The Latest from
Liam Keane

• First Year of College

  Posted: 22 Jun 2006 12:37 AM CDT

  I am happy to say I am done with my first year of college. I completed my last final on Friday and am currently enjoying my summer break. My first year was very interesting. It was nothing like I thought it would be but it was a lot like how I hoped it could be. Basically, I was very impressed and it went much better than I expected. A lot of its goodness came from the amazing Cienega House community. Our wonderful RA, Carlos Perez, was seriously the best RA on campus. Everyone in Cienega was really cool and the relaxed atmosphere made for a very comfortable year.

  When I started writing this entry, I wrote about the classes I took. It seemed the logical way to sum up my first year in college. But then I realized that’s not what this year was about for me. Sure, Professor Raccuhaus was really cool and I watched some interesting movies in Film 46. In fact, I probably actually learned something this year. And while that’s certainly important, I feel like this year was more about the experience. By experience, I don’t mean the normal stereotypical “college experience”. By experience, I mean adjusting to living away from my family, making new friends, and interacting with a community of 20,000 in class and around campus.

  So I started this journal entry over and began making some sort of timeline. I planned to break down the year into events and talk about going home on Halloween, setting up a tree on Christmas, turning nineteen, getting written up by some staff for tossing a chair off a balcony, going to the end of the year dinner, building a sand castle and so forth. But even these stories didn’t really cover what happened this year.

  The best way I can explain how I spent my year is quite simple. I spent my time pulling pranks on Carlos, playing Frisbee with Sarah, joking with Andrew, talking politics with Chrissy, getting food with Nico, getting coffee with Elina, listening to Ian, laughing at Katie, fighting Santosh, teasing Maura, hanging out with Randy, smiling at Lauren, chilling with Sasha, flirting with Giuliana, practicing le parkour with Brady, and flying kites with Eva. In short, it was a great way to spend a year.

  Further notes: I already miss my friends and have begun to reminisce about the time we spent together. I can’t really put how I feel into words so the above will have to do. When I wrote that this year was not about the stereotypical college experience, what I meant was even though I was at the #4 party school in the nation, I didn’t consume a single drink or experiment with any drug (something I am proud of). I don’t necessarily feel those things are “bad” and I don’t think that those who use them are “bad”, I just don’t use them myself. My college experience is not any lesser for it. With regards to “probably actually learning something”, apart from not learning proper grammar, I have learned a ton. I would like to again thank the Santa Barbara Foundation, the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, the Ian McPherson Memorial Aquatics Scholarship Fund, the Brooks and Kate Firestone Honorary Scholarship Fund, United Student Aid Funds, United Volunteer Services, the Santa Ynez Valley Bar Association, the Los Alamos Valley Men’s Club, the Solvang Rotary Foundation, the University of California Santa Barbara Chancellor’s Scholarship Fund, and everyone else whose generous support allowed me to learn so much. I am very grateful.

• Structured Procrastination

  Posted: 30 May 2006 10:13 PM CDT

  Many people have wondered how I ever get anything done. As it turns out, I seem to be following the theory of structured procrastination. John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford explains:”The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.” Continue reading Perry’s article

• 52k

  Posted: 30 May 2006 07:47 AM CDT

  So far, this site has served up over 52,000 pages. Wow.

• Slay the Lizards

  Posted: 30 May 2006 05:37 AM CDT

  Douglas Adams wrote in his book, So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, about an ancient democracy where lizards ruled the people. Ford Prefect attempts to explain to Arthur Dent how the people allowed this to happen:

  “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

  “You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

  “Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

  “But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

  “Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”

  This is a terribly depressing approach to democracy but it seems to be true. When looking at the top Democratic canidates for Governor I can’t say I’m too excited. Angelides is a developer and based on his campaign funding, I cannot support him. Westly looked like an awesome canidate and I was all fired up to support him. I really admired his pledge to run a clean campaign but then he broke his promise by being the first to run negative ads. I feel betrayed. If you are going to publically state “I pledge not to be the first candidate in this primary campaign to initiate any paid advertising in this primary campaign that attacks the other candidate by name” and then you go ahead and do so anyway, you lose your supporters’ confidence in you and you lose the public’s trust. Westly’s website no longer links to the pledge he made and he seems to want to pretend he never made such a promise. As such, I can no longer support Westly.

  To find out who to support in the primary, I visited VoteCircle.com where I looked at a list of the Democrats running. I visited each one’s website and in the end I believe the choice is clear. I am very happy to endorse Michael Strimling, a true progressive running for Governor of California. Please, don’t vote for a lizard!

• The best classes at UCSB

  Posted: 27 May 2006 10:50 AM CDT

  As I sign up for next year’s classes, I’ve found some opinions by fellow Gaucho’s to be quite interesting. Take a look at the discussion about UCSB’s best classes.

• Upgrade from 1.5 to 2.0

  Posted: 27 May 2006 09:53 AM CDT

  I finally got around to updating the blogging software powering this site. You might need to press “Shift+Reload” to see the changes.

• Sun Dance Success

  Posted: 20 May 2006 01:36 AM CDT

  
  Liam Keane. (American, born 1987). Sun Dance Success. (2006). Crayon on paper, 8 ½ x 11″ (21.59 x 27.94 cm). Eva Braunstein Collection

• Ahnold

  Posted: 09 May 2006 01:58 AM CDT

  On Saturday morning, Govenor Schwarzenegger made a surprise visit to UCSB. Some girls who live in my dorm and are active in UCSB Democrats were asking people if they would protest the governor’s policies. A student visiting from Holland, Roderic (who was staying in my room on a couch for the weekend), thought it’d be an interesting way to start off the day. Plus, the girls were all quite cute so I wasn’t arguing. We woke up Brady and at 9am, we set off with the girls for Davidson Library to express our discontent with Mr. Schwarzenegger’s policies.

  We arrived outside Davidson Library and saw around five campus dems sitting on a bench. Police officers were already walking around and men in suits stood just inside the doors of the library, making sure no students were let inside. We checked in with the protest organizers and they told us the governor would arrive in about half an hour. Until then, last minute preparations were being made. Someone arrived with Arrowhead water jugs and hid them in some nearby bushes for later use as drums. Basically, we were supposed to act as innocent as possible - as if we were just meeting at the table for a study session. More concerned students trickled in and joined us and soon signs were handed out. About one third of the signs were rally signs for Phil Angelides. As I had not chosen who I would be voting for in the June 6th primary, I declined to hold an Angelides banner. The other two-thirds of the signs were pretty lame attacks on Arnold (“Stop Arnold’s Arrogance” or “Arnold, Go Home!”). I disagree with some of his decisions but wasn’t willing to publicly assault his character or the fact that he was visiting our campus. I spotted one sign that was fairly moderate in that it had a CDA logo and read “I’m young, I’m a Democrat, and I vote.” After everyone had a sign or a drum, we walked over to the steps of the library and started chanting about fee hikes and how Arnold should go home (ironically, he hadn’t even arrived at this point). As we yelled Democrat slogans and such, fellow Gauchos walked by us and attempted to enter the library to study for midterms which are this week. Each time one would approach the door we would yell “Let him in! Let him in!” and after they were turned away by the suits, someone would yell “Whose university?” and the crowd would respond with an enthusiastic “Our university!” The guards at the doors mocked our cries which annoyed a bunch of the kids taking the whole thing seriously. Brady, Roderic, and I just laughed.

  We were told by a lookout that the governor’s motorcade was arriving, so the horde of malcontents marched over to the back of the library. UCSB police cars and the UCSB ambulance were parked in the staff parking lot and soon a few CHP officers arrived, followed by two black SUVs. Arnold got out and walked into the library amid a great burst of yelling. After he was inside, the crowd marched back over to where we had been earlier. Someone showed up with some bullhorns and the group continued chanting for the duration of Arnold’s press conference (about 20 minutes). With the news that he was indeed ‘going home’ as had been demanded, the group marched back over to watch him leave and yell some more. There were about 40 protestors screaming about how Arnold is wrong for California and there were around 5 fans smiling and giving thumbs ups to Arnold as he left UCSB, waving from his window. After he was gone, Chancellor Yang and his wife came over to address the student protestors and answer questions.

  As it turned out, Schwarzenegger had come to UCSB to meet with the Chancellor and announce that the bond measure that passed the day before would pay for a new library. I couldn’t get over how odd it was that the news conference was about improvements to my campus and I had been outside yelling (kind of biting the hand that feeds you).

  Overall, I was entertained by the event and it was pretty exciting. On the other hand, it was definitely disappointing. There were a number of problems with the event:

  1. The protest claimed that Arnold was not welcome on campus. This is ridiculous. If Howard Dean had showed up and I saw a group of College Republicans protesting his right to visit a public campus, I would laugh at their pettiness. College is supposed to be about broadening one’s perspectives and as such, anyone should be welcome at UCSB.
  2. The protest took issue with the use of the library as a venue. It’s true that it might have been better to use a building that is not used on Saturdays but seeing as the press conference was about funding to replace the library, it makes sense to use it. The group claimed that the closure of the library for about two hours was preventing students from studying for midterms. However, the nearby 24-hour study room remained open. In a hypocritical twist, the noise the protest made disrupted far more students than the closure of the library.
  3. About a third of the signs used in the protest read “Angelides 2006”. First off, if you’re trying to show a public official that you are not happy about their policies, simply stating that you’ll be voting for a competitor in November seems a little pointless. Instead of making the protest a non-partisan, issue-based demonstration, those that carried Angelides signs weakened any argument they were trying to make by demonstrating that they had already made their minds up and were part of a candidate-based activist group.

  Anyway, I think I learned a few things. The first is don’t go to protests organised at one in the morning by kids who have been celebrating Cinco de Mayo. The second is don’t participate in something unless you know what’s going on. After the event, I felt motivated to read up on the canidates in the Democratic primary. From what I’ve read about Phil Angelides, I believe I’ll vote for Steve Westly in the primary (unless someone can tell me why Westly is a bad choice). After reading that article about Phil, if it’s him against Arnold in November I’ll probably vote Green. Anyway, it was an interesting experiance.

  UPDATE: Westly has since lost my support and instead I’ll be voting for Michael Strimling in the primary. Also, some additional pictures of the protest have since made their way online. Oddly enough, they’re in black and white (for added drama I guess).

• Busy Lately

  Posted: 02 May 2006 11:50 PM CDT

  Sandcastle Day 2006, Cienega House team (winner of the “People’s Choice” award)
  

  You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax. Work is for people with jobs. You’ll never remember class time, but you’ll remember time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So, stay out late. Go out on a Tuesday with your friends when you have a paper due Wednesday… The work never ends, but college does. — Tom Petty on college

• Legal status of guide dogs in training

  Posted: 05 Apr 2006 02:52 PM CDT

  My family raised three puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind: Honeybear, Olga, and Glorianne. (Honeybear passed class, was not paired, and became a hearing dog; Olga made it to class but stopped cooperating; Glorianne was career changed in an early phase.) Puppy raisers take their dogs almost everywhere they go in order to provide exercise and socialization. The dogs wear coats that read “Guide Dog Puppy in Training” and users are issued identification cards to certify they are authorized to train the dog. Even with these credentials, occasionally teams are refused access to an area or mode of transportation. Guide Dog staff suggest that raisers try and explain the importance of socialization to uncooperative persons but they advise that raisers should not push the issue. I have heard of some raisers warning businesses they are in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, the ADA only protects handlers with disabilities using service animals; the rights of dogs in training are left up to the states. And in California, service dogs in training are also protected.
  

  California Civil Code Section 54.1.c Visually impaired or blind persons… and persons who are deaf or hearing impaired… and other individuals with a disability and persons authorized to train service dogs for individuals with a disability, may take dogs, for the purpose of training them as guide dogs, signal dogs, or service dogs in any of the places specified in subdivisions (a) and (b).

  Section (a) begins with “Individuals with disabilities shall be entitled to full and equal access… [to] places to which the general public is invited…” and continues with a detailed list of pretty much anywhere. Section (b) prohibits housing discrimination. Section 54.7.a makes what seems to be the only exception: “the provisions of this part shall not be construed to require zoos or wild animal parks to allow… [service dogs] in areas of the zoo or park where zoo or park animals are not separated from members of the public by a physical barrier“. If the zoo does not allow a service dog they must provide free kenneling for the dog and an attendent for the handler. Other than that, service dogs and service dogs in training can go anywhere in California provided the dog is on a leash and is issued a dog tag by the county. Handlers are responsible for any damage done by their dog.