On Mathematics

So this summer I managed to last about two weeks in Discrete Mathematics. It was another case of a WSU math class that included no actual instruction. At first, I was actually optimistic about it, but I quickly realized that while the instructor was personable, his instruction was unorganized and generally subpar. While I kind of sort of need the class eventually, I don't need it that badly right now.

I need to spend my summer finishing my Shakespeare and History of the English Language correspondence classes. I desperately need to do that. I did manage to mail in three assignments for HotEL this week, which is good. I am cautiously optimistic that the changes in Kansas licensure requirements will mean I don't need those final two classes for my endorsement. I still need to finish them up, though.

I spend the next week in glorious Tulsa for AP training. That means I'll miss a week of Calc II. Plus, I have to take my laptop in order to take my C midterm during the week. Goody.

Finally, even though it's cooler here than in South Dakota, it's still far too hot. Ugh.

NHL 07

I've spent some of my precious, precious spring break time playing EA's NHL 07 on my 360. So far, I've developed gamepad thumb. The nasty little bumps on the 360's analog sticks, so comforting when using it for a little, have managed to blister my thumb. Ow.

It's been quite a while since the last time I played an installment of NHL, so I was shocked when I won my first game. Mind you, I was playing on the easiest difficulty. Then I lost three in a row. Oops.

EA's status as a behemoth is often derided, but people who deride it are also derided. I would think, though, that our largest game publisher could afford to include a real manual. One that, for example, helped me figure out what to do at faceoffs. I searched EA's increasingly juvenile and unpoliced forums to find out. All I discovered was that button mashing was for losers...of course a coarse word was used in place of losers. Nicely done EA.

I wimped out and turned off offsides penalties, that's improved my gameplay nicely! It's not a bad implementation, but, arguably, EA continues to not be innovative. Still, that shouldn't surprise anyone. The last time it was innovative was in the 1980s. Ahhhh..Starflight, MULE, Seven Cities of Gold, Earl Weaver Baseball, Lords of Conquest, Adventure Construction Set, etc. Heck, I'll even throw in Keef the Thief and Hard Nova.

Farewell

Back in the olden days, magazines had consumer response cards. You circled numbers on these cards corresponding to the magazine’s advertisers. They would send you—via snail mail, mind you; the interweb was but a gleam in Al Gore’s eye!—product information. A mail-order firm called Chips & Bits regularly advertised in magazines like Computer Gaming World. I circled their number hoping for a real catalog. Well, such a beast never existed, but I did get multiple copies of an imported British magazine called Strategy Plus. It was everything CGW` wasn’t. British magazines at the time had a reputation of being overly colorful and not overly literate. Today, that could be said to be true of most computer magazines. I had seen some British magazines in the dying days of the Atari ST and Amiga that I liked, but Strategy Plus, I’m sorry to say, was not one of them. It was a shoddy magazine most notable for reviews that were really just rewritten press releases.

If I would then have known that nearly two decades later, I would be mourning the death of what that magazine morphed into, Computer Games Magazine, even more than the death of Computer Gaming World (i.e., by becoming Games for Windows: The Official Magazine), I would not have believed you. Sadly, it’s true. CGM has finally been undone by the financial shenanigans of its corporate overlords TheGlobe.com. TheGlobe never really survived the dotcom bust, so this isn’t unexpected, but it’s still sad.

For well over the past decade, CGM has been a voice of reason in the industry. It is as close to a modern CGW as could be found, as close to an American Edge as well. It was trying to be a place for intelligent discourse on the state of gaming. Now it’s gone. It will be truly, truly missed.

As a note of disclosure, I was a freelance reviewer for the magazine around 1999-2000. Those reviews and previews were among my proudest moments. I feel honored to have been a small part of CGM’s past. It has been a while since a magazine I truly loved truly died. Yes, Computer Gaming World has been dying for a decade, now, but I’ve become more or less inured to that.

There is a Periodical Section in the sky. It houses COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!’s Atari ST Disk and Magazine, ST-Log, QuestBusters, Amiga Resource, INFO, BYTE, Creative Computing, and, now, Computer Games Magazine. (And many, many others, of course!) You deserved better. You will be missed missed missed.

Even though it’s not yet even Thanksgiving, my spring schedule has been semi-finalized. By that, I mean that I’ve registered for classes, but things could still change a bit.

I’m annoyed that I can’t take any classes that start before 7:00. Why can’t I, you ask? Because my principal is playing with the schedule to accommodate whiners who want to leave for spring break at noon instead of 3:20. Those three hours irk me. It means that for any early Tuesday evening class, I’d have to miss a day for an extended day to make up for that asinine plan, plus another day for conferences. Missing two sessions of a once-a-week class probably wouldn’t go over well. Tuesday/Thursday classes would work a little better, but conferences are also on Thursday night, so I’d miss three sessions of a twice-a-week class. Grr.

Of course, Wichita State’s scheduling doesn’t help anything. It seems like all of the classes I’m interested in are offered at the same time. Double grr.

Anyway, as of right now, here’s what spring’s schedule looks like:

Monday: Seminar in European History (with Dreifort)

Tuesday: Comparative Politics

Wednesday: Major British Writers I

(everything’s from 7:05 to 9:45)

I wasn’t going to take a seminar yet, but there wasn’t much else offered. I wanted to take Imperial Russia but rumor had it that wouldn’t be the best choice. We’ll see if I regret it or not. Comparative Politics is one of the required courses for secondary social studies and British Writers for secondary English. I figure I may as well take some thing to make me more palatable to high schools.

With luck, Butler will beg me to teach a class, so I may end up shuffling that schedule.

Oh, and for my fun-filled math endorsement, I’m going to try to take Calc I online from Johnson County. I am a bit apprehensive about that little experiment. Trig last summer in person at WSU was easy enough, but it was so horribly taught it’s not even funny. I’m a bit concerned it wasn’t enough to prepare me for Calc, but I guess I’ll find that out.

The good news is that, assuming I pass Calc I, all I need in the summer (methinks) is Evolution of Math and Math 502 (Math for Middle School Teachers…whatever that means) and I’ll have that endorsement (assuming I pass the MS math test, which shouldn’t be hard, the practice one seems pretty easy).

On the Public Nature of Internet Documents

I had class this weekend. There are few things in academia worse than the "Weekend Intensive" class format, at least as practiced at Emporia State University. It's mentally painful and physically exhausting. (The mental pain comes less from grappling with "big issues" and from from trying to keep one's brain from completely atrophying.)

The big news on campus was that one of my classmates had been penning a tell-all blog. Sadly, it was less about the program and more about her slutty personal life. Still, she was afraid it would get out more than it had and deleted it. But may Yahweh preserve the Internet, Yahoo had cached it.

This whole incident begs several questions. Why does one get mad when someone "unintended" reads their blog? It makes no sense. You are publishing it. You are creating it in public places. People are going to eventually see it. If you want to type a diary on a computer, do that. But don't get all hysterical when people read your thoughts when you post them in a public place and, for the sake of all that's holy, don't put something up you don't want someone--anyone--to see.

I mean, this little blog of mine that I've played with for a few months is hardly the stuff of great intellectual fervor (neither is a true blog, by most any stretch of the definition). Yet, I don't care who reads it; it's in the public eye. My private thoughts are private or shared with only a few confidantes (often in e-mail, still not the best way). I know better than to post them for the world to see and then go ballistic when they are, in fact, seen. In all honesty, I knew this before I started in a program designed to make an "information professional" out of me. But if I hadn't, I think something would probably have sunk in at some point during my sojourns at Emporia.

Damn Climate Change

It is 53 degrees as I write this. In December. The high today is to be 57. Now, I realize Wichita is relatively far south as far as latitude goes, but puh-lease. I don't care about melting ice caps or the submerging of Florida (the sooner the better for that), but I want my winters back.

Dog Days of Summer

Intelligent TV is so rare these days. Especially on networks. Especially on ABC. The last great ABC show was SportsNight and we all know how well they handled that. I still hope, though, to find quality shows on broadcast TV and have not yet given up on sampling new shows--unlike many, many others.

Thank goodness for that because otherwise I would never have discovered The Days. This is a great--well, very good--show, if one likes episodic drama as I do. I doubt it will be successful, but I am enjoying the episodes I see, and, yes, I am making a point to see it. Who could not love a show when a nearly 40 mother and her high school daughter are both pregnant? It's funny and well written. Yes, some of the scenes are a bit precious. Yes, there are cliches in abundance. Still, it's a fine project, and one far more deserving of being on the air than so much utter dreck that abounds.