Brain Dump

In the continuing saga of my plans to attend grad school I received my financial aid packet from NYU today. There are still details to work out, of course, but the bottom line is that I can do this, and it will be awesome.

Beyond that I’m just tired. Mondays are my long day (class starts at 08:00, work ends at 21:00, sometimes I have a one hour break for lunch). Coming out of a Saturday+Sunday 12 hour shift cycle means that I’ve had not nearly enough sleep. Fortunately I don’t have to work tomorrow so I’ll sleep in to the decadent hour of 08:00.

It’s really dawning on me just how close all of this is. My last final is May 7, my last day of work is May 8, and on May 10 I officially graduate. Hopefully I’m on the road for the beginning of my trip by May 24 at the very latest. Then it’s ten weeks of driving and visiting and hanging out.

Someone at some point said, perhaps in jest, that I could write a book about this road trip thing. At first I thought that was ridiculous. I mean… people who do cross-country journeys and go on to write books about them have interesting things to say, what would I talk about? Then I realized that I have an angle on this that I find fascinating. I could, very legitimately I feel, write a book entitled Road Tripping Across the Internet. Looking over my list of people to visit, almost every single one of them is someone I met online in one place or another.

Think about that: I’m taking a trip that involves hanging out with more than 50 different people, and with only two or three exceptions every single one of those relationships was first formed somewhere online. Wouldn’t that be a neat book? I like to think so. I’ll be making notes all along the trip anyway, just in case.

Speaking of the trip, I’m working on a project for my web apps class that I plan to use for the summer. More details to come, but it’s sort of an experimental blog/forum system organized primarily around physical locations. We’ll see what happens.

Thomas

I’ve been crazy busy, but things have been progressing well, I think.

I made a final decision regarding graduate school. My acceptance of NYU’s offer went into the mail today. I’m more than a little pumped.

I’ve got most everything I need to do in all my classes completed. The only thing left now is my final project for my web applications class, and that’s mostly a fun one anyway.

Less than two weeks of class left. My last day of work is May 8. My last interaction with the university here will probably be May 10. I’m hoping to get my stuff from the apartment packed and ready to take to move when I’m ready by May 16. Things are coming to a head, and I’m excited.

Also: tired.

Thomas

Ever since I received my acceptance letter from NYU I’ve been slinging stuff back and forth with their financial aid department. My preference is still to be up that way, but I’m going to need far more on the way of aid to do that than I will if I attend GaTech. And with the GaTech response deadline originally April 15 (they very graciously gave me an extension), I had very little time to find out if I had it.

First I call financial aid only to be told that I’m not in the system at all. So I call the guy in charge of aid for my school but have to leave a message. I don’t hear back so I give him another call a few days later and he pokes around and tells me my SSN was entered into the system wrong and that’s what had happened. He fixes it. So I call financial aid again and they confirm that the SSN is in the system, but they tell me it will take a couple of days for them to process my FAFSA now that they know which one to process. I decide to stop bothering them for a few days.

Today I call to see if it’s been handled and the guy I talk to is extremely helpful. He tells me that, oh, they have to send in a specific request to get the thing processed and that hasn’t been done yet. He offers to immediately send an email to the appropriate people, but he warns that it won’t get done before they close for the day. I should call back tomorrow he says.

So that’s what I plan to do.

In only slightly related news, the NYC housing market is radically different from the one I’m used to. Around here our entire rental market turns over in August with the beginning of the Fall semester. This means that most rental properties are projected out to open in August sometime and you need to get in as early as you can to insure widest selection options. NYC is apparently significantly different. Turnover is, of course, higher, and this apparently leads to a market in which availability tends to project out about a month or so. That means that I probably won’t know until sometime in June or July where I’m living or how much it will cost. That’s a new sort of uncertainty for me and should be interesting.

It’s also possible that I just fail to understand how this works. That wouldn’t surprise me either.

Thomas

I’m not too worried about failing to post yesterday. Sleep was more important considering the day I had today.

Woke up at 05:00 to get ready for the trip to Atlanta to check out the program at Georgia Tech. Made good time and arrived without incident and without getting lost or missing any turns. Found the building that most of the HCI labs are in and discovered that it’s actually more of an architectural nightmare than Haley. I suppose that it may be less confusing if you spend time in the building, but it’s basically a maze of corridors with no obvious visible landmarks. It also doesn’t seem to be symmetrical.

Anyway, the trip was good and the tour/orientation thing was also good. I met a number of other prospective students, and some of them were dang sharp. Good conversations were had with them. A lot of questions were answered about all sorts of things, which was nice and tremendously helpful. The only truly weak parts of the experience (at least from the standpoint of recruiting) were that A) the actual lab tour was terribly unorganized and sort of aimless, B) the classes we sat in on were so-so, and C) there was little direct contact with professors.

I still found the entire thing to be very helpful in working toward a decision between NYU and GaTech. The short version is this: both schools are serious, but GaTech is serious business and NYU is serious fun. Perhaps a bit more clearly stated GaTech is focused on industrial research and direct application while NYU is more exploratory and interdisciplinary. Needless to say that second approach draws me in.

Ironically I’m coming to believe that the lack of an ITP PhD is a huge point in the program’s favor rather than a disadvantage. I don’t know if this is the case, but there’s a strong sense at GaTech that the master’s students are sort of second class citizens. The real money and time and energy are spent on the PhD students. Which makes sense, I suppose. But it means that ITP, without that higher level to suck up time and energy from the faculty, has more of that time and energy to devote to the class of students I’ll find myself in.

The point of all this is that this visit was extremely valuable because it helped me get a feel for the program at GaTech and that helped me a bit with deciding that it’s probably not as good a fit as the program at NYU.

Now all I have to do is figure out this whole “money” thing.

Thomas

I was hoping that today would present an opportunity for a bit more reasoned post on the grad school choice thing, but being keyed up (and poking around with NYU’s online system) kept me up waaaay too late. With the early morning (05:00) shift I had today this meant I am woefully short on sleep. Honestly I should probably be in bed now, but…

Today was mostly me leveling out the emotional high of the letter. Part of it is, of course, that I got accepted, but much of it is simply knowing. I don’t have to put off decision-making. I can move forward and get something done, and that’s emotionally stimulating for me. So despite being low on sleep I’ve been pretty active.

Met up with the Nikki for a late lunch thing. Talked about grad school for me and interesting history stuff for her. (I gave her an idea for a master’s thesis free of charge. I’m such a good friend.) Then we headed back to my place to poke around youtube for a bit which eventually led to Soul Caliber 3. Will joined us for some animated violence and we passed the controllers around a bit. Quite a bit of fun, really. I love that game more than, perhaps, I should.

Just as she took off for Japanese stuff Marie called. Marie and Deli and I decided on food (after twenty minutes we settled on Arby’s as our location) and I called Claire (who I’d run into on my way out of work this morning) to see if she wanted to join us. She said she’d meet us there. Then, of course, on the way over there we decide that we don’t want Arby’s after all. No, we want Chick-fil-et. So I called Claire to give her the update.

It turned out to be pretty good though, so I call it a win.

Ran into Tabor, who I’ve seen around but probably haven’t talked to in four or five years. He’s going to be heading off to TX this summer and we talked about the possibility of me visiting him during the roadtrip which would rock. On the way home somehow the topic of Deli’s friend Tate came up in conversation and it turns out she’s likely moving to DC. So there’s another person to visit this summer.

Then we got back to my place and watched an episode of Bones. I’ve seen them all, but I’ve been slowly getting Deli through the series as it’s quite good and since she has good taste she recognizes that.

That’s a decent summary.

Thomas

(Apologies to Nikki for not using the far more amusingly cheesy title I proposed earlier.)

Some of you may know that I’ve been waiting to hear back from grad schools for a while now. More specifically, I heard back from everyone but NYU, the program with the earliest application deadline by far. I was really starting to get worried what with the decision deadline for GaTech being April 15.

So I called the admissions office this morning to ask and they said “Oh, we just mailed stuff out Thursday, so you should get it soon.”

And I did.

And I’m in.

NYU’s Tisch school of the arts has offered me admission for the Fall of 2008.

Which leads to a conundrum: I must now make a choice. I’ve spoken rather a lot with Amy Bruckman at GaTech via email and phone, and she’s sharp. And the work she’s doing? Constructivist educational theory applied to groups via computer-mediated social networking? That’s… sort of exactly what I want to do in the long term. I mean… it’s like someone took my interests and then designed a research program around them. So there’s Georgia Tech looming large in my mind.

But Georgia Tech is in Atlanta, and I am not much of a fan of Atlanta.

NYU, on the other hand, has Clay Shirky. And reading Clay Shirky is what got me into the field the way I am now. I’ve had a chance to visit the ITP labs and talk with some students (something I’m going to due for HCI this Thursday), and it looked pretty dang awesome. Also: NYU is in NYC, which is one of my top five favorite cities in the US. It is full of cool people and places, and that’s a part of education too.

So now there’s a choice. I’m leaning rather heavily toward NYU, but here’s where I throw things open: what do you people think? What’s a good fit? Why should I consider one or the other differently than I am now?

Thomas

I was fully intending to post yesterday, but by the time I finished my web apps project I was too tired to do more than pass out incoherently. I did get it done, though, and it was a surprisingly useful exercise.

Of course it would have been done far earlier if someone hadn’t called me up after work and said “I know you’re having a bad day, let’s hang out”. And then forced me to eat steak and shrimp and go to the bookstore to mock back-cover copy. So if you want to blame someone for this being late, you know who to aim your ire at. (Thanks, by the way.)

I haven’t worked enough with PHP to know if it handles session attributes the same was JSP does, but I know that the way that JSP handles them is pretty dang infuriating. For those who don’t do this sort of stuff, the “session” object is a piece of information you use in web-programming that tracks data from a user across multiple pages of the same server. It’s sort of like a set of cookies that expire when you close the window and don’t actually get stored on your machine (actually, and importantly, session data is stored on the server, so it can’t be tampered with or hacked). One nice thing about the way JSP handles sessions is that it attributes you set are objects, which allows for nicely complex (or simple) data-forms. The thing that I spent all night really upset about was that I couldn’t store a dang primitive type. Or, rather, I couldn’t retrieve it because the command to get attributes returns object types and primitive types are too simple. This meant that instead of having a simple “is the user logged in?” flag in the session history, I had to revalidate from strings every time. There’s a workaround to this, but I didn’t have time to delve into package generation for a simple state-tracking object.

Anyway, long story short (too late), this was frustrating.

What wasn’t frustrating, beyond dinner and bookstore, was just how awesome the internet is. My mom gave me a call last night and I realized that most people don’t know that they, despite living on the other side of the world, have a United States phone number. Because Vonage only cares about you having an IP address and some bandwidth. They’ll plug you into the phone network wherever you dang want in the US. This means that for my parents, calling numbers in the US is already paid-for with their Vonage subscription. And it means that for the growing number of people with unlimited long distance, calling back is just as paid-for. Ten years ago, when we were there the first time, it was hard and expensive to do international calling. Now you just pick up the phone.

Thomas

The part of it that is compelling and interesting is in design and implementation. It’s the same interesting thing you get in any creative endeavor: coming up with good ideas and novel solutions and efficient approaches to problems. That’s fun and interesting and even exhilarating.

The part of programming that sucks is error-checking and fixing. It’s grunt work and largely a derivative of syntactic elements. I absolutely hate it. There’s nothing really interesting involved in it. It’s not stimulating staring at where the compiler has thrown you a highly uninformative error message.

This, probably more than anything else, is what drove me out of computer science. I love the design work. I’ve recently been discovering the joys of developing XML schema and XSL style sheets. It’s downright fun and fascinating and because it doesn’t involve programming (XPath is not programming) there’s no debugging. I love doing design specs, I love designing interfaces. I just hate the drudge work that accompanies implementation.

Surely there’s a way to get rid of that. Though I’ve got no idea what it is. I bet if I found it, though, I’d be rich quick. It would be the key to both enjoyable programming and quite possible wide-spread computer literacy (in the sense that users can read and write it).

Thomas

I’ve got this project for a class. It involves designing and implementing a very bare-bones form of an internet guestbook (in JSP, which is sort of silly since no one likes Tomcat, least of all me). I’ve got all the design and data work done. I’ve got my data structures laid out, and my interface designed, and everything else. All that’s left is the data storage and handling stuff.

Now I’m doing this in JSP and I don’t, for this project, have access to a MySQL server, so I’m forced to fall back on writing flat-text files and writing search and parse code myself. As a method of data storage flat-files are fine, I don’t mind them at all, really. But I positively hate writing my own parsing functions.

This is all a way of me saying that dang do I love the way MySQL automates searching, parsing, and data retrieval. And I very much wish I could use it here.

Thomas

I’m actually managing to stay with the “update once a weekday” thing. I’m sort of impressed with myself.

I’m sure there’s more interesting stuff that’s happened in the last 24 hours, but I’m not really doing this to do work so I’m just going to talk about what’s on my mind.

And what’s on my mind at the moment is Fox’s Bones. Mostly because I just finished watching a couple of episodes with Deli. She got hooked when she showed up on the day I “forced” Nikki to start watching it with me. Both of them, of course, like it.

If you’re not familiar it’s a rather intriguing show structurally. It walks that thin line (which is so rarely walked) between being plot-driven and being relationship-driven. Most shows fall too far into one or the other. Heroes lost me because while it was driven hard by the plot, I lost interest in too many of the characters. Joss Whedon (with the exception of Firefly, which I sometimes suspect got lucky in being canceled so early) tends to lose me by driving everything through relationships at the expense of anything actually happening.

Bones walks the line between. It’s a show that very clearly only works because of the relationships. The tension between Brennan and Booth is clearly the key, but all of the inter-character relationships are dynamic and fun. Yet while it’s a show that works because of the character relationships, it’s not actually about those relationships. It’s a hard balance to strike, and it’s done well here. I love it.

You should watch it too.

Thomas

I agreed to cover the first two hours of Daniel’s shift this morning so he could sleep (long story, but basically he’s working two jobs for the City despite officially only working one, and he’s exhausted). So I was in at 05:00. Then class until 13:00. Then back to work until 21:00.

So, basically, I’ve been on the go for 16 hours straight, and it’s been tiring. I also ended up agreeing to work the first half of Keri’s 12-hour shift tomorrow so she can stick with her family as her grandfather just passed away. That means back at work at 05:00 until class, but I’m free by 12:30, so I may crash and take a nap then.

But exhaustion is not enough to get me down. For today is the day after Easter, and we all know what that means…

Jesus is alive and he brings with him deeply discounted chocolate candies!

I did manage to fit a run on the chocolate aisle into my day, and that’s kept me bouncy through a combination of happiness and a constant state of sugar-high. So yaaaay candy.

The other thing that makes me happy is that I managed to finish Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody over the weekend. I’ve got a one sentence review: “You* should read this book.”

Seriously. It’s just that good.

*: This is a universal ‘you’, but I’d actually welcome questions. If you want to know why you, specifically, should read Here Comes Everybody drop a comment and I’ll lay it out for you.

Thomas

I’ll keep this short since I must shortly meet Claire and Kelly for dinner. Huzzah for post-work dinner!

Today was the fourth 12-hour shift I’ve worked in a row (not that I’m complaining, I signed up for it since I needed the money), and I thankfully have tomorrow off before going back for Easter Sunday.

It was, overall, a good day. I’m not actually sure I’ve worked a shift with Kelly despite us both having been employed by the same organization for nearly a year (I think she’s been here that long, at least), and it was rather fun.

This has been a fascinating job to work, and I’ve mostly enjoyed it on a number of levels, but I find myself more than a little excited by the prospect of leaving in less than two months. The open road calls, and I’m not sure I can take the most recent round of bureaucratic politics and muscle flexing. My fascination with organizations is borne out in being stuck inside one. It’s very interesting to find myself nodding and saying to myself “aha, this is something they’re doing terribly, and here’s a potential solution”. Though I doubt I’d be willing to say anything as an employee (a further interesting thing to recognize).

Which reminds me that I need to make a post soon about said roadtrip. Because, seriously, when you’re driving a total of 10,000 miles (gas prices, please stop rising), you can visit so many cool people. So if you’re in the US or Canada, well, let this serve as a notice that I would rather enjoy putting you on the list of stops…

Thomas

I realize that I haven’t posted since my trip to NYC (which was, by the way, utterly wonderful). That means that my plan to get back to posting once a day (at least on weekdays) didn’t go so well. Still, there’s hope for me to make it back to that level yet, so consider this yet another attempt.

Instead of trying to catch everyone up on what’s been going on recently, I’ll confine myself to the big things. Namely: grad school stuff.

I sent out three applications, and so far I’ve received two letters. Michigan has declined to offer me a slot in their program. This might be a minor blow to my ego, but as they were choice three I didn’t let it get me down too much.

Georgia Tech, my number two choice, has offered me a space. This would (hopefully) mean studying under Amy Bruckman who heads the ELC (Electronic Learning Communities) project. I’d be sort of surprised if many of you have heard of her, but she’s really awesome. I had a long phone conversation with her a week or two ago, and she really impressed me, and got me excited about the program there.

NYU, the clear front runner at the moment, hasn’t gotten back to me yet. I’m really hoping for this one. NYU would mean not only living in NYC, but it would also mean studying with Clay Shirky. (I am about halfway through Clay’s most recent book. It’s not heavy reading, I just don’t have much time to devote to it. It is excellent. Seriously so. And Jon, if you still read LiveJournal, I think you should take a look. There’s some mention of Wenger and CoPs.)

Anyway, here’s hoping I’ll know by next week as Georgia Tech has a response deadline of April 15. Of course at this point I have no idea how I’m going to pay for this whole “education thing”. But, hey, I’m sure something’ll work out.

Thomas

I’m tired, but here’s the update.

Landed safely last night right around 7:20, my scheduled arrival time. Caught the M60 (bus, not machine gun) to Astoria and took the W to the 1 then uptown. Arrived at the inestimably awesome ’s around 8:30 or so? Anyway, there was still food (food!), and it was quite tasty. Introduced the household to Jungle Speed (how do people not know how awesome the game is?) and they in turn introduced me to Hex-Hex (which is light and fun and makes me think about design). Then it was bed time for me.

Woke up relatively early this morning (stupid internal clock and keeping early hours). Had the place to myself with everyone asleep for an hour or so. Then and I took off for breakfast at this place with lovely omelets. I think we sat and talked for an hour or an hour and a half about the stuff she’s working on and the stuff I want to work on, and it was good times.

Then back to her place to grab my gear (I’m staying somewhere else tonight) and off to NYU I took myself. Showed up quite early for my appointment and killed time by wandering around the program floor looking at projects and labs and talking to students. Good times. Then I sat down and talked to Midori, who’s sort of the person who helps hapless prospective students like myself. She had good question and summarized the program extremely well. She answered all my questions and introduced me to a student or two. Good times. Along the way I mentioned that I was hoping to run into Clay Shirky (CLAY SHIRKY) if he were around. He wasn’t, but she said he might be back in a bit and introduced me to some students to talk to.

Clay did, indeed, come back. We talked, and it was super awesome. Clay basically does what I want to do, and needless to say it was a lot of fun trading ideas with him.

Anyway, I’m sleepy, so I’m out.

Thomas

Leaving for the airport in less than an hour. Should be on the ground in NYC by 19:00 or so. Sweet.

I’ve managed to slam out almost all of the homework I would normally do this weekend, and I’ve gotten taken the exams/quizzes I’ll miss and gotten ahead on my reading. This is all remarkably responsible of me. I feel like I might be grown up or something, which is somewhat frightening.

Once I get back from this trip I’m pretty much done with the serious organizational duties I can be involved in without getting letters back from grad schools. That means serious roadtrip planning while I wait to see who wants me to spend two years with them (please let it by NYU). Considering how excited I am about a weekend trip to NYC, I’m sure you can imagine just how much I’m looking forward to this summer.

Randomly, because it’s on my mind, I have to develop an XML/JSP web application for one of my classes this semester. I’m thinking I might try to do some sort of web-based roadtrip tracker that will tell people where I am and let me blog with attached location markers and possibly with photos attached. Of course I’d have to do simultaneous development for PHP and JSP because the course calls for JSP, but PHP has so much broader support that it’s really not feasible to deploy a JSP application for general public usage, and that’s what I want to do.

Anyway, if you’re in NYC and want to hang out this weekend, do give me a call.

Thomas

Forgive me, friends, for I have slacked. It has been over six months since I last looked at this journal or anything associated with it. Which is rather sad since I really do like most of you. (Except you, yes you, you’re the one who killed my dog and laughed about it. Shut up, I totally had a dog once.)

I’m sort of in a hurry at the moment, so this’ll be short, but I’m hoping to get back into the swing of daily updates. Now won’t that be fun? In bulleted form, here’s my life since we last talked.

• Grad school applications are in. NYU, Michigan (Ann Arbor), and Georgia Tech. Currently waiting to hear back from them.
• Flying to NYC this weekend to visit NYU. If you’re in the city and want to get together, give me a heads-up. You know I like to meet people.
• On track to graduate in May with two B.A.s. Rather excited by this prospect.
• Planning to finally execute my roadtrip this summer. The one where I take three months off and put 10,000 miles on my odometer in order to drive around North America. If you live in North America and would be up for a visit, then I want to hear from you.
• Haven’t been doing much roleplaying recently, or really much board gaming either. This is sad, but life goes on. My interest remains undiminished.
• Have been thinking a lot about internet communities and the way software shapes them (surprise!). May make a post on the topic at some point.

But now I’m hopefully back, and will hopefully be updating daily, so I’m sure you’ll hear more about each of these as time goes on.

Thomas

So yesterday marked the third time I moved in the past nine months. Once back last November to live with the sister, then in May to live somehwere else for the summer so other-sister could move into my old space, and now into the place I’m sharing with Will until I (hopefully) graduate.

The place is nice. Not centrally-heated, but with three window A/C units (note to self: contact realty people about getting new filters as these likely haven’t been serviced in years). The interesting thing about window A/C units is that for some tasks they’re simply more efficient. Last night I just had the one unit on in the bedroom and closed the door. It stayed cool, but didn’t chill the whole place. Which is nice because I like to sleep in the chill, but hate to wake up to it. Simply walking out into the hall made me feel toasty.

Also, and probably more importantly, I got my bed back. See, I’ve been sleeping on this bed for years. I don’t know where we got this mattress, but… It’s just about perfect for me. Perhaps a bit short, but supportive precisely where I want, and soft where I prefer. The place I was in for the summer was furnished, so I left my bed behind and used theirs.

This morning was the first time in three months that I’ve woken up and not, as my first action, popped my neck (in three directions) and then my back. That’s just lovely.

I’m an eight minute walk from work, and a seven minute walk to school. I’m glad to be in a place where I can walk again.

Also, and unrelated to anything other than that I discovered this yesterday: we apparently have an FLGS now. I stopped by, talked Eurogames with one of the owners, then some other people showed up and we watched an episode of Cowboy Bebop while discussing LARPs, and finally I got a demo of Warmachine, which is a pretty clever game, but will need more play before I could make much more of a statement than that.

Back to moving: one up-shot of moving as often as I have recently is that I’ve pared my life down to the essentials. Everything which I moved fit into a corner of the room and took up about the same footprint as a king sized mattress. Clothes, electronics, books, furniture… Living small. In a conceited sort of way, I like it.

Thomas

I’m still around. Not even really that busy, just neglecting the ol’ LJ. I moved Friday and move again Friday (or maybe Thursday if the realty company gets their stuff done early). The guy who was there this summer moved out in a hurry (graduation was Saturday, he had to be out by early Monday morning), and he left… pretty much everything.

Looks like he got his clothes, books, DVDs, and major electronics out, but we’ve still got a pair of couches, a bed, a chest of drawers, a desk, an (empty) entertainment center, a mini-fridge, a blender, an POD espresso machine, a pair of floor speakers, and… pretty much everything in the kitchen other than the flatware. The realty company wants us to go through and figure out what we want to keep and what to dump so they can send in a cleaning crew.

Oh, we also got three or four standing lamps, a cable modem, five or six power strips, and assorted random things (flashlight, detergent, etc.).

Anyway, there will be pictures of the new place. As soon as I get my camera back from my sister, anyway.

Thomas

Will and I have been planning to do the roommate thing this fall. We’ve already had two leases taken out from under us. The first was when we decided to sign a lease, Will left the country for two weeks, and when he came back someone else had already done so. The second was when I called on a Thursday to request an appointment to view a place (they said they’d call me back), and when I called back on Tuesday to see if they had any idea when I might get that appointment they told me someone else had already rented it. So! Today I go to turn in our paperwork and hope that the place we looked at yesterday hasn’t been rented in the intervening time. We’ll see.

Thomas

I utterly destroyed my Contemporary Sociological Theory exam yesterday. It’s likely that I missed a couple of questions, but that’s because I didn’t even bother attempting to memorize birth and death dates and locations for Marx, Weber, Simmel, or Mead. I expect to see a bunch of A’s on in the database sometime this week.

I also got my paper back for the class. It was actually a pretty lame assignment: pure drudgery work, no analysis or research. Somewhat amusingly, the prof knew that and freely admitted it. Anyway, paper returned with one note or criticism scribbled in red pen: “Use title page”. Then, on the back page just above the grade is another note “marvelous writing”.

This is actually a combination of ego-boosting and depressing. I drafted this paper once, red-penned it alone (without getting an outside view) and then turned in the second draft. It’s nice to know that I can produce decent work with one go at it, but it’s sort of sad that this sort of work can impress the instructor of a fairly high-level course. I think it says something about my ability, but also something about what we’ve come to expect from our university students.

Thomas