Flow Charts

Have people became lazy?

I am here reading my policy studies book, and came across a flow chart. Well, let me just say I am really surprised that it made it into the textbook how it was printed. Upon looking at it, you can tell that somebody just threw it together. I almost want to say carelessly threw it together, but that wouldn’t be right. After looking at it, I noticed that where the lines come together to make a 90 degree angle, the lines do not match up. Either they overlap a hair or don’t connect by about that much. You know when you do a drawing in Microsoft Word, you cannot always have the lines meet up precisely. I don’t know if I should be criticizing this so much because this book was written by a well known person in the public policy arena, and the people that the book is aimed towards is undergraduate students who are learning public policy for the first time, and are hoping to be lawyers and such.

None of the students that I have seen aren’t as technically savvy as I am, so they probably wouldn’t even notice such a small detail like this. I guess I am a little shocked that the editor and/or publisher did not catch this small error, and have somebody quickly fix the flow chart up. I guess the information is more important than the layout.

Technorati Tags: policy, chart, flow chart

After College

I forgot to include that my last day this summer, my boss had told me that the upper-level management had met and wanted to extend a full-time job offer to me. Of course I said I would accept the position after I finished my degree. That same day somebody who usually brings his lunch, let’s call him J, decided to join myself and the other two people, V and B, that I eat lunch with. Myself, J, and B started discussing future jobs for me. This was before my boss had told me about the full-time offer.

I was a bit confused and mad about the conversation. Why confused? Why mad? Well first I was like, ok why are they talking about this? At first I thought were they generally talking about these positions, and wanted my input on them. So, I gave my opinions and such. Then I realised they wanted to place me in these positions to let me gain more experience and be more valuable for them. This is when I was getting mad, because if they wanted this, why didn’t they do this with me this summer? I would certainly have rather learned something new, over sitting there with nothing to do or getting these little BS jobs.

Oh well, now I have something to look foward to.

Technorati Tags: job, offers, after school

School Year 06-07

I got back to Seattle on Saturday afternoon (Sept 23). I am not quite settled in yet. I still have a few boxes of things to put away still, but I am getting used to being back up here, and the freedom once again. I don’t have my mother pressuring me to hit the sack at 10:30 pm or whatnot.

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When I started this post, I had a few things in mind that I wanted to talk about, but of course I have gotten busy, and simply forgotten them. The school year has offiicially started, beginning last Wednesday. You can see my schedule here. As you can see I am going to be a busy guy. One of my classes is called US Congress. As a political science major, I figured I should learn a wee bit more about the United State’s Congress. But I failed to catch that this class is actually a simulation of Congress. In a week or so, it starts. We had to pick a congressional district that it’s state’s name is within one letter of your last name to mock represent. So of course I said I wanted to represent the Silicon Valley area. When I said that I got a few, what’s that looks.

Once the simulation picks up, I will be basically on-call 24/7, depending on what position I am elected to in our Congress. The other class I am taking is an US Public Policy, it is practically the best class to be taking with the Congress class from what I can tell so far. I have seen a few things already that are overlapping.

My boss saw what it looks like a simple schedule, and scheduled me for a lot of hours to work. Those may have to be cut back in the next few weeks. So, it will be an interesting quarter.

Technorati Tags: political science, public policy, congress, school

A weekly leaving

I have been noticing that almost once a week for a number of weeks there is an article in UWNews that a provost or a vice-provost is leaving my university for a usually higher position. The latest one that is leaving is Rusty Barceló, [link].

My main question is why are all these vice-provosts and provosts are leaving all of a suddenly. Everybody says that the University of Washington is one of the top schools in the country, so why the mass departure as it seems to be? Are these the talks that happens behind closed doors five layers deep, for months and months, or is it a hey come work for us type of deal.

I am just an undergraduate student, so I don’t quite know or understand what these various administrators do or what their role is per se. But is a provost just brought in to setup a program or something, bring in money, then move onto the next place? That is almost as it seem as though that is the case. I am not too sure how I feel about this exactly.

college, university, uw, university of washington, administration, provost

Leaving coComment

Well after partially screwing up a relationship or fully screwing it up, I decided to take a break from coComment for sometime. This isn’t due to the fact that I am no longer in the top position. It is due to what I just said, and I have been somewhat mad at myself for doing this. It is just stupid comments for God sake. I handled my comments that I left before February 5th or 6th moderately well, so I can do this on my own again. Surely on blogs that are not mine, I may not reply as quickly or at all. But seeing that a majority of the comments that I have been making or replying to is on my own blog, I don’t see me losing too much here.

Maybe I will come back in a few weeks or months, but not likely at this moment. The ride was exciting the first few weeks, but now it is gone. I am trying to change my life around, and such. Tuesday evening, I even decided to go to the library and study for a few hours, well five to be exact. Something I haven’t done in years, maybe since my first or second year here. Granted that I didn’t get home until one in the morning, it felt great, cannot explain why exactly.

Technorati Tags: cocomment, comments, blog, blogging, library, study

Update

I am doing a quick post to say why you have only seen my del.icio.us links here lately.

I have been under a crazy schedule. What do I mean? Its just after 8pm, and I just finished dinner. I got home around 7:30, and I left my room at 8:45 this morning. That what it has been for the past week or two. I do have a slew of posts to do, but since I am not Mr Speedy, nor do I have a few doubles of myself I have to figure out what’s best. Sadly my blog isn’t on the top of the list.

Here on this post, I was testing to see if the error Matt found, was fixed. It still didn’t index right at technorati. Finally after sending support requests in since Feburary, I heard back. It seems as though it had a bad database entry or something like that.

So this is another test post.

I am not sick or anything, so no need to worry about that, I just have been having 10.5 hour days with one break. I am going to do my Political Science paper now…

Technorati Tags: database, del.icio.us, error, homework, paper, political science, schedule, technorati

Living Floor

I was browsing Gizmodo, and was kind of shocked at one of the posts I saw. This post here. You are probably saying whoop-dee-do Ryan what’s the big deal with that, it’s just a post about a floor that reacts when you step on it. Yes it seems that it is some weird, maybe even boring invention.

Well, back in Autumn quarter of 2004 I took a class in one of the newest departments, DXArts at my university. The class provided a historical and critical overview of artists and scientists pioneering the digital arts. It also discussed important digital media issues from aesthetics, creative strategies, emerging trends, and socio-cultural aspirations. Our final project was to make a mini proposal of a piece of art that would be built 50-100 years from now.

My original project was going to be something from Star Wars. Basically a holographic media center. Between not being able to draw what I had in mind in Fireworks or freehand, and also the Teaching Assistant said that the idea was crap. So I was in a hole. Somehow I turned to mathematics and thought what I could do. This lead me to do some research in my favorite subject of mathematics, Chaos Theory.

I forget all the steps (side joke, you’ll get in a minute) I took, but you can find my proposal for the artwork that I named “Blue”, here. A quick overview of my project is there is a LCD screen the size of a billboard or so on the side of a building, and on the ground infront of it, then there would be an electronic sensoring pad of some type embedded in the sidewalk. Then everytime somebody steps on the sensor a bit of the image gets built. The images that are built are fractials.

In this frameset, I was told to think solely as an artist. So I didn’t need to figure out if the weight on the sensor equaled the size of the piece that was being built. Nor calculate the probability of multiple steps on the pad, people, etc at one specified period of time. Of course all of those statistics depend of the locatiom where “Blue” would be implemented.

So when I saw that post I was like that’s almost my project.

Technorati Tags: Gizmodo, living floor, school, media, university of washington, dxarts, digital media, blue