Well, that’s two years of dirtying up WordPress.

My first post was October 29th, 2007, at 1657h EST.

This post *should* automatically show up exactly 2 years later (remember, there’s a leap day in 2008).

I hope, that if you have been here before, you were glad that you were.

Well, after being sidelined by illness since last Tuesday, I was back to school full-time yesterday, Monday (October 26).  Hey, I have an automatic post about to publish itself soon.  Wow.  Has it been that long, already?

I hope this finds you well, and if not, I hope you get through it quickly. 

School is ongoing – as expected, I guess.  I have written the MATH exemption exam (yesterday at 0800h for two long, painful hours) and I don’t know if I have even passed the thing.  We’ll see.

Although I was off sick, I am pretty much covered at home for any kind of lab work: I have my own tools, power supply, measuring equipment, computer etc.  Add to that the wonderful advent of e-mail, which we didn’t have the last time I was a student here.  It means that I was able to write a few quizzes and submit them from the stupor of a fever and NyQuil.  Here’s hoping that I will get good marks.  LOL.

I got a bit swamped studying and doing homework last week – so I missed my opportunity to post this stutter-starting, somewhat regular, almost weekly rant. 

You may have noticed that I have been keeping up my “Grades” page for this semester.  The idea of that page is simply to make me somewhat “accountable” in that I had better not slack since I am making my marks public.  I am not really happy with where I appear to be:  I don’t need 100’s in every course, but I would like to end the semester with an A+ average.  My Aboriginal Studies (ABST) and Writing and Reasoning (WRIT) are screwing that up.  I can’t get out of WRIT, and ABST is a lot of writing – and research.  I just ran out of time to get an A in ABST – I hope I do better in the next few tests (written assignments that you get a week to complete) and the final essay (which I have eight weeks to write).  My WRIT course – I stopped by at the Language and Liberal Arts office yesterday and asked if I could write an exemption test.  There stance, however, is that it was my responsibility to have perused the entire Fanshawe website and researched exemption from WRIT on my own, prior to September.  Anyone who actually wrote the test, so I am finding out through asking, was made aware of it by a package sent out to them letting them know that they could come in, write the test, and be assessed as Exempt, “Section A” (for lack of a better, official term) or “Section B”.  I am sure that the fact that around half of the people in my program (about 45 of the 90 who are still here) are in WRIT because they had no idea about the test, and of the other half who wrote – more than half of them are exempt.  I am also quite aware that the last-minute addition of 3 sections of WRIT due to L&LS’s “momentary lapse of reason” when it came to implementing the course itself is no reason to assume that they may have simply FORGOT TO SEND OUT INFORMATION TO THE PEOPLE THAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW WERE COMING.  The end result, of course, is that I cannot be excused from the WRIT course.  It not only is now manditory for me and carries a grade, but also is now part of my GPA, unlike the Pass/Fail that those exempted (with a “P” of course) were given.

If in reading my blog you agree that I should be in a WRIT course, consider that I do not write theses, for the most part, on my WP; I also already know how to use commas, conjunctions, and with some practice, I can identify verbs and nouns.  Yes, this is what I spend three hours every Thursday night, from five-thirty until eight-thirty, doing.  Well, that and we are also required to write a thesis every Thursday, in the last 50 minutes of the class.  We are given a “Prompt” (often a ridiculous near-thesis that does NOT follow the rules we are given) and we must read it, identify the author’s thesis statement.  Then, we must have a concise thesis of our own, with three points which either agree or disagree with that prompt.  The thesis, three body paragraphs and a summary all have to be done, properly, in 50 minutes (with reading the original prompt included) and must be hand written.  My writing is atrocious.  I lose marks for that every week.  I actually lost marks on my 17/24 thesis because I could not provide “proof” of my thesis’ points.  WTF?  We are writing a TEST.  No INTERNET or REFERENCE material.  Even in class she spoke of only making statements that can be proven … and yet that is not possible in the setting we find ourselves.  The topics have been widely ranged – and not often anything I can give an expert opinion in.

But, enough about that horrible, GPA-slaughtering course.

I can’t believe I got five questions wrong on my Digital test.  20/25???  That is an EIGHTY.  That is just not acceptible. 

Well, I am sitting in my lecture hall, it is almost time for class to start, and I had better close this now.  It is the Friday of week 5.

Wow – I can’t even get my LEISURE done on time, LOL.

I sure would like for the people at WP to explain how my e-mail address got in the hands of this idiot…

Dear website operator,

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Topspot-Promotions, an established advertising company, would like to pay you for placing a small text ad on your website for one of our customers.
Moreover, it is also possible for us to pay you for adding images, articles or flash games to your site.
The advertisements fit perfectly a few pages on your site.

Please contact me at Thomas.Brown@topspot-promotions.net and I’ll be happy to provide you with more details.
*If you have other websites which I can review for advertising please send me their urls as well.

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Thomas Brown
Senior Advertising Consultant
Thomas.Brown@topspot-promotions.net

To permanently delete yourself from our list, simply reply to this with a blank email and you will never receive any communication from us in the future.

Well, I am sitting at a table on the T-Mezzanine, it is 0747h EDT (that’s about quarter-to-eight, Eastern Daylight Time, LOL) and it is the last day of September, 2009.  I have been in school for roughly four weeks, and I am happy to be here.  It is an energy-draining (and money-draining) experience, but I am happy to be so burdened.

I do not mean to frighten anyone away from the idea of education – just be ready for its demands:  Time away from things and people you enjoy and love; eating and sleeping irregularly; trying to manage expecations others have of you AND those you have of yourself.  Often, I find the latter to be harder to manage.

I can see that contact with my friends online has sharply declined.  I do try to keep up this blog – as though I was waving a flag yelling, “I’m over here” – but I am sure that most feel I have just lept from the edge of the Earth into the unknown.  I live with the assumption that this WILL get better.  I have one month done, now, and have eight more to go before a three-month break … followed by what *should* be a twelve month co-op placement.  It hopefully means that I will be in school for eight more months, working for fifteen monts or so, then back to school for a final nine months before graduating. 

Here’s hoping.

*EDIT*

Not hoping.  I am taking this by the throat.  I WILL get my co-op, if I have to kill someone.  That goes for getting on the Dean’s list, too.

*ASIENDA EDIT*

I am going to start posting some sort of pseud0-online-twittery thing just so I can look back on this and wonder why in the hell I am doing this from time to time.

I am nearing the end of week three – and because of my current schedule, I am going to make this as regular a Thursday-afternoon-post as I can – and I have a few things I can look back on now.

Let us start with the obvious and expected:  The Bitching.

• Apparently, walking on the right is not supported by everyone at Fanshawe:  Please do not look to any international students for this odd behaviour, though, as it is mostly just 18 to 20 year old Canadians, of both gender, who wander down either side of stairs, halls, doorways, ramps, roads, aisles … well, you get the idea.
• Staying home when actually sick is a rarity … staying home when hungover, common.  I have yet to be puked on or moaned toward, but Sadly, I have been coughed on, sneezed toward. 
• Every hall in the building has a width of 2n-(1/2) Freshmen.  That means that in any given hallway, you can fit on more person between the even-numbered people walking the halls.  If there are two going North, and two South, side-by-side and moving slowly, you can barely fit one-half of a person through the gap in the middle.  If the hall is 14 and a half people wide, there will be 7 people walking one way, and 7 the other, leaving a space between them that the other 14986 students (plus the staff and faculty) have to use to get to class on time of about 23 centimeters (about 9 3/4 inches).
• The seats in the library, lounges, cafeteria and unlocked classrooms where there are electrical outlets will be taken up by students who have no laptops, phones, lamps or any other electrical device.  The ratio of these non-electrically dependant people taking up these positions increases as your battery power decreases.  When you are in a classroom that has those outlets at every chair (and an ethernet socket), your battery is full, and the wireless is excellent.
• EVERYONE has lunch when you do.  When you are in class, every other person is also in class.  If you leave to go to the washroom, everyone else does, too.  This also applies to Tim Horton’s.

There are, of course, many great things about being at Fanshawe.  The diploma is actually well-respected.  The school has a great deal of state-of-the-art facilities for teaching and learning.  There is a learning centre, chaplin’s centre, medical and pharmacy in the building, free counselling in school, life, career.  The programs are quite good.

Personally, I seem to be out of the running for “top of the class”.  It is not something I am happy about at all.  To date, I have pulled some less-than-stellar marks for ELEC, COMP and most likely MATH.  Still waiting on marks for WRIT, and who knows about DIGL.  Meh.

I don’t know if I like or dislike the Wednesday and Thursday schedules which just changed:  My Wednesday has three classes, but the first one is at 0900h, for an hour, then an hour break.  I have a second, one-hour class at 1100h.  I then have a four-hour break before a one-hour class at 1600h.  I get home around six or so.  Thursday now sees me in 5 classes (one is 2 hours) from 0800h to 1400h.  I then have a 3.5 hour break waiting for my 3-hour WRIT class which is over after the written test (every week) at 2030h.  I get HOME after ten, on those nights.  The only good part of that is I barely have homework, since I have time to kill at school, and since my goal here is to overachieve, I have little distraction.  In fact, I am sitting on the third floor of the Library by myself.  (Not ‘entirely’, there are other people here.  However, I just overheard two girls arguing about how an assignment isn’t due tomorrow, it is due Friday.  They’ll do just fine.)

I think My Lovely Wife and I have finally gotten into the grove of all of this after this third week has wound down.  This is a bad semester for hours – two electives (ABST and WRIT) which are 6 hours a week add an extra day in “student time”.  I don’t sleep or eat much – but I have lived like that for quite some time.  That reminds me, I need to go get a turkey sandwich to take to WRIT so I don’t pass out. 

Talk to you next week!

Here are more pics. Speaking of “more”, I put “More…” tags in those other photoblog entries: They were a little overbearing.

The life-sized sign in front of Student Services.

C Block - Motive Power, mostly.

Class-A Mechanic Lab in C Block

Yes, Fanshawe is this big.

Mechanics Lab in C Block.

A Machine Shop in B Block

Information Centre at the Main Doors, in front of the SUB, Library, Bookstore entrances.

Student Union Building. All Ye Who Enter ... LOL

Falcon's Nest. Lots of stuff in there.

Shot One of the SUB. It is the original Student Social Bar Spot. There are two more, now.

Shot Two of the SUB

The Second Student Social Place. The OutBack Shack (out back of the school)

The floor in front of the OutBack Shack's door. Ya, it's all real.