Statement from J-Street

Just got this in an email from a mailing list I'm on:

Julie --

Below please find J Street's statement on the recently announced direct talks between the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Have a great weekend and Shabbat Shalom,

- Hadar

Hadar Susskind
V.P., Policy and Strategy
J Street
August 20, 2010


J Street Statement on Direct Talks
August 20, 2010

J Street welcomes today's announcement of direct talks between the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with the United States closely shepherding the process. We applaud President Obama's leadership and the work of Secretary Clinton and Senator Mitchell in bringing the parties to the table.

But bringing the parties together is only the starting line on a difficult road that will demand real political leadership and courage from the parties and from the United States and the international community. President Obama has said before that talks and process are not the goal - the goal is two states living side-by-side in peace and security, with defined borders and an end to the conflict. We urge President Obama and his team to continue to actively lead the way toward that destination.

J Street is pleased by the announcement of a one year timeline for talks and by the assurances given by U.S. officials that the United States will be actively engaged in the process, helping the parties close gaps and keep moving forward.

The United States and the broader international community - including the Quartet and the Arab League - will have to help the parties to overcome the many obstacles and challenges they will face. We hope that this will include taking an approach that is regional and comprehensive in nature, placing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a regional framework that attempts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole.

The window of opportunity for progress is brief and closing. This could well be the last opportunity to save the two-state solution. We believe that Israel's future as a Jewish, democratic home, not to mention vital American interests in the region, hang in the balance.
We urge the United States, Israel, the Palestinians, and the greater Arab world to approach these negotiations with a seriousness of purpose suited to the urgency of the moment. The stakes are high, and the status quo unsustainable.


----------J Street is the political home of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.
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1. I like this statement a lot. My favorite part is:

The United States and the broader international community - including the Quartet and the Arab League - will have to help the parties to overcome the many obstacles and challenges they will face. We hope that this will include taking an approach that is regional and comprehensive in nature, placing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a regional framework that attempts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole.

2. I'm off to continue enjoying my Grand Tour of America. There will be napping in the car. Have a nice day!

Just FYI

I'm in California this weekend, to greet friends from China, and then we're going to New York to take my "Chinese little brother" to his boarding school (upstate, for the New Yorkers in the house; WAY upstate, for you New Yorkers who believe the world ends at the fringes of New York City). Right now we're in LA, at a very nice hotel (Hilton ain't famous for nothin', y'all) in some sort of Chinatown. Tomorrow it's road trip time: up the 101 to Monterey Bay, stopping in Carmel, and then up to San Fran, to hit up downtown and do a bit of sightseeing. Tom's Dad is in-country for 10 days, but my extremely dear friend Zhongyuan (aka Sally) and I will be traveling together for about a month. We'll see how it goes and where we end up.

There will probably be more posts when we get to my parents' place next week, but I'm not going to make any promises.

Ideally, supercool times will be had by all and we won't run into any huge transportation snafus. Keep your fingers crossed, send us happy thoughts, pray for us, whatever you like.

Oh, and since I'm hitting up Googlism.com (random reasons, long story, don't ask): here's a few of my favorite portions of the current "Julie" page:

julie is taking your name in vain over on general

julie is???

julie is hesitant to set herself up for further heartbreak
julie is known for her warm
julie is originally from quebec
julie is currently the apegga representative on the faculty of science at the university of calgary
julie is no more
julie is irate at the pregnancy
julie is forced to give it up
julie is playing next
julie is identified

julie is far from being some crass yank

julie is an innovator who visualizes how software will actually function in the real world

Two unrelated things

First, if anyone wants to thank a UN Peacekeeper: click here and the Better World Campaign will hook you up. In related news, Bangladesh is sending a mostly-female UN police troop to Haiti. Not exactly a cheery article, but you can read more about the situation here.

This page lists a few online courses in computer graphics programming. Could be useful as a refresher. And wouldn't my life be easier if I had Internet access at home? ... also sillier, in all likelihood, as I cannot resist the Flash games.

UN Peacekeeping website

This thing is awesome. It's a website developed by the good folks at the Better World Campaign. Front page is a quick overview of UN peacekeeping missions around the world, clickable by continent.

Veteran's Day

I went out to buy some white-out, and ended up watching a good bit of the Veteran's Day parade. As a near-pacifist, I'm opposed to war in almost all cases, so flag-waving and cheering the military make me a bit uncomfortable. However, today didn't feel like that. I respect the people who serve, and who served in the past - it's hardly their fault when the leadership of our country makes horrible decisions and sends them into places where I feel we shouldn't be. I was a bit startled by the huge booming sounds that one of the parade units was setting off. Hello, flashbacks? Seems like an odd thing to have in a Veteran's Day parade. Also, the young reservist recruits - dressed ominously in black - had me nearly in tears. Just FYI. Also also, marching bands and baton twirlers are fun, and wear funny hats.

So, bought some Pittsburghy doodads from a street vendor, clapped a lot, said "Thank you!" to some soldiers, and chatted with a few random people about politics and the weather. Sunshine makes any parade better, even when, because of tall downtown buildings, it's only available in a few patches.

Ooh, and I also ran into a gaggle of toddlers, whose adult leader gave me contact info for Brightside Academy, their school. So, another opportunity for teaching Chinese to short people, which I may pursue if I decide to stick around The 'Burgh for a bit longer... as I am sorely tempted to do. New part-time job starts this week, at this place, while the old part-time job, at this place, continues. And I do have a twice-a-week Chinese lesson with a very small girl, if that counts as a third part-time job. Hopefully the new job will not be crazy amounts of hours, as that would probably result in me getting the flu or something. I am not the strongest, healthiest girl on the block. Curse you, anemia!

How did I start out this post? Veteran's Day. Happy (belated) Veteran's Day to all our troops and veterans. Take care of yourselves. It's rough out there, even in the sunshine.

Summer draws to a close

It's been a very quiet summer for me - a little working, a lot of Flash game-playing, many many books, and librariness. And I turned 30, which went over fairly easily, really. I got a spectacular free meal out of it from a couple of chef friends of mine. Scallops, steak, and creole shrimp helped the major aging milestone go down easier.

My cats and I moved to Uptown in April, and so far none of us have been mugged, unless you count the fights I'm pretty sure my cats have had with the neighborhood strays. A studio apartment is really too small to keep my two cats cooped up in permanently - fortunately I have a roof and fire escape they can hang out on. I'm actually still trying to figure out if they can get out to the street on their own... not that anyone cares. Enough about my cats.

The current plan is to polish up my resume and apply for an entry-level Technical Director position at DreamWorks Animation. My internship there during summer 2007 was supremely fantastic, and although I'm not crazy about LA, the DWA campus there is, in my opinion, just about a perfect environment for creative people to do good work in. And if, for whatever reason, DreamWorks and Blue Sky Studios and their ilk won't have me, China's still hiring English teachers. I figure 6 months or so of teaching English again should give me enough time to make connections and shoot for a programming job over there - hopefully graphics programming, although their feature animation industry isn't nearly as well developed as ours. And with the current salaries for foreign teachers, I could actually pay my student loans down reasonably well just as an English teacher, and even more so as a programmer. At least that's the word on the street.

So there you have it: an update on my world.

Interesting little game: MyBrute

I wasn't too enthralled with this the first time I checked it out, but with a long list of classmates participating, whom I could fight against, it became more interesting.

Create your Brute and fight creekpilgrim, if you dare. Fear my cute pink hair! Fear it!

It's an odd little game in that you don't really do anything except choose whom to fight - the things that happen during a fight are all automatic and don't require any actions or choices on your part. And you get experience from other people fighting your brute when you're not around, and possibly some kind of experience from the experience of your pupils - that part I'm not too clear on as yet.

There are one or two other games I know of that basically play themselves - you just let them run and they level up over time. Sadly, I cannot remember their names....

Update: Creekpilgrim is good with a knife. Just killed two brutes, although the first one stole my weapon and killed me with it. Talk about adding injury to insult.

Damn you, Turbine

It figures that they come out with Leaves of Lorien just as I lose access to my shiny ETC machine.

For those of you unfamiliar with Lord of the Rings Online, or those of you who would like to see pretty screenshots from my favorite part of The Lord of the Rings, you can find some linked from this page. (Update: sadly, they've changed the website and I can't find the pretty screenshots. Link is to a map with overhead views, so not nearly as lovely to look at. Unless you really like looking at the tops of trees.)

Grad school hates me, again

On the other hand, this is my favorite grad school advisor EVAR. When life hands you a Leave of Absence, if you're patient enough, you might receive a Spanish computer graphics guy to make up for the sour taste in your mouth.

Of course, when grad school subsequently hands you a Letter of Dismissal... I'm not sure what happens after that, although I'm doing okay with the patience bit (at the moment). Thank the good Lord for library Internet access. And friends. And mothers.

Update: Carnegie Mellon University apparently cannot be bothered to give me a final answer as to what happens after one receives a letter of dismissal and one appeals the aforesaid letter. It's been a year, people. What? You can't pick up a phone and call me back after I call you 2 times in one week? Is your arm broken? At this point, you've passed over from accidental ineptness and you're pretty deep in Extreme Rudeness Territory. The Entertainment Technology Center, naturally, cannot pay me enough money to return and finish my master's degree, at this point. The rest of Carnegie Mellon, including the graphics lab and the entire school of computer science, has deeply disappointed me and I hope they realize their error before I write them off for good and go seriously looking for another institute of higher learning to which I can transfer two and a half years' worth of grad school credits.

Edited Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Link to read after sleeping

This is the end of my Internet wanderings for tonight. I swear it!

A friend of a friend recommends this fabulous post by Rob Donoghue. I was intrigued enough to read the one about mooks; looking forward to finishing this up tomorrow. After the voxelizing has been conquered. Or at least the collision detection that is holding up the voxelizing.

3 am

YouTube served me up a lovely new voice tonight, and then it suggested this, a mashup of said voice, Katie Melua, and... well... watch it. I believe it's a film called Threads, but I can't be bothered to check because Matchbox 20 is singing me a lullaby and I don't feel like interrupting. Say what you will about the pop band, and then take a look at his eyes in the last few seconds of the song. That's quality humanness.

If I'm going to be awake at 3am, I might as well be in this sort of mood. Connections, insights, a sudden view into the territory around this momentary rut my life is in. And I don't mean rut in a bad way. At least not entirely. Not that my performance this semester has been perfect, but the semester itself has been... reasonable. I'm currently walking a waiting-for-student-loans tightwire, with bad consequences for having absolutely no cash waiting just a few steps ahead. And I need to somehow kick my independent study into gear. But these are not things that are going to kill me, and I have faith that people are going to be kind to me this time around.

The work is good. The teammates are cool - tonight's afterhours movie selections were Shinobi and Shaun of the Dead, so you know the bonding's topnotch. Which, unfortunately, meant that I missed the last bus home and here I am. Fortunately for you, if you're a long-lost friend wondering what's up with Julie these days. And most of my friends are at least a bit off the radar, so.

I'm not sure whether I wish I didn't need the kindness. It would be great to do everything right and never need help, at least in theory. But maybe it would be even lonelier.

Working for The Man

Here's another one Juleigh sent out, this time featuring advice about how to restructure instead of downsize, should you be a video game company executive feeling the pinch of the current financial climate.

While I'm not a video game executive, nor do I plan to be one anytime soon, I really enjoyed the article. Thinking back to my time in financial software (hello Ontario Systems), the advice here really makes sense. I don't think I was ever there during painful layoff sessions, but I do pay attention, read pretty widely, and hear stories from people who've worked at various companies; also, Ontario was unusually open about the financial status of the company, at least internally, so I got me some finance and accounting education whether I needed it or not.

I can picture how the suggestions that Mr. Mencher gives might work better than the standard "We're trimming 7% of our workforce in order to meet (or approach) our yearly earnings projection." And given the state of the world economy, who couldn't use advice about better ways to keep a business viable? Really, I think it boils down to: if you let your numbers men or women run the show, you're going to piss off your employees, or at least frighten them into polishing their resume when they should be working harder to fill in for all those people you just fired. Wouldn't it be better to take a look around and find some ways to tighten the collective belt before you resort to decreasing your labor force? Perhaps you don't need that corporate jet after all, or your financial planners and industry forecasters should give up their yearly bonuses for dropping the ball on this one.

Good links for job hunters

The ever-fantastic Ms. Juleigh DeCarlo just sent these out to us, and I want to dig into them (and possibly post about the first one) when I get a bit of breathing room. The sprint to Quarter Presentations is on and things are a bit hectic around the offices. Cool that we have "offices;" a suite of rooms is just what one needs when one is doing serious development.

Six Words that Make Your Resume Suck

The AWN Career Connections

The Five Worst Mistakes You Can Make on a Resume

Evidently, AWN.com is a good resource for entertainment technologists. Who knew?

Beginning again

New year, new semester, new chance to have a fulfilling and useful semester at the ETC. And so far, everything is fab-o, a-ok, could not be better if I had custom ordered it. I mean, having my old housemates back would be perfection, but since they've all abandoned me for the West Coast (except for Zikun! who is in Pittsburgh somewhere), I'll take what I can get.

My main semester project: Crayon 3D which you can investigate here and here. Someday we will have a shinier website. With possible mailing list! Our dreams and future feature lists are bigger than one semester can contain.

Kongregate

No, you didn't just catch me out in a typo. Having discovered the Referrals page on one of my favorite casual game sites, I am here to try it out.

It's fun to combine things. So: my previous post about freelance online writing meets my love of all things piratical meets my addiction to casual games: click here and earn me some points, friends. It's fun, I promise. And if you don't find it fun, please tell me why. I'd genuinely like to know.

Taking the plunge

It might end up being only a small plunge - I have so far invested less than $20 in this venture, plus a few hours doing research on how to make money online without going into anything resembling marketing or "business." I hate business. My friend Carrie and I had a running joke in undergrad that business majors don't have souls. Since the only business major I can think of that I'm particularly close to is thinking about ditching her religion as a bunch of man-made power-grabbing foolishness, I have yet to find a reason to change our theory.

But I digress. Free Lance Home Writers is my new business partner, and hopefully between me putting in some serious time on this and it actually being a decent system, I will make enough to pay off these last couple months of student loan payments that are breathing down my neck. Last only because I will shortly be fighting my way through whatever paperwork is necessary to make the banks leave me alone until I actually graduate at the end of next semester. Also, boots. I need boots. No, really. This is not girl-talk, or retail therapy. My old ones fell apart in Japan, and I don't intend to trudge to the bus stop through snow drifts wearing sneakers.

You see how I have difficulty focusing on finding gainful employment? I think it boils down to real fear that I won't find anything and I'll end up spending the rest of my natural life hiding from big mean banks. I didn't realize going into this whole deal that grad school would be such a gamble. For the past six months, I've felt as though I were teetering on the brink of either pushing through and getting that huge piece of paper from CMU or waving goodbye to $60,000 plus interest and making the best of my life as it stands.

If you're looking for some sort of pretty shiny summary of what this post is about, sorry. Fresh out today.

Short-term Employment

I worked for a subgroup of Progressive Future, called Work for Progress. We registered voters right up until the Pennsylvania deadline, mainly by walking around public areas with high foot traffic and asking everyone we saw whether they were registered to vote at their current address. My second day on the job, they told me that they had just gotten a grant (I forget from whom), so we were now the Community Voters Project and were only going to approach African Americans. So. Interesting.

I could write lots and lots about my experiences registering voters in various Pittsburgh-area neighborhoods, and tell lots of funny stories, but I'm too tired. Sadly for me, although good news for progressives, Obama made it up high enough in the polls for the organization to fold up its Pittsburgh shop and move our directors to states where the race was tighter.

I was pretty much offered a job as a career staff member if I was willing to relocate until November 4th, but didn't end up pursuing that option. Too much uncertainty, and I hate moving, even if it would only be for 6 weeks. Also, campaign workers mostly do it for the love, not the money, unless you're a professional political hack way up the food chain. I'm not sure I could actually have covered living expenses on the salary they offered, not to mention my ridiculous hope of saving up something to help pay for tuition next semester.

So now it's back to the job hunt. I am currently waiting for an email from Etcetera Edutainment about whether they do, in fact, need C++ programmers for the short term. Contract work is tricky - I admire people who can live like that, but I don't think it's the lifestyle for me.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

I had a job interview this morning (more on that later), so I couldn't wear my traditional Full Pirate Regalia. I settled for wearing my much-beloved "In touch with my Inner Pirate" t-shirt under a respectable shirt. And now I am off to Cappy's, to hopefully find my friend with the eyepatch (no joke kids, no joke) and do a couple of shots with the fine folks at Cappyoke. And maybe I'll sing a Tracy Chapman song. She's been in my head lately.

ONE Campus Challenge

I'm considering stepping up as a campus leader for this. I'm not sure I should, as I don't want to over-commit and then do a lousy job. And since I'm not sure what kind of work schedule I'll have this semester, I'm really not sure about the time commitment.

On the other hand, it's something I feel passionate about, and even a small presence on campus would be better than nothing. Plus, it would be a reason to be on main campus on a regular basis, and that would be no bad thing.

A link, for the curious.

UPDATE: I now have a job, and the hours are flexible, which means more time for ONE. I actually tried to sign up as campus leader tonight, but there's something wrong with their webform - it kept telling me a field was missing, which was patently untrue. Sigh. I'll have to try again next week.

Settling in

I now have a place to live, and employment. Both are big improvements over last week. I am living with a woman my grandmother's age, who is renting me a big bedroom on the third floor of her house. I've always wanted to try one of those long rooms shaped almost like a triangle by the slope of the roof on both sides. Now's my chance. It feels cozy, like my own little nest where my cats and I can curl up and do our own thinking. Plus, it's in a part of Pittsburgh I haven't explored before - even the bus ride into town is eye-opening.

I meet tomorrow with my new boss. I'll be teaching high-school students about entertainment technology for six weeks. I'm kinda fuzzy on the details at present, but excited to be teaching again, and looking forward to the challenge.

Pittsburgh is lovely. Blue skies and green trees are heavenly. I have landed on my feet and look forward to what lies ahead down the path.