Random thoughts

Podcasts:
I have been listening to Planet3rry’s podcast Gravity @ 1053 today. I thought I was subscribed to it, but apparently not. He keeps mentioning on his blog that he has an episode about ready to go out. But, I never catch when one is actually posted. So I was not aware that he was really producing. Anyway, I am catching up. I have heard 3 today and my ears are not bleeding yet.

It is a running related podcast.Missionary Talks Logo

Time to vote. A new month is upon us. If you have voted for my podcast during the month of January, you need to vote again in February at Podcast Alley. This is a monthly voting process. You do have to give your email address, but I have not gotten any spam from them yet. Voting each month is kind of a drag, but it at least gives a podcaster an idea of how many are active listeners and it is kinda fun to watch the numbers. Looks like my show will end up in 37th place in the Religion & Spirituality category. That is about where I was for the month of December.

Also, there is Digg. At Digg you don’t have to vote every month. That is nice for the voters, but not so much for the podcasters. This means that once you get your main listeners to digg you, you have little chance of moving up in the standings. It really is just a matter of how many listeners you have. Not how many are rabid fans.

I am trying to promote my podcast as much as possible. If anyone could mention my show at your blog, that would be a great help. Especially if your blog might have religious type readers.

Running:
Yesterday I took my son out for a nice long run. He was doing great after 25 minutes (which was our goal), so I pushed him a bit further. He ran for 40 minutes and covered 5.05 Km. That is not a blazing pace, but it is the first time he has covered that distance. We had previously just been working on moving along consistently (at a higher pace), yesterday I was interested in starting to work up his distance. I did not expect to be able to run that far. He did very well. He may be running his first 5K race sooner than expected.

Blogging:
I wanted to have a post every day this month. I missed 2 days somehow. But, there are some days where I had more than one post, so I made up for the misses. I don’t really have a goal to blog every day, it just worked out that way this month. Maybe it will continue.

Thanks for helping me have a good start to the new year. Send people this way to see what is going on.

Will miracles never cease?

I got a reply back from my grad school today. They are going to accept my paper without penalty. Of course, when they read it they will be the ones penalized. Not my best work. 🙂

I like my school, but they are not the most merciful. Which I can actually understand. What is the point of having rules if you are not going to enforce them. They have to draw a line. If you don’t stick to where the line is drawn, then you set yourself up for people wanting to walk all over you.

I can just see it now. Two years from now someone will get an “F” on a class because they submit their final paper 1 day late and they will point the school back to this blog posting. What a mess that can cause.

Whew! That is over…kinda

I got my paper done. I am somewhat pleased with it. I don’t think it is as organized as it could be, but that is what college papers are about. I certainly would spend a lot more time with it cleaning it up before submitting it to a magazine.

Today was the deadline. It absolutely had to be postmarked today. Well…that did not happen. I have written the college to find out if they will have mercy on me for one day. Knowing them, they will not. But, I am going to hold out hope. There is nothing I can do to change that at this point.

The paper was done at 3:15. An hour and 15 minutes before the post office closed. We had just filled up the ink cartridges on the printer so that I would definitely have enough ink. Only problem was that while changing the cartridge, I did not know that the printer would tell the Mac to disable it. So the Mac would not communicate to the printer. By the time I got that figured out I had already sent the print job to the printer a couple of times. It finally started printing at 3:45. Because I wanted it to print at a higher quality, I knew it would take a bit longer. Fortunately we only live 5 minutes from a post office.

Just a word of advice. When a printer says it prints 17 pages per minute, remember that is on the lowest quality setting. It took 2 minutes per page to print my document. It finished printing at 4:20. 10 minutes to get to the post office should be plenty.

I arrived at the post office with 5 minutes to spare. CLOSED!

Closed? Yup. That branch closes at 4:00 whereas the branch where our PO Box is closes at 4:30. That was 20 minutes away. By the time I got there they were long gone. I did not really expect to catch anyone there since they are usually gone 10 minutes before closing time.

So, here I sit with my paper on my desk waiting to go to the post office tomorrow morning. Here’s to hoping they will have mercy.

Moving along

I took the final exam today. Ouch! Some of the material I knew quite well. Unfortunately those weren’t the things he asked on the test.

I am writing my final paper exposing the evils of Outcome Based Education. I am 8 pages into a 10-15 page paper. I think that is not a bad start. I basically have my outline together now and should be able to flesh it out well tomorrow after a good night’s rest (like 6 hours or so). I don’t think it will be all that bad. I won’t have the number of references that the teacher would like for me to have. I should have 15 or more sources for my research. I have 5 main resources, but there is always Wikipedia. My last paper I got by fine leaning pretty heavily on material that I found on-line. Maybe I can get by with it here too.

Funny, I am starting to think Outcome Based Education may not be all that bad. If Dr. Reese would just take into account that I don’t have a college library available to me and that I did not get my books until late in the semester. Also I had to suffer through 95+ degree days through the month of December. Surely I have put forth enough effort that he will give me a good grade on the final exam even though I did not show that I knew the material well. Oh, and I am ADD too, that should count for at least a whole letter grade.

Besides, I wrote a very entertaining piece for the final essay. He should give me credit for that. I know that talking about the virtues of Wikipedia and pimping my podcast don’t really show my knowledge of the changes in education in the US from the 1600s to the present, but it was fun to write. I enjoyed myself in the process. That too should be worth another letter grade.

Crunch time

I had so many things that I wanted to post to the blog tonight. Normally on Sunday evening I get a chance to veg. But, I am way too far behind on getting a class knocked out for my Master’s Degree. I have a 10-15 page paper due on Tuesday and I have not started writing it. I did, at least, choose a topic yesterday.

I will take my final exam tomorrow while also working on my paper. Then I have to have it all postmarked on Tuesday. That means it must be done and at the post office by 4:30 in the afternoon.

Yikes!