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Archive for April, 2007
This sort of thing is actually pretty common, particularly when somebody applies right out of high school but selects a different college or University, then a couple years later transfers over to our campus. They don’t remember the details of the admissions account they set up way back when. We have a pretty straightforward process for handling these situations to everyone’s satisfaction. Except when you’re a moron.
Every so often I fail to finish all my last cup of water, and the remainder stands in the cup overnight. Formerly, this was no problem, as it would almost invariably be refilled, drunk, and left out to dry the following day. This zero-maintenance personal hydration system worked without flaw until Monday, when I developed an inexplicable thirst for Mountain Dew that lasted until this morning. I left half a cup of water in the cup when I fled the office last Friday, and it sat at my desk, wet, lukewarm, and undisturbed, until lunchtime today, when I raised it to my lips and proceeded to knock back a hearty draught of the good old H2O. I barely suppressed the sudden, overwhelming urge to spew the contents of my mouth onto the keyboard. It was the second foulest-tasting thing I’ve had in my mouth within recent memory; it tasted like licking the inside of a fishtank. It was no longer water; despite the absence of any detectable odor or visual cues, there was no mistaking I’d just attempted to ingest a serving of Cup O’ Algae®. Nasty stuff, that. Time to wash out the cup. Just as soon as I finish gargling this soap.
Seen during my morning peregrination through the campus.
Awww.
Don’t ask me, I didn’t think it up. Nobody really had any explanation for why it took off so fast. There were a lot of quality entries in the submission thread but, inexplicably, a lot of them weren’t used. Most of them are bizarre, hilarious, and disturbingly tasty.
My antivirus was installed and running. Spybot was installed and resident. The firewall was up. I never even touch Internet Exploiter. Everything was all patched up. I don’t run even a single mail client on that box. It’s basically just a gaming rig. And yet, clearly the thing was compromised. Suspicious network activity, blank entries in the Startup tab of msconfig that would reappear after being disabled, and shutdowns were always hung up by a mystery app named “Hidden Window” that I couldn’t find a running process for. There was a zombie in my den I could not exorcize. So I dropped the Big One on it last night. I suppose it was time anyway, considering the OS had been on there since 2003, and that was actually an upgrade installation of Windows 2000 that itself dated back to that crazy summer of 2001 when the wind was in my hair and Windows Me was a fading dot in the rear view mirror. It also gave me the opportunity to repartition the drive- for reasons I cannot now fathom, I’d set aside a logical partition of 60GB and never put a single file on the thing. I’ve no idea why I did that, or what benefit I might have imagined it would provide. And lo! My system is reborn, cleansed of taint and cruft. Or the cruft has been cleaned out of its taint. Whichever. It’s clean, patched, and ready for action, hopefully not to suffer another such episode until the DX10 cards start entering the market in force, when it’ll be superceded by the next rig and relegated to backup server duty. I don’t know why, but for some reason this nuke n’ pave has rekindled my long-dormant desire to geek out over new hardware.
I had not previously seen this movie, having sworn off Star Wars since the Ewoks disgraced the series with their appearance in Return of the Jedi. I had, of course, heard it was bad. That they were movies as empty of quality storytelling as they were filled with eye candy. “Still”, I thought as I reached for the popcorn bowl, “how bad can they really be?” Oh, my. This bad. I’m sure this comes as a surprise to none, but I was still incredulous. Wooden acting, thin plot, horrible scripts. BAD. Jar-Jar. Fart jokes. ?berbadass Darth Vader reduced to a petulant, whiny teenager. BAD. I know these are hardly amazing revelations. It’s just… man… I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m more baffled at the terrible quality of the films, or disappointed in their utterly squandered potential. Lucas had the chance, as an auteur, to build on the success of Star Wars and cement a position as a good filmmaker. Instead, he showed that the craftwork on display his famed 1977 film was no more than a fluke. How people can actually continue to be fans is now quite beyond my ken. |
I took a call out of the queue the other day. It seemed like a pretty standard call from a hopeless applicant. He needed help accessing his admissions account, and had managed to forget not only his password, but his username as well. 
There is a cup on my desk. I drink water from it. I haven’t washed it out in ages; it only holds water, is usually drained by the end of the day, and is bone-dry by the morning. 
For the first time in many moons, or so it seems, I pitched in to help with the 
I am not sure what it was or precisely how I got it. I thought I had taken all the right precautions.
Perhaps the last bit of fallout from our Disneyland vacation (I swear to God this is the last time I’ll mention the trip again) is my oldest son’s burgeoning fixation with all things Star Wars. In an attempt to sate his curiosity, we checked some of the movies out from the library, starting with The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.