The Curse of the Harry Potter.

The first book was great. I looked forward to reading every book...until this one. The last one looks thick, heavy, and even less well crafted than the others of late. It will take up a ton of space in my backpack. It's hardcover to boot.

Question of the day.

If people are drinking more soda and bottled water, are taking these with their meals and are getting obese as a result, is milk really the staple they say it is, and is the increase in price of milk really such a cause for concern?

Why I love my job. A rant.

I love my job because my coworkers and I all know how to write. We don't turn out finely tuned prose like J and Z, but what we write gets the job done. It may be riddled with grammatical inconsistencies, but our peer review process quickly irons those out. And I don't see the problem with starting sentences with conjunctions in a blog.

When I studied for the GMAT, many test questions contained many examples of God-awful phrases and sentences. I used to wonder, "Isn't this obvious? Who on earth would write like that?"

My classmates, that's who. They really do write that poorly, when they can be bothered to write at all. I am not just talking about the engineers. The ones who majored in other things, the ones who really *should* know about writing because they would have taken several writing courses in college, these are the people churning out documents that would have made me blush in middle school.

If these are the college-educated, how are the high schoolers writing?

I am generally willing to give some leeway to those who do not speak English as a first language. I'm impressed at how Z writes so well (and how I write so poorly) considering.

But this quarter's project took the cake. There were four people on my team. The Girl (as in the other female besides me) just sat and nodded her head. She kept saying she understood things conceptually, but couldn't put the numbers to them, and that she was going to study how to do the numbers in detail. I wanted to scream, "You keep saying that, but wouldn't it be easier just to do your homework?"

The First Guy was a little lazy at first, but eventually came through. At least he checked all of my numbers (and by God there were a lot), helped conduct the final analysis, and actually read through and critiqued my argument.

The Second Guy was a moron, almost as bad as the Girl. His major contributions were the templates for the slides and the report. He simply believed all of my numbers. At first glance you'd think he was simply an agreeable, happy guy. It turned out he was just believing everything. Every modification he made to the report I had to undo. His grammar was terrible, and he couldn't decide between past and present tense, very often in the same sentence. His last significant contribution to the report was to move our assumptions from the start of the document to the very end, after our recommendations.

I had to point out to him that it is traditional to end reports with your conclusions, not the assumptions you made while crunching the data. Call me old-fashioned, but I firmly believe reports should end with conclusions.

I downloaded the report at midnight Saturday night. Up until then, I had not been able to look at it, because I did all the numbers for the project. I did all the numbers because FG was checking my numbers, SG was too stupid to replicate the formulas, and the Girl had no idea what was going on. I expected to find a decent argument, to which FG and I needed only to add figures, reference to figures, and analysis of the figures.

Boy, was I wrong. The last time I saw a report this bad was in middle school.

It took me half an hour to adjust the page numbers so the cover page wasn't page 1. He reverted that, at which point I decided I didn't have half an hour to change it back.

He kept losing my tables and figures, substituting his own captions instead. Around version 7 I practically screamed at the group to make damn sure they didn't lose the figures. This was at 5AM Sunday morning.

I wanted to spend Sunday cramming for the final. Instead I was updating the report because SG kept screwing it up. I think I failed the exam as a result.

Now how can I make this known to the professor without sounding whiny?

Five minutes: a study of the mundane.

I bought an electric kettle. It cost $20 plus tax.

It has nearly paid for itself. Here's why: it has given back five minutes of my time every morning. This is because I can boil water while showering, leaving the tea bag to steep while the toast goes. That's five minutes that can now run in parallel with the rest of breakfast assembly time.

Told you it was a study of the mundane.