wink     ; )

Mightiness of Sunlight Bottom

I got a little toy car as a stocking stuffer. It was made in China, as the included instructions make clear. The following is an exerpt of the "safety rules". (To save me the trouble, just assume that there is a "[sic]" after every misspelling and grammatical mistake in the following section. Thanks.):

Safe rule

1. prohibition against 3 years old below of child usage;
2. play attention, you of finger, hair, clothes...etc, don't touch car and wheel, in order to prevent quilt harm;
3. car while ddving not want to by hand grasp it;
4. don't let the remote control close to any fire with car odginal;( such as electric stove, stove beside or mightiness of sunlight bottom)
5. not want the place in danger to play;( such as street, steep slope...etc.)
6. don't let the wet water of car, and not want under the rainy day is open-air usage;
7. not want on the sand ground to play;
8. forbid the child to tear open the remote control with the car;
9. if the car dash to piecesed, and should pass by the per son check or profession personnel maintain the rear can coninue to use.

In addition to these, there are also various pictures with "X"s drawn through them to indicate that you should not do these things. One picutre is of the car under a sun. Another is of the car under a raincloud. Apparently, this toy is only to be used on days that are overcast-but-not-raining.

What the heck are "ddving" and "odginal"? And why are they concerned about "quilt harm"?

Numbers 4 and 9 are my favorites.

I have to believe that the English (if you can call it that) portion of these instructions were produced using machine translation. Otherwise...some poor Chinese-to-English translator is going to have a very short career.

Merry Christmas

Off to the in-laws for the holidays. Should be fun. Will be gone for about a week. Might be able to post sporadically.

Merry Christmas...or if you aren't celebrating that particular holiday, then general merriness to you.

Done, again!

I just finished grading for the semester. (Well, there are still a few answers that I need to run by the prof, but otherwise...) Every time I grade an exam, I am always mystified by the same 3 behaviors:

1. Leaving true/false or multiple choice questions blank. I have no idea why this happens. C'mon people, just take a guess! It won't hurt your grade (this isn't the SAT or anything like that).
2. Marking true/false questions as both true and false. Alternately, circling multiple answers on a multiple choice question. I imagine that the test taker is just trying to cover all her bases, but in reality it is guaranteeing that the question gets marked wrong.
3. Leaving no identifying info on the test. No name, no student ID#, no mailbox number, no SSN, no nothing. And this on tests where there are blanks for your name and box number on every page. I value privacy and anonymity as much as the next person, but if you want credit for your work, I need to know who you are!

In addition to these general rants, I also am bewildered by what material some students fail to study. For example, the person taking a World Religions class who knew neither the 4 Noble Truths of Buddhism, nor the 5 Pillars of Islam. What exactly did this student think was going to be on this exam?

OK, rant over...just needed to vent a little. I'm still gonna be plenty busy even though my schoolwork is done, but that is the topic for a diffrent post.

SnowGlobe

Internet Snowglobe! Make sure to shake it.

How I think I did

Jim says: "I filled in all 85 bubbles, so I'm done now. I'm pretty confident about 20 of them, so that guarantees me at least an F in my final. Hooray!" That pretty much sums up how I felt about the second my my foreign language exams. I think I did very well on my other exams. My Akido kyu test went well too. Unless I completely misjudged my performance, I should officially be 7th kyu in a few weeks. As I said before, the paper went very well--the best I've written in a while. Certainly the best that I've written for a class in years, if not ever. When I presented the short version of the paper to the class, my professor suggested that I present it at an upcoming conference, and he hadn't even read the full paper yet! I was, as you might imagine, quite pleased. But I deferred on sending the paper to the conference committee until I actually get my grade back.

What I've learned about myself in the past semester. 1) 2nd and 3rd (and 4th and 5th) languages are not my thing. I will never be passionate about non-english language classes no matter how many of them I take. 2) I am much happier when I am taking classes that I am passionate about, even though I work much harder and spend more time on those classes.

(Not that I didn't already know these things about myself, but it is good to be reminded from time to time.)

So, what to do about it? First, get these stupid language requirements out of the way as fast as is humanly possible. I have 4 out of 6 required semesters completed. Only two to go. I can do this. Second, take interesting classes while taking those remaining language classes. If they happen to also be required, so much the better. Third, start looking into independent studies so that I can work on stuff that I really care about. Fourth, if at all possible, crank out another draft of my thesis. After all, that's the stuff that gets me really jazzed (so much so that I've already written 1.5 drafts without an advisor).

Basically, write more cool papers so that I don't realize that I'm spending all my time memorizing stupid vocab lists.

End of the Semester

yegads! I've neglected my blog so long its gone blank. Hmmm...sorry about that to anyone who has stuck around during this long unannounced hiatus. I decided that I needed to stop blogging until the semester was over, and I neglected to say so on the actual blog itself.

(Reason that I decided that I needed to stop: I discovered that my blogging style was interfering with my paper writing style. The habit of writing in the first person persepctive and composing in very short bursts was adversely affecting my ability to generate quality fifteen page papers. Point of Irony: starting a blog to practice writing skills may actually degrade them in unforseen ways if you are not careful.)

The good news: I'm done for the semester. (aside from the grading that I have to do as TA.) I can go see LOTR later today with no guilt! The past week has involved: 1) An apparently unmovable work deadline where I had to pull 16 hour days (this in a part-time job where I'm only working 10 hr/week), 2) The aforementioned 15 page paper (the best I've written in 6 months--probably due to my lack of blogging), and 3) Several exams.

In the past 48 hours I've taken 2 foreign language finals (each in a different foreign language). That seriously screwed up my brain. I finished the second one at 7:00 PM on Tuesday. My Akido kyu test started at 7:00 PM on Tuesday. Luckily both exams were within two blocks of each other and I was not in the first group being tested. After sprinting to the dojo and changing in the hallway, I made it to the mat with about 30 sec to spare before my name was called.

Brain. So fried.

I'm gonna have to find some way to keep my blogging habits from screwing up my paper writing habits. Either that, or I'm gonna have to totally change the style of this blog into something more academic. Or else drop it altogether. That would suck.