Suzanne Calling

You all know my point of view on Plagiarism. I've had several rants on it, whether it has involved me directly or as an observer. Amalah, one of the bloggers who I followed since I started blogging, is the most recent to be a victim. Read her post today, and you'll probably have the same reaction I did, disgust that someone would take post after post and claim them as their own. I think it hits me hard, because in seven or so years of reading Amy's posts, she's probably the nicest person you can find in the blogosphere. She posts things that are embarrassing, and it just endears you to her, because you're thinking "yeah, I do dorky things like that, too." Still, I was curious about the situation and found the name of the blogger who did this. The name sounded *really* familiar. It wasn't until I read another blogger's retelling of the events that I realized why. The blogger in question (and her husband), bullied a few people I know and ...

The Florida senate voted 33-6 to break off USF Polytechnic into the state's 12th university, effective July 1st. This, when they cut $400 million from the existing 11 state universities. I weep for those locally who now have no affordable State University campus (it will take a while for the new school to get SACS accreditation) and due to work and family obligations, will have to give up the ability to attend college classes. Ugh...

After yesterday's post, it should come as no surprise that the funding cuts proposed by J.D. Alexander extend to all of the University of South Florida system. He wants to cut the entire USF Polytechnic budget, and a total of $136 million from USF, over 58% of the annual operating revenue. Meanwhile, there are other schools in the state that are seeing less than a 5% cut in their allocations. Vendetta, anyone? Yesterday, I submitted the main part of my doctoral application before this news broke. My original plans were to apply to three schools, then I ultimately decided to apply to just USF. My rationale was that because USF doesn't historically hire their own Ph.D's into tenure track professor roles, I should stick around, then move away once I'm done. The advantage to this strategy is that I know this program, the professors know me and are supportive of my ideas-and I have a research population when I get to that point of my studies. It definitely is more appea...

The situations I encountered this week, that seem to be common in Florida. If they were encountered in my travels up and down the East coast, it was so infrequent as to not spark any memories. Scenario One: I am exiting a shopping center from an access road. It is a T intersection, I am at a stop sign(at the top of the T), oncoming traffic does not have one, traffic on the road to my right does have a stop sign. Without fail, every time I exit this shopping center, despite oncoming traffic having NO stop sign, a driver will come to a dead stop and wave me out. Um, no, you have the right of way, because it is safer than having someone whip around the corner, turn into the shopping center behind you and rear end you. Keep moving. Scenario Two: Same shopping center, another entrance. Incoming traffic has no stop sign, comes to another T intersection where both directions (the top of the T) have a stop sign. It seems like any time I use that entrance (because I want to visit Paner...

I ordered this case a few days before I got my iPad. As it was designed for the first gen iPads, it wasn't a perfect fit, but I was okay with that. I had plans to take a dremel to the back to make the opening for the front camera lens a little bigger and create a hole for the back camera lens. Alas, once in the case, it would. not. come. out! I tried several times and since the camera wasn't that big a deal, I didn't press the issue. Today, the iPad was in my bag when I was headed into the supermarket. Somehow, as I was exiting the car, the iPad fell about 3 feet to the ground and the case fell off. A quick glance and everything looked okay, and I was relieved. I left it in the car. Then I got home and found this: Not even a scratch or dent in the aluminum case-just the glass. Ugh! I'm thinking as much as I love my case, I'm going to replace it.

For all the things I love about Game Teen's school, there is one thing that has been a bit of an annoyance since pretty much day one: the secretary. Maybe it's because she is not trained in Special Education, she seems to lack patience with some of the students, mine being one of them. She has several children around the ages of my two, and it seems as if she expects these kids to behave exactly like her offspring. There's a problem, these are kids who have varying degrees of emotional blindness and are, in many cases, fall well below their chronological age behaviorally. I just have to walk on the campus to see it with my own eyes, to know that my son may keep pace (and even excel) academically, but he behaves like the younger elementary school kids. With my child, there seems to be a snarky tone, when she is explaining to me incidents that happen, it's more like an older kid tattling "well, he did THIS, and he did THAT and well, that's just unacceptable and...

One of my major frustrations with Facebook, is that there is no way to contact them directly. When I had the annoyance of my house listed as a location, there was only a report box, and no listing of department emails or live chat or even a way to Tweet them. (OTOH, I had a Twitter question, posted an @Twitter on their feed and had an answer in 20 minutes.) Yeah, so that lack of direct contact is annoying, but most of the time, it's not a big deal. The latest dislike, the one you may not have noticed is that in the last two weeks, is that every post you make, or picture you place on your wall now has a location on it. Last week, I posted a picture of my new chair, and it took four tries and about twenty minutes on my phone and computer to finally post a picture that didn't have that 'near Tampa' when I was at school or 'near mytown' when I was at home. I hadn't even noticed it until my ex-husband's sister posted on my wall and sent me a message to ...

We don't have a land line in our house. We ditched having one several years ago, when we realized that several months would go by before picking it up to make a call. The cell phones are always handy, and even with the lowest family plan, we rarely used our minutes. Enough of our family and friends had the same carrier that we wouldn't burn through minutes. (The only time we went over minutes was the month my mom passed away.) As a result, we got Chef a cell phone of his own two years ago. His best friend had the number, Ed, me and Jane. That's it. The annoying thing about that phone is that if it is charging, it does NOT ring. So, half the time, you try to reach the kid and you can't, because the phone is on the charger. It is annoying. As the contract is up on that phone, we'll be replacing that Sony Eriksson phone for just that ONE quibble-other than that, the phone is great. So, if Chef's best friend wants to call him and can't reach him, who d...

One quarter of my grade in this last class is to create a tutorial with five different software packages that are used to create presentations. The objective was to create the same educational tutorial, just modify it to use the bells and whistles of the various programs. So, there were five. SoftChalk, Articulate, Camtasia, Captivate and Lectora. I started with the SoftChalk and the time to complete the task was not extremely long, but I probably put about an hour more work into this program due to the learning curve. Then I played with Camtasia and Captivate, two programs that I had purchased for the Mac, but hadn't installed until this week. Camtasia was ridiculously easy to use and turned out a fantastic voiceover presentation that was synched with a Powerpoint slide. (If I created the project on PC, I would have been able to add a quiz.) Now that I've used three other Adobe products, Captivate made a lot of sense and I really liked it. The learning curve was crazy f...

Today's plans: Drop GameTeen at school, then head to campus to study and lead a meeting of the club I chair, then drive over to the Tampa campus to spend five minutes taking a quiz. Today's reality: Drop GameTeen at school, spend three hours studying, two hours in the meeting, drive to Tampa. The part that didn't happen? That quiz. The professor wasn't in her office. On Wednesday afternoon, she asked me to send her an email reminding her that I was coming. I held up that end of the bargain, but did not have a response. When I took my laptop to a seat nearby to find out if there was an updated email, I was stopped by an academic advisor. "Are you here to see so and so for advising?" I explained that I was there to see Dr. B. He told me "I saw her a little while ago. Apparently, I must have just missed her. I did the tactful and diplomatic thing: I fowarded the email I'd sent Wednesday, with an addendum "I guess I should have followed up w...

I've got a virus. Rather, my computer has one. It showed itself today by telling me my security protection was out of date, and when I clicked to close the message (grammatical errors and all), it launched "Antispyware Soft", which was telling me I had dozens of infected files. I run Ad Aware and Spybot regularly, so this thing must have taken hold in the last week or so. This one is especially insidious, a trojan that, even after you remove all the components you can find, it still can replicate. There's one especially resistant file (~DCD9.tmp), that tells you that it is in use in another program when you're attempting to delete it, then when you go back in the temp directory, there are more. The appropriate security programs have been updated and I'm running a scan. Yippee.

One of my classes this semester was Motivation. Those of you who have known me in real life for years are probably laughing that I felt I needed to learn about it, since I was the one trying to figure out what motivated my employees so that we could all achieve the store goals. It was a great class and yes, I learned a lot more about a topic that some might say I'm a little overenthusiastic about, at least in the work setting. At the beginning of each semester, I sit down with the syllabus for each course (that I actually read and mark up all semester long) and look at the grading criteria. If the instructor uses a ten point scale and the total points I can earn equal 500, I'll note that I have a 50 point buffer with which I can still earn that A. Take a test, get an 88, I note that I now have a cushion of 38 points left to still earn that A. It's a method that works well for me, because I walk into that last exam knowing exactly how many points I need to earn that co...

It's time for another round of things I've been pondering. Won't you join me? Do I have "personal slave" tattooed on my forehead? Seems I get called constantly with "I need you to" or "You need to get me..." It's getting old, especially when I've got 2 weeks to move and tests to study for! If a person has a wound on the leg that's getting red and infected, has a history of MRSA and VRE, should they wait three days (until the weekend) to let one of the nurses caring for them to 'take a look at it'? If the same person has a history of ulcers acting up with infection, and blood sugar that goes out of whack with an infection and both are happening, shouldn't that be a blinking neon sign to do SOMETHING? *Long story short, MRSA, extremely high blood sugar and potassium levels earn a hospital stay* If you're being taken to the hospital for the above issues, would you make sure you have everything you need or would yo...

But dropping an iPhone is worse. The screen cracks, yo. If I wasn't called out to bring someone food, it probably wouldn't have happened. Add insult to injury, that person realized she was out of prescriptions and I found out AFTER I drove to the other side of town. Replacing the phone involves a trip to Brandon. Yay. Pictures later.

If you're on Facebook, odds are you know exactly what I just said. If not, it's a dice game that is a rather addicting. The goal of the game is to get various trios of the dice with ones or fives and other combinations that remind you of poker-except they don't. You get six dice, and if a roll has neither a one, a five or a trio of any of the numbers, you 'Farkle' and lose the points from that round. It's a battle to go ten rounds without farkling too much while racking up as many points as possible. My day went fairly well on the study front for the most part. One one study break, I even played a round and got the awesomest round of Farkle ever: Look at round three. That was my highest round EVER. Then I Farkled two of my last three rounds and ended up with a so-so 9100. The day went in similar fashion. I'd been dealing with a headache for most of the afternoon of the Chiari type. Then when I went to start on dinner (Alton's rice pilaf and f...

NBC made the most dunderheaded move it has made since 1979. This week, it was confirmed that Jay Leno was rewarded for having a snoozefest of a show at 10pm by putting him back in the 11:35pm 'Tonight Show' slot. I was the kid who was a night owl and would sneak to watch Carson's monologue far too many nights to count. I loved the rapport of Johnny and Ed, the Amazing Kreskin routines and Carson garbed in a plaid flannel jacket and Elmer Fudd jacket. As I got older, I'd watch the whole show. Back then, it was assumed that David Letterman would be passed the baton when Johnny took his final bow. Instead, Jay Leno came in-and Letterman jumped over to CBS. Who could blame the man? When Game Teen was born, the child's sleep schedule mirrored his Mom and Dad's nicely. My retail hours, and Ed's second shift mainframe job in downtown DC meant we liked to stay up until 1:30 or 2am. Somehow, we got hooked on the Late Show with Conan O'Brien. It's bee...

Why, oh why did I let the physical therapist talk me into increasing weight to 30 pounds on the rowing machine Thursday, after the assistant and I agreed we should drop down to 25 after my neurologist appointment? I shouldn't be doing it at all, but I saw improvement. Instead, I've got a two day headache that won't go away (all those headaches that didn't respond to Tylenol, Aleve or Excedrin? Chiari type.)and my neck and shoulders are really sore. I can take painkillers for that, but it doesn't do a darn thing for the headache. Why is it that I can ask five times, and the can can overflow, and people put their trash on the counter and STILL no one empties the trash can? Why is it that the dishes pile up (dishwasher is broken) and rather than pick up a sponge to wash dishes, the other inhabitants of the house feel the need to dig out rubbermaid containers to eat from instead? Why is it that whenever someone is hungry, they tell me instead of doing something about...

If I haven't mentioned it, one of the advantages to becoming a college student again is that I have the ability to purchase health insurance. As soon as I was dispersed my grants for the semester, I paid up. I am once again insured. As I haven't seen any doctors for nearly 18 months, it was time to start scheduling appointments. A neurologist to find out whether the RSD has spread. Another doctor for a checkup and an annoying issue that runs in the family. Soon, an appointment with Nurse M to do a baseline, since I haven't seen her in a while. SSDI is of the mind that if you're not seeing doctors, you can't be that bad health wise and denies the claim. Never mind the fact that I'm hurting and don't have the funds to see my doctors. So, the neurologist is scheduled-for mid October. The other doctor's appointment seemed too good to be true: I called Thursday and was offered an appointment for this morning. "Are you sure?", I asked. Yes, w...

I have my first assignment for one of my classes due at midnight tonight. This instructor (web course) already has not endeared herself to me, because the stock answer to everyone who stated that we're leery of group projects is "Well, you need to learn how to work in groups because you will in the real world." Problem is, everyone stating it explained how they've worked for many years and are now returning to college. We KNOW how to work in groups, but there's a big difference between no work, no pay in the real world and the classroom group project. Soooo, tonight's project? There's a 4 step process for determining an ethical dilemma and how to prevent things from happening. I have to determine Abridged Rights and Neglected Duties. Only problem is that they are not addressed in the two videos or chapter of the text that relate to the topic (and the reading really isn't part of this week's assignment, anyway). It sucks when I don't have t...

The other night, during that Elluminate session, my IT Ethics prof stated that she would assign us our groups after the drop/add period had passed. Then, once she assigned the groups, we would have one week to meet online, draft our group contract and submit it to her. Well, last night, just before 11pm, the lists were issued in an email, along with telling us we needed to get together and return our contracts to her SUNDAY night, Less than 48 hours. I was okay with that, as there is an assignment due next Friday night. Let's get this group stuff out of the way and get to work on delegating our roles along with working on the individual assignments. Except that not one person had sent out an email or posted on the group section of Blackboard. My Type A personality was champing at the bit, but I held off on posting. I really don't think it's a good idea to lead, in case I do find employment. Yes, it's my strength, but I don't think it'd be fair to my fel...