Bond… James Bond Monday, Jan 8 2007 

Weekend Happenings plotinus 8:21 am

So my wife had a work thing in a city 2 1/2 hours NE of RBI, and since she’s really not a morning person and would rather stick things in her eyes than get up before 9 and we had to leave for the city at 7:30, I was Mr. Chauffer.

I wasn’t part of anything associated with her work, so I pretty much had the day to kill, 3 hours of which I killed watching Casino Royal. 

I like Bond movies. The action is good, the plots are decent, and I’m generally engaged in the movies and don’t find myself bored to tears (like I almost was in Night at the Museum (funny, but kind of boring in spots)). 

I LOVED Casino Royal.  Bond was, for the first time in recent memory, real.  Unlike the Pierce Brosnan Bond, who was always impeccably dressed with nary a cut, scratch, bruise or injury, the Daniel James Bond was magnificent.  He bled.  He damn near died (enter Bond girl Vesper Lynd).  He had scars on his face. In short, I think, the best bond of the last decade, if not since Roger Moore or Sean Connery.  Oh, and the plot was pretty good too.  =)

 

The streak is over Friday, Jan 5 2007 

Course-Related Stuff and Rantings, Annoyances, etc. plotinus 4:45 pm

And it had just begun. Oh well.

It’s Friday. It’s 4:41. It’s about time to go home.

It’s hard to come back to work after having 5 straight days off… and then having to work for 4 days – rather tiring.

Classes start on Monday – my last term of coursework. I cannot wait to be done with classes and all the bullshit associated with professorial egos.  Granted, my goal is to join the ranks of the professors, but as a student, I’m sick of dealing with the “I know more than you” attitude. I know they know more, which is why I want to learn from them.

Anyway, two classes, one on dissertation research stuff, one one how adults learn.  Should be interesting.  Prelims later this semester, proposal meeting early summer, data collection early fall, data analysis mid-fall, write write write until March, defend in late March, graduate in May 08.  Here’s hoping that all works to plan =)

Have a good weekend, campers. More next week… this weekend if I’m inspired.

 

Two days in a row! Wednesday, Jan 3 2007 

Clarifying points and Work in all its glory plotinus 8:35 am

Ok, so I shouldn’t be that excited, but I’m now posting for my second day in a row…

It’s going to be a rough morning… hard to keep my eyes open, and yet the To Do list on my desk is many items long… over 10, many of which need to be completed by Friday.  Does that mean I should stop blogging?  Uh, no. I can manage to do this, and those, and get all necessary things done.

An update to yesterday’s excitement… My wife took a pregnancy test again this morning just to verify Sunday’s findings, and it immediately changed to positive… none of this waiting for two minutes stuff.  The reason for the second test?  It’s still hard to believe that she is pregnant. She sees the doctor next Monday, who I’m sure will confirm it yet again.

So that’s it.  Off to my list o’ things to do.

 

New Year’s Excitement Tuesday, Jan 2 2007 

Course-Related Stuff and Fun! plotinus 9:14 am

So I got married in early 2006.  To someone I met on the internet courtesy of match.com. On the first day of 2005.

Two days ago, December 31, 2006, we learned that we are not alone.  Nope. No longer just the two of us.  My wife is pregnant!  Woot!

 We figure it happened around the 16th, making for a mid-to-late-September due date. 

Now, the dilemma (if there is one). My wife, as expected, is super SUPER excited.  Me? I’m excited.  But I’m mega-anxious.  I’m in the middle of a job search to move me from RBI in SRN to a smaller institution in Urban Somewhere.  That move, if all goes well, will happen in May or June.  I’m also completing my coursework for my Ph.D. this semester (god willing and I don’t kill my department head (more on that another time)) and will be entering dissertation mode shortly thereafter (Prelims are *tentatively* scheduled for April, barring a murder…).   How do I match my wife’s excitement in light of the turmoil of the rest of my life?

 Thoughts, if there are any, are welcome.

But I’m going to be a daddy! =)

 

Been a long time, been a long time… Tuesday, Jan 2 2007 

Uncategorized plotinus 8:27 am

… been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.

 [insert drum solo and final chord]

 So about a year ago I started this blog, and then all of a sudden simply stopped posting.  I suppose at the time things got busy, what with spring semester courses, a wedding to attend to, a honeymoon to plan, an office merger to deal with, and a whole host of other randomness that precluded me from lamenting and/or praising the life that is my own on the lovely internet.

 Well, this is an end to that.  While not a resolution, as resolutions are often overlooked, forgotten, and ignored, this is my attempt to once again enter the blogosphere with thoughts I find interesting in hopes that you, dear readers, will also find them interesting as well.

So, a quick recap of the last year: work, school, wedding, school, work, school.  Really, what else is there? =)

 I do hope to be far more regular here, maybe even damned near daily.  There’s lots going on here at RBI… and in my life.  I can’t wait to share.

 

Quite possibly the quote of the year, thus far Thursday, Feb 2 2006 

Fun! and Scary, scary thoughts plotinus 8:10 am

In response to 24 Caltech students (who, as the article notes, are internationally known for their astronomical IQs) dressed in capes, tutus and other costumes as part of a dormitory initiation getting stranded on the mudslide-covered Mount Wilson Toll Road:

“You’ve got to remember that common sense is not factored into the intelligence quotient,” said Deputy Greg Gabriel, who leads the Altadena Search and Rescue team. 

Read the whole story here. 

 

 

My Self-Created Hell Tuesday, Jan 31 2006 

Fun! and Useful Oddities plotinus 2:04 pm

DMV Employees
Circle I Limbo

Militant Vegans
Circle II Whining in a Dark & Stormy Wind 

Bill Gates
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow

The Current Pope
Circle IV Rolling Weights

Parents who bring squalling brats to R-rated movies
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled

River Styx

Parents who won’t let their children grow up on their own
Circle VI Buried for Eternity

River Phlegyas

The Taxman
Circle VII Burning Sands

General asshats
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement

George Bush
Circle IX Frozen in Ice

Design your own hell

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m Catholic, and pleased to be Catholic.  But did we (I’m speaking in the royal, ubiquitous we since I’m NOT a Prince of the Church) have to elect an ex-Nazi to the papacy?  I mean, seriously – he could have left Germany, gone into hiding, said to the Nazi’s “You hoo! I’m a Catholic! Send me to a Concentration Camp!”, or anything to note that he, in fact, was not a Nazi and did not want anything to do with their facist ways.  No.  Apparently there was no one better to look at.

(thanks to Katie for posting this for others to find and build)

 

They may be dying faster… Thursday, Jan 26 2006 

Useful Oddities plotinus 2:26 pm

But at least they’re civically minded…  See this story, from also published in USA Today, where it is noted that first-year students show “a distinctive and widespread rise” in civic responsibility and social justice.

Among the results posted by USA Today (shamelessly copied here, but at least attributed) are:

• 66.3% said it is essential or very important to help others who are in difficulty, the highest response in 25 years.

• A record 83.2% said they had volunteered at least occasionally during their high school senior year, and 67.3% said there’s a good chance they will continue to volunteer at college, also an all-time high.

• 25.6% said it is essential or very important to participate personally in community action programs, up 4.1 percentage points over 2004 and the highest since 1996.

• 33.9% said becoming a leader is essential or very important, up 3.2 percentage points over 2004.

The study is the Cooperative Institutional Research Project – you may have heard about it on your campus by it’s pronoucable acronym, CIRP (pronounced serp), which last fall was administered to som 263,710 students at 385 colleges around the U.S. (and my RBI did participate).

The liberal part of me loves the next part:

The survey found that today’s first-year students support a decline in support for military spending, down from 45% in 2002 to just 34.2% last fall.

Woo hoo!  It’s interesting.  You can also learn more about the CIRP at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Research.

 

Not so good news for our first-year students Wednesday, Jan 25 2006 

Scary, scary thoughts plotinus 4:43 pm

In today’s USA Today (this article) it notes that in an analysis of 620 student deaths since January 1, 2000, first-year students account for more than one-third of undergraduate deaths.

This is bad news, and I’m betting that the trend will likely get worse. Ugh.

We really need students to understand how risky risky behaviors really can be.  We need them to understand that “Animal House” is not normal college.  We need to teach them that college is a place to grow and expand one’s horizons, not do everything under the sun because they no longer have direct parental oversight.  We need them to realize the impact their actions have on others.

We need to do a lot. God help us.

 

A journal on plagiarism Wednesday, Jan 25 2006 

Useful Oddities plotinus 8:09 am

An interesting article on plagiarism, courtesy of InsideHigherEd.com.

Enjoy.

 

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