Least appropriate use of departmental email

The nominees are .... yeah, I wish I had the time to come up with a shortlist, but it's a no-brainer: the winner is one of our department's admin personnel, who today emailed to the entire listserv a 7.5MB PDF advertising a house for rent in Roseville. Built in 1976, the 2,044 sf split-level home has been remodeled from top to bottom, and features "a HUGE eat-in kitchen," 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2 fireplaces, and "a sunroom overlooking the in-ground pool." Every grad student should seriously consider paying $2,400 a month (plus utilities) for housing. Cuz, y'know, they have all that money and free time to entertain friends in their spacious back yard and pool.

Bureaucratic asshattery, part XIV

So peeved right now, just HAVE to post or brain will a splode.

I came in this a.m. to work in the computer lab, cuz I have a review this afternoon and need to get stuff finished. Lab should open at 8. Not for the first time, it didn't. I waited. About 8:05, I asked the other kid standing around if he was waiting for the lab too, & he said yes, so I went to the office of our Director of Technology to tell him.

His reaction: "Jenny must be running late." (I almost thought he was going to tell me to just go wait for her, but then he got out of his chair.)
Me: "This has happened before..."
Him: "Yes, but the lab has also opened early before. People have lives." (I don't remember his exact phrasing, but his overall tone was pretty dismissive.
Me: "Well, I have a life too, and work that needs to get done."

What annoyed me so much about this was his dismissive tone, and the apparent attitude that when they say the lab opens at 8 am, what they really mean is an average of 8 am. They need to clarify that, I think. Also, I'm pretty sure that if you worked in a real job, Jenny, "having a life" wouldn't cut it as a reason for repeated tardiness.

Time-displacement shipping

I just got a note from Lenovo, the horrible company that I will never again order a product from, regarding my order. I ordered a laptop and, since the discount was good, a 2GB jump drive as well. I received the jump drive about two weeks ago, but last week noticed that its estimated shipping date was bumped back to 10/25 or something like that. The laptop, meanwhile, was pushed back to 10/29. There's been no update to the invoice since then.

The subject line of this morning's email is "Electronic Receipt for Invoice 6371498 -- shipped on 10/17/2007." I'm thinking, "Sweet! Finally they shipped the damn laptop."

Upon opening the note, however, I found that no, the item that was shipped yesterday was my jump drive. The one that is currently plugged in to this computer. Yeah, that one. It'll arrive in roughly 4 days via UPS. Well, 4 days or negative 2 weeks. Whichever.

Oh, wait:

It looks like it was delivered on the 5th. It's nice that Lenovo finally got me a tracking number for something I've had in my possession for two weeks. I wonder what happens if I click that "Quantum View" tab, and if that has anything to do with the temporal discrepancy.

I'm feeling a strong urge to cancel the order now just out of spite. At the very least I should call and bitch at them some more. But then I might get stuck on another committee.

School = blog

When the semester started, I'd expected my rate of posting to drop to nearly unity less itself. Oddly, I'm still posting as often or more so than during my vacation time. How odd, I said to myself.

Comp 1001: Writing to convey information

Let me regale you with another example (is that really something one can be "regaled" with?) of poor textbook writing from my GIS text. The authors are discussing maps, and the issue of map scale - that is, the ratio that tells how much of real life distance is represented by a specified unit of measure on the map. One common way to show the scale is with a representative fraction (RF)....

This is a simple ratio in the form of 1:1,000,000 or 1/1,000,000. In an RF, the number on the left side is the map distance, and its value is always unity.

Unity. Not 1 (or one). Presumably that would be too.... pedestrian? I mean after all, we're academics. We're supposed to be smarter than other people, and we ought to express ourselves in such a way as to make clear how smart we are. Am I right? By using the term unity in its mathematical sense as a reference to the numerical value of 1, we show the reader, who has never met us, that the tops of all our hats have worn thin in the center.

Then, just for giggles, let's look at the brief mention of temporal scale as it applies to maps: "The unit of measurement of a temporal scale can be years, months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds." But nothing else, apparently. Decades, centuries, and larger units are not to be used (it would seem).

Day 1

So far, this first day is going okay. I haven't been to a class yet - my first one starts at 12:45, but after that I'm in class almost straight through till 9:45. Picked up my buss pass, a notebook, and now I've got a couple hours to kill. If you have any innovative ideas for how to kill time, please let me know. Strangulation and stabbing are fine, but they get old after a while.

Time, apparently, is relative

In today's mail we received this item from a local furniture store. It's a standard flyer of the sort businesses mail out to solicit business. But this one has a curious instruction printed at along the top of the envelope.



It's a good thing it got here today! But if it hadn't, no biggie. Y'know - within a day or so is fine.

I'm in love

Okay, I know I need to get this coursework finished for the summer, but I have to tell both of my readers about this: I'm in love with Linden Hills. Really. This place has everything. If I could afford it, I would pay $1200 a month to live in a 600 sq ft studio apartment in this neighborhood (and I'd probably have to - the one downside is that this is an affluent, mostly white neighborhood; efforts to revive poor neighborhoods often result in gentrification, which looks similar).

They have everything. Employment, shopping, housing, green space, historic buildings, multimodal transit....

They're right on Lake Harriet (on the left side of this pic, taken from linden-hills.com).


It's what New Urbanists wish they could achieve, but it's been there for over 60 years. (And time is a crucial element here, so maybe some NU neighborhoods will eventually be like it.)

The commercial hub at 43rd St W and Upton Ave S makes the 50th and France retail node in Edina look like a turd wrapped in burnt hair. (And don't even get me started on those suburban shitholes like Arbor Fakes.)

The Star Trek Horror Picture Show

Pharyngula posts this video. Worth a look.