iMac G3, Strawberry Flavour

Well, now on the desk in my office there are two computers running: in Intel Jooyontech PC running Ubuntu Linux, and a Strawberry iMac G3 — you know, the blobject kind of thing like the one pictured on the right. The former I bought several years ago from a Korea-blogger named Shawn, not too long before his unfortunate suicide in China. The iMac, the more recent addition to my roomful of PCs, was given to me by another professor down the hall named Nico. I plugged in my wireless laptop and keyboard to see whether it’d work for me, and …

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Dozens of Hours Down, Three Hours to Go.

I have precisely three classes left this semester, each one hour long. Well, actually, fifty minutes, but you get the idea. This evening, a final-exam postmortem with my English Through Drama class, and a final meeting with my evening Intermediate Composition class, where the students will write me a letter, at my request, about what they’ve learned in the last 15 weeks. Tomorrow morning, I’ll have another one-hour meeting with my other Composition students and they’ll do the same thing. From then on, it’s all just about assigning final grades, marking one written final exam, and wading my way through …

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Ogallala Rewrite Continues

I’ve just hit 2300 words in my rewrite of Ogallala, which puts me at just under halfway for the target wordcount. (I’m going to shoot for 6000 words, though 7000 will be okay too if necessary.) One of the things I learned at Clarion came into play in my rewrite, which is about characterization. Yes, some pretty strong objections were issued regarding the poor handling of science in the story. But of course, aside from some of my own goofs, I was also aware that some of the science involved was messed-up, because in one way the story is about …

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청연 (Blue Swallow)

I just saw the best Korean movie I’ve seen in years, a biopic about Park Kyung Won — the first civilian female Korean aviator — but before I talk about that, I want to tell a story which might help explain why I think so highly of the film. I have many excellent students. By excellent, I mean intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, and compassionate. I mean hardworking and relatively critical-minded. One of my moist outstanding students — someone who’s been abroad, who’s got an excellent handle on English, who gets Western culture just that little bit better than her classmates, in …

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What Have You Learned in This Class?

There was a chorus of amused laughter today when I handed out the preview for the final exam in one of my classes. The text consists of two questions: one, mandatory, and the other a choice from three possible topics. I decided to mention only the possible topics for the questions of choice, but to reveal the whole question for the mandatory one. Which, in essence, was the same as the title of this post: What have you learned in this class? This question was, of course, followed by two paragraphs of elaboration, but none of it too challenging: just …

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32 Questions

ganked from badassbroccoli: o1. my uncle once: rode a motorbike all around rural Quebec. o2. never in my life: have I been as happy as I am now. o3. when i was five: I had to wear a patch on my good eye, and banged into everything in my way when I went walking. o4. high School is: no kind of place to learn anything. o5. i once met: the Dalai Lama. o6. there’s this girl i know who: who writes a lot about gay and transgendered people in my writing course, and who has, perhaps for this reason, begun …

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Welcome to the Server Room (to the tune of Welcome to the Jungle)

On one of the mailing lists I was on, someone riffed on the idea of a certain Guns’n’Roses song being adapted for sysadmins. I came up with all the lyrics except the first line. Fun like this is why I am still on this mailing list… and why I don’t sleep enough. Welcome to the server room, we’ve got fun and games… We got all the passwords here, for all the usernames. We are the people that can find Whatever you download If you got the login, honey, We got your node Chorus: In the server room Welcome to the …

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Flickring

I’ve added loads of photos to my Flickr account–linked in the sidebar–in the last few days. Today, I added shots from today, an outing with Lime around Bucheon. Users on my contacts list can see more pics, including pics of Lime, who’s forbidden public posting of any pictures of her, for reasons I’ve discussed before on this blog. Anyway, lots of new pics to see. I’m making this pro account worth the price.

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Ogallala Rewrite

Inspired by Alfred Bester’s example, I’m going to worry less about exactly how the science works in the rewrite of this story. This will infuriate some readers, maybe — though I think it can be balanced if I work things just right. In the original draft, the science was actually quite faulty according to the dominant model we have now about icecaps melting, and the implications of the melt were totally misconstructed by one character, though not by accident. I think I can still work in some of that, but actually, I think I can do a better job of …

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The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester

I decided to just relax and do some reading for enjoyment — after all the editing and other busy-work I’ve been doing for over a week now, I needed that. So anyway, I just finished reading this book today, and very much enjoyed it. As I posted over at AllConsuming moments ago, I would be all too happy to recommend it to friends, as my friend Charlie recommended it to me long ago: There’s a good reason this novel is on so many SF top-lists. It’s an excellent novel, because it immerses you in a world, and then propels you …

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