I Believe

Here’s one thing the Obama administration has accomplished: A very effective redesign of the USAJOBS site.  This seems to have happened very recently, within the past week or so.  I definitely remember the old site still being up as of early January.  This may seem like a minor thing, and in many ways it is, but this is the main way people apply for jobs with the federal government and the old site was terribly clunky and hard to use, which only made the already ridiculously ponderous application process even more so.  One thing we really need in this country is for more and better-qualified people to be applying for these jobs, and making the application website easier to use is a small but important step in that direction.

Henry Farrell Reads Jeffrey Rowland?

So it would seem.

The Real Stuff

Last week was the first week of classes of the semester.  I’m very happy with the classes I’m taking.  The ones I took last semester were mostly basic background stuff, and those that weren’t were pretty theoretical.  I enjoyed those classes, and I feel like I got the opportunity to think about a lot of important issues, but I don’t feel like I learned a whole lot of practical things that I hadn’t known before.  This semester, though, all of my classes are mainly about teaching practical, useful stuff, though in different ways.  I’m particularly excited about finally taking a GIS class, since that’s a skill I really think I should have, both for its practical value and because it’s the sort of thing that I think would be really interesting to me.  I’m also taking some classes on the planning process, which will finally give me a real sense, I hope, of how this all actually works in the real world and where I can see myself in it.  It’s been a bit awkward so far to be getting a graduate degree in planning without having a sense of what I actually want to do with that degree.  Hopefully I’ll have a much better idea after this semester.  All these classes will involve a ton of work, of course, so I’ll be very busy, but I think it’ll be worth it.

Haiti

The news out of Haiti regarding the effects of the earthquake there is pretty dire and depressing.  I don’t know a whole lot about the political and cultural context, aside from the oft-repeated fact that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, but this page (via apostropher at Unfogged) is very useful in providing background information.  The devastation reminds me of the Port Royal earthquake of 1692, which effectively destroyed what had been the capital of Jamaica and killed two-thirds of its population.  The epicenter of the Haitian earthquake seems to have been similarly close to Port-au-Prince, and as a result it sounds like the country’s governmental institutions have been crippled to a degree that makes them essentially useless.  Port Royal never recovered, although Jamaica eventually sort of did, and Haiti today is a much poorer country in relative terms than Jamaica was in 1692.  It’s all very sad.

Another Year In Retrospect

2009 was a good year for me.  I’m much happier now than I have been in a very long time, and that is largely the result of things that have happened in my life over the course of the past year.  Hopefully 2010 will be good too.

Another Year In Cities

Continuing a tradition I began last year, here are the cities I visited in 2009 and stayed in for at least one night:

• Albuquerque, NM
• Show Low, AZ
• Winslow, AZ
• Flagstaff, AZ
• Cortez, CO
• Blanding, UT
• Bicknell, UT
• Kanab, UT
• St. George, UT
• Las Vegas, NV
• Lone Pine, CA
• Bishop, CA
• Carson City, NV
• Reno, NV
• Santa Cruz, CA
• Barstow, CA
• Philadelphia, PA
• Roswell, NM
• Austin, TX
• Houston, TX
• Highland Park, NJ
• Kayenta, AZ

Once again, this list doesn’t include truly rural areas like Chaco, although some of the places on the list are quite small.  It also includes each place just once, in order of my first visit there during the year.

Clearly, I visited a lot more cities this year than last, mostly on my big road trip in February and March.  I’m pretty happy with that.

For Posterity

My mom just bought a machine that digitizes VHS tapes and uploads them to a computer, so my big project over the break is to go through all our old home videos and digitize them.  We noticed a little while ago that some (but not all) of the older ones are starting to deteriorate, so the main goal here is to preserve what’s left while we still can, but it will also make it a lot easier to watch and distribute the videos once we burn them to DVD.  It’s mostly the audio that’s going at this point, and even that is only on a few, so it looks like this will be pretty successful.  It’s certainly been interesting for me to look at these old tapes.

Most of them are just informal home videos of me and my sister when we were little kids, but there are a few that contain information of more general historical interest, including an interview with my dad that was done as part of an oral history project by the United Indian Traders Association for its archive at Northern Arizona University.  Anyway, it’s interesting stuff, and I think it’ll be a useful way for me to occupy my time while I’m on break.

Leading The Recovery

Albuquerque is one of the first cities to return to pre-recession output levels?  Sounds good, I guess, especially since I’m heading back there in a couple of days.  As for what the cities on the list have in common, just at a glance I’d say “high levels of federal spending per capita” probably accounts for Albuquerque, Virginia Beach, and DC.  That explanation probably wouldn’t work for Austin and McAllen, although it might for San Antonio, but Texas has a tendency to follow its own economic rhythm, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to the rest of the country.  A look at the maps on the MetroMonitor website suggests that Texas is doing considerably better than the country as a whole across a wide range of economic indicators.

It’s Not About You

Via Yglesias, a very good Op-Ed about how climate change is all about collective action, not individual morality.  Lobbying the Senate to pass cap-and-trade is vastly more important than any amount of diminishing your individual “carbon footprint.”

First Snow

The weather’s been kind of weird here lately, going back and forth between cold and rainy and warm and clear.  Now it’s snowing pretty significantly, although it hasn’t begun to stick.  I’ve found it interesting being back in the Northeast and adjusting to the very different weather patterns after being in the Southwest for a while.