(No Title)
Okay,
Comments are actually up and running now.
Sorry about that.
Okay,
Comments are actually up and running now.
Sorry about that.
Saw two movies in the recent past: Wicked and Shadowlands (second time to see Shadowlands). Wicked was pretty horrible. It starred…I’m going to mess this up…not Dunst (so hot with red hair)...IMDB says Julia Stiles. It was a thriller with no thrill.
Shadowlands is a big recommendation, especially for people interested in Christianity. It’s a biography of a period of C. S. Lewis’s life. Very good, and sad.
Silence of the Lambs is waiting for tonight. That’s a re-see as well. I’m looking forward to seeing it again.
I want my group and I want to leave. We’re critiquing a lab report without having a published format.
It looks like Glamdring lives! The old MUD programming project may be revived by MetaMagus.
Speaking of MetaMagus, I need to start poking around the blog software to look for a way to take comments. I’ll be right back, I’m sure.
Ok, I cleared the rant out so I can actually put some news and musings here. Felt like Howard Dean there for a second. “WAHAGHHH!”
Classes are good. Work is kicking in, which is always a bad thing for sanity. I’m trying to learn a lesson from last semester and just focus, but not too much. Overfocus for me is more dangerous than anything else.
It looks like we won’t have so many lab reports, and that’s good – after 8 last semester. As long as the group is okay things should be excellent.
There will probably be an update as to the group situation soon. We’re…pardon my French…totally jerking off right now.
Okay. Here you go. If you want to post a comment to one of these blog entries, just click the link below the timestamp at the bottom of each message.
By the way, the lab group is three people I don’t know. But, it should be okay. Whatever.
Well, I’m sitting here in Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics Lab. It has just been announced that groups are to be randomly selected (after carefully making sure friends were in my section). Class should have started 10 minutes ago, and we’re just sitting here with the TA’s reading papers or something. Why is it that classes are made to be hard when the ones that should be difficult can so easily be made simple by a good professor? Here’s a list of some things bad professors do:
- Make you read their minds. I’m already losing in that game from the start because I can’t understand how you could give so many years to your education and then teach for little money while neglecting to become good at it.
- Waste your time. This falls under the sitting around group as well as the needless work group. Labs are notorious in both areas.
- Make you wonder about your grade up to the last minute, even when you’ve done a solid job all semester. No explanation needed. It just sucks. It’s happened about five times. I’m sick of it.
- Don’t understand their own field. Why?
- Don’t care about students. This is the blanket accusation. This means time wasting, laziness, bad teaching, the works.
It’s been 25 minutes now. Good thing the class is two hours long! I would hate to run out of time.
DHCP finally working again on the laptop, and the cable is still working. Things are looking up!
Okay. David Folk Thomas on FNC doing the news at like 1:30 AM. Is that how you pay your dues in the TV news industry? And with a name like that? Prime time, baby!
Houston made the survey newswatch. Some burglar got stuck in a chimney. This follows the guy who jumped through the drive-thru window. And was the dentist office robber in Oklahoma or Houston? I don’t remember.
Why do we publish such ingenious ideas for crime? Aren’t they just encouraging our human competitiveness and creativity?
Random fact: there are more dentists here in Norman than any other town I have ever seen.
ESP-like synergistic event: the local news once mentioned a “Norman resident who was a dentist.” Kristin and I concurrently said, “Who isn’t?”
I think I’m about done with activists. I just spent about twenty minutes being “educated” (their words) by members of the Sierra Club on CSPAN-2. I feel just the same about members of the RNC and the DNC and anyone else who is paid to have such a big mouth.
I like watching O’Reilly because he messes with people who try to make him into an activist for one single large group. Yes, he is an activist at times on some issues (and those are the issues over which I am most likely to disagree with him). I’m somewhere between lukewarm and slightly opposed to his position on “gangster rap” (more on this some other day/night), but I appreciate someone who takes a stand against the concept of the organizational advocate.
We need our advocates: we need loudmouths who won’t shut up until we at least consider their issue. That’s fine. But we have to remember we don’t have a right to be heard; we just have a right to speak. C-SPAN seems to be the engine for people to be heard who probably never should be. If 24-hour news doesn’t rake every piece of muck throughout the day, C-SPAN certainly picks up the scraps.
If the right comes off oblivious or idealistic, the left certainly comes off patronizing. I don’t need to be “educated” about environmental issues. I would rather hear an opinion. And I will make up my mind for myself, thank you. And McDonalds did NOT cause the Holocaust! (An opinion of a professor from last semester.) I think I might be more left on more issues if things weren’t so patronizing over there.
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Service woes and redemptions: IP address still not being issued. Probably done by Friday, no guarantees. Cable may be disconnected due to a mistiming in a service request. SBC finally provided the instructions to disable the routing functions and make the box into a bridge that would not interfere with the router.
Operational detail: a new WAP was purchased as a secondary option and not used. The ghost of Routers Past lives on.
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The spin is horrible. I just read a writeup about Aspartame (the sweetener in Diet Coke) on a holistic medicine website. It appears that my new liking for Diet Vanilla Coke is going to make me lose my mind, get brain cancer, and develop asthma. WebMD denies all such reports, except a bit of a concession for memory effects.
Message to holistic medicine people: spinning medical dangers about a popular ingredient will NOT help your cause. Most people have an instinct when it comes to doing stupid things concerning their health. We, the semi to respectably-intelligent people of America, do not need you to tell us what to do. We need raw data with some competing angles of analysis to fill in where clarity is lacking. I don’t want to hear from Coca-Cola that Aspartame will make me better in bed and grow taller. I also don’t want to hear from a bunch of twenty year-old treehouse dwellers that it’s going to make my head explode. I just want to hear the facts. If there’s a 0.1% chance of brain cancer, I’ll make a call. If it’s 25%, I’ll put down the can. It’s my call. Let me keep that, at least.
I’m young, I have a working bootleg Linux WAP/Router combo, I have a good life. I don’t think I have brain cancer from Diet Coke. I am happy. I am intelligent in most subjects, and I’m getting better at navigating while I’m driving. I don’t need people cramming sunshine or workboots up my tailpipe. Just leave me with a good concept of risk and return, and I’ll figure out what to do to keep things going as well as they are.
About Geo. McCalip
Am I related to this guy?
I’m going to bed. I promise.
Well, back for the new semester. Things look good, even though you can never really take the temperature of expected workload until a few weeks into the semester.
I’m going to say that the “test phase” of the blog is now over, and I’m going to shoot toward regular postings, with the ultimate intent to distribute the URL to friends.
It’s about time to renew my faith in Linksys publicly after the August 25 blasting. The router incompatibility was all OU’s fault. It worked great in an office that I set up over the break. (More on the OU router situation later.)
This section of the post is about blasting SBC. Let’s go through a little chronology of my experiences with them over the break while setting up the aforementioned office: (1) DSL guy lied about when he would show up and delayed several days, (2) when DSL guy finally arrived he acted as though we had not requested a static IP address and said the renewed service order would take 7-10 days to process, (3) it took longer than that, (4) in the meantime another tech said that the modem would plug straight into the (aforementioned) Linksys router and work great with one minor and already-known configuration change, (5) the modem (upon arrival) was actually a modem-router combo that completely messed up the pre-existing router that I had configured, and (6) upon calling tech support about the issue they did not know if a regular off-the-shelf modem would even work with their own service.
So, I STILL can’t find a way to get rid of that router!
Speaking of routers, I have a software one running up here on a Linux machine that’s serving a wireless access point perfectly. Linux is absolutely not easy to get complicated stuff going, but when it starts working it’s heavenly.
Concurrently, OU blocked my laptop’s network card because I was suspected of having the MSBLAST worm. Little did they know, the MSBLAST worm disables itself when the system clock passes January 1, 2004. I’m on my fourth day waiting for reconnect. I’m sure they’re amazed at my Zen-like calm as I tell them daily over the phone that the delay is no problem. I neglect to mention I am running a bootleg router and access point. Not their business.
Kristin’s doing well. She’s taking a fun educational math class that is going to be one of the easiest things she’s ever done but may be pretty helpful. She thought she had Heisman-winner Jason White in her literature class, but that’s not happening.
I think I’ll put down the “pen” now pending an updated O’Reilly-esque “Unresolved Problems” section. It’s a pity to have to shower for a one-class day (the big lab was cancelled for the first week), especially when the percentage of men in the class is literally about 90-95%. (The second tier of upper division Mechanical Engineering – not a chick magnet class.)
I have responding thoughts to Remyn’s blog that I’m drumming up, and there will be more zany news and rantings about the service industry. All this and more…after Design of Mechanical Components.