dennisjudd.com

18 glorious, no school days to enjoy until the fall semester starts up.
I did send my college’s testing center this email earlier today. It will be interesting to see what, if any, response I get back:

Yesterday morning I very quickly made a decision that would have an impact on my testing experience later on that afternoon. I choose coffee over taking a shower. With summer class, work, and two children under the age of two in the house I find myself making decisions like that more and more. Of course that’s really of no concern to anyone in the testing center, however, later that day when I arrived to take my final exam for my online class I was told that there was a no hat policy, and that I had to take it off.
My problem isn’t that I don’t understand the policy. I can reasonably see why it would be in place with new advances in technology, and student’s general sneakiness. I get it. What I don’t get is why this “policy” isn’t documented anywhere on the testing center site, or any of the linked *.pdf files that state the items of interest as:
-You MUST present your telecourse ID card
AND a picture ID
-Take tests at either center
-Allow at least 90 minutes before closing
And what really just confuses the heck out of me is that I was told I had to take my hat off (thereby releasing my un-showered hair into a position that closely resembles a person who has been slightly electrocuted….I’m actually quite certain that a small child nearby was crying) but then I am allowed to take my test with my TI 84 calculator in hand.
Let me repeat that, my TI 84 calculator, which is probably several more times powerful than the computer systems used in the Apollo moon landing. Which has probably enough memory built into it for my entire algebra text book to be entered. Odds are if I dropped this thing into a group of monkeys they would probably worship it as a god for the next few thousand years…..yet my ability to cheat or do whatever other nefarious deed is rendered null by removal of my hat? What am I an evil Frosty the Snowman?
I’ll probably never understand all the reasons why wearing a hat is of major concern, and that’s fine. It’s not my job to create, mandate or enforce policies for testing…but at least let’s give people a fighting chance by telling them of these policy’s ahead of time (for example on the handy dandy website for the testing center) so they can be aware that they need to make time for that shower. That way they can avoid looking like an idiot, and you won’t have to read their complaining emails anymore. It’s a win win.
Dennis Judd

Finals week….the summer of Algebra hell is almost at an end, now I just need to fake understanding this stuff until Thursday and then I can rest for a whole two weeks until Algebra 112 starts up…..wait…what?
btw, did I mention that Connor got a hair cut last week?

So for the last two times that I’ve worked on my sister-in-laws laptop I’ve been under a lot of pressure, with a little amount of free time. The first time we were getting married, so all I was able to do was my basic round of tweaking and tuning. I didn’t want to get to into the modifications of services and then have her get back to CA with it not working.
The more recent time was when Amelia was born and she came out to help for three weeks. Most of my old modifications were present and running fine, so I did a recheck up and even popped the hard drive out to scan it on my computer. Everything was pretty much set, and it was running as good as you could get XP on a laptop with 256mb or ram (I upgraded her to 768 actually as a thank you for coming out). There was however one lingering issue, that I had not been able to fix either time…the DVD player was skipping.
Now when I say skipping, I mean the video and audio were lagging every half second almost like some type of bottle neck was stopping it from getting the data off the dvd quickly enough. Apparently she’d had the dvd drive replaced a few times by the help desk of whatever big box store she bought it from, and it fixed it for a while but the problem always came back. I tried messing with audio codecs, video codecs, shared video memory sizes just about everything I could think of. I even check Compaq’s side about dvd playback issues or patches, but didn’t find anything.
Then I checked the IDE channel for the DVD drive…and sure enough it was set to PIO mode instead of DMA. No matter what I did I couldn’t get it to change to DMA mode….so in the device manager I deleted the secondary IDE channel and rebooted. Two minutes later I was watching a DVD with no skipping or problems at all…..and now that I knew what to look for, there was an IDE channel firmware patch on Compaq’s site after all.
So until I hear otherwise, I’m considering this problem solved and it only took me two years.

Stolen from geekologie…

Kat just sent this to me….yes it did make me laugh.

Just a few updates…
- Juliet is still alive….still giving her antibiotics and blood pressure pills, and she gets a 3oz can of cat food every night. We’re trying to avoid having to give her lactated ringers for the rest of her life. Considering everything that happened to her, honestly it’s amazing she’s alive.
- School is going pretty well. While Jen’s family was in town to visit Amelia I pretty much locked myself in my office and did math homework as much as I could. So that put’s me a week ahead, and I got a good grade on my last exam so I’m pretty happy about that. If I can just keep the momentum up, I might just escape with my life…boy was a summer class a bad idea.
- There is a Binny’s supposedly being built in Algonquin….how freaking cool is that?
- There is a new Call of Duty: World at War coming out, but here’s my thing. Call of Duty 4 was great…but Call of Duty 3 sucked ass. I mean seriously, it was a horrible game and there were times I just rolled my eyes at the screen while playing it. So I have to ask why in gods name would they have the same developer (Treyarch) make this one. Am I going to have to twirl the left analog stick again to plant the C4 firing pin?
- Amelia is doing well and so is Connor. Jen’s taking great care of them and all their updates are on their site. Although I took this picture of Connor yesterday and had to share:

It’s easy really, if you cube the binomial then x^3+64 = (x+4)(x^2-4x+16)

With everybody here to help us with Amelia I figured it would be a good time to get some extra projects done that have been on my “to do” list for a while.
A while back when my sister Terri moved, I was at home depot to grab some parts for her house and saw these three outside lights on clearance. So I grabbed them and finally put them all up this weekend. Anything had to be better than the plastic cheapo ones that were up there.

This is the old plastic outside light, we had three of them

Here is the new outside light, it’s metal, glass, has a photosensor and is a CFL
And of course I had help putting them all together:

Little itty babies are kind of a contradiction of themselves.
On one hand they need constant attention and care about every two hours, either feeding or diapter changing and usually both. But compared to a very active 14 month old who can reach at least three inches into any counter, they are every easy to contain and integrate with other activites. Want to fold the laundry? No problem. Want to play a video game? Amelia could care less. Try to do any of this around Connor and suddenly he only wants to do what you want to do.
It’s kind of like a tornado…..nothing but unfocused energy swirling around destructivly on the outside, and in the center calm peacefulness.
Anyways, so that’s why I’m no posting a lot. When I do get on my computer it’s to do Algebra homework for my summer class (which I need to be doing right now…..). Thankfully our neighbors took pity on me and mowed the lawn for me. It was really nice of them, and was a big help. I think I do a lot of things for people in my day to day life, but it’s still weird when somebody does something for me.
Anyways back to factoring cubes….