I’m taking the “online” session of General Chemistry I.  All the homework is done online, and we only physically meet six times, three Friday/Saturday session pairs.  Yesterday was the orientation, which included watching video presentations on how to use lab glassware and instruments, and on safety.  Today we had the first two labs.  The next [...]

Aw, the waiting game sucks; let’s play Hungry Hungry Hippos! — Homer Simpson

I finally got my application to UIS and all related materials ready, and shipped off via Fedex this afternoon, so the UIS admissions office should have it on Monday morning. If they think I’m a suitable candidate, they will forward my [...]

The latest version of Black Box now uses icons to represent relfections and hits, and can be played on either the normal 8×8 board with four atoms, or the larger 10×10 board with six atoms.
I’m not sure whether I’ll do any further work on this.  If I do, I’ll probably have to write my own [...]

Tom Harrison in his blog Monday Evening was kind enough to recognize a second grade teacher and me for our accomplishments in our mathematics courses. I enjoyed Linear Algebra very much, which is a good thing since if I am accepted to UIS, my minor will be mathematics, and for that I will be [...]

Back when I was in college before, and always short of money, I did what many students have done over the years, and subsisted largely on one of the least expensive foods available, boxed macaroni and cheese. But when you think of macaroni and cheese, don’t think of the high-quality product from the likes [...]

Tonight’s film, Rabbit-Proof Fence, was about children who in the 1930s were forcibly taken away from their aborigine mothers under Australia’s half-caste “education” program. Two sisters their cousin, ages 8-14, were taken to a boarding school 1200 miles away from their home. Despite seeing firsthand the cruel punishment meted out to captured runaways, [...]

Module 1 assignments 2 and 3 were to analyze the meaning of the student essay “Rick” from Reading Critically, Writing Well, and to analyze the writing. I posted my work just under an hour before the deadline. My response on the meaning of the essay was significantly different than those of the other [...]

The Computer Science deparment at UIS requests of applicants a sample of Java code they have written. They don’t give any particular guidance as to the desired size or complexity of the code. I am submitting a Black Box game applet, which I think should be sufficient to show that I’m reasonably proficient [...]

After much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, I finally decided on a subject for the autoiographical essay, which as I’ve previously explained here must be about another person or a significant event (on a single day). Presumably the subject should be a person or event that has had a profound influence on [...]

I just tried using FreeNX instead of X port forwarding with SSH. The problem with X port forwarding is that if your SSH connection dies for any reason, you lose your X session. You can use the ’screen’ program inside an xterm (or just in SSH directly) for console-style programs, but that doesn’t [...]