medium fire until the tomatoe juices begin to darken a bit.

You can also substitute the cured meat (because it does make the dish too salty, with all that feta) with ground beef (1/2 lbs) that you brown after you add the carrots to the mushroom mix and before you add the tomatoes.

Costco sells a kick ass feta. Surely it’s not what my father’s 2nd cousin of his sister-in-law’s brother used to make in his creamery before the European Union shut it down for unhygienic practice (though most of the family believe that it was probably his affinity to his goats that was more troublesome). But barring that, Costco sells a decent feta.

You can also get red bell peppers (by the half-dozen) at Costo. In the summer Costco usually carries clamshells of little colorful banana peppers in mixed colors (red, green, yellow, orange). These are great for stuffing with cheese, though a bit more difficult to stuff because of their small size. They are also a challenge to keep them upright in the pan. But they make a great dish with superb presentation and they’re ideal finger food for a party.

If you live in the Chicagoland: I find Caputo’s (on Harlem and Grand, north of Grand) to be one of the best source of produce. Their (spear)mint is phenomenal but it’s quite a drive to get there, and Harlem is a very slow street with all the little old italian matrons driving at 5 mph down the road heading to Caputo’s. While at Caputo’s you may want to get a jar or two of d’Agostino anchovy fillets preserved in oil; the ones cured in red pepper flakes have a bite and they are the perfect garnish for the rice stuffed peppers.

Some find these disclaimers cute, others annoying, and most of us ignore them anyway.  Yet I am curious as to why they are placed at the end of the email.  If they are meant to protect the message from being read by unintended users, shouldn’t they be placed at the beginning of the email?