meme
From joee_girl :
i) Trolling (or moderating, if that's what you want to call it)
Is fun, and totally not hard effort. Since you're not getting paid to do it, there's absolutely no obligation to invest time in it. I put very little time into forum-admin stuff. Also, I get twice the mailbox space for PMs, and they still all get filled up. I wish it was like Gmail.
Also, there's the lulz, when you have to deal with the people that complain that there's a big mean moderator conspiracy, to either:
(i) Promote the Rudd government and suppress any discussion that is anti-Labor and pro-Liberal.
(ii) Promote mean old militant atheism, and allow bashing of religion.
(iii) Suppress the truth that the 11/9 attacks were set up from the inside by the Mossad or Halliburton or the Lizard People or whatever it is.
Also, it feels good, when somebody makes posts criticising you, or attacking you, to go and use the report post to admins button, and enter something like "crap post is crap" in the reason-for-reporting form, and a little while later you come back and see that the senior admins have deleted all the posts.
(ii) Being very tall
I'm not tall, you're just short. Well, I'm not that tall, anyway. I don't really experience what's special about being tall, because I don't have any experience of being not-tall. Kind of like how it's difficult to try and visualise how a small animal on the floor visualises the people and the world around it, it's hard to visualise in the third person what it's like for someone else.
(iii) Gender issues on the internet
/me scowls at joannac.
Actually, this reminds me of a certain amusing thing I encountered today. A certain person, we'll just call him O, saw my copy of Cosmos magazine on the table, picked it up, and looked at it for a second, and said... Oh, I originally thought it was Cosmo.
It's gotten confusing, ever since we started letting actual girls use the Internet, hasn't it?
(For the uninitiated, some twit on the Intertubes once thought I was a girl, simply because of the avatar, as you see above, or something.)
This is amusing, coming from the person who specifically needs to append "girl" onto their username, to make sure people are aware that she's actually a girl. :P
(iv) Living on a farm
Personally, I was never a huge fan, and I like the city. I like being close to things, and I find being out in the countryside boring.
But I really do like having workshop space to build things and make a mess and wreak havoc... and that's something I really miss here in my little apartment. There's currently a dismantled UPS taking up most of my floor space.
It would be totally nice if I could get away with using university workshop/lab space to build my personal projects, but it just doesn't seem like you could ever get away with it at Melbourne, yet you would never bat an eyelid at somewhere like MIT. It's not like I'd be consuming any university resources.
That reminds me of another anecdote, which ties into part (v). Once I needed to drill a few small mounting holes in my PCB, in design lab, so I went and asked the workshop staff to check if it was OK to use the drill... oh noes, you're not allowed to set foot in the workshop. You give it to the staff, and they take it to the workshop, they drill the hole, and they bring it back. For goodness' sake. You wonder why your students have no real useful practical skills?
(v) Electrical engineering degrees
In general, electrical engineering at Melbourne, in my experience, is pretty crap. I never enjoyed it.
One reason for that is that there's a lot of emphasis on boring theoretical stuff, on maths, on MATLAB, and nowhere enough emphasis on actually designing and building physical things and making them work, in the real world.
In the first couple of years, lab work is completely abstracted, completely scripted and completely spoon-fed - it's just plug this pre-built module into this, and measure this and plot this. You're not learning one iota of useful, practical skills. And then you get these students who get to design lab in third year who have got absolutely no idea, what so ever, about how to go and design a real-world device, let alone to actually assemble it, who end up needing to be spoon-fed by their supervisors, if they're lucky enough to have supervisors who actually give them any time of day, or the workshop staff, who aren't really supposed to be putting all that effort into them.
Oh, and then there's the completely moronic, irrelevant, pointless, scientifically inaccurate, boring safety induction videos every.darned.semester.over.and.over.again, which are the single biggest waste of my time I've ever experienced in my university career.
If I wanted to employ an EE, personally, I'd take a Monash or Latrobe or Swinburne or RMIT graduate over a Melbourne graduate.