Blah blah webcam blah

I bit the bullet and bought one. Another step closer to developing my social networking/dysfunction!

Something to Look Up To

I wish I could only have such hilarious bad comics... 200 Bad Comics!

Conflicting Sentiments

A few hours ago, two girls were standing outside our apartment building. They were from this building, as I recognized the older, pudgier girl who constantly had a sour look on her face, as many tween girls often do. She was cradling around a charcoal grey kitten; or rather, the kitten was clawed onto her hoodie with dear life, as she would wave her arms around to any passerby, calling out to them. She would then stretch the cat out with one hand as the car would drive by. The younger one was waving around an empty box, similarly yelling out to the street, and rushed over to the opposite side to yell out some more.

As I am a sucker for cute furry things, I had an idea of what they were doing. Unfortunately, I cannot follow through my desires, as I am still allergic to such animals. So I can only watch as the mother came out of the building to console the kids, and they were brought back into the building.

Had I any initiative, or less of an allergy, I would have gone out and done as I wanted to do, which Jorghnassen kept reminding me that I could not do. Hence, I can only write how my imaginary conversation with the girls would have followed:

-Dear, what in the world are you two peddling?

"We're selling a cat." She points to herself with both hands, while the cat is hanging on to dear life with all four limbs hooked onto her shirt.

-Is that how you treat a cat?

"No, miss, we're trying to find a good home for it." The other girl shouts out at another car barreling down the road. "CAT FOR SALE!"

-How did it come about that you have this... cat for sale?

"We had it for a while but now my family can't afford to keep this cat." The girls pout and look toward the cat forlornly. The cat is squirming desperately out of her arms, but the girl manages to enclose it in her pudgy embrace.

-Dears, where is your mother or father?

"They're inside..."

-Do they know you're doing this?

"Yes..." Their eyes dart around and they kick their legs into air with the suspicious look that kids give when they are up to something.

-Well, let me talk to them.

"Are you going to buy the cat?"

-Let me talk to your parents first.

The girls lead me to the mother, who is furious at their callous behaviour. (Why? I don't know. She was pretty mad earlier when she took the girls back inside.) On the other hand, the mother confirms the story. Despite Jorgh's objections, I agree to take the cat in. Everyone looks at the cat, now clawed onto my shirt and scratching me as I take it back to my apartment. It now leads a happy life without little girls trying to perform acrobatics with it on the street.

---

Jorghnassen is known as doublebof, and we were comparing our OKCupid match questions.

ST Voyager's Stupid Sad Episode :(:(:(

I regularly visit the SA forums whenever it's open to the public. I justify this obsession: sometimes there are threads that are horrible, hilarious (or both), and often get posted into the SA Front Page like the Comedy Goldmines or Photoshop Phridays.

This afternoon I had the misfortune of reading the "MS-Paint the saddest thing" thread, and some of the things posted there (while not MS Painted) were pretty sad, like the Thai insurance commercials. I only watched one of them but boy is it gut-wrenching: Click this if you feel like crying pathetically.

I had the TV on right afterwards, and it happened to be the Star Trek: Voyager episode called "Course: Oblivion". To summarize: the entire crew and ship came to the realization that they were merely copies of the original Voyager and crew due to some chance encounter on some planet that made exact bio-copies of everything, and their bodies and everything else were breaking down because of some techno-jargon; they had the choice to continue leading their copied lives and to continue heading to Earth, or go back to the planet they originated from to survive.

Of course, things don't turn out so well for them. In fact... let's just say that I really think you should pay just a little more attention to mysterious piles of blobs when you walk by.

Goddamn that was sad. :(

---

Yes, it's been a pretty sad afternoon. What with Jorghnassen killing all the spiders and everything. :(

I have something on my face...

... otherwise, why would those girls be looking at me at that Zehrs?

Jorghnassen, of course, is the reason why.

We walked by an aisle going to the cash register and I looked straight at her, as she stared straight at me. She stopped talking, and the other girls continued oblivious to her silence. I was wondering if the asian (chinese probably) girls at first were long lost cousins or something because I seriously have no idea why that particular one was staring at me for much longer than a stranger would at another person. Then I realized that none of my cousins are anywhere in proximity of the Wawaloo region, and they didn't look anything like anyone else I knew.

As we loaded the things in our basket to the cash, I looked back at the girls who were still standing at the aisle, still curious at first. Now hiding behind a goddamn clipboard that she was holding, she was peeking from behind it and still chatting with her friend and staring at us. At me. Wha-?

After a few more covert confirmations that I was being stared at, I mentioned it to Jorghnassen. The ill-concealed spying from the girls was rather disturbing. By then, we were already moving away from the register, and he looked back and he thought he was actually the one being stared at. Then I got more disturbed.

Now before you think I'm becoming jealous, it was because Jorgh is teaching a course right now at the university, and the girls (or one of them anyway) are probably in his class. He says the spy-girl looks familiar, and he could probably confirm it next class.

I know I'm not always the most restrained of girlfriends in the PDA department, so I can gather that seeing your prof with a girl who *looks* like a university student (but who is probably glad she's not a university student anymore) holding his arm might look suspicious, and smacks of unethical behaviour if one thinks that student-type is in the same class as the prof is teaching. And I know that one has a right to talk to other people in public about people you happen to recognize in public.

Nonetheless, it's not polite to stare! >:(

Final Exams Loom

I finally submitted the final exams to the office for storage. This time around, the administration wants the exams in at least a week before the date because the other times the other teachers only had it ready and photocopied the morning of the exam, which stressed out the admin that now they mandated their request.

Actually, producing the final exam is less stressful than writing one. On the other hand, it is much, much longer than writing one. But if one were to calculate the hours for a student to study, complete exercises, and revise notes on one course, it would probably add up to more, so I won't complain about the amount of time spent over one exam.

On the other hand, the responsibilities in exam making are staggering. Not only do I have to make up all the questions (I cheated, though, and took a lot of them from the damnable textbook), make full solutions of the questions, and mark them fairly, but I consider the following:

• Balance: on a scale of 1 to 10, difficulty should be a 5 or 6, depending on the type of course. The main issue is gaging the class' abilities and the difficulty scale.


• Weighting: more time spent on a certain topic doesn't necessarily correspond to more points in that topic. Hence, the points per question will vary.


• Type of questions: either make it easy on yourself to mark (but longer to prepare) and make those choice-based questions like Multiple Choice, True/False, etc. - or make it hard on yourself to mark (but shorter to prepare) and give open questions that will require pages and pages of student chicken scratch that you will have to decipher and make some sort of logical sense with, only to give half a mark for spelling a word correctly.


• Requirements of the course (and thus, the province): if there are 50 items in the course outline that must be covered, then the exam should cover as many as possible. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to cover nearly half those points this term. :(


• Length: there's a danger that you want to cover everything in the course in the exam, in order to make all the study time worthwhile for the students. But doing so will make the exam much too long to be written in any alloted time slot. Otherwise, you'd have to ask pretty superficial questions just to get everything in. Last time, the exam was too long and I actually had to cut out two entire questions after the exam was written. :(:(


• Approval: who else but the administration will look at this exam? Actually, no one at this point. But if I had been in a larger school with more people having taught or teaching the same course, I would have to collaborate with that person to figure out what will work in the exam and what will be thrown out. Unfortunately, since I have never taught any of these courses before, it would have been better that I had someone else to consult with.

Now I can go to sleep.

P.S. School starts again on July 3rd.

Some music to soothe the beast?

... or to agonize it into suicide?!?

Don't listen to this if you really, truly intend to keep your hearing. You might think I'm kidding, but I'm serious this time.



This one is for those of you who think it is funny to deafen people around you with evil ringtones.