argus

If you’ve never heard of the website ratemyprofessors.com, it’s exactly what it sounds like — a forum where students can create rankings of their favorite professors, with comments. The site pulls all of that together in a pretty nice fashion.

Why do I care, since I’ve gradumacated and all that? Because my dad teaches at Auburn University in Auburn, AL :)

And he has rankings: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=265007

I LOVE the internet.

A friend of mine wanted some photos to use for a short film he’s working on — shots of his character, to be used in pictures as props and what not. So I went and did that last night.

Good experience, actually working with a live model, where the point of the whole session is for you to take pictures of them. It confirmed for me that I don’t know jack about photography …but I already knew that :)

Right now all the shots are in a private gallery while he is reviewing them and picking the ones he wants; I may post the really good/interesting ones in a public gallery at some point in the future…

Here at work, we write code in a programming language called Python. Since there is more than one person writing code in this language, we have a standard of conventions to follow — things like “always put a space after a comma in a list of function variables”, etc.

Well, one of the more asinine standards (which means “things that you have to do to write correct code” according to my project manager) that we have adopted is maximum line length. If you are writing some code and the line exceeds 78 characters, then you have to reformat that line to break into two lines.

This has some advantages — namely that the code is printable without unexpected formatting behavior — but also is a colossal pain to remember to do, and ends up making a longer-than-average-but still-elegant line look nasty and choppy. IMO.

Things like this should be guidelines, not standards.

<breath> OK. Done :)

6:07 AM

Landline rings. The landline NEVER rings, much less at some ungodly hour like 6:17 AM. Needless to say, I don’t answer it, and don’t actually hear it until the last ring. Answering machine picks up, gets dial tone.

6:17 AM

Landline rings. Same deal, except this time I’m still not-asleep-enough that I hear all the rings, and then the answering machine answering the dial tone.

6:27 AM

Landline rings. At this point I’m no longer having fun, so I yank the phone up ..and, unsurprisingly, it’s a fax machine. This begs several questions, the best of which is “Who is sending a fax ANYwhere at 6:17 in the AM?”

6:37 AM

Landline rings. I don’t answer it, since I’m Googling on phrases like “what to do if a fax machine keeps calling you” Needless to say, I didn’t find any info that was immediately helpful (most “solutions” involve either forwarding your number to a known fax or some variant of this approach).

6:47 AM

Landline rings. Given that it’s now only 45 minutes before I was going to get up anyway, I concede defeat and try to make lemonade from lemons by deciding to get an early start on the day, and I go shower.

6:57 AM

From the bathroom, I hear the landline ring.

7:07 AM

As I’m grabbing my wallet and other pocket paraphenalia right before I walk out the door, the landline rings.

Somewhere in the world a fax machine is contemplating suicide.

I hope.

OK, OK… before I hear it from the lot of you, I know I SAID that I was going to stay out of my daily news reads. And I have (aside from the exceptions mentioned previously). But things arriving in my emailbox are a different matter. And I just received a pretty good one.

And, yes, I’ve checked the veracity of this with snopes.com ;)

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World? By Ben Stein

As I begin to write this, I “slug” it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is “eonlineFINAL,” and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it.

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