So, I went up to Janjangbureh for Thanksgiving this last week. Fun place, Janjangbureh is. Formerly named Georgetown, it sits on McCarthy Island in the middle of The Gambia River in the Central River Division of the country. Quiet streets with a funky mix of West Africa meets Colonial England. The air is fresh with an interesting smell I couldn’t place - but decidedly sweet - and there were more stars than you could ever imagine (thanks, in part, to the electricity being out on the island the whole time I was up there, removing any source of possible light pollution). Oh yeah, and I ate so much on Turkey Day that I nearly got sick.

Nearly.
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FYI: you’ll notice a new item at the bottom of the sidebar on the main page. This item links to ClustrMaps, a tracking service that will provide interesting statistics on where website visitors are physically located, based on their originating IP address. Should provide an additional bit of interesting trivia, do you think?

Thanks -

Matt

Yeah, that’s right baby! I’ve got a box at my home now. Built it from old broken computers at GTTI and convinced the administration there to let me bring it home to do work. They were thrilled with that idea, as several weeks ago I had submitted a request for a computer, which would have meant they’d have to spend money they don’t really have. This way, I’ve taken broken computers and made one working system from them that I can now use. Something from nothing - not too bad, eh?
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This goes out to any vets (in particular my PC recruiter, Carmen) who might be able to tell me what’s going on with Rhythm’s skin and fur in these pictures.
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More cute pics and vids of Rhythm. Poor girl, she’s lost a bunch of fur along the sides of her body and along her rear legs, and in back of her ears from those awful fleas. She’s got to have a pretty serious allergy to flea saliva or something… anyway, her morale is high now even if she’s not as cute to look at. Hopefully, her fur will begin to grow back soon (and hopefully she’ll stop scratching so much). On the plus side, her skin is clearing up - no more scaling, and all the little flea bites appear to be healing and (slowly) going away.
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In an earlier post (Failing, Fires, Flowers, and Fleas), I had mentioned something about either these fires occurring naturally due to the heat generated by decomposition, or by “rogue garbage arsonists.” Turns out, people do set fire to the garbage, because garbage piles up quicker than it’s often-times removed by the official services, so burning it is the only real way to get rid of the stuff in a timely manner. Interesting.

I’ve been spending too much time focusing on plans for two years in the future. Thoughts about grad school, where I’ll live, what I’ll do, so on and so forth has pulled my attention away from where it ought to be focused. Granted, I haven’t had more than my classes at GTTI to think about work-wise, but in an interest to prepare for the eventuality of starting this Statehouse gig (which supposedly should start soon!), I started some initial design for the app, and spent some time deciding on the system’s likely technological structure.
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I got a response from the School of Business Administration at the University of Vermont yesterday, to my inquiry about my “advanced standing” in their MBA program. It turns out that what this means, is that I could skip all of the core requirements and jump straight into the advanced coursework. Here are the details.
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Yes, I’m setting myself (and you, gentle reader) to experience random posts. These posts will cover something, or nothing, or anything in between. Generally, they’ll contain blurbs of stuffs-going-on that are interesting but don’t really necessitate an entire post of their own. That said, shall we begin?
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Wow, that’s a lot of F’s, isn’t it?

Let’s start with Failing. I gave my students their first programming exam on Wednesday last week, and unfortunately many of them didn’t do as well as I would have liked.
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