Madness In My Method

parley vs parlay

(BTW - I've decided that "par-lei" means to golf in Hawaii)

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more:

accolade vs accolate (a drug)
acolyte vs accolite (an IT company located here in Dallas, Texas)

Good luck getting a job there. That little "computer science degree required" statement is thoroughly put through the ringer for their interviews.

( Along with GRE lessons, I'm also learning Japanese with my eldest nephew. )

As another development, eldest and his friends started playing D&D. They've been playing the World War Z and the Walking Dead games that are based on similar RPG mechanics, but one of the boys has officially bought a couple of the D&D books, and they're branching out into that arena as a group. I'm such a proud geek aunt. I was initially toying with the idea of getting eldest into Pathfinder a couple months ago, so hearing of this new development thrills me.

Eldest is doing the math of the future in his head. He knows I'm trying to teach his younger brother programming, and he would like to learn to draw/animate anime, and he's really digging into the RPGs. He'd like it if the two of them managed to make their own games.

I'm thinking it's time to introduce him to Persona or some of the other visual novel type games. This seems to be the direction he's heading.

Studying for the GRE (this will be long going until probably May, so expect many random posts about it from me), I just learned of the term eggcorns. I'd definitely heard of the term malapropism before, but never eggcorns.

Ha! Even my spellchecker doesn't believe in eggcorns yet.

Here's a wonderful eggcorn database.

This one also makes for a pleasant read.

I was looking for another book to delve into until again my Game of Thrones becomes available, and I came across The Three-Bodied Problem. After checking it out and finishing up the tail end of Think Like a Freak, I managed to completely forget the synopsis of The Three-Bodied Problem. All I could recall was that it sounded interesting enough for me to pick it as my next book, but beyond that, absolutely nothing about the synopsis was remembered.

So, if you pick up this book and start reading without reading the synopsis, or forgetting the synopsis like I did, it's going to come off as a very trippy book. Now that I'm a couple parts into the book and thinking about it while at a computer, I looked up the synopsis again and still find it to be a bit of a trippy book, although now things are starting to make sense, and I remember why I picked out this book in the first place.

I now realize that I know absolutely nothing about China's history over the past few decades. I also realize I how much I hate stupid, nonsensical revolutions. The first couple chapters reminded me of The Wave, which classroom experiment my own Honors World History teacher* utilized in a smaller, more controlled fashion to introduce our classes to WWII. I had read The Good Earth as part of that same class, but, as that book cover says, it's set in pre-revolutionary China, so I have little knowledge of the revolutionary China period. This book, The Three-Bodied Problem, is my first introduction to it, and I'm now interested in learning more about the details. I love it when a book can manage to pique my interest in a new subject like that.

( * About That Teacher )

Of all the universities that were added to Coursera, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is by far the most surprising.

Last night I was yet again faced with the task of explaining my bachelor's degree to someone I just met. Just as a refresher course, technically my degree is a BS in Interdisciplinary Studies (INTS), which tells you fuck all about my actual degree. INTS captures all the degree types that are not pre-created by the various schools. For instance, you could major in Politcal Media, which would require a lot of politics courses as well as a lot of media courses, but you don't want to major in just politics or just media. All INTS degrees require a minimum of three specialty areas that you specify and work out with your advisor who makes sure you are meeting all the requirements for graduation. One of my requirements for a BS versus a BA was a minimum number of hard science classes (which psychology does not count), so I had to include enough upper level math courses in my degree plan in order to get the BS distinction.

The INTS degree holder is someone who has technically minored in many yet majored in none. The major is the gestalt of the minors. (It's so much fun being able to use that word in a sentence.) So, my major is in Artificial Intelligence: Research and Development. My Areas of Concentration were defined as Research Methods, Cognition and Decision Making, and Modeling. I have an accounting* minor, a psychology minor (specifically, neural networks, neuroscience, judgment and decision making, and laboratory testing and devices), and a mathematics minor (specifically, matrices, game theory, discrete math, and multi-variate statistics). What I don't have, though, is a Chilean miner.

Oh, I kill me....

*I would have happily traded the accounting minor for the computer programming minor if I had the spare time and money to just forgo the umpteengajillion hours I had already accumulated as an accounting major before switching to INTS. It would have made a lot more sense and would have eased my current apprehension of applying to grad schools. However, my advisor and I were able to justify the accounting courses seeing as how just about anything created in the field of AI: R&D could be a potential marketable product, and being able to start and run a business based on that product could actually fit in the direct description that I had worked out for my degree. I think I was cheating a bit, but does it count as cheating if someone else signed off on it?

Time to buy a calendar again.

Time to buckle down.

Time to start grad school applications.


I took a year off and just did my thing. Now it's time to get busy again.

I DO NOT look forward to this.

Remember this rant that I posted on the tenth? Well, UTA sent out a mass email a couple of days ago explaining all of the change-over crap going on with the email system and how to go about accessing your email.

Let that one sink in for a minute.

Why oh why?

I've gone this entire time with not a clue as to what my UTA email address is. We used the same ID and password to sign in to the registration module and the email system alike.

Until now. Our new email system requires you to use your email address to log in. Ok, that wouldn't be a problem except that I've never given out my email and don't know what it is.

After a fun little search I finally find out I have 4 different email addresses associated with UTA and not one of them uses the same password as my registration sign-on (which, btw, is not the same as my registration ID which happens to be a long ass number that I can never remember either), but instead is a long series of numbers that I luckily found on an obscure UTA website that I personally have never had to use before, and which required my registration sign-on and password to access.

Did you get all that?

It would have been nice if they had sent an email a MONTH ago telling me all of this. I knew they were changing the email system to provide for more space, blah, blah, blah, so while that's nice and all, it still sucks having to jump through mini hoops just to see if I have any email messages.

Yes, I may just be a grumpy old bitch when it comes to this sort of crap, but that's why you enjoy reading my trials and tribulations on LJ, right?

EDIT:GRRRERERFEEEDSDFSKLJGDSGDSHO:
THEY DIDN'T AUTOMATICALLY TRANSFER EVERYTHING FROM OUR OLD EMAIL SERVER TO OUR NEW ONE!!!111 We get to transfer this ourselves manually. Even better - there's nothing on the page saying that this wasn't done and that we will have to do it ourselves. It's not until after you've logged in to the new email server and see that something is noticeably missing and then go back to the info page and see a "Student E-Mail Migration Page" link that you finally realize once again that UTA sucks giant hairy monkey balls. Fuckers.

EDIT2: That Migration Page I mentioned...yeah, well that's were they tell you that you need to set up the new email account and they walk you through the steps that, if you were a smart monkey like me, YOU'VE ALREADY FUCKING DONE no thanks to them.