This afternoon was a truly weird experience.

My son will be taking the SAT as part of a national talent search. It scares me that he is going to be doing something that I did in preparation to leave home. Fortunately, the consequences are not yet so serious. It's more as preparation for him to take it "for real" down the line.

Recently, however, I contacted one of the local colleges. My hope was that the older boy could take a class or two in an area of strong interest. These are classes he can't take at his high school, nor in most colleges. It's a fairly specialized program.

It might help to keep in mind that my "high schooler", while taking some high school level courses and attending a program in a high school, is actually in 8th grade this year.

An officer from the school contacted me a couple weeks ago, and we agreed to get together with the boy to talk about his interests.

I should've known better. As it turns out, this was actually a chance for them to give us their sales pitch. It also turns out that they don't take part-time enrollees. That was okay, said this officer. Maybe in a year or two, you can come to our school full-time!

She thought my son was either a junior or senior in high school. To his credit, the boy didn't give her any indication that he was not, and he really handled himself well when asked questions. It was probably obvious he hadn't given college life a lot of thought, but he was very interested in what she had to say.

He did seem very excited about the program. I am, however, going to sit back and let it sink in for him. While this was a bit of a let-down, it was also good to get him thinking about the future a bit. I think he's happy where he is right now, but it may be that in a year or two, he's antsy to really dig into this stuff. (Of course, another possible scenario is that we move, and then we'll have to figure out what he wants to do to complete his high school education.) Hopefully he'll have thought about this a bit before we get there.

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was talking to one of the two college professors I knew, finding out what I would need to do to get into a "good" college. Soon enough the older one will be there. I guess today was a wake-up call, hopefully for both of us, that this stuff is just around the corner. It's both exciting and frightening.

Tags: college, older son
Current Mood: optimistic

I had lunch with a friend today, and I spent a good chunk of it spazzing about my orals.

I guess it's finally hitting me how different my grad school experience is from both my MS program and my husband's experience.

There is no doubt that my husband was also a spazz when it came time for his orals. On the other hand, I seem to recall our advisor reminding him that orals were meant to be a time to present your project and get feedback from the committee on things they think are going to be helpful or to be careful about. He managed to get through his written exam, thus showing that he was capable of dealing with advanced concepts in his field. For our old program, that was the mechanism used for weeding out students. The orals were meant to help direct him in his research and get the guidance of people with more experience. The hubby said it was fairly grueling...I think it was over 3 hours long? But when he came out, he was relieved and happy about some of the things that they had talked about. Along the way in his research, he met with his committee a couple more times and got some fairly good feedback as his project evolved. He never had the sense that anyone viewed this as a rite of passage.

I am getting the distinct feeling that is not a common experience. I have gotten the feeling that, in other places, oral exams are about weeding students out. Tonight, I was told by another student that a lot of grad students end up crying after their orals because they feel like they've gone through three hours of torture.

I am getting the feeling that my experience will be nothing like my husband's because, while I have gotten some guidance about certain aspects of this process, there is a lot that's not being said, and there are a lot of people are refusing to discuss it. This process has me worried because, when it comes down to it, I'm not entirely sure what it's about, and I have the feeling that everyone involved has their own ideas.

Tags: grad school, orals
Current Mood: confused

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Tags: bugs, csi wii, fck, lj_cares, lj_photophile, notes, rte, writer's block

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

There was something wonderful about being in electrical engineering. I really loved the fact that any time I went to my office, night or day, there were always people buzzing around the building. I could go walking down the hall and find people in various labs working on projects or in the teaching center doing homework or in the computer center, working on circuit models or designing ICs. Even at 2 or 3 a.m., and especially toward the end of the semester. I would often go to my office in the evenings or during the weekends to get things done. I also appreciated the fact that there was almost always room in the parking lot right outside my building. (They stopped enforcing parking after 5 p.m. on weekdays.)

I'm not sure why, but that's not the case in my current building/department. And what's worse is that the building is old and creaky. I really don't like to stay at my office until late at night/the wee hours of the morning because there are so few other people there. If I need to take a break, I don't feel like I can get up and walk down the hall to see what other people are doing because there is no one there to chat with. Then I have to walk across a dark campus to get to my car.

I am guessing this is a function of being in a smaller department where more commuting occurs. EE at my old school had 500 undergrads (about six times our dept.) and around 100 grads (slightly more than here). We seldom had to worry much about campus safety (although I could usually find a nice undergrad to walk me to my car if need be). For the undergrads, dorms are less than a block away. The grad student housing was either a block away or three blocks away, depending on which buildings you inhabited.

It's somewhat disappointing, though. Sometimes my marathon midnight sessions were super productive, but I don't feel like I can do those here. And even the weekends are difficult, especially during football games because parking is such a pain. Another reason why I miss Fargo.

Tags: electrical engineering, school, working late
Current Mood: disappointed

"Interesting. You're afraid of insects and women. Ladybugs must render you catatonic." - Sheldon, The Big Bang Theory

Yesterday was the one lab that I simultaneously love and hate. It involves modeling of river processes using a stream table. It is, in my opinion, by far the most educational lab in the whole series because one gets to observe the processes in action, make predictions, and then take measurements to see if their intuition is right (or, if you are one of those rare students who actually does read the lab ahead of time, that you understood the explanations).

My feelings about the lab are entirely dependent on the excitement level of the students. My second lab yesterday had a group that really enjoyed themselves. They got into it, built things like little sandcastles, got their hands all dirty, cheered when their structures worked they way they wanted, and mourned the loss of plastic cows that were too close to the banks that were highly susceptible to erosional processes. They also mocked the monopoly hotels that were stupid enough to build on riverfront property.

Contrast that with one of the earlier groups. I had two large spoons and I told them they needed to use them to dig a river channel in the sand. Everyone looked at me blankly. Finally, one student took one of the spoons. Everyone else just stood there and watched. After a little bit, I told them that if someone didn't take the other spoon and start digging, they were all going to fail that lab. (Yeah, I prefer to use a carrot...but there are occasions where a blunt object needs to be employed.) The rest of the group still was extremely uninvolved. Instead, they complained to me about how they hated sand and didn't want to get dirty. There were no sandcastles, cows, or hotels.

I've noticed this a lot lately, and I think it comes down to this: city-dwelling kids hardly get to play outside unsupervised. They also develop huge aversions to dirt and other...stuff. (The exceptions are those whose parents made an effort to get them outdoors or participated in various rituals such as the deer opener.)

My rural area friends have commented on this same trend. Most kids don't do anything unsupervised in cities and spend all of their time indoors. School is making this worse. Kids are being given ever more homework at younger grades, seat work is now taking place in kindergarten, etc. Contrast this with my rural area friends and relative whose kids play outside a lot, understand how things work, aren't afraid of dirt, and, forgive me for saying this, are a fairly skinny lot. They're also fairly independent (i.e. not like my son, who, left to his own devices would eat nothing but cereal). The city-dweller parents think the rural parents are neglectful, but I tend to think of them as "free-range".

The way my mother talks about me as a child, you'd think I never went outside. I admit that I spent a lot of time reading. However, not all my time. I played in the mud, I watched tadpoles change into frogs, I studied ladybugs and boxelder bugs, made a sundial, observed the stars (one thing that big cities REALLY wreck), played in the snow, collected rocks, etc. Girl scout summer camp was the one thing that made girls scouts worthwhile. Instead of sitting inside doing crafts, we actually got to go camping and hiking.

I've come to the conclusion, probably as a result of both my upbringing and my experience as a homeschooling parent, that experiential learning is more powerful than book learning. Now, I'm certainly an advocate of books and learning from them, but you aren't going to get the whole picture from that. I'm also seeing younger kids get less and less of this learning or even actively resisting it. When it comes to basic concepts, they are often stymied.

In the first lab, we discuss ice on a river. When I ask the question about how water freezes, the only kids who answer are those who have been ice-fishing. The rest don't know. I'm sure they were told somewhere in their long, arduous public and private school careers, but they never SAW it. I am finding more and more things like this that I learned about in school, but that I only REALLY learned it when I saw or experienced it. It makes me sad to realize that fewer kids are having the real opportunities to learn. Rather than giving them more homework or summer school, kids really need to get outside and have the opportunity to experience things, to make mistakes, and do some REAL learning.

Tags: geology, learning, parenting, school
Current Mood: disappointed

sixwordstories
Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.

Tags: flash fiction, sixwordstories

dailyfoodie
Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.

Tags: dailyfoodie, food, photography

If I manage to make it through this semester (i.e. pass my classes, pass my oral exam, and manage to keep up with my teaching/grading), it will be nothing short of a miracle. And it doesn't help that there's another fellowship deadline at the end of November.

Tags: grad school

Princess is gone with her dad this weekend....


We have the weekend alone together... with the bed already warmed up....


And I was told to distract myself this weekend....

Current Mood: mischievous