• Elevator Slugs

    I am increasingly disgusted by the fat and lazy who are too sorry to take the stairs in the Combs Building. The area in front of the elevator is so clogged between class changes that it is nearly impossible to navigate past it. If you’re lazy enough to take the elevator, at least stand back out of the way of those of us who are mobile (or at least attempt to be).

    If you legitimately have a problem that prevents you from using the stairs, taking the elevator is an acceptable thing to do. If, however, you simply lack the wherewithall to climb two flights of stairs to the 2nd floor, you need somebody to shake you! The media wants to blame McDonald’s for the obesity that is prevalent in this nation. I blame the people who always have to use the elevator.

  • Anticipation

    I’ve be hunting fervently trying to find a teaching job for the fall but to no avail. The way it looks, I’ll have to substitute my way through the MaT program. That’s ok by me, but I’ll be living poor for awhile longer. I don’t require a lot of money, but I really don’t want to live with my parents anymore. They’re great and all, but when you’re 22, you don’t want to answer to them everytime you come in late or make too much noise running a late-night computer experiment. (And yes, I will still run late-night computer experiments even though computers won’t be my primary profession. I love them, remember!)

    I really like being young. The future is still really far ahead of me and I haven’t made any decisions yet (marriage, children, etc.) that limit my ability to go where I can be happiest. The next couple years will be uncertain, which is something I normally don’t like. At the moment, however, I don’t think I mind what’s going on. Let somebody else worry about what to do with me for awhile. I am a sentient being who reasonably capable of finding some form of income. Besides, when is the last time somebody starved to death in America who was willing to go find some food! As far as my thoughts on my future, I’ll let Einstein sum it up for me: “I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.”

  • Ice & Snow

    The weather here the last two days has been so incredibly odd. Sunday evening, we were greeted with about half an inch of ice. Looking outside at the crystaline water was incredibly deceptive. The ground looked as though it had maybe a dusting of snow on it. When I went to my 10:20 am class yesterday, I soon discovered why everybody had been asking me if we had class. The streets and sidewalks were covered with ice, so I gimped my way onto the grass whenever possible to avoid busting my tail. By noon, though, the ice was almost completely gone. It had went from 25 degrees to about 65 in about 5 hours!

    This morning, I woke up and looked outside. The sky was the craziest shade of orange I had ever seen. It looked as if Morehead were being sucked into some hell dimension (or at least what I imagine it would look like). I showered and came back to the room. The sky had went from crazy orange to a foggy gray in a 20 minute timespan. About an hour later, it started snowing like crazy. Right now, it’s super cold and windy, and it’ll be snowing one minute and clear the next. This is just another example of how Kentucky has some of the most unique weather patterns in the world.

  • Hello, Boys and Girls

    I have decided to forego a job in the computer industry and instead teach. There are two reasons for this decison. One is that as a teacher, I get all holidays and summers off. The other is that the only way I can change the many things I hate about eastern Kentucky is to take hold of the education process. Instilling a love for education in kids is tough. I read one study that said that kids are only influenced somewhere around 12% by what they are taught in school. There’s no way I’d bet on a horse race with those kinds of odds, but I think there are enough kids living in eastern Kentucky right now that have the potential to do great things. My job as a teacher will be to help them find opportunities that they may have otherwised missed.

    I guess all my years of studying computers won’t go totally to waste since that’s what I’m going to try to teach. As far as ushering my students into the 21st century, I couldn’t have picked a better subject. There is almost no job or skill these days that doesn’t require some computer knowledge. I hope my students become so proficient with technology that there is no way that companies will send jobs to India. I’m sick of hearing about the superiority of India: Educated eastern-Kentuckians will do just fine!

    The obvious response to my mission is that thousands of teachers started with the same vision yet it seems that none have managed to do very much about it. This is true. To put this as arrogantly as possible, I haven’t tried yet. If I weren’t so bull-headed, I wouldn’t have made it this far. If I devote my life to the cause of education, I believe that things will change. I may not live to see it, but I can sow seeds that will blossom long after I’ve gone. No matter what happens, at least I can say I tried.

  • The Tech of 2003

    Even though it is the 11th of January, I figured I’d post my thoughts on the state of technology in 2003. In a nutshell, 2003 was a very disappointing year. Nothing revolutionary (or for that matter evolutionary) happened. PCs got faster with better graphics and more memory, but the applications that take advantage of this power never materialized. Statistical analysis and number crunching have benefited because raw proccessing power is the key to such apps. There are plenty holy grail applications that have failed for years because of the lack of speed. Voice recognition, facial recognition, and natural language text translation could become a reality now if somebody would try to code them again in earnest.

    Consumer electronics saw some really neat trends with the most important being digital music. Portable digital players got smaller and cheaper with higher capacities. The Apple iPod is the coolest even though it is more expensive than all the others. Napster, iTunes, and MusicMatch have all made buying digital music easy and legal. I think the music industry should have embraced the downloading of music years ago because they are making money hand over fist with it. It’s so much cheaper for them than trying to sale CDs retail style, especially now that they’ve finished digitizing the existing catalog. Aside from digital music, large format High Definition televisions got cheaper. Sadly, HDTV content didn’t get much of a boost despite government mandates that all stations must broadcast HDTV signals by 2006. Let’s just pray that 2004 is more interesting.

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