I’ve had a very busy time over the past two weeks with my students having a major website development assignment due.   Out of a class of 88, I’ve had around 12-15 students coming to see me nearly every day.

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If we just consider the poorest developing countries, what is the best kind of assistance we could give them?  Malaria nets? Drinking water?  Measles vaccines?  Antibiotics?   Food?  Or birth control?

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Everyone knows that donating money to charity is a good thing.  But which charity?  How do you decide which charities to give money to?

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I’ve attended a few academic conferences now, but this is the first time I’ve been part of the organizing committee on any of them.  Part of my responsibility is to help coordinate the double-blind peer reviewing process, and it’s been quite an eye-opener for me.

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I’ve been taking Spanish classes every Monday night for the past three months.  Tonight I started the level 2 intensive course – 2 hours every Monday and Thursday for the next six weeks.   Back when I signed up, I figured that I’d be over the busy part of the semester by now.  Look how well that prediction turned out.

Tonight’s class seems a huge step up from the previous level.  The tutor spoke in Spanish almost the entire time, and there were lots of things that other students seemed to know that I’d never come across before (like words for animals and fabrics).  However, I’m not too badly off – there were a few others there who seemed to know even less than I do.

Tonight was mostly about reviewing the basics – greetings, numbers and letters, introductions and basic personal information, the verb ‘to be’ and conjugations for a few of the most common regular and irregular verbs.  At one point, we were going around the class describing our personalities and one guy says ‘Soy caliente’.  Caliente means hot in Spanish.  He was trying to say he’s hot-headed and impulsive but we laughed a bit because we thought he was saying that he’s hot (as in attractive).  Turns out that if you use caliente in that context, it actually means ‘I’m horny’.  The tutor was too embarrassed to translate it out loud but he wrote some of the letters on the board until we got the idea.

Then he was talking about how someone would refer to themselves as being hot, as in attractive, and made me rate the guy as to how attractive he was, asking if he was a 60 or an 85 and saying he wouldn’t move on with the class until I’d given him a rating.   I said cien (100) and everyone laughed and the guy made a great show of thanking me.  When it came my turn, I described myself as optimistic, and everyone laughed when the tutor said that my rating the guy 100 was an example of that.

We have to do a regular writing exercise to practice our sentence composition skills.  Currently we only know how to speak in present tense, so we have to keep a diary describing our daily activities in present tense only.  Here’s my first week’s exercise (I have no guarantee that this is in any way correct):

Yo vivo en un apartamento en el centro.  Me levanto a las siete y media todos los días.  Mi trabajo es muy cerca de mi apartamento.  Por la mañana enseño en la universidad.  Hay ochenta y ocho estudiantes in mi clase.  Por la tarde trabajo en mi computadora.  Por la noche, mis amigos y yo bebemos tequila.

My intended translation is this:

I live in an apartment in the city centre.  I get up at 7:30 every day. My work is very close to my apartment.  In the morning I teach in the university.  There are 88 students in my class.  In the afternoon, I work at my computer.  In the evening, my friends and I drink tequila.

My love of tequila is a running joke in the Spanish class, and the tutor makes frequent reference to it.  Another student is travelling to South America to meet girls, and so the tutor often makes reference to him being sad because he’s single and mentioning him finding a girlfriend.

Whenever I’ve installed MSN Messenger, I’ve always unselected all the other stuff that comes along with it: email client, writing client, photo manager, toolbar etc.  I figured my needs were already taken care of in those areas.  But recently a colleague raved about Windows Live Writer, so tonight I downloaded it and gave it a try.

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This has been a crazy semester for me. I’m redeveloping both of my courses, which is a bigger challenge than I thought it would be. I’m teaching some new technologies that I haven’t used before, so there’s a lot of learning involved before I can even start preparing lecture and lab materials. I barely get time to do the other things that I’m now responsible for at work, let alone any kind of social activities. My car seriously needs a mechanic but I just haven’t had time to take it. I have a serious issue with the radiator or radiator hoses which means I need to pour about a 3L bottle of water into it every day or two. Fortunately I’m only doing short trips so it doesn’t have time to heat up much, but the noise it’s making is quite unsettling.

At the moment, I’m working between 12 and 16 hours a day. A fairly typical day has me arriving at work about 8:30am and getting get home around 10pm. Weekends I usually average about 6-8 hours a day. I haven’t been to the gym in months and I haven’t cooked a meal in months. It’s not a very healthy (or cheap) way to live.
We are currently in Week 9 of the semester and I have lectures prepared for tomorrow. Tomorrow when I’m not lecturing, I’ll prepare lectures for Wednesday and labs for Friday. On Thursday, I’ll prepare Friday’s lectures. On the weekend, I’ll make the two tests my students just sat and the assignment they handed in two weeks ago.
With a bit of luck, things will improve.
At any rate, I only have 3 and a half weeks left to survive this semester. And never again will I redesign two courses at once.

I can’t believe it has been over two months since I last posted. Naughty me.

Well, here’s my list of excuses:

I’ve been redeveloping both of my courses this semester. My windows applications development course has changed from VB, Windows Forms 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0 to C#, WPF and the entity framework. That’s a lot of new stuff for me to master. Also, my web applications development course has been upgraded to include more web design content and also to use the ASP.NET entity framework.

I’ve started writing not one, but two textbooks - one for each of the courses I teach. They’ve both got about 10 chapters each so far. I’ve been giving them out to the students as notes as I finish each chapter.

I’ve been helping to organize a conference, which turns out to me more work than I thought it was going to be.

I’ve been working on getting some conference papers submitted, and have more upcoming deadlines for that.

I’ve been invited onto the curriculum committee in my department, and we are reviewing and revising our entire curriculum, which is a lot of work

I’ve been taking introductory spanish classes.
I’ve been doing social stuff, like inviting people over and going to hens nights and weddings and suchlike.

And, saving the best for last, I submitted my thesis! I handed it in to the graduate center on Thursday morning. It has now been sent out to the (anonymous) examiners, and I’ll get called in for the oral examination in July. Until then, I don’t have to worry about it at all!

I’m sure I’ll find plenty of other things to procrastinate about now though, starting with the conference paper I have to submit in two weeks.

Whenever I’m feeling particularly masochistic, I read websites like answersingenesis.org, a young earth creationist fundamentalist christian apologetics site. I highly recommend their article called ‘What’s the best “proof” of creation?‘. It is aimed at christians, teaching them the best way to argue with and convert evolutionists.
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My current PC is nearly 3 years old now and is getting a bit past its use-by date.   I’m planning on buying or building myself a new PC over the next couple of months. Read More »