Happy belated Labor Day – a bit water logged in the Northeast US are we? Scary thing, actually. For most of Saturday, when it was cloudy (yet without rain) I was most reminded of Seattle. See, a lot of people think of Seattle as this dreary and always-wet type of place. Having been there (and been preached to by the residents of WA) I can say that yes, for three out of four seasons, it is typically cloudy… however, it’s not a simple monotonous gray – their skies actually are a mosaic of gray. Think about the skies of CT on over this past weekend… there were rolling and fast moving clouds the whole time; on Saturday there was an occasional blast of sunshine as well… Welcome to typical Seattle weather.
Oh and by the way, their summers are usually more sunny than ours. Of course, the irony of it is that we don’t live there but we’ve some how gotten a piece of their weather pattern… if only Microsoft would open an R&D center in NYC.
OK, so what is the point? Didn’t know I needed to make one – after all, I rarely do. I’m on vacation from work this week, so it’s rather hard for me to get into the Rants’ site and post up some new messages – consequently I’m not too sure how or when I will get this Rant up to the server. All the more reason for it not to be a deep reflection on the cosmic forces of nature and how they interact with the mundane and useless episodes of my own being. Just fluff this week.
What’s Randy doing on his vacation, you ask? A whole lot of nothing! There’s some stuff that I need to do: I’ve got a class starting up at University next week, so I really, really need to work on my class plan. It’s the same class that I taught over the Spring trimester but since my last group of students hated the book I had used, I found a new one (one that was published after the class started, otherwise I would have chosen this one hands down) and that means that I need to change the flow of the class to use the new book. Lot of good it does students to read “Chapter 8” when it has nothing to do with what the lecture is on! I’m also peer reviewing (I’d hate to use the word editing or proof reading b/c I don’t think I’m qualified, but as I’m kick-ass debugger, I’m good at finding typos in sample code, so that’s what I’m really doing: QA!) Steve’s book that’s on it’s to be published some time this year I think… I’ve been toying with the first chapter for a while, but now I’m through that and well into the 2nd – just another two to go and I’ll be caught up with that. I’m also jones’n for some outdoor time – shock I know! – but I think the analog time could do me some good… even now, I’m pecking away my notebook while at the local Starbucks – of course I forgot my 802.11b card, so I’m not using their hotspot either but it makes for a good reading/writing environment… just as well – saves me 2-bits, since I have DSL at my house anyway, why would I want to go wireless somewhere else? I just thought it would be nice to get out and see something other than my condo for a change :)
Should also be interesting to see if I can get thru the next four days without having to Rant… what are the odds of that, really? Easy to figure that out – how hard is it to count to zero!