Following in Chuq’s footsteps, I have moved from WordPress over to TypePad. Here’s the new feed

I’ve spent more than a month contemplating dealing with comment spam, and have given up. I’m more likely to write if I don’t have technical issues like that.

It’s been long hard slog but the semester is over. I don’t think I should have re-started blogging that close to finals week. Two finals, two final assignments, an American Kenpo seminar, and a USSD belt test all wrapped into just about 10 days made for, well, too much to do.

But it’s over, and I hope to get myself back to writing on a more regular basis.

Once I’ve graded all the homework that backed up on my for my TA job.

I’ve been going to the local United Studios of Self-Defense dojo here in North Vancouver for about 6 months. It’s not Parker Kenpo, which I studied for about four years with John Sepulveda in Santa Clara, but it’s still a good workout and I can certainly use the exercise.

With finals coming up and time getting short to finish assignments, I find that time in the dojo does me extra good. Monday night I went in pretty down and low energy and came out (after a warm-up, an hour of group class, a half-hour of semi-private lesson, and a cool-down) tired but happy.

One reason? I actually got popped in the groin by a fellow student. One of the big differences between my previous study and this school is the level of contact, which is much lower here then I’m used to (or that I used to be used to). When Denny’s kick got close enough to tap my cup, it actually felt good. (She was mortified, and the other students were worried that I was hurt, but all Sensei Steve said was “that’d make me keep my distance” )

it’s because of some of the anti-comment-spam stuff. I’m trying to decide whether I should fix it or just move over to TypePad or something where I don’t have to worry about it.

Thanks for trying, though.

They Thought They Were Free:

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

How many Americans have reached this “one day, too late?” We Move To Canada explains why she doesn’t feel comfortable voting in the US elections. How many of us are sickened enough by Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons and Darth Cheney’s “no-brainer?”

Will it be enough?

Currently I have two part time jobs: TA for an undergraduate business MIS class; and Sr. Programmer for a small game company over town*. Although they seem very different, there is a thread between them: they’re both teaching jobs.

The TA job is obviously a teaching job: one day a week I hold three (roughly identical) labs or tutorials in which I demonstrate the basic use of software while the students (mostly) follow along. We’ve done Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio so far. Most of the material is very basic. In addition I hold three hours a week (over two days) of office hours. So far I’ve had a total of two visitors, so the office hours are generally an excuse to sit in a room and do my own reading or homework. The last two weeks I’ve put in 12 hours or so of grading about 46 papers. For all this I get paid (or at least I’m told I do — I haven’t been paid yet) a reasonable amount, considering that I’m a graduate student and I want to find out what teaching is like. This experience is very different from my teaching at PAVI over the summer semester and I value it for demonstrating what more conventional teaching is like.

The Sr. Programmer job is perhaps less obvious, but it’s still a teaching job. The small team I’m working in is new and quite young, as is my boss the CTO (OK, he’s only young compared to me). My job is not just to create code, but to provide my experience to the younger programmers and to be a kind of security blanket for the CTO, who’s quite competent but overworked. So I review designs and help make overall plans (like how the version control system should be used or how projects should be organized). Even though the projects are small (we’re doing casual games) it’s still nice to be well organized and the experience of working in a more formalized way will be good for everyone when they work on a more complex and higher-stress project.

Before entering graduate school I did a full set of assessment tests this spring with what they call an “industrial psychologist”. The tests included intelligence testing as well as aptitude and interest assessments. The top result was University Professor, which surprised me. Although perhaps it shouldn’t have, given that both my parents held advanced degrees and my father taught (statistics and applied mathematics) at Columbia, UCLA, and the University of Oregon. I have generally enjoyed lecturing on development and the mentoring portion of the management job. A significant reason I’m taking the MBA is because I need a master’s degree to teach at an accredited game development school in the US, and the MBA is therefore “dual purpose” for me.

So this matter of teaching is looming large…

*”over town” is local slang for “in Vancouver proper,” or so we’re told. It’s possible that it’s an elaborate gag on the newly arrived Americans, but I don’t think so. People don’t laugh at us if we say it, and we do occasionally hear others use the phrase. And besides, I think Canadians are generally too nice to do something mean like that.

Today is called the feast of Crispian… He that shall live this day and see old age will yearly, on the vigil, feast his neighbors….

Well here we are. Or at least here I am. I rather doubt that anyone is reading this after almost a year’s hiatus. I could not resist re-starting on the date of the most thrilling apocryphal speech ever written.

Life has, as they say, changed. I am the fourth student in my household, now. I’ve taken my first midterm in over 20 years (I predict an 83, 28 if he grades in Celsius). I’ve also (briefly) had three part-time jobs simultaneously…now fortunately down to two, and possibly down to one next semester.

I’ve got too much to do, but I find I miss this too much to stop completely. Not sure how often I’ll be writing. Not sure that I won’t be moving over to TypePad or some other service. Not sure what the subject matter will be, except it’ll interest me. Hopefully that will interest a few other people too.

I think I can promise a brief review of Max Brooks’ World War Z and Doug Coupland’s jPod. Possibly some pictures. Definitely some comments on the subject of game programming and mentoring younger programmers. And possibly a word or two on the subject of getting an MBA, too.

All things are ready if our minds be so….