Enemy of Entropy

School Happy

18 May 2008, 11:55 pm. Comments Off. Filed under College, Education, Geekery, Writing.

I finally got the grades from the first tech­ni­cal writ­ing assign­ment I turned in last week, and the peer reviews I did on two of my class­mates’ rough drafts. I got full points for all of them!

I was wor­ried about one of the peer reviews, because the per­son chose to do a set of instruc­tions for start­ing to cross-​​stitch. I know too much about that topic to eval­u­ate it well from a beginner’s point of view, and that was the intended audi­ence. I actu­ally approached the pro­fes­sor with some ques­tions, and won­dered if I should swap reviews with some­one new to stitch­ing. Hap­pily, the pro­fes­sor said I pro­vided a bal­anced review that reflected my expe­ri­ences as a for­mer begin­ner and cur­rently expe­ri­enced stitcher, and that I was respect­ful through­out. I was try­ing very, very hard to avoid any hint of con­de­scen­sion, and it appears that it worked!

My topic was “Cre­at­ing Your First Pod­cast,” and that received full points, too. It had to be done with a Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level less than 8th grade, which was not easy. I got it down to 7th grade, and couldn’t go any lower. The pro­fes­sor said that was due to the tech­ni­cal terms I had to use, and was per­fectly acceptable.

Semester Is Past the Half-​​way Point!

10 February 2008, 11:12 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under College, Writing.

And so far, I’ve only lost one point in my Project Man­age­ment class, none in the other class. That was due to a stu­pid mou­s­ing error — bad hands! Oh well, if that’s all my hands cost me this semes­ter, I’ll be happy.

The career course required us to do “long-​​term career plan­ning” this week. I don’t know how use­ful their idea of career plan­ning is, to be hon­est, in today’s econ­omy. There aren’t many peo­ple who can count on mov­ing up steadily in one path, due to the fact that the econ­omy changes so much more quickly than it did 30 to 50 years ago. Do I feel san­guine about mak­ing pre­dic­tions as to where I’ll be, pro­fes­sion­ally, in 30 years? Um, no. For one thing, I’ll be 71 years old then! For another, I’ll be happy just to get back to work, period!

Today’s Thing-​​a-​​Day time was spent col­or­ing. It was nice.

I have a happy Sam­bear danc­ing in front of me, because he just posted Chap­ter 17 of Heart of the Hunter. He already hit his word tar­get for the novel, but hap­pily, he isn’t stop­ping ’til the plot is wrapped up.

Still Thinging; Date Night

9 February 2008, 11:50 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under College, Critters, Family, Fun, Geekery, Health, Home, Needlework, Podcast, Writing.

I am, in fact, still keep­ing up with Thing-​​a-​​Day! I need to go post over there, though. I do wish I could auto­mat­i­cally cross-​​post, but if wishes were fishes and all that.

I stitched tonight while Sam and I gamed. I also wrote for a while, ear­lier. Sam and I have recently begun par­tic­i­pat­ing in a forum that does a great job of encour­ag­ing intro­spec­tion, and being a safe place in which to express one­self. It’s a pow­er­ful thing, and I’m in awe of the peo­ple who cre­ated and run it.
Read on…

Sunday, T-​​a-​​Day3

3 February 2008, 11:29 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Blogging, College, Geekery, Reading.

I did more web­i­fy­ing today, and got all happy because I resolved a tem­plate prob­lem. I don’t “know” php, as in I don’t write my own scripts. I’m learn­ing more and more about it work­ing with other people’s tem­plates, and have got­ten to where I can mix and match from dif­fer­ent tem­plates to get the effects I want. I also spent some time in mysql, try­ing to clean up some of this site’s tables to make it load faster.

I also read a lit­tle, and I’m really, really try­ing to fin­ish the book I’m on before div­ing into the deli­cious stack of books my sweetie brought home from the library for me. I wrapped up the week’s class assign­ments, too. I wanted to stitch, but I was attacked by a rogue nap.

My project man­age­ment teacher released the study guide for the final, which is 3 – 4 weeks away (you can do it any time dur­ing week 8, and we just fin­ished week 4). Um, does any­body really study that far in advance? I’ve never been very dis­ci­plined about studying.

Sam is edit­ing a chap­ter of Fledg­ling, which he re-​​recorded because he was dis­pleased with the sound qual­ity. He edited Square One ear­lier. Sorry, Hope, but I don’t think he got to record the lat­est chap­ter of Heart of the Hunter :-(

It’s still Feb­ru­ary, right? The tem­per­a­ture was way up in the 70s today! It’s back down to 50 now — out­side. Inside, the temp is still too hot for sleep­ing com­fort­ably. Pout.

Are there any Word­Press geeks read­ing this? I could have sworn that I saw a plug-​​in that allowed com­menters to send a pri­vate mes­sage to a blog’s owner, sort of like hav­ing com­ments screened in LJ except that the owner doesn’t ever (couldn’t, as I under­stand it) make the “whis­per” pub­lic. I can’t find such a thing in the offi­cial plu­gin repos­i­tory at Word​Press​.org, though. Any­body know of such a thing? I don’t want to use a com­ment form, because of secu­rity con­cerns.1

1 All the com­ment plu­g­ins and forms I’ve seen use the web host to send the mes­sage, instead of the sender’s out­go­ing mail server, mak­ing it harder to get any­thing done about inap­pro­pri­ate messages.

MomoCon?

28 January 2008, 10:50 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Fun, Geekery, RPGs.

Any­body going to Momo­Con here in Atlanta? I’d never heard of it before today. It’s free, and may be in its sec­ond year (I’m not sure). It seems quite small, which could be nice. It’s local, which is a big plus for us. I’m unclear as to whether there’s any gam­ing hap­pen­ing or not, and there’s no men­tion of filk­ing that I can see.

 

Powered by WebRing.