Trapped at Berkeley

I think the time gap between this post and the last post is the longest such gap this blog has ever seen.

Many things have occurred since the last post, and most of them have been keeping me very busy. Here’s some of the important stuff:

I moved back into the dorms. This will be the first year where I haven’t lived in Bowles Hall and where I’ve had a roommate. While I have nothing against my current living conditions, I still wish I was able to return to Bowles Hall — I really miss the atmosphere and short walk to classes. As an aside, I was recently quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle about the changes in policy regarding my former dormitory.

My third year at UC Berkeley started, and I’m as busy as ever. I’m taking five upper-division courses, and they leave me with very little free time. I’m feeling a lot of pressure to become more efficient with my time. We’ll see how that goes…

Along with my friends Ryan and Dima, I’m currently trying to bring back the Berkeley GNU/Linux Users Group. This week, we held a speech by Richard M. Stallman, who turned out to be pretty interesting. Pictures are posted here.

I’m acting as a co-teacher/teaching assistant for CS 198: System Administration for the Web. It’s an interesting and educational experience to teach people. I’m having fun, and I think it’s a great way to develop my skills at presenting information.

I’ve also had some computer problems, and, as I type this post, I’m attempting to recover data from a broken backup. The one lesson that I’ll never forget from this experience is to always test my backups before going ahead with a possibly destructive task. Though nothing vital was lost, the information I did lose was of considerable value.

Today, I selected my dorm room for next year at the Berkeley Housing and Dining Room Draw. I’ll be living in Foothill Hillside 7A30A with a (currently) freshman Chemistry major.

It’ll be interesting living in a Foothill Hillside double — I’ve lived in a Bowles Hall single for the past two years. I’ve loved Bowles Hall for its proximity to the College of Chemistry, but Foothill Hillside isn’t much further away. Furthermore, while singles offer the most privacy and personal space, they also tend to get lonely. I look forward to the new experience of living with someone else.

I’m still angry at Housing and Dining though…

I got this email today:

Dear Bowles Resident:

All current Bowles Hall residents who have applied for a 2005-06 housing contract and indicated a preference to return to Bowles Hall next year will not be able to return to Bowles.

Next year, Bowles Hall has been identified as a First Year Experience (for freshmen only) pilot program. This program is designed for new students to the University, with a particular focus on their successful transition to the University as leaders and scholars.

I’m upset that Berkeley Housing and Dining didn’t notify me sooner. I’ve been living at Bowles Hall for nearly two years, and I had wanted to live there for another year. Students were only able to specify five housing preferences on their housing applications, and I indicated Bowles Hall as my first choice. It’s too late to provide Housing and Dining with a revised list of preferences because housing decisions have already been made. Furthermore, I probably wouldn’t have applied for housing if I had known Bowles Hall wasn’t available. Now, Housing and Dining has pocketed my application fee, and I’m stuck in housing limbo.

The First Year Experience sounds totally stupid — some underworked staffer probably came up with this brilliant idea during a lunch break. One of the great things about living in the dorms is meeting returning students who have had experience with the university system and knowledge of the local area. For freshmen, these dormmates are often much better (and more easily approachable) advisors than the ones the university officially provides.

Why couldn’t the university make a theme program for this? Most of the freshmen who are going to be living at Bowles aren’t going to be interested — the success and popularity of similar programs at Bowles attests to that. Furthermore, Bowles Hall is probably the worst dorm for such a program: half of the residents live in singles, and we have the least common space of any dorm. Bowles Hall is not the best dorm to foster bonding between freshmen.

I’m betting this program is going to be shelved after a year.

Since Bowles Hall is an all-male dormitory, you can imagine that quite a bit of drinking goes on here. As with anything else that happens in Bowles Hall, the Residential Assistants usually adopt a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy - in other words, as long as you don’t gravely harm yourself or any of your neighbors, nobody will ever find out about it.

So, as you finish your first beer at Bowles Hall, you might want to start singing the Bowles Hall Drinking Song:

(speaking start)
The steward went below. (Shhh!)
To light the captain’s lamp. (Shhh!)
The lamp it would not light. (Why not?)
Because the wick was damp. (Oh!)
The captain went below. (Shhh!)
To kick the steward’s… (Shhh!)
He said, “So fire it up you son-of-a-bitch,
The Golden Gate is passed!”

(more…)

This is my second year living in UC Berkeley’s oldest dormitory: Bowles Hall. After the wild adventure that was last year, the administration has decided to crack down on many of our “traditions.” In the interest of preserving them for future Bowlesmen, I’ve decided to make occasional posts about “Bowles Hall Culture.”

This first post is about our war cry:

Alakazoo, Alakazaam,
Horseshit, God Damn,
Witch’s Tit, Bloody Cunt,
Rah, Rah, Fuck!