rebuttal of myself

i seem to expect that all university classes should be amazingly well taught and should totally change your life. i must have gotten this from tv, but in real life, classes are taught by people and real people tend to…

away message

ok. so from august 8th through august 17th i’ll be in almaty, kazakhstan. depending on my success in getting access to the internet, i plan to update my travails on a fairly regular basis, and if i have any luck…

Getting to Almaty

7AM Friday, Frankfurt weird analog departure signs where the letters flip…bicycles in the airport…toblerone smart car on display…people smoking and smelling a wee bit ripe… people address me in english. do i look like i speak english? and of course…

my kazakhstan trip in brief

monday 8/12 i redesigned the entire database. what used to look logically like this: …now looks like this: that it had only taken me a day to totally revamp what had previously taken me several weeks to design and build…

the fallacy of optimism

fate must be preparing to send me something very special because i have this gut feeling that things have been rather crappy lately. let me count the ways: i came home tonight to find that the over-large, heavy miniblinds on…

fallacy, eh?

i just discovered today that the university of north carolina now considers me a resident of the state of north carolina. the benefit? my graduate education over the next two years has dropped from $32,000 to $0. *jumping up and…

new project

i’m working on a database to track trainings for a project in kenya. somehow the kenyan(s) who designed it initially created one massively big flatfile (picture a very large excel spreadsheet with lots of gaps and duplicates) to hold all…