Question of the day.

Where are my grades?

Question of the day.

What are chocolate covered strawberries but a race against time?

Statement of the day.

Isn't that the definition of insanity?

It's a website. I am trying to update something on it. It takes a long time to come back with a non-error. That is, it's an error and the thing didn't go through, but the page telling me that doesn't exist, so I get a page not found error. There are no other buttons, like "save" or "modify" that are relevant to my desired action. So I keep clicking the same button, "update", expecting something different will happen.

I'd stop clicking "update", except when I was clicking the other button for a different action, it also kept failing until it finally went through.

Things I didn't need this week because finals are on Saturday.

Team member bailing out of doing the presentation, even though he insisted all day that he was up to the task.

Kitchen flooding. The drain pipe thingy has decided it doesn't want to drain into the sewer line anymore. It has decided the floor is a much better place.

The knowledge that if I didn't have finals, I'd probably diagnose and fix the drain problem myself. It would just take a few hours and a trip to the hardware store. Instead, I have what looks like an expensive date with the plumber and no sense of accomplishment.

Sending e-mail to the wrong disti list.

Report, due Saturday, in less than decent shape, given all the questions we have for one of the teammates.

The real possibility that this quarter's projects could be rendered null and void for want of real communication.

Another Comment.

As fun as it is to bash PowerPoint, it makes me sad to think about all the hours people have spent deliberately defeating PowerPoint's default layouts, only to end up with the results they ended up with. Well, except for the ones who insisted on foils. We may not agree with the colors or layouts PowerPoint chose, but there really are times users can't do better than the designers.

Cataloging the Worst Presentations Ever (rankings and better names to follow sometime later).

Picture Guy:

He was an avid lover of nature and decided to incorporate photos of nature from his state into his presentation. These weren't his photos; he used some from a professional photographer. He spent a significant amount of time describing the picture instead of describing his work. Normal people would have dropped the photo into the side or the middle of the slide. He made the photo the background and changed the font color to match. I have yet to decide whether the white text on yellow grass (yes grass), green text on green grass, or the black text on snow and deep red grass was the least legible.

The Paper Might Have Been Shorter:

She recognized her accent was somewhat thick and the audience may have a tough time understanding her. That was no excuse for pasting entire paragaphs (probably from her paper) into the slides. The text became so dense and small as to be difficult to read, so she had to recolor some of the text to highlight the salient points. She failed to recognize that we couldn't read her slides because of the text size, not the color. She also spent too many slides defining her terms and not enough on actual analysis, a fatal flaw for a 20-minute presentation.

Imagine That:

He failed to recognize why much of the world moved to Excel and PowerPoint a decade ago. His foils required spending 20 minutes tracking down a light projector. Because he didn't completely understand how his mathematics package worked, he hadn't resized the fonts before printing and he couldn't properly plot one of his performance graphs. He told us to imagine the line shifted upward because his performance was really better than that shown. I wished I'd thought to do that during my own presentation: "Imagine these numbers, but 20% better."

Why Bother:

Like Imagine That, he also failed to recognize the brave new world of the 90's. His foils contained numerous paragaphs and quotations clipped from his favorite authors. He didn't expect us to actually read the slides, he just put them up to impress upon us that he knew about these authors. His foils also demonstrated the limitations of foils. Namely, that if you forget to add something, you have to write it in with Sharpie, which doesn't work so well if your Sharpie is wearing down, you have terrible handwriting, and the thing you want to add is another paragraph.

(In fact, I would like to flog anybody who pastes paragaphs into their slides, but I saw so many of those on Saturday that I realized it would take too long to take care of all the offenders.)

(Also, after The Paper Might Have Been Shorter, I realized that pasting in paragraphs from other authors' papers is slightly less egregious than pasting in paragraphs from your own paper, which forced about a dozen presentations off this list.)

Exhaust Them so They Don't Ask Questions:

She shrank the margins and line spacing, but not the font size as much, so she could fit more text on the slide. The result was the first and only presentation I'd ever attended where I actually got tired reading the slide. If she hadn't worked for a government agency and could productize this, she could put all those sleeping pill manufacturers out of business.

Why I'll never be a TV chef.

Ingredients
1 lb. spiral pasta
~2 pints grape tomatoes (purchased from Costco, where pints have no meaning)
8, possibly 10 medium to large mini sweet peppers (lost count)
1 normal can diced tomatoes
1 to 2 tsp. each dried basil, roasted garlic flakes (they had shaker tops)
pinch salt
black pepper
7.5 oz. part-skim ricotta (1/2 the 15 oz. tub) (it might have been 2/3 of the tub)
splash vodka
olive oil

Method
1. Boil water for pasta. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a pan. A wok will do, but I guess normal people use a skillet or saute pan.
2. Add raw tomatoes and peppers to the oil. Cover and bring heat down to medium. Stir once in a while, until some of the tomatoes burst.
3. Add canned tomatoes, basil, garlic, salt, and pepper to the vegetables. Heat through and keep at a simmer.
4. Stir in ricotta. The mixture will turn pink. Turn heat down to keep at a simmer.
5. Cook pasta. Stir vodka into the sauce.
6. Drain pasta, dump the pasta into the sauce. This is why a wok works well.
7. Serve with parmesan.

Ideas for what to name this dish?

Question of the day.

How effective can the traffic reports on the news really be if the backup just keeps getting worse?

Question of the day.

Don't people pee in the river?