Our Dumb Blog

First day back to school, but Mom didn’t insist on a picture in the front yard before I headed out. (Do all mothers do this, or was this just a quirk of my own?)

We had couch surfers last night, Damien & Mary from Leeds. They only stayed one night, but we had fun anyway. They were extraordinarily grateful for dinner and a place to sleep, and were good company. They claimed to like my beer (even the questionable stuff), and made a good show of enjoying dinner.

My first class was at 12:15, and the couch surfers enjoyed a lazy morning planning their day and sipping tea. They mentioned that we’re the first Americans they’ve stayed with that actually had proper tea, which made me happy. They left about the same time I did.

It was miserably hot today (okay, high 80s, but I’m easily made miserable), and the ride to school in full gear in the heat just isn’t fun. The parking garage was baracaded to entry with police officers telling people it was full and that they’d have to park and ride the bus. It must be a good feeling to be told you have to ride the bus after spending $300 on a parking permit. I managed to work my way around the cars, and thread my way between a police officer and a barricade to get into the garage. The motorcycle parking on the entry level was full, but there was space on the level below.

Despite the nonsense, I still had plenty of time which I’d allowed because my first class was in the building with all the other humanities classes, so I don’t know it terribly well. I found the classroom without too much trouble. My first class was Advanced Grammar. I know. I could hardly believe it myself, but UCCS has some extraordinarily absurd policies about a “Writing Portfolio”.

In order to graduate, one must submit 2 papers, each a minimum of 4 pages in length. The papers must have been written at UCCS. If a student does not pass the writing portfolio, he must take and pass a 3000-level or higher composition course. A course that is otherwise not required for the degree. Since I’ve taken all the humanities classes I needed to take at UD, I have no papers to submit. I will have to write a substantial paper for the “Computing Ethics” class I have to take next semester, but that’s not until next semester, and it’s only one paper. It’s likely the only paper I’ll have to write. So, I was told that I would have no choice but to take the additional class. I looked at the available classes, and picked the least-miserable sounding class that worked with my schedule which turned out to be Advanced Grammar.

When the classroom emptied and I walked in, I was astonished. I should have taken a picture. The room was probably the tiniest classroom I’ve ever seen, and it was packed full of desks. The sort of desks I haven’t sat in since elementary school. They were clearly designed for children, not adults. I couldn’t fit into mine, and the 3 desks at the front of the classroom were taken. I sat with my legs in the aisle and was astonished at how it felt like I had been forced to return to elementary school.

As I looked around, I noticed that I was surrounded by girls. Eventually, another guy came in and sat down next to me. He was in my C++ last semester, and was taking the class for the same reason I was. The rest of the class was full of girls. English major girls.

The elementary school sensation was not eased by the professor, an older woman that reminded me of my elementary school teachers. The first thing she asked us to do was, “take out a sheet of paper and write the answers to the following questions…” I started looking around to make sure this wasn’t some ridiculous joke. No one else seemed to think it was.

The questions were things like “What do you expect from this class? What are your goals in this class? Why are you taking this class?” I was the last to finish mine. I wrote a bit of a rant about how I hoped the class’s scope extended beyond prescriptivist nonsense (I’m always one to make friends with teachers the first day), and explained that I was taking the class in order to fulfill the writing portfolio requirement. (I apparently misspelled fulfill. Damn.) I turned mine in, it went on the top of the stack, and the elementary school nonsense got worse.

“Okay, everyone move your desks around, form groups, and go over the syllabus together!” the professor requested. Seriously? I sat by myself and looked at the guy next to me. I told him we’d be a group of two, but 3 girls in front of us said we could join their group. So we did. We introduced ourselves and started talking about the syllabus.

The teacher came as close as she could to me in the crowded classroom and said, “Are you Berck?” “Yes?” “Come with me a second,” and she motioned me out of the classroom.

Wow. I was being called into the hall already! She had the stack of papers in her hand, and had clearly just read mine. I braced myself for a “you need to have a positive attitude” speech. Instead, she said, “Advanced grammar won’t meet the writing portfolio requirement.”

I explained that the catalog said it would. She said that I was probably confused with similar course numbers, as there was a composition class with a similar number and people had been getting them confused. I tried to find the requirement on the UCCS website with my MacBook, but all the pages Google pointed to were now gone. She told me to go talk to the writing portfolio office on the bottom floor. I made her repeat the directions to the office 4 times. They were horribly vague, and I had no idea what she was talking about. I also mentioned that the other guy in the class was in there for the same reason, so she should tell him.

I got lost just trying to find the staircase I’d gone up. After eventually winding back up where I’d started, the other guy in the class was walking toward me. He at least pointed me to the stairs, and I was able to find the writing portfolio office by trial and error without too much trouble.

The two women in the closet-sized office said there was no way that Advanced Grammar would qualify for the requirement. I went ahead and explained my situation and asked what I should do. They said that policies had changed, and I could submit 1 transfer paper and 1 UCCS paper. That still didn’t really help because I had zero UCCS papers to submit. They gave me the paperwork on the alternative class I could take, and told me to talk to a professor in charge of the portfolio thing and gave me her email address. Since I know that professors in those sorts of positions are sometimes not very good about returning email, I asked if they knew what her office hours were. They didn’t, but told me where her office was and suggested that the hours might be posted on her door.

I set off and was astounded to find her in her office. I explained my predicament, and to my astonishment, she said she would accept 2 transfer papers.

I’m still tittering and twitching. I’m not really sure I believe this is going to work out. I immediately hopped back on my motorcycle and went home, hoping to find UD papers.

I first searched through all the old files on my computer and found nothing. This didn’t surprise me, as I have almost no files before 1998, and sparse files before 2000. I was using a 486 with Linux installed through most of time at UD. I wrote my papers in WordPerfect for Linux, and I would have thought I’d still have them, but I don’t. Or can’t find them.

So I went out to the closet on the porch and hauled out my giant box of paper that I’ve decided to keep over the years. I spent half an hour paging through it and came up with dozens of papers from UD, but very few of them were over 4 pages. 3 pages seemed to be the typical length, and all the longer ones were answers to multi-question exams, which didn’t really fit the definition of a single paper. Fortunately, there were two decent papers. They wanted me to submit a clean copy, and I lucked out. The Dante one had been revised once and resubmitted, so the revised copy had no marks on it from the professor, and his comments and the grade (B+) were written on a cover page. The other was for Dr. Paynter who had Parkinson’s disease and thankfully wrote almost no comments on papers, because no one could read them anyway.

So, I’ve dropped the grammar class (woohooo!) and plan to submit the papers tomorrow. I should find out in a few weeks they pass muster. They’re hardly my best work, but they’re certainly sufficient for this requirement.

I couldn’t find a lot of the papers that I’ve written. I’m not sure why. I know I had to write some fairly lengthy papers (I found several syllabuses that mentioned 10 page papers), but I can’t find any of them. Sad. On the other hand, who knew I’d need them.

My other classes for the day were Programming Langauges, taught by an older guy who thinks COBOL is awesome (seriously!), and Algorithms. Programming Languages looks like a lot of fun. The major project for the class involves writing the same program in 5 different languages: Prolog, FORTRAN, Scheme, COBOL and ADA. That sounds fun, because I’d love to play with different ancient languages, but i’m not likely to do so on my own. Algorithms is going to be tough and awfully mathematical. It’s cross-listed as a graduate level class, and the professor assured us it would be a difficult class. I’m not sure I’ll enjoy it, but it’ll be good for me.

Tomorrow I have Statistics, Operating Systems, and “Computability, Automata and Formal Languages”, which is an intense name for a class.

So, I’m down to 15 hours! It’s not going to be an easy semester, but now it actually seems doable. I’m going to double-check and make sure there’s not a CS elective I can take to better my chances of graduating next semester.

Well, thanks to a 20% curve on the final exam, I managed an A- in the course overall. So, no more 4.0, but at least I don’t have a C! And Sydney says I can still claim to have straight A’s.

I took my Differential Equations final today, and with any luck I’ve got a B for the course.

I say with any luck, because I may have gotten a C. I suppose that if my 4.0 needs to end, that Differential Equations is an appropriately difficult class to deliver the crushing blow. Not that I actually have a 4.0. I only have a 4.0 at UCCS as long as I conveniently ignore the 2.3 I had at UD.

I thought there was a vague chance that I would turn out to be good at math. This summer has taught me otherwise. It’s a good thing I wasn’t planning on being a mathematician.

The class was extraordinarily challenging for me. I found that at different times it seemed to require just about every mathematical trick I had learned up to this point. The biggest problem is that because it was a summer class where one week of material in a normal semester is covered in one day (3 days/week) that it was impossible for me to practice enough to get proficient with it. I think it might have been possible to get an A were I not taking two other classes at the same time.

I suspect that even passing differential equations makes me better at math than 99% of the population, yet compared to anyone who is good at it, I’m laughably bad. If you just want an idea of what a differential equations test looks like, here’s our midterm. (That’s the solutions as worked out by the professor.) The worst part about that exam was having us solve a single problem 3 different ways. I got 3 different answers, but didn’t have time to figure out where I’d made a mistake.

My Linear Algebra final is on Monday. I’m dreading it, because I need an A on the final to get an A in the class. I’m not sure if I’ll manage it or not.

My third class, Computer Networks, is the only one I’m really enjoying. I wish I had more time to spend with it, but the subject is interesting, our textbook is really good, and the professor is doing a good job.

I’ve been too busy with school work to write, and this isn’t as detailed as I’d like, but it’s about time to get this up here.

Leaving Dunlap, TN on the first day, it was already about 90° in the late morning. Dunlap sits at the bottom of the Saquatchie valley, and I was pleased that I didn’t get any pinging on the climb out. That would wait until later after the bike got heat-soaked from a couple hours of riding. I had no trouble avoiding Nashville on the way back, thankfully. The heat as I headed west got to be pretty miserable, and I had to stop often to rehydrate and cool off.

I was wearing an Olympia GT Air Transition jacket, and it does a wonderful job of ventilation with all the vents open. There’s a lot of exposed mesh with everything open, but it seems a reasonable trade-off in the heat. I was also wearing Olympia pants that have a large amount of venting, and after this trip, I can safely recommend Olympia gear. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to scrub all the bugs out of it, though:)

At some point, I stopped at a combination cemetery and playground.

The Dorena-Hickville ferry was still closed. The US-60 bridge across the Mississippi was still closed, so I had to cross at Cairo on the interstate again.

I spent the first night on the return journey in Sikeston again, but this time at a “campground”, actually an RV park. Fortunately, they actually had some grass for me to pitch my tent, but I was reminded how much I really hate camping at RV parks. Shortly after I arrived, the family next to where I was assigned to pitch my tent engaged in an astonishingly loud domestic dispute. The insults being hurled back and forth were startlingly vile. I felt bad for their two poor kids who likely couldn’t sleep either.

Sunset in Sikeston, MO

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I don’t think the temperature dropped much below 80° that night. The mosquitos were out in force, so I had to stay zipped into my tent. I really love my tent, but it’s a 4-season tent that’s better suited to the winter than the summer, and does a really good job of maintaining heat even with the windows open. This is great when camping in Colorado in the winter, but not so great when camping on the Missouri during a heat wave.

It took awhile to heat up and the first few hours were pretty nice. I got to the Ozarks and once again had a wonderful time on delightful curvy back roads through the Mark Twain National Forest. As I approached Kansas, the temperatures got up to 100° again, and I had to stop fairly often. At some point, I stopped at a Dairy Queen for some ice cream and was actually shivering in the air conditioning.

I detoured south at Kelsey’s suggestion and spent that night in Kansas at Liz’s Uncle Randy’s house who was nice enough to provide an air conditioned bed for the night. I slept better than I had in a long time. That night, I pricelined a motel in Dodge City, KS for $40 for the next night. I just couldn’t stand the thought of camping in that heat again. The heat was really wearing me down during the day, and I worried about making the last day after a night of no sleep.

I adjusted the chain in their driveway before I left as it had acquired quite a bit of slack. The driveway was flat, but the rear tire seemed to just kiss the ground while on the center-stand, and that seemed weird. Because my hosts live on the end of a pretty substantial gravel road, I decided to wash the bike at a car wash before I left Independence.

After doing so, I wanted to lube the chain since I’d also washed the chain to get all the grit off of it. I found that I simply couldn’t get the rear wheel off the ground while the bike was on the center-stand, and finally I figured out that the frame was dented where the center stand rests, which was allowing the center-stand to over-rotate and the bike was then resting back on both wheels. I probably caused this by hauling the bike onto the center stand at every gas stop in order to check the oil… with all my gear strapped to the back. Apparently, it was more than the stand can handle. Since it’s the frame itself that’s dented, I’m not really sure how to fix it. I’m thinking something cheesy like welding a bit of metal on top of the dents should work. There’s no way to actually see that part of the frame without crawling under the bike, so it wouldn’t matter if it’s ugly. (While working on the bike after I got home, I just duct taped a nickel on each side of the dented part of the frame, and that worked great as a temporary measure. But I need a real solution… any ideas?)

That morning was strangely hazy. It stayed cool for far longer than I thought it should, probably a result of the sun cutting through the haze at an oblique angle. The wind across Kansas was intense, as usual, but mostly out of the south. The problem with a south wind while headed west across Kansas is that the wake turbulence off of all the eastbound trucks gets blown into my lane. Riding through it on a CB350 at 70mph with no wind screen feels like riding through a pile of bricks. It was bad enough that I’d get all the way over to the right side of the road and lie flat across the tank each time I passed a truck. The good part was that there was less construction on the southern route across Kansas.

The better part is that before long, I hit the Gypsum Hills. I had no idea that there was a part of Kansas that looks like this:

Runway 1, Cimarron, Kansas. That was on the road. The road I was taking home. I did not detour for that picture. There is no runway perimeter fence. I’ve never had to check for cars on final before! I took that photo siting on the bike, and it only looks like a slightly shallow approach. Had I stood up, I think I’d have been right on a 3° glideslope. Awesome.

The whole rest of the trip ended up being perfect weather-wise. I was extraordinarily sore by the time I made it home, though.

Here’s a video: Longhorns

Also, here’s a phone picture of Moose, the Bremer’s new Bouvier.