Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
26 days of rain, and a state of emergency has been declared.
Can’t say I’m surprised, really. I think it was my next-door neighbor starting to build an ark that tipped me off.
“Drip, Drip, Drip” by Chumbawamba from the album Tubthumper (1997, 5:08).
I got a bit of an ego boost today in my English class when JC let me know that I was one of only about three students she’d ever seen get a perfect score on their Compass English placement test.
That ego boost was quite nicely taken care of about an hour later when I took the pre-test for the next lesson in my math class and got another perfect score — a perfect zero.
Heh. Oops. Words always have been far easier than numbers for me. Homework time!
“Rez” by Underworld from the album Dirty Epic/Cowgirl (1994, 9:56).
And…we’re back. The server my site resides on went down about 3pm yesterday, and didn’t come back until sometime this morning. Sorry ’bout that — these things do happen from time to time, though.
In the meantime…
Yesterday, a customer came wandering into the store. “Hi there,” I greeted him. “Anything we can help you with today?”
“Yeah, I wanted to look at a couple cameras.” Then he paused and took a closer look at me. “Um…are you Michael? Of Eclecticism?”
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“I’m Joe — Pop Astronaut.”
And another connection was made between the online world and real life. We chatted for a bit, then got him set up with the camera he’d been considering. Small world!
Small bits related to my recent re-acquaintance with television:
Last night, Prairie and I finished our Desperate Housewives Season One marathon, which we’d been working on for the past couple weeks. We’ve both been enjoying watching Season Two on Sunday nights, and have been borrowing Season One so that I could get caught up on all the back story.
Battlestar Galactica has started up again also, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid any articles about the first episode of the second half of Season Two until I get a chance to watch it myself. The episode is sitting on my ‘puter…I just need to get a chance to watch it! Maybe tonight…
Finally, Lost finally starts up again this Wednesday — and because I’m working until 10pm that night, I’m not going to be able to see it until I get a chance to download it! Grrrrr…stupid work. ;)
And I think that pretty much brings us up to date. Plans for tonight are light: work ’til 6pm, do my reading for school tomorrow, have dinner, and watch tonight’s Desperate Housewives. Non-stop excitement, I tell you!
No, no — not Plato. Plato Learning, Inc. They’re the company that provides the online program that we’re using in my math class.
It’s not that the program is bad — in fact, it seems to be simple enough (I’ve only gone through the introductory “this is how it works” section so far), and their website lists a number of success stories and awards for the program. It’s simply that after going through the first section and poking around at the CDs, I can’t find any good reason why the software is Windows-specific.
Basically, the entire setup is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, with a Windows shell that it runs inside. To start a session, you go to the PIM site, choose your school, and then you’re presented with the options to do a lesson or check your progress. When you choose to do a lesson, a small nscc.iss file is downloaded. That file is actually a minimal text file with five small variables:
[Site Info]
Site=NSCC
SID=SD1
externalserver=isswebdb.academic.com
Server=isswebdb.academic.com
PORT=1521
Windows has .iss files registered to the shell program, which then connects to their servers using the information passed on inside the .iss file. After a quick logon/password check, the shell program then proceeds to run the courses off of the provided course CDs.
As best I can tell, the shell program needs to do four things:
.iss file,In other words, absolutely nothing that requires Windows. The only thing preventing them from being able to offer the home-based services to Mac users as well as Windows users is the lack of a Mac-based shell. While I’m no programmer, I really have to wonder about just how complex something like that really would be…I’m guessing not terribly. Certainly something a major educational software company should be able to handle hiring a Mac programmer to do.
Ah, well. Macs are still the minority, so things like this aren’t exactly a surprise. Annoying and frustrating, yes — but not a surprise.
Amusingly, figuring all this out gained me a small “star moment” in class today. While about half the computers in the classroom were handling the nscc.iss file correctly (downloading it and triggering the launch of the shell), the other half apparently didn’t have .iss registered as a known file type under Windows. For those students, clicking the ‘do a lesson’ link resulted in nothing but a standard Windows “I don’t know what this file is. Open it or save it?” dialog box. Saving it, of course, did nothing, and trying to open it just presented the “pick a program” dialog box. Neither the students nor Ms. DeSoto had any clue what was going wrong, or how to get around it.
While my computer had worked as it should, I was watching the guy next to me fumble his way through trying to get things to work correctly. When the “pick a program” dialog popped up he started scrolling through it, and I noticed a program called issstub.exe pass by. Figuring that there was a good chance that issstub might handle .iss files, I told him to give that one a try — and as soon as he chose that one, the shell program opened right up, connected, and was ready to go. I pointed this out to another couple students who were having the same problem wile Ms. DeSoto watched, and then she passed the process on to the rest of the class. Success!
As the hour ended, I was packing up my bag when she walked by and patted me on the shoulder. “Thanks so much for finding that — you saved my day!”
Hey. Day number two, and I’m already sucking up to the teachers. ;)
“I Was Born to Love You” by Queen from the album Made In Heaven (1995, 4:49).
Well, okay, so there wasn’t any big yellow school bus for me today.
And no, there wasn’t a short bus either, smartasses. ;)
Still and all, it was my first day in school in fifteen years, so I figured I had to mark the occasion in some form.
While this was the first day, so everything was just introductions, syllabi, and getting things started, it was a decent enough start. First up was ENG101, taught by JC Clapp, who Prairie had recommended to me. We spent the first half of the hour going over the syllabus, then had the second half to write a brief “who are you and why are you in this class” bit (not really an essay, more of a short scrawled letter).
Next was MAT097, with Jennifer DeSoto. While I’d chosen that particular class because it fit well schedule-wise, it will be interesting to see how I fare. Rather than being a traditional lecture/assignment style course, it’s very self-driven and done nearly entirely online — the teachers are closer to being tutors, and the class hours are there for us to use the school’s computers to connect to the online course. Technically, it’s possible to do all the online work from home…if you have a Windows based PC. “ Ah, well…looks like I won’t have an excuse for skipping out of the classroom sessions. ;) On the bright side, if the numbers make a bit more sense to me this time around, it was mentioned that there have been students who’ve completed two or three courses in the space of one quarter. I don’t expect I’ll be one of those, but….
So, we’re off to a good start. And on we go from here!
Looks like the plan is for Prairie and I to have dinner and rest for a bit, grab showers, and then head downtown to hit the Noc Noc along with gracesine, rainfromheaven…and whoever else may show up.
Hope everyone has a happy, fun and safe New Year’s Eve. See you in ’06!
“Catharsis” by Bolland, CJ from the album Electronic Highway (1995, 6:03).
I first started bouncing around the ‘net in the fall of 1991, when I made my first ill-fated attempt at being a college student (a half-semester at UAA that I pretty much just stopped going to). I had the user ID of ‘ASMDH’ — Anchorage, Student, Michael David Hanscom — and the sole remaining evidence of that first ‘net address is a comment by Royce from a few days ago, and a listing in the IRN FAQ, also courtesy of Royce. Digging through the IRN archives gives me an earliest confirmable ‘net presence of Thursday, the 17th of October, 1991 at 12:18:11 (entry #5 in IRN 1.5).
As I discovered about four years ago, the first definite evidence of my existence as a denizen of the ‘net outside of UAA comes from a Usenet post archived by Google Groups that dates to February 9th, 1994 at 5:49am. The post is to rec.music.industrial and concerns nine inch nails bootleg CDs. Heh. Sounds like me, alright. By then I had an account through Alaska.net, but there’s no web presence listed in my signature — which makes sense, as the web was still a brand new thing in 1994.
My first web page went up sometime in 1995, though I don’t know exactly when. The earliest archive I have dates back to February 27, 1996, but I’d been working with the space and teaching myself HTML for some time at that point. With a little poking around, however, you might stumble across the “these pages last updated” link at the bottom of that page. And what do you think you’ll find if you follow that link?
Time- and date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order (the most recent at the top) detailing little updates I’d made to the website and some personal bits here and there.
Sound familiar?
Going by the earliest entry on that page, I’ve been blogging in one form or another for ten years as of 3:13am (Alaska time), December 29, 2005.
That’s a long time. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed this if I hadn’t decided to put all those early, hand-coded entries into my current Movable Type installation a while ago. It was kind of fun to see my archives page list posts all the way back to that earliest archived post!
I just wish I hadn’t lost a lot of pages from back when I was hand-coding my site. While my archives jump from early 1996 up to 2001, I was keeping a blog-like website during all that time…I was just hand-coding everything, and when the page got too long, I’d delete the oldest entries at the bottom. Ah, well…as often seems to be the case, it seemed to be a good idea at the time.
In any case, this post marks ten years of archived babbling and rambling — blogging, in today’s vernacular — for me. As I write this post, those ten years have created (and this doesn’t even factor in my LiveJournal account):
Those of you who stop by from time to time, be you family, friend, anonymous stranger, or any other visitor — thanks for being around, dropping by and saying hi, and generally giving me a reason to keep this thing going.
And here’s to the next ten years.
“Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).
Around $1000 poorer and after approximately 4.34 miles of walking:
I’m pretty sure that’s everything I needed to remember.
“Bob Dylan’s Dream” by Dylan, Bob from the album Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The (1963, 5:03).
A meme, courtesy of ctakahara…
E. L. “Bob” Bartlett High School, 1991.
Who was your significant other?
Didn’t have one until my senior year, during which I had two girlfriends (no, not at the same time). I was still far too shy and introverted to actually develop much of a relationship with either of them beyond holding hands. The first was Karyn, I can’t even remember the name of the second (sad, I know…). I think I got brave enough to kiss Karyn once.
Was your Prom a night to remember?
In a vague sort of way. My date was my friend Jill, and we went with a group of friends. I don’t really remember the Prom itself all that much, though. The part of the night I do remember was walking into a ritzy restaurant (that doesn’t exist anymore, I think…it used to be right across the street from Covenant House, where my mom was working at the time) and being welcomed by the host by name. “Your table is right here, Mr. Hanscom….” Sure, Dad set it up while making reservations, but it was a nice touch.
What was your favorite song you danced to the night of Prom?
Heh…not the foggiest. That was a long, long time ago.
Do you own all 4 yearbooks?
Yup. They’re fun to drag out from time to time when I need a good scare.
What was your favorite movie in high school?
Again, haven’t got a clue. Good possibilities: Real Genius, Legend, Labyrinth, Ladyhawke, Star Trek II…many other possibilities, too.
What was your number 1 choice of college in high school?
Probably UAA due to the simple fact that it was the only likely possibility.
What radio station did you jam out to in high school?
There were two main pop stations in Anchorage at that point: 101.3 KGOT and “Power” 102.1. While even back then I was starting to develop my tastes away from the standard ‘pop’ tunes, I’d usually turn into Power 102 — while it was mostly the same music as KGOT, when George Michael‘s “I Want Your Sex” came out, Power 102 played the normal version, while KGOT wimped out and played the edited “I Want Your Love” version. That was enough to sour me on KGOT!
Were you involved in any organizations or clubs?
Freshman through Senior year I was part of the drama department’s tech crew, with one jaunt onstage during my Junior year as an orphan boy in “Oliver!”.
Orchestra and choir, also freshman through senior years.
My junior year, I was part of the infamous Apathy Club. While initially formed by Royce and a couple others as an excuse to hang out after school and watch movies (Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Strange Brew, and other such classic fare), in a feat that called question to our name, we actually managed to collect more cans in the annual canned food drive than the German Club, who had never been beat before.
Senior year brought me onto the Yearbook staff as layout editor.
What was your favorite class in high school?
Yearbook and photography my senior year. Academically, I’m not sure that any classes stand out as favorites…I kind of slogged my way through.
Who was your big crush in high school?
This could be a really long list…
Would you say you’ve changed a lot since highschool?
Heh. Oh, lord yes. Drastically.
What do you miss the most about it?
Very little — some of my friends, but not much about school itself.
Your worst memory of HS?
The fear leading up to graduation that I wasn’t going to be walking the stage. While I’m generally a fairly sharp cookie, I had a bad tendency to slack off, and ended up graduating with something like a low D average, simply because I blew off so many classes (not physically skipping school, but not doing — or doing, but not turning in — the homework). I always tested well, but my homework scores were low enough to drag my grades down.
Did you have a car ?
Nope. Feet and the bus — I didn’t learn to drive ’til I moved out of my parents house.
What were your school colors?
Blue and gold.
Who was your favorite teacher?
Yearbook advisor Mr. Lyke.
Did you own a cell phone in high school?
Here’s where I show my age — I don’t believe any students owned cell phones when I was in high school. At least, I don’t remember anyone in school carting around a wheelbarrow….
Did you leave campus for lunch?
Rarely — part of the no-car bit. Occasionally I’d head out with friends who had their own wheels, though.
If so, where was your favorite place to go eat?
Any of the fast-food places within easy driving distance of campus.
Were you always late to class?
Nope…rarely, actually.
Did you ever have to stay for Sat. School?
Nope. One day of after-school detention, and I don’t even remember why I landed that. I think it was for repeated instances of not turning in homework, actually.
Did you ever ditch?
Nope…I was pretty boring back then.
When it comes time for the reunion will you be there?
I’ve already skipped my ten-year. The jury’s out on the 20-year…I’ll worry about that when the time comes.
| Frosh | Soph | Junior | Senior |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
Christmas Day was wonderful this year. I woke up around 10am to the smell of homemade cinnamon rolls baking in the oven, and spent the rest of the day lazing around the apartment with Prairie. And I do mean lazing — even after getting to sleep in, I still ended up taking two naps over the course of the day…just because I could!
The usual Flickr photoset of the day has been posted, complete with silly pictures of Prairie and I unwrapping our loot for the day, along with all the good food she made for us.
“Gaudete, Gaudete” by El Duende from the album A Dark Noël (2000, 4:08).