In a web exclusive article, Foreign Policy magazine takes a look at Peace Corps and the effectiveness of the agency.
There are also some reactions to the article from RPCVs on the Foreign Policy blog.
The following is a rambling journal entry I wrote about two years ago. A bit dramatic, but I found it amusing to read.
Mein Tag
This is my life. I usually arrive at work between 8:30 and 9 in the morning, depending on whether I drive or take RTD’s “S” route into Boulder. Everyday as I walk up to the building’s entrance, where the office smokers are filling their lungs with the toxic substance, I feel my spirit sinking and the world becoming depressing. When I arrive at my desk, I push the power button on my Dell notebook. During the 30-40 second wait while the machine boots up and logs in, I slump down in my chair and ponder how bad it is for my back to sit slumped like that. Once logged in, I go through the same procedure of opening up Firefox, Outlook, and the Trillian IM client. Ignoring the emails and tickets crying out for urgent attention, I open up gmail and eagerly wait for new emails from friends around the world. After checking personal email, I browse to my Yahoo RSS aggregator to get the highlights of news from around the world. My current favorite is the Morning Briefing on the Foreign Policy Editor’s Blog.
Around 9am on Mondays and Thursdays we have the all-important team status meeting. For 15-30 minutes I sit in the conference room as my co-workers talk about the projects they are currently working on. Usually I stare out the window at the Flatirons, admiring the majesty and tranquility so close, yet at this time, so far. When I’m not staring out the window, I observe my co-workers. I wonder if they really like being there or if they are just better at faking it than I am. When it comes my turn to give a status on my projects, I dutifully give a minute long summary of whatever picayune project or projects that consume my work schedule at the time. Then we are dismissed from the meeting to make way for others to continue the meeting on some project that requires a more in-depth daily meeting. I’ve never bothered to inquire what that meeting is about. I’ve never recieved an Outlook meeting request to attend the meeting so I assume that I don’t need to know anything about it.
After the meeting I return to my desk and stare at Outlook email until the reciept of the much awaited email from the receptionist stating that the Burrito Guy is here selling burritos. This is pretty much the highlight of my day. The burritos are way overpriced at $3 a burrito and aren’t even that tasty when compared to other breakfast burritos I’ve had the pleasure of consuming over the course of my life. But, I always look forward to the morning burrito.
Back at my desk, I close my eyes and savor the burrito for as long as I can. People seem less inclined to barge into your cube if you have food in your mouth. When the burrito is gone and a pang of sadness hits, I open up an SSH client and log in to the server which contains the code needed to run the websales reconciliation scripts. Ah, websales. I knew there was a reason I took accounting and finance in business school. I’m thankful for the foreknowledge of the CU business school to realize that someday I would work at a company with a finance department too incompetitent to know the difference between a credit and a debit, forcing the web developers to do the heavy lifting of finance instead. Websales usually takes between 30 minutes and two hours depending on how many of the finance departments mistakes we have to hand correct.
At this point, it’a almost lunchtime. After the arrival of Burrito Guy, lunchtime is my second favorite portion of the day. I like to refer to lunchtime as my hour long mini-vacation. A five minute drive up Pearl Street brings me to Barnes & Nobles where I spend the next hour or so browsing the travel and language sections. During that time I read about far off places that I wish I visit. I read grammar points about languages that I’ll never be able to speak fluently, or probably even proficiently. But, I’m still able to get a little buzz from the lunchtime vacation.
After lunch, the rest of the day consists of waiting for 5pm to roll around. Some of the day is spent IMing my good friend and co-worker Brooke until I see that she is wanting too much to concentrate on her work. Then I walk down the long yellow hallway to the main building where I stop and visit the Web Design girl, Marina. She’s an interesting person and I often wonder why she is working here. She seems much to creative and artsy to be stuck in the cube designing boring corporate graphics and webpages. But, at least she has a fancy Mac with a huge monitor to play with.
The actual work part of my day usually consists of forcing our highly-touted Content Management System, called Eprise, to work with our system. The implementation is akin to setting up a tent in a forest using duct tape and yarn stolen from your grandmother’s knitting basket. The duct tape is pretty solid, but not pretty. The yarn may look pretty but you know that it’s going to fall apart pretty soon. It’s funny to think that I often look at the legacy code written by developers no longer with the company, who left after being severely screwed by the company, and think of what a hack this code is. Then I proceed with writing my own hack code to replace the previous hack code, knowing that someday when I have left the company someone will come along and do the same with my code. Such is the cycle of software/we development I guess.
When five o’clock finally hits, my computer is already being shut down and I’m halfway out the door before the project manager approaches with a tale of some important issue that needs to be addressed or other news of an uncontrollable fire destined to reck terror on the world. I smartly inform her that I’m going home and whatever issue it is can wait until tomorrow because, quite truthfully, no one is starving due to this, no one is losing a leg in a landmine due to this, and in a week noone will even remember this issue. Perspective please and thank you.
This is my life. Good to the last drop.
“We can disagree whether it’s an authoritarian regime, a dictatorship. But it’s a regime that is undemocratic. Nobody argues that,” Kasparov says. “But Russia, I don’t think, yet has made its final choice.”
Playing around with the Google Maps API today, I thought I could just embed a nifty little map of Ukraine in Wordpress, but it won’t let me post PHP right now.
Not as cool as viewing it within this page, but you can see where DP is.
What do Delaware and the Ukrainian Orange Revolution have in common? Well, to be honest, nothing really. Except that I am choosing to write about both of them in this edition of “what did Mike do on the east coast this weekend”.
In continuation of last week’s adventures in Richmond, a friend and I decided to visit the country’s first state, Delaware. On another cloudy and rainy Saturday morning we left the DC area in search of something new and exciting to write home about. After about two and half hours of good conversation about graduate schools and Ukrainian life, we found our destination - the Atlantic Ocean. It ended up being another long, but very entertaining, day trip to the surrounding states.
Today, I attended a showing of a new film about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. It was a really well done presentation of the events leading up to and during the 2004 peaceful revolution in Ukraine after attempts by those in power to rig the election in their favor. Watching this film before going to Ukraine last year would’ve been beneficial since I wasn’t aware of most of the details before this. But, since Peace Corps is ostensibly a non-political organization I don’t think they would’ve shown it during PST as another round of elections was in the works at the time. Watching the movie I thought that, once again, real life international politics is way more interesting than anything that Hollywood could come up with. I don’t think a script could have been written as exciting and dramatic as the events during those cold 17 days in the Ukrainian winter, from a botched assassination attempt to human blockades preventing the authorities from taking away the people’s voice.
If you are interested, I’d check it out: www.orangerevolutionmovie.com/. Or you can call me up and I’ll tell you all about it. =)
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all