mikhail panchenko / blog

Yesterday, I was toying with setting up Gmail for my domain using Dreamhost’s control panel. However, I clicked too many buttons without reading what they did, so I ended up pointing my domain to a cookbook google apps website. When I went to reverse the changes, something got jacked with Dreamhost’s queueing, so I just got stuck with the google page.

Here’s the good news: less than two hours after my request, submitted at about 10:30 central/8:30 pacific, I had an email response from the support team, and everything had been rolled back to the way it was. By the time I woke up in the morning, the DNS had long propagated, and mihasya.com was back. Say what you want about Dreamhost, but they know how to run a good business.

Posts with actual content coming soon

NYT’s Article full of kids justifying philosophy as a major will single handedly result in a major economic depression about 5 years from now, when all the kids whose parents read that article today graduate from college with absolutely no idea how to do anything constructive.

The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers.

Note the strategic use of the word “can” that most people will probably just ignore. Yeah, sure, it CAN translate into practical skills – if you HAVE practical skills to begin with.

Have fun being a graduate student for the rest of your life.

My favorite:

Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive. “That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Man… if I weren’t worried that she has absolutely no sense of humor, I would immediately send this “Jenna” character a hilarious facebook message. But I just don’t have time for a harassment suit right now. It’s just not worth it because anything I could say that would actually be funny would immediately land me in jail w/o collecting anything. Fuck it, I’m gonna give it a shot.

Yup. Might be in trouble on this one. Tried to keep it pretty tame though.

A while ago there was an article in my school’s own craptastic student run newspaper written by some dude who was majoring in some BS like “Interdisciplinary Project in Humanities” which straight up claimed that liberal arts students like himself were completely unemployable and should just accept it. I took some offense (having just signed my fairly lucrative internship offer) and wrote some fairly pointed responses.

Looking back on it, I realize that the article shouldn’t have offended to me. I’m not like that guy. I create websites and go to database conferences in my spare time. He writes poorly edited bullshit articles for a slightly-below student newspaper.

Which brings me back to my point: philosophy is only ok as a major if you have some sort of marketable skills or characteristic to offer alongside your “deep existential torrent,” or if you plan to immediately follow up with grad school – philosophy, law, whatever. If you’re a handsome devil like me (especially if you have a mustache), you can pretty much do whatever you want.

(Disclaimer: I am an investor in philosophy; in fact, I am procrastinating from writing my capstone paper to write this post)