I find that nothing gets me cleaning the apartment like having a project to do. And nothing gets me working on a project like having a clean apartment AND another more urgent, less appealing project to do.
Right now, if your apartment is messy, work on your current project. Of course, instead of working the project, you'll procrastinate it by cleaning your apartment. When your apartment is clean, get yourself an urgent, unappealing project. Soon you'll be using your original project as a means of procrastinating the new one!
On the first day of class, my college history teacher asked for a show of hands on how many had been in a high school history class taught by "Coach What's-His-Name". Almost all the hands went up. The situation is quite similar for high school math. I had one HS math teacher who wasn't a coach, and she was even worse than the ones that were.
Indeed. On any given day in high school math class, I'd snooze through the lecture and skip the lesson, and go straight to trying to solve the problems (usually during the lecture, once I was bored with doing origami). If I had problems, I'd go back to the chapter or listen in on the lecture to figure out how to do things.
The teachers were usually not amused. However, I was equally unamused by the crappy book with the frequent word problems about LaRonda's Kwanzaa party and the end-of-chapter reflection question that asked how I felt about using such and such equation to solve such and such problem.
I got put in my place in 3rd grade because my mom showed me a way to subtract quickly in my head without all the "cross out the 9, replace it with an 8, and put a 1 in front of the 5" nonsense they liked to call "borrowing" (you borrow, but you never give back!!??). My page of problems came back marked up for me to re-do because I didn't "show my work," as the entirety of my work consisted of occasional barely noticeable tick marks next to certain numbers.
I was floored in my college pre-calc class when we went through the steps to see where the quadratic formula came from, and when I learned that an imaginary number is more significant than "what QuadKill on the calculator spits out when there's no real answer".
Worse yet, the AP/Honors courses are not only at a higher level, but for some baffling reason most would assign an order of magnitude more work. While I could've handled the material, I simply didn't want the increased workload and so avoided AP classes like the plague. The threat alone of so much more homework was enough to make me avoid AP classes like the plague. Then, using the handy loophole, my non-AP-enrolled self took and passed 3 AP tests for the college credit.
Ugh, that reminds me of this leadership retreat I went to (in college, mind you).
We did one of those "rank the 40 things you would bring with you to a desert island" exercises, where you then compare your answers to an expert's. We did a list on our own, then we did one as a group.
We then got our group score, and did some seemingly unnecessary math to it, and voila! The group got a perfect score! "I don't know how it works, but it always does! When we work together, we always get a superior score! Teamwork is Awesome!" announced the retreat facilitator proudly.
I immediately recognized that, to get the group score out of 100, the math we had just done was...
score = a + (100 - a)
So... If 100 = 100, then Teamwork is Awesome!
Arguing until I was red in the face would not convince the lady that she had drawn a conclusion based on 1=1. Insistence on "I've been doing this for 15 years, and it's always worked!" led me to believe that I'm the first attendee of that retreat in 15 years who could do math. I about cried. I remain highly skeptical about the value of teamwork to this day.
There's no requirement for public school teachers to have masters' degrees. A Bachelor's degree and a credential are all that's required, at least in California.
The public school system is more worried about getting someone that actualy cares about the students at all.
Now who's being the idealist? The public school system rarely has such concerns, or they wouldn't do everything possible to scare away the best teachers, and even moderately good ones. Standardized testing, nonsensical state mandates, psychotic district administrators, requirements to use ghastly textbooks, etc. So many headaches are thrust upon our public teachers that have nothing to do with teaching, that it's a wonder anyone sticks with it. I've known people who would have been excellent teachers (including one who was the "perfect" math teacher you speak of) who were scared off by the horrors of the system and ended up pursuing other fields.
The last thing our system is geared toward is finding good teachers, or ones who care about the students. It's geared toward finding teachers who are willing to put up with all the crap that our public school system shovels their way. Some do it because they love teaching or care about the students and will put up with the suffering. Some do it because the job offers an awesome 3 months off per year. Some do it because they were able to get tenure and love the job security. Some do it because that's the career path they started in and they don't want to make a change.
Video is rarely a good substitute for text. After watching the considerably long "Upgrading from Drupal 5 to 6" video, I didn't actually retain the information. All I needed was a list of steps on what to do, but instead, if I wanted to do it properly, I'd have to keep jumping around this crazy little video to re-listen to everything I was supposed to do. Keep your videos, and give me a text explanation any day. I can skim text to get to important parts. I can also search it for keywords. I can't effectively skim video, and it's hell trying to forward and rewind to the part I remember being important because the guy in the video said a memorable word.
Rather than re-watch the video and portions thereof for hours on end, I saved out my pages, nuked the site from orbit, and installed 6 fresh. Had to reconfigure a bunch of stuff, but in the end the process was far less painful.
If the book has trouble getting the point across clearly, I'd suggest that it is a failing of the author. There are a LOT of very poorly written technical books. Unfortunately, lots of techies aren't effective technical writers.
I was once lost for a considerable time in a department store. Well, I knew exactly where I was. I was in the elevator, because I was 3 or so and elevators are awesome! And I wasn't going to leave the store without Mom. Mom panicked, store management had everyone looking for me and guarded the exits. Found me just fine. I wasn't abducted. I wasn't killed. Societal mechanisms are in place to return wayward children to their parents in the vast majority of cases. Yes, there can be a lot of panic involved, but I would be very interested in seeing statistics on how many lost children are recovered within a couple hours versus how many remain missing for longer periods. Unfortunately, I don't think such statistics could be properly gathered, given how many such incidents are resolved without ever making a blip on statistic-gatherers' radar.
I'd tell them that I sympathize deeply, but that they are an extremely rare anomaly and that the societal impact of tracking our children's every move may be orders of magnitude more harmful than the very occasional child abduction. I'd then have them watch the Penn & Teller episode on Stranger Danger. I'd also point out that they were personally acquainted with one of the suspects.
Bad things happen. You can't prevent all of them, and I think it is a mistake to try to change how 300 million people live in a very likely negative manner to try to prevent the very few rare cases from occurring.
The difference is that putting a child in a car seat does not significantly hamper the child's exploration of the world, nor might it make them more reluctant to try things or to establish personal criteria for trust and risk assessment. The technology might make their lives safer in the short run, but I wouldn't say it makes them better now, and might even make them less safe later if, say, the technology should fail and they don't know what to do.
The drawbacks to restraining devices are few and far between (one might say they make it more difficult to fit more people in a car, or that they make people take longer to enter and exit the car, and that they cost money, for example), and the benefits significant (not being thrown from a vehicle in an accident, which happen quite frequently). The drawbacks to children with tracking devices are numerous (removes or lessens a source of independence and responsibility and trust and life lessons), and much more significant in comparison to the benefits (helps you find them if they get lost, may help retrieve them in the extremely unlikely case of abduction) than in the seat belt example.
The only life skill a child will miss out on by not wearing a restraining device is how to hold on really tight. Without the luxury of tracking devices, though, my parents taught me, among other things, a valuable navigational skill should I ever get lost... always pick the street that's bigger or has more or thicker lines down the middle and follow it until I hit a familiar street. Fifteen years later, it got me home at night when I took a wrong turn and got completely disoriented in a not-particularly-nice part of town.
We mostly use the system for software development, yeah. Trac was all right, but there were just a lot of little quirks that made it annoying to use. One of the biggest headaches was that project creation and administration required a significant measure of command-line intervention on the part of the administrator. Redmine has a very simple web interface for this, and permissions are easily delegated to other people on a per-project basis. Redmine is also much friendlier in cross-project navigation, where trac required an entire separate environment for each project, forcing me to make any changes to every project rather than just once globally. Email notification is also easier in Redmine. Essentially, everything trac does, Redmine does in a more elegant fashion and with significantly less administrator intervention.
I suppose I could use tickets to track everything, but essentially I'd be writing a bunch of tickets to myself. I work at a small company, and the admin request method of choice is to walk into my office. I'd rather not add extra layers of red tape to the matter, and so far there are not so many incidents that any given page is overwhelmed. The incidents I log on each page are on the order of "this was a strange thing that required a non-obvious action to fix", which is primarily what this is a handy reference for.
It's bleedingly simple... (I forgot, I also include technical specs)
This is the template, in the wiki syntax that Redmine undertsands. I make a copy of it, then fill in data under each heading (and replace ServerName with the appropriate name). Formatting is all handled by Redmine, and I don't get much fancier than a few bulleted lists and tables.
The wiki data resides in a MySQL database that is backed up regularly. However, Redmine, which hosts the wiki, is a Ruby on Rails app. It was the app that had gone down, and while the data (and the mirror of the data) was still safe, the app that hosted it was malfunctioning.
I have a wiki set up for the company I admin. Each server on the network has its own page, with a standard set of categories...
Purpose
Access (IP addresses, names, special ports)
Services provided (and descriptions of the services)
Maintenance (to do at intervals)
Quirks (stuff that tends to go wrong and what I've done about it)
Installation Notes (anything special I did when installing the server or any software on it)
Captain's Log (an entry for each incident involving this server, what its symptoms were, what I did to fix it, etc.)
I have a nicely formatted template page with all those categories set out. I also maintain a page of IP address assignments and an inventory of harware specs of all the machines in the office (which is helpful in the cases of "We need to reproduce a bug that only happens on ____ processor with ____ video card" and of "We're getting new machines. Who is in most dire need of an upgrade?").
I write down everything in these, and find myself referring to them very often. My predecessor gave me a Word document with all his notes in it, which has been very useful, and I used that as a starting point for my pages. The wiki has saved me a ton of time, kept me organized, and serves as a great reference for me and for the inevitable next admin.
The only caveat is if the wiki (or the server it's on) goes down. This has happened once, and my instructions for fixing the wiki were... on the wiki, so extra troubleshooting for me. Thus, I find it good practice to maintain a hard copy of the wiki pages, especially the page that tells how to fix the wiki.
I'm running this on Redmine, which has proven to be bleedingly simple to use and administer, and much easier than trac, which we used before. It's especially nice having it on the intranet, as I'll just have a browser open to the wiki as I work on systems and refer to and update it as appropriate. It's very handy to document exactly how I performed a strange or experimental installation of some software that I'll want to replicate later without making myself crazy, and I'll take the extra few seconds to retype the commands I just used into the wiki from anywhere in the building, though I probably wouldn't do the same into a Word doc.
It's not so much the mundane day-to-day that I find that important to document. It's the weird fixes, the trouble spots, the command line parameters, the installation procedures, the changes that shouldn't have fixed it but did, and the horrific chain reaction situations that make one piece of software crash because a seemingly unrelated piece of software has the wrong version of the 64-bit library. Things that take 4 hours to figure out and 3 seconds to implement... those are the ones to document, and those are the ones that I'd be kicking myself 20 months later for neglecting to write down. In an afternoon, any schmuck could walk into the building and figure out which network cable goes where. Documenting the strange bits (and the frustrations), though, can get a malfunctioning mail server back up and running in 3 minutes instead of 3 hours (which, of course, is secondary to good administration keeping the server from going down in the first place).
I AM CONTACTING WITH YOU ON BEHALF OF THE RAILS CONSTRUCTION PLANING CORPORATION SOLAR BULLET LLC. I HOPE THIS DAY FINDS YOU WELL. MY ASSOCIATES AND I ARE PREPARED TO START THE MOVING FORWARD ON CONSTRUCTIONS OF A 220MPH SOLAR-POWERED BULLET TRAIN TO MAJOR CITIES IN ARIZONA AND ALSO TO BE PASSING THROUGH THE SMALLER CITIES SUCH AS YOURS. THIS WILL BE A TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION US DOLLARS PROJECT ( $27 000 000 000 US ) WHICH WE ARE PREPARED TO MAKE LARGE INVESTMENTS IN AT NO COST TO YOUR TOWNSHIP. IN ORDER TO RELEASE FUNDS WE WILL BE REQUIRED TO DO A VERY SMALL ENVIRONMENTAL STUDY AT THE COST OF THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND US DOLLARS ( $35 000 US ) TO SECURE THE TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION. THIS STUDY COSTS WILL BE SPLIT BETWEEN THE CITIES OF ARIZONA ON THE PATHS OF THE SOLAR-POWERED BULLET TRAIN AT THE COST OF FIVE-THOUSAND US DOLLARS ( $5 000 US ) PER CITY. PLEASE SEND IN HASTE THE FIVE-THOUSAND US DOLLARS TO OUR ASSOCIATES SO WE CAN BE MADE ABLE TO SECURE THE TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION US DOLLARS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!
WARMEST REGARDS,
BILL GAITHER, CO-PRESIDENT, SOLAR BULLET LLC
RAYMOND WRIGHT, CO-PRESIDENT, SOLAR BULLET LLC
I've had problems trying to run GigE over Cat5 on much shorter distances, especially if there is a jack somewhere in the mix. Could be due to the quality of the Cat5 cables, but it fails at distances in the neighborhood of 20 meters in my office. Our wiring inside the walls is all Cat5. When I attach a Cat5 to a jack and hook it up to a GigE switch, no dice. If I attach Cat5e to the jack, it works fine.
Putting a metric buttload of students in a classroom and saying information in their general direction is very close to pointless, a pointlessness hardly restricted to college level. Smaller, interactive workshop-type classrooms, where there's actual feedback between the professor and students, though, are still very much relevant. I'd say it's more the "I talk at you, you write it down, you regurgitate it later" paradigm that's irrelevant, rather than the setting in which it is presented. Dumping 50, 100, 200, 500 students in one big room serves little purpose other than to push as many students through some required class with the lowest staff expenditure possible.
I once coded pathing algorithms for a maze-searching robot in the passenger seat of a 1990 Honda Accord going upwards of 100mph from the southern edge of Los Angeles to Davis, starting at 4am. Said robot was to find its way through the maze around noon. Memory is hazy on how well the code worked, on account of being at it since 4am. Was quite surprised to learn that one can reach Fresno in under three hours when the roads are clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that nothing gets me cleaning the apartment like having a project to do. And nothing gets me working on a project like having a clean apartment AND another more urgent, less appealing project to do.
Right now, if your apartment is messy, work on your current project. Of course, instead of working the project, you'll procrastinate it by cleaning your apartment. When your apartment is clean, get yourself an urgent, unappealing project. Soon you'll be using your original project as a means of procrastinating the new one!
On the first day of class, my college history teacher asked for a show of hands on how many had been in a high school history class taught by "Coach What's-His-Name". Almost all the hands went up. The situation is quite similar for high school math. I had one HS math teacher who wasn't a coach, and she was even worse than the ones that were.
Indeed. On any given day in high school math class, I'd snooze through the lecture and skip the lesson, and go straight to trying to solve the problems (usually during the lecture, once I was bored with doing origami). If I had problems, I'd go back to the chapter or listen in on the lecture to figure out how to do things.
The teachers were usually not amused. However, I was equally unamused by the crappy book with the frequent word problems about LaRonda's Kwanzaa party and the end-of-chapter reflection question that asked how I felt about using such and such equation to solve such and such problem.
I got put in my place in 3rd grade because my mom showed me a way to subtract quickly in my head without all the "cross out the 9, replace it with an 8, and put a 1 in front of the 5" nonsense they liked to call "borrowing" (you borrow, but you never give back!!??). My page of problems came back marked up for me to re-do because I didn't "show my work," as the entirety of my work consisted of occasional barely noticeable tick marks next to certain numbers.
I was floored in my college pre-calc class when we went through the steps to see where the quadratic formula came from, and when I learned that an imaginary number is more significant than "what QuadKill on the calculator spits out when there's no real answer".
Worse yet, the AP/Honors courses are not only at a higher level, but for some baffling reason most would assign an order of magnitude more work. While I could've handled the material, I simply didn't want the increased workload and so avoided AP classes like the plague. The threat alone of so much more homework was enough to make me avoid AP classes like the plague. Then, using the handy loophole, my non-AP-enrolled self took and passed 3 AP tests for the college credit.
It was a lost cause. Anyways, pursuing the matter much further would have delayed lunch.
Ugh, that reminds me of this leadership retreat I went to (in college, mind you).
We did one of those "rank the 40 things you would bring with you to a desert island" exercises, where you then compare your answers to an expert's. We did a list on our own, then we did one as a group.
We then got our group score, and did some seemingly unnecessary math to it, and voila! The group got a perfect score! "I don't know how it works, but it always does! When we work together, we always get a superior score! Teamwork is Awesome!" announced the retreat facilitator proudly.
I immediately recognized that, to get the group score out of 100, the math we had just done was...
score = a + (100 - a)
So... If 100 = 100, then Teamwork is Awesome!
Arguing until I was red in the face would not convince the lady that she had drawn a conclusion based on 1=1. Insistence on "I've been doing this for 15 years, and it's always worked!" led me to believe that I'm the first attendee of that retreat in 15 years who could do math. I about cried. I remain highly skeptical about the value of teamwork to this day.
There's no requirement for public school teachers to have masters' degrees. A Bachelor's degree and a credential are all that's required, at least in California.
The public school system is more worried about getting someone that actualy cares about the students at all.
Now who's being the idealist? The public school system rarely has such concerns, or they wouldn't do everything possible to scare away the best teachers, and even moderately good ones. Standardized testing, nonsensical state mandates, psychotic district administrators, requirements to use ghastly textbooks, etc. So many headaches are thrust upon our public teachers that have nothing to do with teaching, that it's a wonder anyone sticks with it. I've known people who would have been excellent teachers (including one who was the "perfect" math teacher you speak of) who were scared off by the horrors of the system and ended up pursuing other fields.
The last thing our system is geared toward is finding good teachers, or ones who care about the students. It's geared toward finding teachers who are willing to put up with all the crap that our public school system shovels their way. Some do it because they love teaching or care about the students and will put up with the suffering. Some do it because the job offers an awesome 3 months off per year. Some do it because they were able to get tenure and love the job security. Some do it because that's the career path they started in and they don't want to make a change.
Video is rarely a good substitute for text. After watching the considerably long "Upgrading from Drupal 5 to 6" video, I didn't actually retain the information. All I needed was a list of steps on what to do, but instead, if I wanted to do it properly, I'd have to keep jumping around this crazy little video to re-listen to everything I was supposed to do. Keep your videos, and give me a text explanation any day. I can skim text to get to important parts. I can also search it for keywords. I can't effectively skim video, and it's hell trying to forward and rewind to the part I remember being important because the guy in the video said a memorable word.
Rather than re-watch the video and portions thereof for hours on end, I saved out my pages, nuked the site from orbit, and installed 6 fresh. Had to reconfigure a bunch of stuff, but in the end the process was far less painful.
If the book has trouble getting the point across clearly, I'd suggest that it is a failing of the author. There are a LOT of very poorly written technical books. Unfortunately, lots of techies aren't effective technical writers.
I was referring to the school year, which tends to begin in the fall in my area. Sheesh!
I was once lost for a considerable time in a department store. Well, I knew exactly where I was. I was in the elevator, because I was 3 or so and elevators are awesome! And I wasn't going to leave the store without Mom. Mom panicked, store management had everyone looking for me and guarded the exits. Found me just fine. I wasn't abducted. I wasn't killed. Societal mechanisms are in place to return wayward children to their parents in the vast majority of cases. Yes, there can be a lot of panic involved, but I would be very interested in seeing statistics on how many lost children are recovered within a couple hours versus how many remain missing for longer periods. Unfortunately, I don't think such statistics could be properly gathered, given how many such incidents are resolved without ever making a blip on statistic-gatherers' radar.
While 1984 was written as speculative fiction, some of our friends in the UK seem to be using it as an instruction manual.
I'd tell them that I sympathize deeply, but that they are an extremely rare anomaly and that the societal impact of tracking our children's every move may be orders of magnitude more harmful than the very occasional child abduction. I'd then have them watch the Penn & Teller episode on Stranger Danger. I'd also point out that they were personally acquainted with one of the suspects.
Bad things happen. You can't prevent all of them, and I think it is a mistake to try to change how 300 million people live in a very likely negative manner to try to prevent the very few rare cases from occurring.
Since when does kindergarten need an introductory period the year before?
The difference is that putting a child in a car seat does not significantly hamper the child's exploration of the world, nor might it make them more reluctant to try things or to establish personal criteria for trust and risk assessment. The technology might make their lives safer in the short run, but I wouldn't say it makes them better now, and might even make them less safe later if, say, the technology should fail and they don't know what to do.
The drawbacks to restraining devices are few and far between (one might say they make it more difficult to fit more people in a car, or that they make people take longer to enter and exit the car, and that they cost money, for example), and the benefits significant (not being thrown from a vehicle in an accident, which happen quite frequently). The drawbacks to children with tracking devices are numerous (removes or lessens a source of independence and responsibility and trust and life lessons), and much more significant in comparison to the benefits (helps you find them if they get lost, may help retrieve them in the extremely unlikely case of abduction) than in the seat belt example.
The only life skill a child will miss out on by not wearing a restraining device is how to hold on really tight. Without the luxury of tracking devices, though, my parents taught me, among other things, a valuable navigational skill should I ever get lost... always pick the street that's bigger or has more or thicker lines down the middle and follow it until I hit a familiar street. Fifteen years later, it got me home at night when I took a wrong turn and got completely disoriented in a not-particularly-nice part of town.
We mostly use the system for software development, yeah. Trac was all right, but there were just a lot of little quirks that made it annoying to use. One of the biggest headaches was that project creation and administration required a significant measure of command-line intervention on the part of the administrator. Redmine has a very simple web interface for this, and permissions are easily delegated to other people on a per-project basis. Redmine is also much friendlier in cross-project navigation, where trac required an entire separate environment for each project, forcing me to make any changes to every project rather than just once globally. Email notification is also easier in Redmine. Essentially, everything trac does, Redmine does in a more elegant fashion and with significantly less administrator intervention.
I suppose I could use tickets to track everything, but essentially I'd be writing a bunch of tickets to myself. I work at a small company, and the admin request method of choice is to walk into my office. I'd rather not add extra layers of red tape to the matter, and so far there are not so many incidents that any given page is overwhelmed. The incidents I log on each page are on the order of "this was a strange thing that required a non-obvious action to fix", which is primarily what this is a handy reference for.
Which is why one would be wise to password protect said wiki pages and put them in a somewhat obscure location.
This is the template, in the wiki syntax that Redmine undertsands. I make a copy of it, then fill in data under each heading (and replace ServerName with the appropriate name). Formatting is all handled by Redmine, and I don't get much fancier than a few bulleted lists and tables.
The wiki data resides in a MySQL database that is backed up regularly. However, Redmine, which hosts the wiki, is a Ruby on Rails app. It was the app that had gone down, and while the data (and the mirror of the data) was still safe, the app that hosted it was malfunctioning.
I have a nicely formatted template page with all those categories set out. I also maintain a page of IP address assignments and an inventory of harware specs of all the machines in the office (which is helpful in the cases of "We need to reproduce a bug that only happens on ____ processor with ____ video card" and of "We're getting new machines. Who is in most dire need of an upgrade?").
I write down everything in these, and find myself referring to them very often. My predecessor gave me a Word document with all his notes in it, which has been very useful, and I used that as a starting point for my pages. The wiki has saved me a ton of time, kept me organized, and serves as a great reference for me and for the inevitable next admin.
The only caveat is if the wiki (or the server it's on) goes down. This has happened once, and my instructions for fixing the wiki were... on the wiki, so extra troubleshooting for me. Thus, I find it good practice to maintain a hard copy of the wiki pages, especially the page that tells how to fix the wiki.
I'm running this on Redmine, which has proven to be bleedingly simple to use and administer, and much easier than trac, which we used before. It's especially nice having it on the intranet, as I'll just have a browser open to the wiki as I work on systems and refer to and update it as appropriate. It's very handy to document exactly how I performed a strange or experimental installation of some software that I'll want to replicate later without making myself crazy, and I'll take the extra few seconds to retype the commands I just used into the wiki from anywhere in the building, though I probably wouldn't do the same into a Word doc.
It's not so much the mundane day-to-day that I find that important to document. It's the weird fixes, the trouble spots, the command line parameters, the installation procedures, the changes that shouldn't have fixed it but did, and the horrific chain reaction situations that make one piece of software crash because a seemingly unrelated piece of software has the wrong version of the 64-bit library. Things that take 4 hours to figure out and 3 seconds to implement... those are the ones to document, and those are the ones that I'd be kicking myself 20 months later for neglecting to write down. In an afternoon, any schmuck could walk into the building and figure out which network cable goes where. Documenting the strange bits (and the frustrations), though, can get a malfunctioning mail server back up and running in 3 minutes instead of 3 hours (which, of course, is secondary to good administration keeping the server from going down in the first place).
I AM CONTACTING WITH YOU ON BEHALF OF THE RAILS CONSTRUCTION PLANING CORPORATION SOLAR BULLET LLC. I HOPE THIS DAY FINDS YOU WELL. MY ASSOCIATES AND I ARE PREPARED TO START THE MOVING FORWARD ON CONSTRUCTIONS OF A 220MPH SOLAR-POWERED BULLET TRAIN TO MAJOR CITIES IN ARIZONA AND ALSO TO BE PASSING THROUGH THE SMALLER CITIES SUCH AS YOURS. THIS WILL BE A TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION US DOLLARS PROJECT ( $27 000 000 000 US ) WHICH WE ARE PREPARED TO MAKE LARGE INVESTMENTS IN AT NO COST TO YOUR TOWNSHIP. IN ORDER TO RELEASE FUNDS WE WILL BE REQUIRED TO DO A VERY SMALL ENVIRONMENTAL STUDY AT THE COST OF THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND US DOLLARS ( $35 000 US ) TO SECURE THE TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION. THIS STUDY COSTS WILL BE SPLIT BETWEEN THE CITIES OF ARIZONA ON THE PATHS OF THE SOLAR-POWERED BULLET TRAIN AT THE COST OF FIVE-THOUSAND US DOLLARS ( $5 000 US ) PER CITY. PLEASE SEND IN HASTE THE FIVE-THOUSAND US DOLLARS TO OUR ASSOCIATES SO WE CAN BE MADE ABLE TO SECURE THE TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION US DOLLARS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! WARMEST REGARDS, BILL GAITHER, CO-PRESIDENT, SOLAR BULLET LLC RAYMOND WRIGHT, CO-PRESIDENT, SOLAR BULLET LLC
I've had problems trying to run GigE over Cat5 on much shorter distances, especially if there is a jack somewhere in the mix. Could be due to the quality of the Cat5 cables, but it fails at distances in the neighborhood of 20 meters in my office. Our wiring inside the walls is all Cat5. When I attach a Cat5 to a jack and hook it up to a GigE switch, no dice. If I attach Cat5e to the jack, it works fine.
Putting a metric buttload of students in a classroom and saying information in their general direction is very close to pointless, a pointlessness hardly restricted to college level. Smaller, interactive workshop-type classrooms, where there's actual feedback between the professor and students, though, are still very much relevant. I'd say it's more the "I talk at you, you write it down, you regurgitate it later" paradigm that's irrelevant, rather than the setting in which it is presented. Dumping 50, 100, 200, 500 students in one big room serves little purpose other than to push as many students through some required class with the lowest staff expenditure possible.
I'm a composer. As long as I have pencil and paper, I have distractions. I wrote a (well received) saxophone trio in my database architecture course.
I once coded pathing algorithms for a maze-searching robot in the passenger seat of a 1990 Honda Accord going upwards of 100mph from the southern edge of Los Angeles to Davis, starting at 4am. Said robot was to find its way through the maze around noon. Memory is hazy on how well the code worked, on account of being at it since 4am. Was quite surprised to learn that one can reach Fresno in under three hours when the roads are clear.