Good lord.

I think I’m done. Okay, so, it’s only a preliminary proposal, really, but I’ve got the HSC forms filled out. I’m sure I screwed it up somewhere but at least it’s done. I have all my qual reading done. I even have most of my stats/quant stuff done (including the problems). The crim stuff is going to be interesting because I’m not getting the bible until Monday.

It was about $55 worth of printing for the readings. Two binders of readings for the semester. That hurts.

I toyed with the idea of dropping a class and taking two hours of readings in the department on sports and delinquency. Then I talked to work and bargained my hours down some. 32 is still considered full time so I get full time benefits. The paycheck… Well, I’ll have to figure that out when I get to it. Even at 40 hours I wouldn’t be making enough to cover all my bills. (This is the part where I cross my fingers and pray for the tuition scholarship to come through.) But I think I should be okay, at least until Nov.-Dec. financially. The real worry is balancing 32 hours of work and 11 hours of grad school courses. I’ll have to cross my fingers on that too. And send out a couple of emails about my final decisions on the matter.

Which I’ll do now before I forget.

There. Done. I love Semagic drafting.

Let’s see, what else?

I’ve been getting a lot of sales calls since I moved here last month. Just today I’ve had five since around 10am. I finally figured out why they keep calling though; my old number is on the national DNCL, not this one. Time to add myself again!

I have mixed feelings about the National Do No Call List. On one hand, I love not getting phone solicitation. On the other, I’ve done that job and the more people sign up to things like the DNCL the faster people like me go out of business. And the DNCL has some glaring blind spots that will get you every time:

• Charitable organizations (which is why the FOP — Fraternal Order of Police — can call me about once a month to solicit donations)
• Organizations you’ve already done business with (so if you stay at night at, say, a Hampton Inn once three years ago, they can call you)

So the DNCL sort of misses a lot of the egregious offenders of phone solicitation.

I also found time this week to finish Bioshock. I went with the “good” ending and made it out of the game with 950 achievement points. Not bad for a first play through. When I have more time I want to do it a second time, try a different plasmid build and maybe even pay more attention to the philosophy of the game. It’s obviously based on objectivism (”Atlas” and if Andrew Ryan isn’t supposed to be Ayn Rand I’ll eat my shoes) and I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of direct quotes from Atlas, Shrugged but it’s been a while since I’ve read the book.

See, this is what I love about video games (Roger Ebert notwithstanding): they can be as socio-politically/intellectually deep as you want them to be. Bioshock is either a philosophical ramble through an ailing dystopia filled with egoists and scientists so devoted to pure research they lost their sense of humanity altogether or it’s a really fucking cool setting for a survival horror FPS game.

Someone linked me this video of Miss Teen South Carolina flubbing her geography on a question about how to improve geographical education in the US. I cringe for a variety of reasons.

Word of the day: exegesis

I have a lot more to talk about but, frankly, after working on this stuff for quant for about 8 hours today… I want to get off the computer and do something fun.

Just. What?

Um, someone just told me that they hope Morena Baccarin gets the part of Wonder Woman because she’s from Brazil and Wonder Woman is Amazonian.

…that — I really have no words where to start beyond, ‘you couldn’t wish for her to get the part because you think she’s talented?’