The forgetting continues...

Yesterday we went to Disneyland. I brought my office keys with me in case we needed to drop by for something. It was my attempt at being prepared. Little did I know that my preparedness yesterday would undermine my preparedness today. In my sleep-deprived state this morning, I forgot to get my office keys out of the other car. Here is a picture of this morning's work location...

Diversity includes the middle

With some demented intrigue I have been following the debates about gay marriage. I have posted before about why I think government should stop regulating marriage and leave it to churches to endorse marriage, so I'll leave additional commentary on that for another time.

Andrew Breitbart writes in his commentary "I fear the vicious and hypocritical path that the activist gay left is headed on will eventually be met with a backlash. If it already hasn't." For a self described "gay-friendly" person, this seems more than alarming.

I consider myself as a tolerant person, who wishes the same in return. I found a sigh of relief in his commentary. I have found that those who wish to embrace diversity have a rather narrow interpretation of what diversity includes. Diversity includes all positions along the spectrum from radically conservative ideas to radically liberal ideas. Diversity also includes traditionally held positions and values. If we exclude any of these positions, we cannot embrace diversity as it is. You may feel free to not include any of these groups, but in doing so, you cannot correctly claim diversity.

BONUS (from despair.com):

Scheduling

Today, I forgot an advising appointment. I wish that I could claim that it was an isolated event, but it isn't. Since I left consulting, I have not been able to remember the simplest things. I even have an iTouch that I use with Entourage (Mac version of Outlook). I think that I need a biomechanical device that records what I say and type, deciphers it into recognizable pieces, then schedules my life and work tasks for me.
*preproduction model schematic stolen from China*

Even with such a device I would probably disregard the prompts as malfunctions. But at least, I would have been prompted.

Easy controversy

I have been pondering how to improve the educational experiences of my students. Inevitably, I revert to planning a class that has more discussion and less lecture. I could start each class with a controversial topic from the readings and then guide discussion. The problems is how you evaluate such a class. Essay exams and writing assignments are a time consumptive proposition for me, and it would be difficult to write exams for general consumption. To exacerbate the problem, students don't even have to think critically and independently with all of the available information on the internet. Take for example ProCon.org which is a clearing house for quotes and information on controversial issues. Now even contentious issues have a Cliffs Notes online edition.

Great sites

In my internet meanderings, I have found three new time wasting sites.
WallStats
Indexed
and
Fail

I simultaneously love and hate the flexibility of my work.

Survey (part 2)

I have been having too much fun with surveymonkey.com. I am designing a bad survey to demonstrate the horrible things that you can ask. Feel free to participate if you wish. If you think that I am becoming a bigger geek than I was before, just wait for the regression results.
Click here to take a very bad survey

Rainbow Six

Pirates rock, but Navy Seals killing Somali pirates rocks even more. Congrats on a successful intervention! If I could only make that shot from that distance on rough seas, I would have beaten Rainbow Six long ago.