The speech last night
I'm happy to say that I was able to hear all of Barack Obama's acceptance speech last night, and delighted that he devoted a decent amount of it to specifics concerning how he will deal with job loss among the middle class, health coverage, energy and the war, plus some other items that do not come to me at the moment.
I'm not too thrilled with McBush's choice of the wolf-killing governor of Alaska as his running mate; yes, it's nice that a major party (for the second time, since Geraldine Ferraro was the Ds' candidate for VP back in the 80's) has chosen a woman, but someone so unsound on environmental matters? Oh, well - it's the political system we've got.
Today has seen some problems already, starting with one student, a man in his 30's or perhaps a little older, accessing if not exactly porn as such, some extremely risque pictures on an extremely dubious dating site. He'd been given a verbal warning already, and although he apologized to me, I said I'd have to notify my supervisor, who then came down and spoke to him, and I've been directed to report any further problems because if we have them, he'll be banned from the lab for the rest of the semester. Then we had the student who was incredibly irate because her test in WebCT from another college wasn't acting right; fortunately, IT was able to send the extremely knowledgeable and helpful AM to deal with the problem so it should be all right again (the faculty member at the other institution will have to reset the test), and then (here insert the term of your choice; my thought was "un-be-f_ _ _ ing-lievable") when I learned that empty toner cartridges have been put back on the shelf where the full ones are stored. I think they'd been taken by people from other offices, which is all right, but if they'd just let me know! Fortunately, I was able to order more from Danka. And then there was the CU who wasted several dozen sheets of paper printing out everything from a website, most of it garbage - so much for trying to conserve paper!
I've actually managed to save some data from the data collection program so that it can be used for statistical purposes next year, and I've revised the lab staff manual to reflect the most recent changes, and distributed it to the staff - whether anyone will read it and learn from it is another matter altogether, of course, but there it is.
Long story short, after the first two weeks of Fall semester I'm ready for three days off!
Unfortunately, I learned yesterday that SP has lost the job he started with such high hopes and enthusiasm last March; it seems that the head of the company called him in and told him that he is not a "good fit," (whatever that means) and then paid him $1K to train his replacement, who's also an HCC grad, long acquainted with SP - how awkward for both of them!
01-20-09 minus 144 days
I'm not too thrilled with McBush's choice of the wolf-killing governor of Alaska as his running mate; yes, it's nice that a major party (for the second time, since Geraldine Ferraro was the Ds' candidate for VP back in the 80's) has chosen a woman, but someone so unsound on environmental matters? Oh, well - it's the political system we've got.
Today has seen some problems already, starting with one student, a man in his 30's or perhaps a little older, accessing if not exactly porn as such, some extremely risque pictures on an extremely dubious dating site. He'd been given a verbal warning already, and although he apologized to me, I said I'd have to notify my supervisor, who then came down and spoke to him, and I've been directed to report any further problems because if we have them, he'll be banned from the lab for the rest of the semester. Then we had the student who was incredibly irate because her test in WebCT from another college wasn't acting right; fortunately, IT was able to send the extremely knowledgeable and helpful AM to deal with the problem so it should be all right again (the faculty member at the other institution will have to reset the test), and then (here insert the term of your choice; my thought was "un-be-f_ _ _ ing-lievable") when I learned that empty toner cartridges have been put back on the shelf where the full ones are stored. I think they'd been taken by people from other offices, which is all right, but if they'd just let me know! Fortunately, I was able to order more from Danka. And then there was the CU who wasted several dozen sheets of paper printing out everything from a website, most of it garbage - so much for trying to conserve paper!
I've actually managed to save some data from the data collection program so that it can be used for statistical purposes next year, and I've revised the lab staff manual to reflect the most recent changes, and distributed it to the staff - whether anyone will read it and learn from it is another matter altogether, of course, but there it is.
Long story short, after the first two weeks of Fall semester I'm ready for three days off!
Unfortunately, I learned yesterday that SP has lost the job he started with such high hopes and enthusiasm last March; it seems that the head of the company called him in and told him that he is not a "good fit," (whatever that means) and then paid him $1K to train his replacement, who's also an HCC grad, long acquainted with SP - how awkward for both of them!
01-20-09 minus 144 days