That random journal by that random girl

The biggest advantage of my new layout is that all the adds are on the right-hand sidebar, so you can ignore them. Also, for firefox users, get the adblock plus add-on (http://adblockplus.org/en/installation); it should help with a lot of these, but unfortunately not all. I have no control over the adds that they put on here, so if there's anything excessively disturbing, reloading the page will usually swap it for a new add. Or, since everything's on the right hand side, you can easily change the size of your browser screen to get rid of them too.

The only other thing on the right-hand side is links to individual journal entries, down at the bottom of the collumn.

Any links in the "The Cactus's Links" list on the left-hand side are ones that I put there; they're safe to click on.

6 weeks left. Only 6 weeks left. Little too long to hold my breathe over without changing colors though. ; )

It's been a busy semester. I accidentally wound up getting three jobs at the beginning of the semester, but I've been juggling them alright, and tend to fit into a total of about 10 hours a week if they have to, so it's been OK. Two of them involve evaluating student work, and it's always hard either way because I'm such a perfectionist that I see a million sixty-seven thousand five-hundred eighty-nine (and a half) things wrong with an assignment when grading them, but I hate to give out bad grades too. I seem to balance it by giving good scores to one class and nearly flunking the other class, but there's a huge difference in the types of students in each class that could also account for the difference, and I trust the profs to curve grades as needed when all is said and done. Indeed, the end-of-course curve gives me a fine ultimatum, especially for the lab where I give hands-on assistance to the experiments: make my students happy with me now while I'm working with them by giving out lots of As, and then let them get lowered by surprise after the class is over, or give out lower grades and have them hate me while I'm still working with them but have them actually get better scores than they count on. The later is nicer to the students, but oh so much harder for me.

All of my Science-major Senior friends have the GRE tomorrow (Graduate-school Readiness Exam: it's kind of like the SAT only more stressful and for college students instead of high-schoolers). It's on campus, so I'm going to try to make cookies tonight to bring over for them in the morning. Some engineers take the GRE too, but since we come out of college "field-ready" for the workforce, we aren't "boxed in" to going to graduate school like all the other non-humanities majors. We have an 8-hour Fundamentals of Engineering exam to make up for skipping the GRE though, so it's a bit of a trade-off. Except mechanicals (yay!) don't technically have to take the FE, so we can get off the hook scot-free, except we're not allowed to run our own business if we don't pass the FE to be licensed; so it really cuts down on our independance when we don't take it. I plan to take it. I plan to pay about 200 bucks to take it. Pay 200 bucks, track down carpools, take good care of my high-school calculator (luckily one of the best calculators allowed on the test), probably go through an airport's worth of scrutiny to make sure I haven't written answers on the insides of my eyelids.

Also, most Science majors actually like school, so they don't mind if they have to go to graduate school. I do not always understand them, but they're still fun to hang out with. I've also heard grad school doesn't have nearly as much emphasis on grades, so maybe I'd like it if I were to give it a shot, but frankly I don't need to worry about that choice this year.

As for me, one more year and I'm out of here and never looking back. Unless I get that year off that I'm trying for. But even half of that would be in school anyway, so doesn't count as "time off," just probably a lighter class load and more electives than required classes. I might squeeze a double major out of it if I can pull this off. I'm hoping. : ) Once I get the application in I'll stop worrying until I hear back from them.

And yeah, tomorrow is "Be Nice to Senior Science Students Day." If you don't know a Senior Science student , you can just be nice to me instead. ; )  Chocolate counts as nice.

I had a test today. And a week-long homework assignment due. And a lab. All in the same class. It's just that time of year.

~R

Hello all. Having had so much trouble with getting out massive email updates, and always forgetting email addresses and having to go back and resend, etc., I have decided to move to a blog-style update method. I have chosen livejournal because some friends have it, but also because you guys can see the updates without having to get your own account. As usual, I love getting personal emails from ya'll, but this'll make me a little easier for you to keep up with. ; )

A few rules due to the public nature required to not make you guys get accounts; my personal name, address, phone number, email address, etc. are not going to show up in this account, and if you make comments on any entries, I ask that you follow these rules or I will remove said comments.

I'm not planning on there being any regular schedule to postings, but will look into whether there's a way people without accounts (grandparents and stuff) can subscribe to be emailed when I update the account, and if so will let you know.

Love to all; and if my dear brother gets any more snow before I do then I'll have to come over there with a blowtorch to take care of it.

~R

EDIT: If you're reading this, our maintenance is OVER! The problem was not found on our equipment, which means we'll have to work with our ISP to fix this small problem -- which also means another maintenance window in the future -- but at least we have eliminated our side.

Thank you everyone, and a special shout out to rekoil for giving me a great suggestion AND also the opportunity to feel like I've just called in to a local radio station.

Have a great day, night or afternoon wherever you may be.

---

Hi everyone, sorry for the late notice but I'm going to have to do some testing on 1 of our 4 internet circuits TONIGHT; Friday night or Saturday morning depending on which time zone you're in.

Most of us shouldn't notice any impact, though there may be some slowness or lag when I switch traffic on to our other ISP circuits and then another hit when I stop the tests. If a page won't load or times out, try hitting refresh 1 or 2 times and it should load then. If it doesn't work at all... trust me, I'll be typing really really really fast to try to undo whatever I just did. Hopefully you'll have some Halloween candy (if you're in the USA and celebrate that kind of thing) nearby to take away the bitterness of a small site outage. :(

Here's the handy-dandy Website That I Always Use to get a feel for when the maintenance will start in your area. Our site traffic historically dips on Friday afternoons until Saturday morning which is why we tend to pick this time for maintenance work.

( tech details )

status.livejournal.org will, of course be updated before and after the maintenance window. Or else marta will get mad at me. :D

bt