Clearance Sale

Rowhouse 'Hood You scored 25 out of 40 on urban-rural and 22 out of 40 land intensity.

People know you as: The Bohemian Gentrifier Quote: "That crack house just needed a little paint." Your score indicates that you are a city-dweller of the old-school. You like a dense, finely grained neighborhood with restaurants, churches and brothels all on the same block. Although you've never spoken to him personally, you know that guy Eddie down the street is a pimp and you're sure to tell your lame suburban friends about him at every opportunity, just to freak them out. The bad news is that as more and more people like you move into your neighborhood it gradually becomes less cool and more expensive. Enjoy things while you can, because in 5 years you're going to have to move to the next 'hood uptown. Examples of places you should live: Baltimore, Philadelphia All Categories Secluded Hideaway / Farm or Ranch / Small Town / Little City / Suburb / Streetcar Suburb / Rowhouse 'Hood / Downtown Loft

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 60% on urban-rural You scored higher than 51% on land intensity

Link: The Where Should You Live Test written by TwelveFloorsUp on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	6.6
Mind:	6.7
Body:	4.3
Spirit:	4.8
Friends/Family:	6.3
Love:	7.3
Finance:	7.3
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

6.25 %

My weblog owns 6.25 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

You Are Mexican Food

Spicy yet dependable. You pull punches, but people still love you.

What Kind of Food Are You?

You Should Get a PhD in Science (like chemistry, math, or engineering)

You're both smart and innovative when it comes to ideas. Maybe you'll find a cure for cancer - or develop the latest underground drug.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

You Are a Boston Creme Donut

You have a tough exterior. No one wants to mess with you. But on the inside, you're a total pushover and completely soft. You're a traditionalist, and you don't change easily. You're likely to eat the same doughnut every morning, and pout if it's sold out.

What Donut Are You?

My name....David

childhood memory... rushing to the kindergarten toychest to get the batplane before anyone else could get it – would have to have been 5

fondest memory... Hammer to Egg for a goal, Yuk vs. Indiana, Pool play, College Nationals, Wilmington, NC 1989 – although I have many fond memories.

soundtrack...Melissa Etheridge

retreat... often I wander hardware aisles looking for inspiration

wildest dream... for the family of my past to be the model for my family of the future, in Maui, and independently wealthy, and with an ipod, and…

proudest moment...opening night, La Cage au Faux, MSMT, 1992 – although again, a long list

biggest challenge... coming up with answers to soul searching questions, really

alarm clock...I do my own reminders.

perfect day... a day that doesn’t need a list

first job...store associate, toy department, K-Mart

indulgence... McDonald’s #2, Supersize with a Coke – I indulge a little too much

last purchase...with a card? Gas, I know – thrilling!

favorite movie... Matrix Reloaded

inspiration... I try to find the inspiration in anything, its all about how you take from one thing and have it shape another

My life... going very well, thank you for asking

My card is...pick a card, any card!

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major! Mathematics 100% Engineering 100% Journalism 100% Philosophy 92% Anthropology 75% Theater 75% Chemistry 75% Psychology 75% English 67% Linguistics 67% Sociology 67% Dance 58% Art 58% Biology 50% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

You Are Apple Pie

You're the perfect combo of comforting and traditional Those who like you crave security

What Kind of Pie Are You?

You Are Somewhat Machiavellian

You're not going to mow over everyone to get ahead... But you're also powerful enough to make things happen for yourself. You understand how the world works, even when it's an ugly place. You just don't get ugly yourself - unless you have to!

How Machiavellian Are You?

Anyone Know Any HTML?

I have this problem with the page. When I print I get this strange mess of HTML just after the counter. Happens here and at work, in IE and in Firefox, on this page and the other one. In the sidebar I see the hitmap and then the counter and then this (replacing the greater and less than signs with brackets so it will print):

[a href="http://sm2.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=sm2Tanbi" target="_top"]
[img src="http://sm2.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=sm2Tanbi" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/][/a]

Can you print or print preview an entry and see if you get it too?

If you do, and you are someone that knows about such things, could you scope out the source and see if you know what's up? The counter guy says there's nothing wrong. I'm begining to wonder if it is just me.

Link of the Day

There are no words, just go.

Ellipses...

Yesterday's post needed "start" and "finish" entries for each item, then it would look much more possible... I wonder why we're not hearing from governments that they would like to give us back the windfall gas tax profits they're getting... I can't tell if parking next to a tented dumpster with "asbestos removal" danger tape on it should make me nervous... Moussaoui is not Bin Laden, he's more the their towel boy... I think the font on my CV is too big, but the people getting it are always complaining I make the text too small... Just why is it that deporting 12 million people is so impractical, certainly the guy that saw them pour the first truck of fill on the Boston Back Bay thought that was impractical... If it goes below freezing tonight I am definitely registering a complaint, as soon as I figure out where it goes - other than here... I think that when someone advertises something on the TV, say like cable, they should have to tell you the price after the introductory deal with just as much energy as the price during the deal... I have now purchased four different, and differently tasked, items to try to deal with seasonal allergy congestion... You can't imagine my shock when I discovered that "decider" actually was a word, damn... Anyone got any good and inexpensive ideas on digital archiving of say 100 C and D sheet hand draftings??? I got an email today trying to sell me the guide book for Acad2K7, personally I think we were fine at AcadR14. Too many updates...

Four Days...

1. Buy binder stuff
2. Professional & Academic Referrers list
   
3. Student Referrers list
   
4. Alumni Referrers list
5. Peer Referrers list
   
6. CV
7. Personal statement
8. Course Materials
9. Work Examples
   
10. Supplimentary items
11. Paper output
12. CD output
    

What Good Will Short Range Snub Fighters be Against a Space Station Like That?

My pick for this year's winner. I didn't go in, so I don't know what their game was.

I would show you pictures of this year's modifications to last year's entry icon - done this year by Kevin's Stage Machinery class. But what with all the rain, both times I was there it was just a mound of viscolene.

Actually, all in all carnival passed pretty much without my notice.

If its Raining, It must be Carnival

Never seems to fail this time of year. CMU students get all ready to cut loose with a big, pre-end of year blowout for carnival and, of course, it rains. Its just something about Pittsburgh and spring. When I was a junior here it actually rained, on and off, for 40 days and 40 nights. Building an arc would not have been a waste of time.

And if you lucked out with the theme you might have been able to enter it as a booth.

I went for a walk around the midway today. I beat the Entertainment Engineering game. That was fun. I liked the Death Star booth. I'll try to get a photo tomorrow.

If it isn't raining. :-(

Is Powerpoint the Devil?

For the longest time I have thought Powerpoint was some kind of evil incarnate. Like many other MS Apps, I believe that the program has actually changed the way things are done rather than people finding a tool that does what they need. Do you think when they started out that the people at Microsoft had the idea that they were going to permeate graphic design and information delivery to the depth that they have? The thought that what was a business tool has become such a normal education tool is a little scary. Working at the board is dynamic - lecturing is jazz, not a march. Even if the tool has the ability to go backward and forward and to write on the screen over a slide, it can't skip from one presentation to another smoothly, and I would bet that some of the other mitigations aren't implemented by most of the people using the tool.

So its the Devil, right?

Like so many things, I guess it depends on your perspective. Today we used a Powerpoint presentation at a faculty meeting. I had spent some time the night before cutting and pasting about 7 emails into a presentation file. The result was that 6 different people giving an update to a single effort were able to present something cohesive. All six people didn't have to put time into the composition, and I myself didn't have to generate everything from scratch, and on top of it all, people walked away from the meeting with a copy of the slides. Since the purpose of the session was to recap things we'd talked about several times before, times when people could have taken their own notes, getting the slides as a take home seems like a fairly high value facet. Seems like in this case we had hit the target of what the software is good for and it delivered startlingly.

So not completely the Devil?

Since I did this presentation while accumulating supplementary items for my renewal binder, no sooner did I hit save then did I print and punch a copy for my "school service" section. At that moment I was struck my another possible strength of the process. Right now all of my classroom lectures are outlines. Most of them are outlines with six years of scribbles on them, things that were missing, show or person specific items, connections to current events, whatever. They are a very valuable tool for me to teach with. In at least one case, they are also good enough for someone else to teach with - even if they don't know the subject. (Although I haven't tried that for years, but some time ago I would just put a student up front with the outline. Worked pretty well for CAD.) The downside, in this atmosphere of renewal, is that they are not presentable. If I had all of the lectures in PowerPoint, then in my binder along with the syllabus and all the assignments I could include the content outlines from every single course. That would really punch up the document especially since for my field, often people don't understand what I do. Too late now, but what an advantage at renewal time.

So, not the Devil?

Probably in the end I will always think PowerPoint is the Devil, even if it does have proper uses and archiving advantages. I know I can't submit my outlines, notes, and photos (I sometimes shoot a picture of the board at the end of class as source material for another lecture if I have had a particularly useful tangent). But for me, in class the improv element is too important to lose, and in meetings the whole thing still feels a little bit smarmy. Maybe for class I could make it more useful by doing the presentation against a whiteboard, so it could cut down the actual amount of writing for the stuff I know I am going to do but not cut off the room to roam. It might be worth experimenting with.

Today I could have been convinced. I wonder if the feeling will stick.

Renewal Trauma

That's a lot of printing. Today I went through an entire ream of paper. I got a warning on both the color and black ink cartridges (and the black was new yesterday). What am I doing? I am preparing to submit my case for review. This review is for promotion from assistant to associate. Seems kind of weird to be head of my option for more than three years now while remaining junior faculty, but I guess that's how it works sometimes.

So, for the last two weeks I've been assembling potential reviewers. I have to give them contact information for 20 Professional or Academic reviewers, 20 current or former students, plus some people from "other units" at the university. Are you out there and I've forgotten you? Send me an email. It turns out to be quite a few names.

On top of that I've been gathering the syllabi and assignments from every class I've ever done. Its interesting to see which classes have changed and which haven't, and its fun to watch as the format of the document changes over time. I feel like they're pretty tight now. I wonder what they will look like if I do this for another six years - or more. Most interesting from my classes is probably Technical Design. It appears to get easier every year at yet still remain too difficult in whatever its new configuration is. The first year I think I did something like 8 projects and 6 homeworks. This year I am down to 4 and 4. Project #3 appears to be cursed, as over the years I have had more different project threes than any other number.

Today I went through my hard drive looking for school service and professional items. I appear to be something of a hard drive packrat, and a well organized one at that. Pages and pages of forms, schedules, drawings, and reports. Printing and printing and printing.

The saddest part about the output is that in the end it will be submitted electronically. So everything I printed today I will have to .pdf sometime in the next 2 weeks. But I need the paper output so I can see the thing to make decisions. In front of me there's quite a bit of .pdf publishing and CD burning. Maybe I'll do an autorun menu for the disk, and labels. It wouldn't be my project unless I were making it bigger.

Next I have to confirm reviewers and figure out to do with the contents of my portfolio. I don't think I want to submit the full sized items this time. But that means scanning a bunch of photos and drawings (and just figuring out what to do with c-sheet and d-sheet drawings). I still have a CV to revise and a personal statement to craft. Yes, there's quite a bit to do.

Kinda fun though.

Graft

Today I heard on the radio that UnitedHealth Group posted first quarter earnings this year of over $800,000,000.00!

Well done.

That's eight hundred million dollars if you lost track of the zeros. The sad thing is, UnitedHealth Group isn't a hospital, or doctors, nurses, not a medical equipment fabricator. UnitedHealth Group is an insurance company. They are an insurance company that stands to profit 3.2 billion dollars this year.

Billion, with a "B"

The sad thing is, this isn't an investment column.

The CEO of said company last year accumulated stock options worth in excess of $1 billion dollars.

That's a lot of lattes.

So, just for the record, because of this country's current stand on national health care in the first three months of this year $800,000,000.00 that could have actually gone for health care went into the pockets on insurance companies.

That's just sick. But wait, there's more!

Apparently, a large chunk of these profits come courtesy of the new Medicare Part D public/private partnership for the purchase of prescription drugs. You know, the one that said that Medicare couldn't negotiate for better prices. The one with the deadline that scared everyone in ASAP so they wouldn't have to pay a late fee. That one.

If there were any doubt that what this congress and this administration called Medicare reform was actually a big, wet, sloppy blow job to industry I have 800,000,000 examples to clarify the question.

If there were any doubt that these jackals should not be let anywhere near the social security program, I think we have 800,000,000 good reasons to convince us.

And in case you didn't connect the dots, that a big chunk of the money came from Medicare means that the money that went into the corporate pockets...

... it came out of ours.