Huh...

I enjoy firing up Solitaire in Windows for a few minutes between tasks. Usually I try to do something like play as fast as I can, or play mindlessly without strategy, or adopt rules for deciding between choices. But usually there is no point in playing the game all the way through.

Anyway, I was just playing on my Sony VAIO S270P laptop, which runs a 1.7GHz Pentium-M chipset, and was amused that somewhere in the past five years Microsoft finally fixed an oddity in Solitaire. The little animation at the end of the game originally ran on much slower machines many Windows ago. And there was never any adjustment to the timing, so it would just ZOOP! by even on 200MHz machines. But they've apparently realized how dumb this looked and put a timing delay in the steps, so it works just fine in Windows XP Pro now on, what is for me, a very hot machine.

It's important to test these things from time to time.

Thought you should know.

Dr. Phil

The End of Grading Awards

The last big round of grading I have to do each semester is something that I do to myself. Otherwise I'd be able to join my colleagues and be done with grades last week rather than finishing up just before the final noon deadline on the Tuesdays after Finals Week.

This is all about a science literacy book report that I require in all my classes. It's a pet project of mine. I always warn the students that they should watch out whenever they run into a research/pet project of a professor in their classes -- and take the assignment really seriously. (grin)

Out of some 126 papers this semester, most are pretty good. And even good papers can have typos and wrong word forms -- it isn't automatically a sign of failure or stupidity. Those of us involved in the writing game at all know that proofreading is difficult. Spellcheckers, alas, cannot tell you that a perfectly spelt word happens to be the wrong one. And grammar checkers -- don't get me started on those! (double-grin)

However, as I'm grading and recording the grades on a worksheet, I find myself scribbling the real boners in the margins. Now that I've a blog, I can share these -- without attribution, of course. I'm not trying to belittle anyone, even with my snarky little comments. (triple-word-score-grin)

( On with the show... )

Why do I subject myself to this if I complain about being tortured (or at least the tortured English)? For one thing, I am appalled at the number of students who claim they don't ever read any books -- or take almost pride in not having had to read a whole book since elementary school. For someone to whom reading/breathing are close to equivalent acts, this is terrible! Someone has to do something! So why do I torture the students? Because so many of them end up, sometimes grudgingly, acknowledging that they found such-and-such a book fun, exciting -- and for once someone in college is asking for them to have an opinion about something! Sure I do it for science literacy. And to improve their minds and make them more open to books.

And maybe, someday, when Dr. Phil has a science fiction book out there, some of my former students who would otherwise never read SF and certainly have no reason to suck up to Dr. Phil any more, will become part of my audience. Because they'll remember I was a storyteller in class, and I always had a reason for the story. (big-end-of-semester-grin)

Some of us are seriously into this "life-long learning" crap...

Dr. Phil