Whitman’s newspaper is the Pioneer and there was an article this week calling for Professor-bloggers to give the URL of their blogs to the Pio so they can be publicized.
I’m thinking that I don’t mention soapbox to them.
Is it mean if I think it’s funny? My students have weekly quizzes on Thursdays and this week’s quiz has a lot of true or false questions. The funny thing is that the answers are all false. (Or true, all one or the other, just in case some student happens to read this.)
If the trues and falses are distributed more or less evenly, you can feel good about the fact that you’re answering T to 50% and F to 50%. I think having a strong bias will really make people have to stand by their knowledge. It’ll be really interesting to see how many people switch their answers back and forth.
So, I friend of mine is looking at a position at Oxford and forwarded the “job description/job perks” page. I am particularly jealous of the maternity/paternity leave (26 weeks), “pensionable housing allowance” (£8,438), and 1 term in six of accrued sabbatical, up to 18 terms, but a couple other elements caught my eye:
The Fellow will be able to draw on an allowance for the purpose of entertaining undergraduate students (currently £435), plus a per capita allowance of £15 for entertaining graduate students to whom he/she is College Advisor.
Yes, that’s right, you get a little over 400 quid to “entertain” undergrads (cue Professor [redacted] joke here), but only fifteen for each graduate student advisee. Better save up for 50p vodka shot night at the Union?
This past week was full of awkward moments caused by those stupid little ear-bud-y things that dumb people put in their ears because they are too cool (or too lazy) to hold their phone up to their head, and instead walk around talking to themselves. “Oooh, look at me, I’m busy and important, I need to have a phone in my ear every damn second just in case I need to do some more bootlicking.”
First, I was twice greeted by someone in the bathroom stall next to me, and somewhat surprisedly I give some kind of “whats up” in return, only to get a “dude, I’m on the phone” response. Seriously, who takes phone calls while taking a dump?
Then, leaving work on Friday, I saw some guy that I might have seen in passing a couple times previously and gave him a little head-nod in greeting, and his (apparent) response was “take care.” Now, that’s pretty weird, I think, so I’m left hoping that he was actually on the phone – I couldn’t see his right ear – and the “take care” was for his phone buddy, not me. Of course, I responded to his “take care” with “have a good weekend”, so either way, very awkward.
F*$@ing Bluetooth. Technology sucks.
As a visiprof, I’m probably only going to be here in Walla Walla for one year. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to get nice furniture for a crap apartment that I’m only in 3.5 days a week. On the other hand, my experiment of sleeping on a thermarest mattress proved that I needed something more.
Mattresses for normal beds are hundreds of dollars and, since I don’t want to carry this stuff all back at the end of the year, aren’t that easy to sell off. A futon, on the other hand, is a bed. It’s a sofa. It’s anything you want to imagine it to be. Of course, at furniture stores, they’re also multiple hundreds of dollars (plus money for delivery).
What’s the solution? Well, what store specializes in cheap furniture packed into very small boxes? Ikea!
That brings me to one of the coolest furniture assembly stories that I’ve ever had. The vacuum-packed futon. Idea first packs the mattress in a vacuum bag, sucks the air out, and then rolls it up. To unpack, you take off the outer plastic and you end up with a flat hard thing. Remove the second layer and there’s a sucking sound and the futon poofs up.
Much comfier than the thermarest too.
So, this has been kicking around in the ‘drafts’ section for almost a month now, but it’s been a busy month and the item at hand is still worth a post. Namely, Boseman, MT coming up with the genius policy of asking prospective employees to “please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages, or memberships on any Internet based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, etc”… and also requiring the listing of the corresponding username and password information! wow.
According to city attorney Greg Sullivan, the city has “positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City.”
Note that after just a couple days after the story was leaked to local TV, the city backed off the policy, but it’s quite clear that they really had no clue what they were actually asking for… only three lines were provided for data entry, nevermind the privacy issues, etc. But, “moral character” is important stuff, so why not.
So, it looks as though my current work computer has bitten the proverbial dust. I was having overheating problems all last week, and even before then the fans would spin up excessively – and this is a G5 tower, mind you, so 5 cooling fans at 3000 rpm made my office sound like an aircraft hangar.
So now the question comes to the replacement machine. Assuming I can get the “corp” to pay for it, what features are necessary and what can I do without? I’m tempted go for a bare-bones 8-core tower and then add RAM and hard drives separately, especially since being able to run calculations on 7 processors in parallel would be only/almost half as efficient as running on some of the “slow” 16-processors-per-node NAVO machines. Anyway, here’s hoping, and I welcome any insight/suggestions.
