BGSU's quarterback went to the Steelers. As if I needed more reason to hate them than I already have.
UT's quarterback went to Tampa Bay. Somehow I'm seeing him making his first professional play in NFL Europe, if even there.
The Bengals ... I can't say it was a great draft, but it wasn't a bad one, at least. Still, given how rough their schedule next year is looking, it'll be a miracle if they break .500 again, let alone make the playoffs, whether or not Carson is back at 100% for the season opener.
And hey, at least there's a good chance now that Stevie Y will come back for one more run for the cup next year. Sigh.
Most importantly, though, I've spent way too much time following this stuff and not enough time working on those papers and exams I need to do here. Excuse me while I go run off to campus and away from all of my various distractions here ...
Ten-page paper due Monday. (At noon? Then again, the professor's about to pop a kid ...)
Take-home exam due Tuesday.
Ten-page paper due Wednesday.
I think I need to go get some more sugar free Red Bull ...
So, Oilers in 6, anyone? Sigh. This shows you what I get for saying that I didn't care about the season as long as Jiri was okay. (Which still holds, but that doesn't make yet another early-round playoff exit any less disappointing.)
I just finished teaching my last comp class this semester. I'm kind of worried about student evaluations from that class because I really didn't connect with this group of students like I did with my students from last semester, and I sensed that there were lots of times this semester where I wasn't explaining myself as clearly as I needed to. Still, this is a learning experience just as much for me as it is for my students, and hopefully over the summer I'll be able to rework my pedagogical approach to avoid stuff like this when I teach again in the fall.
We're finally starting to get leaves on the trees here and I'd really like to go out and photograph them, but of course I'm too busy with school stuff right now to do that. As it is I'm kind of avoiding working on stuff by writing here, even though I really need to get on the ball with my final papers ASAP.
More later. I hope.
Normally I don't want the end of the semester to come so quickly because I'm worried that I won't have enough time to finish all of my end-of-semester papers and the like. This semester, though, I think I'm more worried that once the semester ends I'm going to fall into a tremendous depression pit, even by my standards.
I won't have classes over break, and my only academic responsibilities will be doing reading for the MA exam and re-learning Japanese, neither of which feels like a particular bother to me. What is bothersome, though, is that it looks like this break will be the loneliest three-plus months of my life.
I only have one real friend left here in the Toledo area, and she'll be moving to Australia here shortly. I'm getting sick and tired of the dance game community here locally, because so many people are starting to take on the juvenile and hurtful behaviour exhibited by so many of the "celebrities" of the dance game community. (I'd been thinking about trying to organize a tournament here over the summer, but now I don't even know if that would be worth the hassle of dealing with all those people.) I'd like to go back to the Carolinas for another tournament here, but that would cost me a lot of money, and I'm not sure I'll even have the cash for that given that I likely won't be making any money this summer.
It's not like I'm being that social right now, but at least with school in session I'm getting out of the house and interacting with my comp students and my fellow students in my grad school classes. It's not really socialization, but at least it's something. Once finals are over, though, I'm worried that I'll pretty much be here at the house all summer by myself. The thought of that is already depressing enough; I certainly hope that doesn't wind up being the reality of this next break.
As if I hadn't had enough shit to deal with these past forty-eight hours, it looks like someone hacked the .forum and stole my own account out from under me. That's the last time I ever try running a database programme on my own Website, that's for sure.
I may or may not set up a discussion forum elsewhere, but in the meantime you can always send feedback to me through my LiveJournal syndication feed. Anything like that, though, will have to wait until after the semester is over for obvious reasons.
From the front page of Yahoo! just now ... Bush Taps Portman as New Budget Director
Tell me I am not the only person who got three words into that headline and started thinking something incredibly nasty.
While I was fixing dinner downstairs just now, my brother-in-law came down saying that he had been ordered by Heather to bring her a Twinkie coated in chocolate syrup. When informed that we had no chocolate syrup, Heather said to cover the Twinkie in the Monty Python-themed Ben and Jerry's we'd bought this past weekend.
This had better not be what I think it is. I'm not ready to be an aunt just yet.
Yggdrasil Mark I is continuing to operate well here after the installation of the new hard disk. There are a couple of things here that kind of bother me here, though. First of all, I haven't taken my old hard disk out of Yggdrasil yet, even though I think I've already moved over everything of relevance from it. I worry that the hard disk failed because of overuse (I've had a nasty tendency recently to leave my computer on overnight all the time, mainly to keep my IM programmes running in the hopes of hearing from those special somoenes), so I'm thinking that I'd be best served to get the hard disk out ASAP if just to use it at this point as a kind of backup disk. Related to that, right now my computer is still recognizing the old drive as the C: drive while the new hard disk is showing up as the E: drive. (The DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive shows up as the D: drive.) It's been a while since I was really into this kind of stuff, but if I remember correctly this doesn't actually pose a problem, it's just more of an incovenience, right?
By the way, this incident has now convinced me more than ever that Norton Utilities is one of the biggest wastes of my money I've ever spent. I'm still using the anti-virus, but you'd think all those disk detection tools would have said something before my drive just up and died on me like that. Grrrrr.
We've been up in the 70s these past few days, which is definitely way too warm for this time of year here. I like to have a month or so of lower-to-mid 60s for highs, since that's a real comfort zone for me. (Even if I'm out late at night playing DDR or ITG, it's still light coat weather when I'm going home.) As it is, coming to campus today I had to park in one of the student garages since my car was overheating thanks to the temperature and the abundant sunshine. (My car not only doesn't have air conditioning, but the driver's side window won't roll down.)
Still, I managed to get through most of the winter without really chilly temperatures, or lots of snow, or lots of dangerous driving, which is more than I can say for the past few winters or so here in Toledo. Don't let me forget that when next year I start complaining about the slippery roads and stuff like that again.
Now if I could only get rid of whatever it is that's made me so nauseous these past couple of days ... I'm not sure if it's a physical bug or something psychological, but it kept me out of class for a couple of days there, and I don't need to be getting sick at this point in the semester.
Just to update from my previous post, Yggdrasil Mark I is back up and running. I got Windows installed to the new hard disk, and it looks like all my personal files from the old hard disk transfered over okay. (I've still got the old hard disk hooked up in case I realize I forgot something earlier, though.) I've got all of the progammes I need (and most of the ones I don't really "need" but still want) operational again, and now it's just a matter of actually turning out all my end-of-semester work here without going crazy in the process.
Yes, I will back up all my important files to CD-ROMs, but that will have to wait until after the semester is over. I'll be too swamped with work here to do otherwise.
Yggdrasil Mark I's hard drive died last night. A preliminary chkdsk seems to indicate that only program files and little, if any, personal data was corrupted, but she won't boot up now.
I grabbed a hard disk at Best Buy on my way to teach just now, and after I get done here I'll be going home to try to effect repairs. I haven't done a backup of anything for close to three years now, so suffice to say, I'm really hoping this works out.
See, this is why I should have gotten to work on all that end-of-term stuff here sooner ...
I really wish I could figure out what's up with my recent lack of motivation. For once I think I actually have time to work on end-of-term stuff here before it suddenly comes due in a few weeks here, but so help me I just can't get myself to work on stuff. Maybe I'm one of those people who needs the pressure of a super-close deadline to work on that stuff. Sigh.
You know, it's been close to a year since I left Spectrum, and I still haven't even heard from anyone on when I might expect my stuff back. If I were any more motivated than I am right now, this might move me to get upset. As it is, though, I'm just like, "Whatever."
"University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?"
Yeah, I need to update maloneysbaloney.org here. Like a year ago today. ;.;
A couple of weeks ago I had one of the higher-ups in the comp department sit in on one of my classes. They claim that this is part of a larger programme for "faculty mentoring," but in reality it was more of a performance review than anything else.
I just read my results, and all in all I think I did well for myself. The only real difficulties that my reviewer brought up were more issues of teaching philosophy than anything else, and I'm hoping that I can talk with some of the higher-ups about my teaching philosophy and how I integrate it into my class. I'm certainly taking the reviewer's suggestions under advisement.
That being said, I don't think that this semester has gone as well for me as last semester did. I'm having a hard time connecting with the students, and I think the main reason for this is football. Seriously, in the fall semester when I came in early Monday afternoons to teach, I could always strike up a conversation with people on Sunday's games, and that in turn led to us discussing other things. It created a comfort zone that I felt transfered over to class discussions. This semester, though, there's no football to talk about, and I usually spend the moments before class in self-absorbed reflection, which isn't exactly that conducive to engendering discussion. I'm going to have to find ways to remedy that in the future. (I think catching Family Guy Sunday evenings might help, but to be honest I don't really care that much for the show.)
The other big problem I've run into this semester is that I'm not energizing my students that much. My whole teaching philosophy is predicated around the students taking charge of their own education; I make it a point not to bog them down with dictator-like proclamations like "Turn your cell phones off before class," or "Raise your hand if you want to speak," because I think things like that reinforce patriarchal notions of authority and make the classroom environment much less conducive to learning. That being said, this semester my students haven't been that eager to take the reins and learn on their own. It wasn't like everyone in my class last semester did so, but I had a couple of students there who were very good at marshalling the class and leading them on learning excursions that were both beneficial and relevant to them. I don't have anyone like that in my classroom this semester, though, and I've had to deal with more than my share of uncomfortable silences here.
Still, my students are writing very well, and they are learning the critical thinking skills I think are the most important things that they will learn in college (or even in life in general). However, I kind of get the feeling that this semester my students are learning these things in spite of my teaching, instead of because of my teaching. I'm really going to have to reflect on my teaching methodology here this summer.
Thursday while I was out I picked up the Beatmania bundle that just came out. Back when I was giving serious thought to getting a Japanese PS2 to play the Japanese DDR games, I thought that I might also get into Beatmania, since Beatmania games were only being released in Japan. Given that the US release has a lot of my favourite songs on it (including my two all-time Bemani favourites, 5.1.1. and Fly Through the Night), I don't think I'll be doing that now.
A lot of people in the Bemani community go to great lengths to get the best Beatmania experience possible, including not only buying all the games they can, but purchasing arcade-quality controllers that usually cost in excess of $400 each. By point of comparison, the Beatmania bundle, which includes a controller as well as the game, only costs $60. Not that I don't understand the impulse to get quality equipment, but $400 for a controller (and Beatmania also has a "doubles" mode like the dance games which forces you to use two controllers at once) just seems absurd to me. Keep in mind, the only reason I buy super-expensive dance pads is because I go through cheaper pads too quickly to make them affordable. That, and you can't wear shoes on "soft pads," and I need the ankle support that shoes give me.
That being said, I've been playing Beatmania a lot this past weekend, and it's been a pretty frustrating experience. I grant you that I haven't been playing a lot of piano lately, and even at my peak it wasn't like I was a virtuoso, but all things being equal I'm a pretty darn good piano player. Why, then, am I having such trouble with Beatmania? Seriously, I'm starting to think that I'm now more rhythm-accurate with my feet than I am with my fingers, and that just makes no sense. I know that playing on a Beatmania controller isn't exactly the same thing as playing a piano, but still, you'd think at least some of my skills would transfer over. Given the scores I've been getting on Beatmania, though, that doesn't seem to be the case, and it burns. Oh yes, it burns.
You know, the North Carolina trip should have been a "vacation" for me, but it wound up turning into the opposite of a vacation. Between all the new experiences, the worries I had, plus the financial screw-up I had to deal with on the way home, I was just plain wiped by the time I got back here.
The following week I was hip-deep in the financial difficulties, until finally on Saturday the chargeback went through and I had money again. (Then I got food poisoning, which knocked me out most of Sunday.) This week I've had to deal with two different class presentations, and it's only now that I've been able to actually relax and recharge here. There's only a month left in the semester at this point (pretty much), so hopefully my sloth these past couple of days will do me more good than bad.