Jack Hardcastle

The Wiess musical Baby opened this past weekend. Going back to my roots as a stagehand. The funny thing is that the review got everything wrong. The set is abstract but it is by no means simple. 17 major set pieces and 27 scene changes in a two hour production. Hah.

In breaking with a long-standing tradition of nearly a century, my class will be the first class not to receive our diplomas at Commencement. Instead, we will parade across the stage, shake President Leebron’s hand, and be given a blue plastic tube with a paper “poster” inside. They will then mail us our diplomas six to eight weeks later, like some QVC infomercial. Seamonkeys, instead of a life-affirming document.

Their reasons behind this are varied. We were told by Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman (a.k.a. “The Eunuch”) that it was a money problem. We asked him who said that, and he told us Assistant to the President Mark Scheid ‘67. Scheid told us the money wasn’t an issue; it was the manpower necessary to roll the diplomas and collect the grades. He pointed us to head Registrar David Tenney ‘87, who told us the manpower was an issue, but a surmountable one. Turns out the real reason for the decision was too many alums complained last year that they spilled champagne on their freshly minted sheepskin diplomas. Read that again, because I’m sure you didn’t get it the first time.

If you do not have the wherewithal to safeguard your hard earned diploma after you’ve received a Rice education, then you do not deserve that hallowed honor. If you cannot safely handle your diploma then perhaps the University shouldn’t give it to you, and should just keep it on file somewhere in the basement of the Allen Center where you can come look at it under glass when you want to. Don’t f*** it up for the rest of us just because you yourself are a f***up.

I’m tired of lying down on this. Call to Conversation, graduation announcements, diplomas. I’m going to cause a you-know-what storm. I’m tired of this, and I want the University to know just how angry I am because I want them to be deathly, deathly afraid of ever crossing a student like they’ve crossed me. I am beyond angry on this. I am livid. And soon, “Bron-Bron” will understand why.

Well, we’re back from our little excursion across Texas. I’m glad I went, but not certain I’d go again immediately. We hit Austin, New Braunfels, and San Antonio on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday respectively. All in all, seven of us went, and I was one of two drivers. We did some sightseeing, some shopping, and some relaxing. I was just glad to get out of Houston. Click through to read the whole writeup.

Alright, I think I’ve got my problem licked, thanks to some help.

On Win32, the FastCgiIpcDir directive takes named pipes. I have no idea how to configure that (because I’m not exactly sure how named pipes fit into a CGI handler), so I left the default (i.e. comment out that line). So, before my <VirtualHost> sections, I have this:

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

Then I have this line for my Typo app, outside my <VirtualHost> but immediately after.

FastCgiServer "C:/path/to/app/public/dispatch.fcgi" -idle-timeout 120 -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 2

BAM! It all works perfectly! Suddenly, I’ve seen a 100-fold increase in my application’s speed. It’s fantastic. Now I can change my environment.rb file back to the default.

If I was unsure about parachuting before, this video makes me positive I’d like to go someday.

I’m in a very unusual mood today. Tired, and too-busy, and excited, and relieved all at once. The elections are over here at Wiess and my lame duck period has officially begun, but I’m still in office for almost a month, and I’m still going to be very busy this week. First and foremost, we have a jazz concert here at the College on Friday night, and I’m the defacto coordinator for the time being. That’s a pain in my rump. I didn’t get a whole lot of help running the election (except from Doward, who’s always amazing), and at times I feel like I just want to drop it all and let other people see how much slack there would be. Then I realize I’d cry while watching things fall apart, like Lisa keeps threatening to do.

At least there’s this to keep me cheery. We’re throwing one hell of a going-away bash for Dr. Bill and the Kalbs. Check out the design for the shirt, sketched by Caitlin Topham, Wiess ‘06. It’s exactly what I had envisioned, and best of all she drew this based on a 50-pixel tall blowup from my camera phone, where Dr. Bill was just standing in the background.

So much to do tomorrow, and so little desire to do it. But such is life.

Got back from New Orleans at about 11:15 last night. Had an awesome time. We left Rice around 2:30 on Friday afternoon, and drove 7 hours (with some heavy traffic leaving Houston and entering Baton Rouge). The first thing we did was park and catch the end of the Morpheus and Crew d’ Etat parades, and then headed into the French Quarter for a little while.

It seemed pretty packed to me, and it took about an hour to get from one end of Bourbon to the other, but according to veterans it was empty compared to previous years. I spent half the time staring up at the balconies to make sure I didn’t get clocked by some rapidly moving beads. I must say I think the whole thing is overhyped. There are clearly marked strip clubs and probably a hundred bars (with to-go beers and hand grenades) but it was not the sort of drunken revelry people portray.

It seemed to be all about the beads, and 95 times out of a hundred you didn’t have to do anything except stand there and make eye contact with someone standing on a balcony throwing them. We were walking around Jackson Square towards the river and a woman burst out of her second floor porch and said, “Don’t move!” She went inside and ended up giving us an entire bag of really nice beads just for saying our hometowns. I think we ended up with, between the eight of us, about 50-75 pounds of beads after 16 hours. Not bad, considering none of us were really trying at all, and seven of the eight of us were guys.

We ate beignets at Cafe du Monde, and were given an iron by some drunk guys in the Park. I nearly got trampled by a mounted policeman whose horse got spooked by the flying beads and came flying backwards at me into a wall. We used a paid bathroom for free at Krystal’s when the attendant wandered away, and the rest of the gang used the river when there were no other options available (it’s really interesting to see how drinking affects your bladder — I had to go about one-tenth as much as everyone else). All in all, it was a great trip. I don’t know if I’d ever do it again, but I’m glad I did it once.

I wrote a column for the Rice Thresher that will be run in a shorter, letter form instead. Click through to read the full column.

There’s a new kosher restaurant that just opened up in Houston. It’s apparently the first such establishment in the city of five million people. I didn’t have the heart to tell my friends at lunch that I drive by one of the only kosher Krispy Kremes in the country, eat at a kosher pizzeria regularly, and have friends who have entire kosher kitchens. Not to mention, I actually know what kosher is (there was a fact box in the article describing Jewish culture and terminology).

I guess I figured it was treif.

I’ve spent the better half of today working on getting this blog up, and I have finally fixed the problem but not in a manner with which I’m satisfied. Specifically, I can’t get my Virtual Hosts to have different RAILS_ENV settings. I tried SetEnv RAILS_ENV production in the httpd.conf and .htaccess to no avail. If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong, I’d love to hear it.

Edit: This has been fixed.