Art History 1 (ART 114) Activated

Today is February 2nd and that means that 2nd chance classes, including ART 114, are now active. That being said, since the early activation of the course in January, there hasn’t been a lot of activity in the course today, and I suspect that the remaining 10 or so students will fall in one at a time over the next few days.

So far I have only worked on part of the first group of assignments, and just need to take the quiz to be finished with them. The new schedule for the course seems a bit insane. The missing weeks are being made up for by doubling up on assignments in a few of the weeks. I really don’t like it, especially the weeks during which we have to write papers. There are 4 fewer weeks, but still 3 full length papers to write. I guess it’s good that I like art and I like writing, otherwise this course would be an absolute bitch.

Now… to finish up my reading on “Art Before History”.

Cryptic Blog Entry #2

At times I am a really selfish person. There is an item that was dangled in front of me a few days ago and now that product is only available to a specific group of people. This upset me greatly and I went into a very selfish mood over it, which I suspect bothered some people. I looked at other items of a similar class, but found none to interest me as much as the candy that was dangled in front of my face and then yanked away like yarn from a cat. Life seems like it isn’t fair sometimes. Although, in this case, the group that is so entitled to receive said item technically probably needs the item more than I do, and I could settle for a lesser item, but why would I want to when the superior item is available?

New GITI To Do Module

I feel like I have rewritten the ToDo module so many times, but it probably has only been two of three rewrites. None of my rewrites have been anything useful, or anything I have even really looked at after it was written. There was even one revision that once completely finished, I rolled back to the original version of ToDo. Now I think I have something that might work well. I have moved away from my traditional GITI item manager style of writing a module and moved to a somewhat smaller implementation. The module’s current entire UI is displayed below. All there is to it is a list, each item with a checkbox, a method for deleting unwanted items and a way to add new entries. As with any GITI module, this is not as far as it is planned to go. This is just its primarily implemention, on the GITI summary (home) page. Additional functionality will be added to allow items to have a deadline, as well as add a verbose description.

Academic Decay

Every semester many optimistic students sign up for courses, but how many actually stay in them, and of those, how many participate? Every semester when an instructor assigns weekly discussion board activities for online or hybrid courses, it surprises me how many people begin falling away from the course. In one of my psychology courses we began with a quite optimistic enrollment of 25 students, and now, 4 weeks into the course, we are down to 18 students still enrolled. During the first week we had 22 people to participate in the discussion board, the second week we lost a few and went to 18 (end of drop/add period, likely full class participation), then in the 3rd week we had 16 students to participate and then this week, only 13 students participated. I do not understand how students can let themselves fall out of a course like this. It is online, and they have all week to participate, but yet many choose to not participate in the course. For in-person courses I can understand, I have been the one to flake out of a course once or twice, but this is online, anytime stuff and it requires to academic skill at all, just talking to people, like any other discussion board, with a few guidelines. What concerns me more is the fact that if this few people are participating in the discussion boards, how many are participating in the tests each week? I probably do not want to know the answer to that question.

In most circumstanced I do not drop courses or abandon an online course, especially not this early in the semester. Why do others do it? I feel that students leaving a course weakens the overall strength of the course, especially when the number of students drops below 20. Schools that pride themselves on small class sizes do not really make sense to me. What is advantageous to having a class of 10 or 12 students? That is only 10 people to get ideas from or to see a different point of view from. Although, on the other side, I do hate courses that have more than about 50 students as well. Is 25 – 50 a good range for a class, or is this too much of a personal preference thing for myself?

Trouble Blogging

There are topics that do not get mentioned in this blog. That is something that is known to many of my readers. This in the past has never presented to be a problem, until now. There is something going on in my life right now that is very special to me, something marvelously exciting, but I do not feel as though it is appropriate for this blog, however, it does not seem to quite fit my other blogs either. I keep a restricted access journal on the topic, but its not the same as expressing my feelings publicly. This is such a joyous thing, but yet private as well.

As I mentioned, there are other blogs that might be better suited to this topic, but in other ways, it does not seem to fit there. I am conflicted on my feelings about my own privacy. All of my blogs are public, so why is there really the need for the serpation anyway? No one who does not already know a great deal about me visits this blog, and to top it off, the only real reason for the seperation of blogs is the TMI issues. Should I not be comfortable enough with myself to allow for disclosure of these things that make me feel like I will burst if I do not share them?

Change of Clay Body

My enthusiasm for Standard Ceramic Company’s 563 clay body has been short lived. Upon going to get a fresh batch this morning I was informed that it has been discontinued. I am now in posession of Standard’s 220 clay body. Supposed to be very similar, but I will determine that. I liked how well 563 vitrified, so I guess I will try 220 to see if it does the same.
I am a bit upset that I can no longer get the clay body that I prefer, but I guess things change and nothing stays the same.

Renewed Excitement for PSYC

I am not quite as worried about my psychology courses as I was before. I just finished my quiz in Theories of Personality on Freud and I got a perfect score. I am beginning to feel a little better about these courses. I believe my lack of performance in the courses may be related to the fact that I am taking courses at a new institution and I am not quite familiar with the teaching atmosphere yet and I try to dive in just like they are any other course I have taken.
I have taken a variety of courses online, but none in psychology, these are my first online psychology courses, and I am finding things to be different from my in person psyc courses from a few years ago.
I want to do well in the psychology courses, since I believe I can be sucessful with psychology and develop a career from it.

Active Directory Authentication on Ubuntu

My network is primarily a Microsoft Active Directory domain, with a majority of clients being member systems. An Ubuntu Linux system does not, in its default state, fit in to that network. Using a tool called Likewise Open I was very easily able to add my Ubuntu system to the Windows domain. Once the tool was installed, to login as a domain user it is just as simple as logging in with domain syntax (DOMAIN\user). That is where the expected behavior seems to end. The thing is merely an authentication tool, which would be nice in a fleet of computers running Linux. It prevents the need for having to create users on every system. A few things I really hoped would be there were not. I would have liked for my specified “HOME” path on the domain to have been followed for the Linux machine, but it was not, nor was it even mounted anywhere in the file system.
My experiment with authenticating to AD on Ubuntu was pleasant enough, but I am going to have to work more with it if I ever want to have a seemless network across all of my platforms. I suspect that if I am able to pass a logon script to my Linux machines that I may be able to resolve my issues with things not being mounted and the experience not being exactly transparent.

Digital Photo Assignments

When it comes to digital photography assignments lately I am finding myself in one of two categories, and no where in between. Those categories are having pretty much no clue fora subject for the assignment, or having an overabundance of inspiration. My current project is macro, so I am very comfortable already with doing it, and I have more subject ideas than I could ever turn in. Now I just have to narrow it down and focus on one that I want to perfect.
This being said about the assignment, maco requires me putting the D60 on its tripod, which I am starting to not like doing. The D60 and I are devoping a hands-on relationship. Lately the D60’s tripod has been mostly a storage stand for the camera.

Recipes Make No Sense

What is a cup of flour? Densly packed or lightly packed? Perhaps sifted? Volume is no way to measure things like flour, or grated carrot for that matter. So many things in cooking involve air, it is nearly impossible to measure by volume and have the correct amount. Kitchen scales are more likely to be in use in modern times, so perhaps we should change the way we write recipes to reflect this and only measure fluids by volume.
I have been using Cooks.com recently and have discovered that as a culinary society, we are seriously lacking a standard protocol for writing recipes. There are academic definitions for things like chop, mince, slice, etc, but recipes almost never uniformly use one that they intend to use. Cooking has always been a very informal thing and recipes have been used by cooks as ways to share instructions with each other, usually people who have a clue how the person speaks and thinks, but in the sense of broader sharing, there needs to be some sort of protocol or agreement.
Also, what is with people and getting recipes almost finished, but neglecting to include the actual cooking instructions for stuff? I hate having to guess tempertures and times (moreso temps, I can gauge time).