Weekend remainders

Google offers suggestions based on searches others have made. It's interesting to see the difference in searches between men and women.

An Iowa guy wishes his wife a happy birthday by writing it out with hog manure.

Being super duper endowed does not necessarily = employment.

A guy robbed a restaurant and thought the chicken smelled so good he stopped to eat some. He's no doubt rethinking that decision in prison.

Ever thought about the evolution of video games? For my fellow geeks, here's a timeline.

For the political geeks: There's a new book Game Changer that has lots of juicy gossip from the 2008 campaign. Here's a rundown of the best gossip. And here's an excerpt from the book about the Edwards debacle.

And finally, more disturbing news from this country: A Brit is found with a grain of cannabis smaller than a grain of sand under his shoe and is sentenced to four years. And then there's this.

Iowa cold

It's been a cold start to 2010 for my friends back in Iowa. Thanks to a handy weather application on the IPhone I routinely check weather around the world.

Anchorage, Alaska,

Moscow,

Minsk...

... have all been warmer than Cedar Rapids for the past week. Temperatures have been below zero 9 out of the first 10 days of 2010.

Even for Iowa, that's a long cold spell. How cold has it been? Temps in Cedar Rapids have been matching Novosibirsk. Never heard of the place? It's the capitol of Siberia.

I suggest doing what I did living here last summer: Look up the places that have it worse than you. In this case my fellow Iowans would have to look to Barrow, Alaska. One of my friends from grad school is the DA in Barrow. Since Barrow is within the Artic circle they go weeks without daylight and in the summer there's daylight 24 hours/day. In the long dark freeze it is currently -37. The warmest temperature they expect in the next week is -16.

Rape victim charged

This is the type of story that will keep any of my family/friends from coming to visit.  What I'm not 100% sure about:  I know the alcohol charge would not be there if she were not Muslim, but I'm not sure about the "sex outside marriage" charge.

The day I was the innocent one

Thursday, January 7 will be remembered as the day where my innocence and naïveté brought joy to many others.  First, there was my quiet plantiff cry about losing my ability to focus.  Never once did I think of the childhood "you'll go blind" reference.  I'm too pure for that.


And on FaceBook I noticed many people simply putting a color in their status updates.  Just a color, nothing else.  So I decided to make my status:

Seriously. Am I the only person on FB that doesn't understand the color comments on others' status updates? Since I have no idea what it means I'll just say I'm orange... only because nothing rhymes with it.

It turns out the colors were to raise breast cancer awareness by the women posting the color of the bra they were wearing.  That brought a flood of replies of people who got a good chuckle out of my post.  My friend Thad said:

kranz, thanks for the image of you walking around today in an orange bra... started laughing, but then got somewhat disturbed...

I am glad to raise awareness for breast cancer, but the image of me in an orange bra has been giving me the shakes all day long.

Another never ending semester

I had hoped to have everything done by tonight and enjoying a bottle of wine by now.  This afternoon I discovered that one of my answer keys was wrong for several questions.  Good students were failing the final, but since I wasn't looking at the names as I was grading I didn't notice until after I finished grading them all.  Now I get to go back and make many, many corrections.  This is a final I wrote myself so I only need to look in the mirror to see who to blame.
Ugh.


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On the positive side I've confirmed having lunch with my American/Emirati friend on Saturday.  I am very much looking forward to seeing him.


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Also unrelated... not to concern anyone, but is an inability to focus a sign of aging or something I should be worried about?  I first noticed it in Ukraine where I was useless in reading maps in anything short of full daylight... and it became very apparent when grading finals when I pretty much needed a reading lamp.


This fall I had my eyes checked and I have the same prescription I've had for a decade.  Before I get too worried I'll buy some reading glasses.  Maybe that's all it will take.

Tonight the IPhone paid for itself...

... with my sanity.

As I've discussed before, when I write tests my answers create patterns that make sense to me and make grading very quick. Like: ABBA ACDC BADD or BAD CADE DEAD DAD

Tonight I had over 100 tests to grade where there were 18 T/F & 40 multiple choice answers, multiple versions and no pattern.

Grading each test was time consuming to be constantly be checking the key. I thought to myself, "If only someone could be reading me the answers this would go so much quicker."

Then it hit me: The IPhone has a voice memo feature. I read all 58 answers into the phone. It took 41 seconds. With a touch of a button it read them back and I was able to mark each exam in those 41 seconds.

I cannot express how huge of an improvement this is in my life as a teacher!

In academics we like to hold "workshops" and give ourselves credit for continuous education. It's ideas like this that I'd like to hear from my peers; practical real world ways to improve teaching and make our job easier.

Sometimes grading can be fun

The problem: A company manufactures shirts and has fixed costs of Dh 10,000 and variable costs of Dh 20 per shirt. They plan to sell the shirts for Dh 40. How many shirts will the company have to produce and sell to break even?

The answer from one student:

500 shits

Finals week

• Root canal
• Hemmorhoids
• A strange burning sensation...

I'm making a list of all the things I'd prefer over finals week.

The pleas for help and explanations of why they hadn't done better all term becomes very taxing. I wish I could be a bad-ass and take joy in seeing their misery but I can't... even for those who deserve it.

American students never learned to grovel. Here it is a finely honed skill. It's only 1PM and my interactions with students has already left a cup of acid in my stomach. I have two more finals this afternoon.

I'd definitely prefer a root canal.

Quote of the day

For the record, I am more comfortable speaking my mind here than I did working for Susan Hamilton, but tonight a colleague surprised me with:

"So you think we have less academic freedom here?"

I gave him my best, "Watcha you talkin' about, Willis?" face. He understood immediately.

I'm so excited...

... but it's not about these pictures.

Tonight the world's tallest building is being dedicated in Dubai. The event is a huge media circus and Mike said his friends videoing the event had to walk miles with their equipment because parking is so bad.

I'm not in Dubai and didn't see this. The reason I'm excited is that the one Emirati friend I had before I came here IS in Dubai and took these pics. I first met Yousef as a freshman at Coe in 2004 as he pledged Sigma Nu. I was disappointed in 2005 when he said he was transferring to Houston. Although we've kept in touch by e-mail/FaceBook we haven't seen each other since.

I very much hope to see him during his visit here. If I do I know what I will say:

Yousef! I have three things to say to you:
1. It is great to see you.
2. You are NOTHING like any Emirati I have met in the year and a half I've been here.
3. I'll repeat, it is great to see you.

As I told him on FB I have at least a thousand questions, but I won't take it personally if he doesn't have time. I know what it's like to be back home for a limited time. (The August trip still bothers me.)

I'll bet I wake up in time

I just realized I'm in a bizarre OCD mode. Tomorrow I have a final at 8AM. The tests are printed and ready to go, but I don't normally have to be in class at that time on a Tuesday so I set an alarm, and then another, and then another.

At this point I have 3 cell phones (each with two alarms) AND an old fashioned wind up alarm clock set to go off between 6:30 and 7:00.

Now that's anal retentive... even for me.

My head is going to explode...

... and I have yet to give a final.

I hate finals week in this country. I don’t love it in the US, but I hate it here. Students get a free education so long as they attend class. Five absences and they get booted. Four is OK. Ann is lucky in that her college (we both work at the same university) has a person who plays gatekeeper for excuses. In my college each instructor gets to decide whether or not to count an absence.

In the fall of 2008 my students took advantage of me relentlessly. It seemed 80% of my class was constantly sick, “in hospital”, and a stunning number of grandparents died (supposedly).

Since then here’s what I told my classes: “I will forgive two absences for anyone. After that you get four allowed absences. When you hit seven you are done, period. No family emergency/aunt dying or hospital visit will matter.”

Six absences means missing 3 weeks of class. I don’t think I missed six classes in all of my undergraduate career, let alone in one class.

Well, out of 160 students this semester 10 were dropped for attendance and now the groveling has begun. I was on campus for only a few minutes when I was surrounded by students. Each had great excuses for their absences.

After listening for a while I said, “I have no power to change this.” That didn’t get through and eventually I had to walk away.

Later a male student called me. I don’t give out my number and the IPhone is a new number. Even the department secretary doesn’t have that number! Anyhow, this was another, “But sir, you gave me seven absences…” He also could not understand the meaning of “There is nothing I can do.” I politely got off the phone as quickly as I could. He started calling and calling and then texting:

SORRY sair,

can u tell me who can hipe me? ;-( Please ;-( ;-( ;-( ;-( ;-( ;-(

In the meantime I started the IPod and I swear this was the first song it randomly picked:

I won’t back down.
No, I won’t back down.
You can stand me up at the gates of Hell, but I won’t back down.

I’ve been playing the song in a continuous loop for an hour. The rest of the lyrics are appropriate for my situation.

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And the amazing thing is that this is just the beginning: Tomorrow all five of my classes take their finals.

Update: I posted the video having never watched it. I still like the song but the video is soo '80's (and not in a good way).

Notice anything wrong in this picture?

This nice graphs shows the weather for CR over 2009. See the super cold in January? That's when I flew back in. See the mild July? That's when I stayed away. The hottest day in August, that was me roofing, of course.

But all of that doesn't hold a candle to the real mystery. Look at this picture closely. Click on it it see it better.

The real mystery is in the bottom graph. It measures snowfall According to the NWS, no snow has fallen in Cedar Rapids so far this season. I've been watching this for months waiting for a correction and it never came.

I can't believe I missed this yesterday

Happy 0102/2010!

In my defense, I've grown accustomed to writing day/month/year. (Our system of month/day/year doesn't make much sense if you think about it.) So I'll try to remember to post this again on 1 February, 2010.

Weekend remainders - the apocalypse edition

Cows jumping six feet, a prominent economist calls for a trade war, tomato plants eating insects... They're all signs of the apocalypse. Fortunately, we now know it will all come down in 503 days.

A good sign of the end of the world? When you see a cow on a roof.

Weight loss surgery, it's not just for the obese anymore.

It may not be Armageddon but here's some depressing economic stats:

Here's food stamp usage by county across the US.

Here's a look a county by county look at unemployment for the past five years.

There are tomato plants that can eat insects!

Economists Paul Krugman falls just short of calling for a trade war with China. (For non-econ geeks this is very rare.)

Don't panic, but the real date of the apocalypse has been determined: May 21, 2011.

Those "The world will end in 2012" suckers won't know what hit them.

Depressing graph of the day

You may need to click on it to see it more clearly. What does it show? No job gains for the decade and a loss of household net worth.

Sunset at the tennis tournament

Mike captured this on Friday. We loaded up with sunscreen to watch tennis but it was mostly cloudy all day. It was even too cool for the shorts and t-shirts we were wearing. To feel warm kept looking up the temperature in Cedar Rapids on IPhone. Those negative 5, 6 and 7 readings took the chill out of the 70 degree air.

What I'm not seeing...

... is TV.

In mid-December my cable box stopped working for an unknown reason. I realized I didn't miss it so I turned it in. That will save $45/month. I sold my 32" TV to Ann & Mike. I'm looking for a larger TV... in the 42 to 50" range. The prices just keep dropping so I'm willing to wait.

Tennis greats in Abu Dhabi

I was excited to see Federer and Nadal play on New Year's Day. They each had different opponents and the idea was for them to meet in the championship round the next day.

For hosting the top two players in the world, the stadium was surprisingly small. A seat at the very top was still easy to see everything. The matches were "best of 3."

Federer played first. He exhibited absolutely zero energy. He won the first set in a tie-breaker and lost the second set in a tie-breaker. In the third set he gave up and his serve was broken a couple of times.

The event paid $250,000 to the winner and Federer gave everyone the impression that $250,000 was small peanuts and not worth working for.

As night set in Nadal's match began...

Nadal scrambled and worked hard. The effort you see here is more than Federer put into his entire match. Not surprisingly, Nadal won in two sets.

Going into this I had tremendous respect for Federer. Given his grand slam record he is arguably the best tennis player that's ever lived... It's too bad that guy didn't show up.

Christmas present

Our compound of 24 apartments has a maintenance groundskeeper guy. I'm not sure what his purpose is, but he lives in an shack right next to my building with no utilities. (He typically bathes using a bucket right under one of my windows.) He likes to sit out in front of our complex and the chair on on the right is what he'd been sitting on. For Christmas I spent $7 and bought him the chair on the left.

Sadly, this picnic chair may be the best Christmas gift I've ever given. He was very excited and now spends hours per day sitting on it watching... well nothing. I live in the boonies and there is just nothing much to see out here, but at least he has a decent chair to sit on.