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

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

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

Quiz 1 Returned

Just got my quiz back on Friday. I got only a few points below the average. Which sets me at around a 3.0 overall. For those of you that aren’t in the states, the max you can get is a 4.0. I am relatively happy about this. My TA gave me a few remarks, I talked to her after class and she’s like you did well, but you forgot to explain these two things in the essay. I told here that I was about to those points and such. She acknowledged the fact that she could tell that I was going to talk about them. I just wanted to say give me two more points then for that.

Quiz 1

Thursday just about killed me. I had a quiz in Political Science, work, DASA meeting, my night class, then the library (for about 20 minutes). I was gone from 10:30 am till just after 8 that night. Pretty much I paid for that Thursday and somewhat Friday morning. But of course I didn’t get to eat too much, so that is why I had a splitting headache after I got home Thursday night, and woke up at midnight or so with one. Instead of getting up like I planned to I just continued to sleep. The only thing I probably would have done is eat, but the only thing I really have in my cubbord chili. And chili at that time wouldn’t sit particularly well after a while.

I think the quiz in my political science class went fine. I have to check the schedule because although the professor called it a quiz, it was pretty lengthy. On the three IDs that we had to do, I wrote a page in all. Which for me is pretty good. I think and I am hoping I did pretty well on the quiz. I will find that out in a few days.

Work was work. I have been struggling to get some files to work properly. One program, will say this file is crap and has tons of errors. Then another program says that file is all good. I am totally unfamilar with the material, so in the Braille program I can’t tell if everything is being seen. Not to mention that I don’t know the computer language language that they are written in to well.

Then I had to deal with a co-worker. He usually comes in and checks his gmail for the first 20 or so minutes of his shift. My boss has told him that he’s not allowed to do that, we can check mail for 5 or so minutes, but not that long. Of course my co-worker says I check my email. Well, yes I do check mine at work, but he doesn’t realize that I come in almost every day an hour early and stay 30 minutes to an hour every day. Then after a decent amount of time went by I reminded him how he should think about checking the work account. Of course I had to move because the computer I normally work at is set up with Outlook Express.

Of course, instead of grabbing the pdf and letting me go back to work, he had to examine and comment on the thing. What happens is we get a request to do a chapter at a time instead of each picture. Makes sense really, some chapers are 20 to 30 pages, and sometimes have up to about four images per page. Well my co-worker saw that this chapter only had like one or two images, and made a comment about how dumb it was that they had sent us the whole chapter versus the few pages a picture is on. I kindly reminded him how books are scanned and coverted to both plain text and a pdf on a chapter by chapter basis and that it isn’t this partiular senders job to pick out the images. My co-worker didn’t like the idea of that, and how it was a waste of time. I pointed out that it took him maybe a whole minute or two to scroll through this pdf. He told me that i really didn’t understand what it took to make these graphics. Uhm ok, I don’t know how to? How about no? I have been working there since Oct ’03, when I had to hand trace each image on the computer from a screen cap from a pdf, and not the quick task of copying it from a pdf, copying to PhotoShop, adding some Braille in Corel and embossing it.

Second Day of School

I meant to blog yesterday, but just didn’t get around to it. Anyway here it goes. Yesterday was the first day of my fourth year. I may as well as say it is my first. I think I actually get to start my degree this year. I am taking Macroeconomics and a Political Science course.

I am pretty excited for the Political Science course. The instructor seems pretty excited about the course. I asked him a simple question and he said he’d e-mail me the answer. So thinking that I would never get the answer, I just went on. Well while I was checking my email at work, I saw that he had sent me my answer. I got a three paragraph essay practically.

I was quite shocked, and now want to kick ass in there. I also ran into my friend Grace, a real sweetie, we plan to hang out. Today was a long day, so that’s all I have, I am beat.

Technorati Tags: class, poli sci, professor