Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

Sony headphones, cont.

In response to my complaints by letter and phone, as well as sending back the broken old pair, Sony sent me a new set of MDR-EX71SL Fontopia earbuds (£25.67 on Amazon). While this is welcome, I would have preferred to have them send me a refund. On past form, the new pair will only last about three months before completely falling apart due to cheap materials and shoddy construction. My earlier complaint about them is here. To anyone considering buying Sony Fontopia earbuds: don’t. They are no longer the nice-sounding, solid things they were back in 2000 or so. Now, they are made of plastic so soft, you can literally peel it off the wires gently with your fingers. It is less tough than the brand-new shoestring licorices that you are surprised to bite into and not find toughened by months of exposure to 7-11 air and fluorescent lighting.

Rather than put the refund towards new Sony headphones, I would probably have gone with either the Shure E2Cs (£51.49) or Etymotic ER6Is (£68.51), which many people have told me are more durable and have better sound. They need to be earbuds, because I want to be able to wear them under a bike helmet and carry them virtually everywhere. While big ear-covering headphones would be great for my room, they hardly work with bikes and iPod Shuffles.

Since the replacement EX71s are new and in the original packaging, I could try selling them online somewhere, thereby generating some funds to put towards a better set. Of course, that would mean at least another couple of weeks with ear canals aching from button-shaped and unyielding hard white generic Apple headphones. What do cost-conscious audiophiles suggest?

Life on an upswing

I am really glad to have my bike in working order again. Using it for a mail-run to Wadham and finding a card from Sarah was doubly gratifying. Oxford is a really fun place to cycle at night, lights blinking. The familiar streets feel liberating without traffic. I am equally glad to have dropped another paper into the inter-college post for Dr. Hurrell. It’s the one I am presenting on tomorrow, so I hope it is acceptably good. Now, I just need to write another three for him in the next couple of weeks and the academic year will be over.

Having a trio of parties seems the natural response: one next week to mark the end of term, one on the 22nd to celebrate the summer solstice, and another on July 1st to celebrate Canada Day. It will be a grand affair and I encourage all the Canucks in Oxford who I know to come out for it. Those wanting to observe Canadians in groups may also be considered for admission, though you will be required to learn any one sentence in French, as well as the chorus to ‘The Log Driver’s Waltz.’ Anyone who can provide actual Canadian beer is automatically extremely welcome.

PS. Mica’s video contest quarter file is ongoing. Please take a moment to vote for him. His film is really dramatically better than the version of ‘Song 2’ it is up against. Incidentally, yes – I will continue advertising this contest until i

Please, please hold – ye patches

Getting a bicycle tire puncture while out riding is just bad luck. Doing so miles from home with no repair equipment is the compounding of bad luck and bad planning. Somehow getting four separate punctures – three in one cluster and another halfway around the wheel – seems genuinely malicious. Especially when one is at least 1mm in diameter, so you patch it and put the wheel back on, only to learn that there are three more holes so very tiny that you can’t even see them. It’s even worse when you only find the third whole after going through the whole rigamarole of putting the wheel back together (harder than you might think).

That said, I now have the experience of fixing a puncture three times, as well as a replacement pump for the one that has gone AWOL, and some tire irons, a fresh backup tube, and chain lube just to round the whole thing off. Total cost of new kit: about 20% of the value of the bike.

Now, the plan was originally to speed my twenty minute walk to the department by fixing the bike. After one and a half hours of mucking around with rubber cement, that doesn’t look so viable. Still, my productivity and cardiovascular fitness in coming weeks should both rise given the return of my bike to an operational state.

Provided my inexpertly applied patches hold…

Thinking about powers and polarity

I’ve been trying hard to sort out a decent answer for the unipolarity/great powers question on which I am presenting Tuesday, but still having a lot of trouble. The definitions strike me as very circular. The characteristics we ascribe to great powers (nukes, UN Security Council seats, big economies) are as much descriptions of the states we already think of as great powers as they are a checklist against which countries can be compared. Likewise, ‘unipolarity’ in the contemporary sense basically just means ‘the world how it has more-or-less been since the end of the Cold War.’

The importance of the term ‘great power’ lies in the ways in which the distinction changes the thinking of states. While largely reflective of underlying capabilities, the confidence associated with such status is a capability in itself. Likewise, it is in the psychology of the great power distinction that the concept most forcefully manifests itself in the world. As such, the criteria of great power status change over time with both the real and perceived values of different national capabilities: an overseas empire, for instance, or nuclear weapons.

Since the United States is generally accepted to be the most powerful nation in the world, there is an obvious incentive to create arguments that might sway its behaviour. This is a strategy that manifests itself in ways like opposition groups attempting to secure American support for the removal of autocratic or unpopular rulers . It also manifests itself through the manipulation of the United States’ perception of its own security, and what the enhancement of that security requires. A prime contemporary example of this trend is the support that some truly grim regimes in the Arab world have been able to extract from the present administration, in exchange for security cooperation. To make attempts at lobbying based on assertions about the role of superpower states in general, or the conditions of unipolarity, is a less transparent way of trying to influence American policy today. Arguably, such initiative is aided by the generally positivist conception of the social sciences in the United States at present. Faith in the existence of valid laws of state behaviour opens the door to manipulation of that behaviour through the manipulation of how such laws are understood. For instance, consider the ways in which South Asian governments interacted with the ‘domino theory’ during the Vietnam War era.

The most common way in which unipolarity is used as a justification for policy by liberals is to assert the moral responsibility of the superpower to at least lead the drive towards greater international justice. Likewise, the classical realist response is to develop and immediate and abiding concern about new great powers rising to challenge the superpower: hence the intense present concern about China. Both perspectives are important for understanding how the idea of unipolarity affects policy prescriptions.

I think I basically just need to poke at these ideas for a few more hours – as well as reading some more sources – and I will have a decent, though perhaps somewhat unusual, paper and presentation.

Mica’s Michelle video

Mica has a new video online, made for his girlfriend Michelle. I think it’s really sweet, somewhat explicit, and almost perfectly reflective of his overall character.

I hope she is the kind of woman who will appreciate it. The very last segment, shot at Cleveland Park in North Vancouver, definitely makes the greatest impression, for me.

PS. Remember to keep voting for his contest video.

Parties, walking, bikes, and gratitude

Anna's cake After walking about six miles home from Anna’s birthday party, my father talked me through the repair of the puncture in my rear tire. Now, I just need to buy a pump to replace the one I have deemed hopelessly lost. Since the cycle shops wanted to charge me eleven quid, or so, just to repair the punctured tube this is a very welcome development. Indeed, the eleven quid will cover most of the ‘go to Heathrow to meet Linnea’ shortfall. Excellent.

Now, I should sleep. My thanks to Anna for an entertaining party.

PS. Aside from being a very cool kind of cat, Cheshire is also a tasty – though very crumbly – kind of cheese. I actually find the cheese to be rather like the cat: it vanishes fairly quickly, but leaves a smile.

Summer day, time to vote for Mica again

With the summer solstice nineteen days away, it is dazzlingly bright outside and all of Oxford’s green spaces are strewn with sleeping, reading, shirtless, ice-cream eating, ultimate-playing students. The University Parks look like English Bay, in Vancouver, on a sunny summer’s afternoon. While I don’t overly appreciate being irradiated by the sun, myself, I enjoy the spirit that seems to accompany the collective exodus to the outside world: even if I am appreciating it through library windows.

On Mica’s ‘Hives’ video
On a different matter, my brother Mica’s video has made it to the quarter final of the ‘Google Idol’ competition. I highly recommend that people take the time to go vote. You can also leave him comments on his blog. He is winning by a rather smaller margin this time, so people are especially encouraged to have a look.

My post about the previous round is here.

For my part, I am going to read a few more articles before heading off to Anna’s birthday party, way down Abingdon Road. I will also continue to dream of Amsterdam, where I feel increasingly compelled to go for a week or so, once classes end. Ideally, it’s a trip that I can convince someone interesting, with whom I have a stable and engaging relationship, to accompany me on.

Gay marriage back in the news

I wrote previously on an almost identical issue, but that which needs to be said generally needs to be said again.

Apparently Conservatice Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants to re-open the debate about gay marriage. At present, it is legal for same-sex couples to get married in Canada. This is a good thing for precisely the same reasons that it is good that couples of different races can get married: it is a simple requirement within a just and equitable society. The fact that homosexuality makes some people uncomfortable is no excuse whatsoever for discrimination. Likewise, the existence of certain traditions about what marriage has meant to some people must not preclude a societal definition that is blind to arbitrary factors. Particular churches can decide for themselves what kind of unions they want to bless and what kind of ceremonies they want to host, but under the law there must be equality and the protection of minority rights.

I am entirely confident that we will look back upon this issue in fifty years time the same way we look back on racially segregated schools today. That is to say, we will see it as a matter where governments took an astonishingly long time to accept a policy that is obviously a moral imperative. Canada’s legal history with regards to homosexuality is certainly not a sterling one. As recently as 1967, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Everett Klippert could be jailed as a ‘dangerous sexual offender’ simply on the grounds that he was likely to engage in consensual homosexual sex with adults. He was still in prison until 1971: two years after the Trudeau government decriminalized homosexuality. (See the CBC Timeline)

As regards the Harper government, this is indirectly a positive development. His only hope of getting a majority government in the next election is to prove that the Conservatives can be trusted with one. People are rightly distrustful, because of exactly the kind of political currents that have led to this announcement. Now, we just need the Liberals to clean themselves up quite a bit, get a strong new leader, and turn themselves back into the best option Canadians can hope for at the federal level.

A few words on the OED

Those of you on the networks of better universities probably have access to that finest of English dictionaries: the Oxford English Dictionary. A bit of the colourful history of the thing can be learned from the entertaining book The Professor and the Madman. Perhaps the most notable thing about the OED is that it doesn’t simply seek to define all words in the English language, it also seeks to identify when they were first used in a particular sense. As such, it constitutes a wonderful history of the language itself.

Here’s a special bonus for people using Firefox or Safari. Follow these instructions and you can add a new button that, if pressed, opens a popup window that lets you do an OED search. Also, if you select a word in a brower window and click the button, it will automatically look it up.

Like online access to the OED in general, this will only work if you are physically connected to the network of an institution that subscribes, or you are using a virtual private network (VPN) to access such a network.

My history with light and lenses

Over the last few days, I went through all 6000 or so original photos that I have copied to my laptop over the years. The vast majority were either taken in Oxford or in Vancouver, in the days leading up to my departure. There are also some travel photos – notably from my European trip in 2004 – and various sets of images scanned from rolls of film. I have very few photos from the period prior to what might be termed the middle of the Meghan era. Even going back that far fills me with conviction that I’ve lived a pretty interesting life; enough so that whole swaths of it can be forgotten entirely and come back like a CD you listened to a hundred times years ago, but never since.

While the quality of the photos has been improving, the subject matter and general characteristics of composition seem to be quite consistent. If anything, photos taken since I got a digital camera have been a bit more experimental upon occasion. There are also more shots of kinds that I prefer to have on a hard drive somewhere than on a website: not explicit, but simply not attempts at art or documentation for public consumption. I want what I put online to be attractive in a fairly conventional sense: with lines that guide the eye, proper exposure, and people looking good.

I really wish I had scanned some photos or negatives from my earliest period of real photography: after I got a manual Pentax SLR in tenth grade and started to do my own developing and printing. Much of it was quite technically imperfect, but it was nonetheless quite an exciting introduction into an empowering new medium. I particularly liked some of the shots generated over the course of a long string of trips to Victoria to visit Kate. Opening the huge plastic box with my old photo stuff in it, when next I am moving the bulk of my physical stuff in Vancouver, will probably involve a far more profound variant of the feeling of unfamiliar familiarity described above.

As with writing, I often feel somewhat entrapped within my own photographic style. I want to do something radically different, but attempts to do so are rarely good enough to warrant any public display – the ultimate objective of the greater part of everything I do. I can’t just turn around, like Orson Scott Card did, and write a cyberpunk short story that is any good.

Like with almost everything I do, I am almost always really pleased to get any kind of substantive response to photography I’ve done: regardless of how critical or positive it is. I am putting these things out there to be engaged with, to alter the ways that people think about me, themselves, and the world. If I am managing to do so, please tell me. If there is a way I could do better, I would be even happier to hear it.

PS. The gateway to almost all the photography I have online is here.

PPS. Given the annoyance of my increasingly fungus-covered digital camera sensor, donations to my photo gear fund are extremely welcome.