tbradshaw.net

Soon after posting my quick experiences with Planet, I received a suggestion from Brent O’Connor to check out Bloglines. Bloglines is a free (and apparently quite popular) service for aggregating blogs similar to Planet plus a bunch of other functionality as well. Sounded good to me, so I decided to try it out. Soon after experimenting with Bloglines, I received a pm on EnterTheGame asking for a comparison of the two. Another great idea.

So, as a way of collecting my own notes and sharing a bit with anyone that’s curious, here is my comparison/contrast of Planet vs. Bloglines.

Methodology

First, there’s an immediate difference in the methodology between Planet and Bloglines.

Planet is a quick and simple Python script that takes a set of feed URI’s, a touch of metadata, and generates a single HTML page with all of the posts in chronological order. That’s it, the whole enchilada. As such, Planet is very simple to use, but certainly requires a certain amount of base knowledge to use. Things like editing text files on a web server and setting up a cron job are expected prerequisites. No problem for me or most people that Planet serves. It has a very “do it yourself” kind of feel, it’s one web tool in the toolbox of self-sufficient web usage.

Bloglines, on the other hand, is a fully featured, fully loaded, full service, feed aggregation and blog publishing service provider. It’s apparent in the feel that this is a group of people providing services to web users of all skill levels. I would imagine that little background knowledge is necessary to make full use of Bloglines’ functionality. It also makes an attempt to be not just one web tool in the toolbox, but a complete toolbox for feed handling. A noble goal, for sure.

Planet vs. Bloglines winner in this category? Tie. There is nothing wrong with either methodology. It just depends on what the user is looking for.

Feed Support

It’s kind of sad, but landscape the blogosphere is a nasty conglomerate of feed types in varying stages of compliance with a range of standards. As such, the ability of any truely useful application is often measured by the range of well-formed (and perhaps mal-formed) feeds that it can handle.

Planet appears to have problems with the RSS feeds available from Xanga. I have this hunch that these feeds fall into the “mal-formed” category of RSS feeds, but it would still be nice if they were handled in such a fashion that the nastiness of the Xanga feed generation were invisible to the user. One can read my previous post for how mangled it is. Also, generally speaking, Planet uses a tool written out-of-house for handling it’s feed parsing. So these problems might not be in Planet code proper, but I’m still going to refer to them as “planet problems”.

Bloglines, on the other hand, seems to be able to handle Xanga feeds superbly. I have a feeling this has very little to do with standards compliance, and instead a lot to do with some custom handling of Xanga’s nastiness. In fact, when adding feeds to Bloglines there are four methodologies available. First, you can just enter the URI of a blog or a feed. If you enter the URI of a blog, it will attempt to find a feed and if you enter the URI of a feed… well that’s just kind of obvious. The other three methods for adding feeds are to enter the username of a blog writer from the providers Blogger, LiveJournal, or Xanga, respectively. Bloglines then takes care of the rest for finding the feed and adding a subscription. It kind of makes me cringe as a standards-loving geek that this is necessary, but I think this is definitely the best way to handle it for the vast majority of users.

Bloglines vs. Planet? Bloglines, definitely. Planet is definitely written to the “general case” and in the case of Xanga, it shows. Bloglines definitely felt like it was “right”, even if the implementation under the hood might be nasty. But then again, a user doesn’t have to worry about the source of a provided service, heh heh.

Extra Features

Planet doesn’t really have any extra features. It does generate a few feeds for the entire aggregated stream, which is nice. But besides that, Planet does only what it set out to do, generate a static HTML page after aggregating the given feeds. Very UNIX like, “do one thing and do it well”.

Bloglines has a load of extra features. You can arrange feeds into “folders” like categories, read them based on those categories or all at once. It has a dynamic presentation, rather than a static presentation, and as such you can do things like “view the posts from the last 24 hours” and stuff like that. In fact, by default Bloglines only displays the posts that are new since your last visit. Pretty cool idea, kind of turns blog reading towards the email reading paradigm rather than the web reading paradigm. One can even enable an email notification for when a feed has updated. I’ve probably only scratched the surface, but Bloglines seems to provide a lot. (I didn’t even mention the fact that they also do blog hosting and publication.

Display

Planet provides a robust templating system that allows the user to pretty much generate anything that they can think up. Provided that they know how to edit a template file, anyway. This is readily apparent when cruising around other sites that use Planet and see just how much variance that there is.

Bloglines has a pretty basic and rigid display, no doubt a concerted effort between their datamodel decisions for all of those features and their desire for consistant branding for the service they provide.

Planet vs. Bloglines? I think Planet has to take the cake on this one. While some may love Bloglines interface, I don’t know how being able to output anything can be beat.

Conclusion

This is where this relatively objective review turns into a wholly opinionated blog entry. If you’re really wondering which you should use between Planet and Bloglines, focus on the top part of this “review”.

Display is really the most important part of a blog aggregator for me, and this is where Planet plays it’s trump. While Bloglines does a great job of moving the paradigm of reading blog entries to more of a piece-meal email reading type of activity, that’s really just not what I want. I read blogs as part of my morning, daily, and nightly reading routine, one that is quite comfortably set in the reading webpages/reading a newspaper paradigm. And while Bloglines can also be set to show all the posts in a given range, those posts are always grouped by the feed. I adore how the default Planet output is to have all blog entries sorted into one chronology. I just find this more entertaining and vibrant to read, especially with the right theme. I can’t get Bloglines to reproduce this configuration.

Feed support is also important, but I think I might be able to get around the problems myself. I could either patch the library Planet uses to handle Xanga feeds as a special case, or more likely I’ll try some free service like FeedBurner to do all of the heavy lifting.

Methodology is completely a personal preference, and so I consider this the least important aspect of the service. I lean towards “do-it-yourself” kinds of tools, so I guess Planet wins for me personally in this regard.

In closing, Bloglines is pretty damn cool… but I think I’m going to keep working on my Planet based aggregator to see if I can get it to the state that I want it to be.

Heh, the title of this entry makes it sounds like I’m doing something really scientific. Well, not really. I’ve recently been experimenting with using the planet web log aggregator to scoop up a lot of the blogs that I would like to read more, but usually don’t for lack of a convienent way to do it.

So I’ve tried setting up planet as a personal aggregator at http://www.tbradshaw.net/agg and see if I can get it to something that I would consider useful for my daily reading routine. So far it’s promising, if a bit unweildy.

The main problem right now is with those of my friends and aquaintences that use Xanga to host their web blog. It seems that Xanga puts off some badly formed RSS, which makes their entries show up in my aggregator all wacked out. Instead of getting a nice entry at the correct date for each of their entries, I get instead a single “dateless” blog entry that shows up as “today” and contains every blog post that is currently available in the feed.

It’s still getting the content, more or less, but it’s kind of ruining the nice chronology that makes a nice planet site. I’m thinking that I’ll figure something out, because the idea has great potential. Anyone ran into this before and found a nice solution?

Since I’m always pretty curious about the social implications of web blogging, I was particularly intrigued when I stumbled on this
research survey proctored by MIT. They encourage participants to spread the word, so I figured I’d ablidge:

Just had the weirdest deja vu moment I’ve had in a long time.

So I’m at work, doing some documentation work listening to Cake mp3’s. Sterling, in developing the knowledge base application for our department, included a fun little bit of code that sticks in the output of “fortune” into a quick quote line at the bottom of every page. (For those not familiar, “fortune” is a small text application that just outputs fortunes/jokes/quotes/snippets randomly when requested. It’s a staple of UNIX history.)

However, I was taken amiss when the fortune generated was:

You have unusual equipment for success. Be sure to use it properly.

Whoa! I’ve seen this fortune before, and strangely enough it came from a real fortune cookie. Lauren Hatfield got it out of a fortune cookie at some chinese place in the mall at Fort Hays when we had lunch with her brother and brother’s friend. It later turned very funny when we returned to Salina and Mrs. Hatfield interpreted the fortune cookie for her.

The strangest deja vu. I’m listening to Cake’s Pressure Chief the album that I first heard that same exact day while riding from Fort Hays to Salina. (Tom, Lauren’s brother, loaned it to her for the drive home.) And then out of no where a date seeded random number generator gives me the fortune out of her cookie.

Bizzare.

I just got back from watching Batman Begins at our local Sethchilds 12 theater and I was seriously impressed. In a couple ways, actually.

First, the movie was fantastic. This is truely the best Batman movie in the series and one of the best movies that I’ve seen in a long time. I’m still relatively amazed that they managed to take a superhero based comic movie that contains the depth of character and experiences that this movie had. For the first time on film (in my opinion), the anguish of Bruce Wayne was expressed in a way that really resonated with the audience. Not only that, but they didn’t completely sacrifice the humorous moments or the over-the-top action to do it. I’m still really impressed. I mean, this is no Shawshank Redemption or anything, but Batman Begins is really the best possible Batman movie that I could imagine. I’m so pleased.

Second, our local theater is looking much much better. The seats were comfortable, the sound was pretty good, and it looked nice in the theater itself. I didn’t even stick to the floor, once! Even though I was watching the movie by myself in the theater, the comfort level was more than enough that I had a good time with the flick. I’m really happy that our local theater is stepping it up a bit. I might actually have to go see more movies in the near future.

It’s been ages since I initially recognized that the widget that I want to use for Boof is gtksourceview. However, the long standing problem has been a lack of an easily accessible package for the python bindings to gtksourceview in the portage tree.

Quite some time ago, gtksourceview went from being a fairly accepted gtk widget to a pretty prime-time widget used in not only widely used applications like gedit, the GNOME text editor, but now in the up-and-coming MonoDevelop. Gtksourceview was clearly moved into the standard set of gnome packages, and I thought that surely the python bindings for gtksourceview would enter into the standard gnome-python bindings in short order.

Well, it kind of did. But the portage tree for Gentoo didn’t keep up. However, there is a tried at true method for getting the “cutting edge” GNOME stuff for Gentoo in the form of Break My Gentoo. Though, I should say that there used to be a tried and true method for getting the latest and greatest stuff from GNOME on Gentoo. Apparently that project has all but died. So I’ve been patiently watching the portage tree for that day when my next emerge sync would bring me a build for a newer that 2.6 version of gnome-python.

To make things just a little more complicated, the gnome-python package was split upstream into gnome-python, with the core developer API bindings, and gnome-python-extras, with the not-so-essential dohickies like my beloved gtksourceview and other nicities like nautilus cd burning. So I was waiting not only for a new gnome-python, but also a gnome-python-extras package to be added to the portage tree.

Well last night one of those became a reality when gnome-python 2.10 hit the portage tree. Stunned by the potential progress, I decided to hop around and look for a gnome-python-extras ebuild that would be handy. Low and behold, I found one! A developer on Gentoo by the name of spyderous has an overlay that contains just what the doctor ordered.

I now have gnome-python version 2.10 and gnome-python-extras version 2.11 installed on my home pc, and I haven’t been this excited for a new piece of software in a long long time. Hopefully I’ll have some time to play with it soon!

I am no longer convinced that the U.S. form of government is a just system to rule free people. Our constitution means absolutely nothing when the Supreme Court can interpret and intentionally destroy the meaning of every critical limitation of the powers of government.

It’s bad enough I want to cry.

The well written dissenting option by O’Connor sums up my thoughts pretty well. I couldn’t find a good link to it in such short order, but I’ll post one later.

I’ve decided to reformat my workstation here at work and reinstall Windows on it. It’s not that I wasn’t productive enough in Linux. Quite the contrary, I feel that my productivity is much higher in a GNU/Linux environment than it ever has been in Windows.

I’m really changing back for a kind of unexpected rationale. I’m kind of getting out of touch with Windows. While I still have the same knowledge level that I’ve had historically when it comes to administering Windows systems… the familiarity has faded considerably.

And I really think that switching my workstation back to Windows can give me the familiarity necessary to be more efficient in my work. So while my personal productivity might go down a bit due to things like poor virtual desktop support and crappy mouse focus management, the added familiarity should speed me up considerably on some of the more “mundane” tasks around the office. Especially since it’s the “mundane” tasks that a person wants to get done the fastest.

I don’t think that it would have came to this, as my original plan was great. Primarily linux workstation, but then a full second workstation running Windows that I would use VNC from to utilize both at the same time. Unfortunately that second workstation has been riddled with hardware problems that has kept it out of commission almost entirely since I first started using it.

But without it, I’ve gotten out of touch. I’m looking to fix that now.

As I make this “heartbeat” post, I can’t help but remember an old addage that we used to have for our gaming sites. “If you have to make a post to remind people your project is alive, then it will probably be dead soon.”

However, I guess now blogging has kind of defied that logic. After all, the primary “project” is life and that won’t go away just from inactivity.

Anyway, I have a blogging backlog. There are a number of unfinished blog entries that need a bit of work before they are ready to roll out, and I don’t think that they will be coming out in chronological order as I usually force myself to. Instead, I expect much more of a “least amount of effort out first” order in the coming days.

Just a heads up.

Tuesday marked the beginning of the Ultimate Frisbee summer league, and the first time that I’ve played ultimate in probably 2 years.

I was a little rusty, but I was happy to see that my throwing hasn’t deteriorated a whole lot. Our first day of play was marked with quite a bit of wind, and I was still able to keep things low and fairly accurate despite the wind.

It’s also fun that I’m on the same team as Forrest, Llama, Dan, and Brandon. The conversation on the way back from the field was a little tough though, as Llama, Dan, and Brandon kind of made some comments about the club team players not passing to them enough. They play all the time in a casual setting and haven’t seemed to transistion well to a slightly more competitive setting.

While I can completely understand how they feel like they are being looked over when they are “open”, and that it seems that the club team players aren’t including them enough, I think it has a lot to do with the level of gameplay that they are used to. It’s tough to consider the idea that there is so much more to ultimate frisbee, that often a player that looks and feels “open” isn’t really open. Or even less obvious, when passing the frisbee to a player that is actually wide open isn’t really a smart pass. There is a lot going on in the game that takes a bit of practice and knowledge of the game specifics to really grasp, and the club players that are members of each of the summer teams really play ultimate on a completely different level than we do as casual players.

I suppose it’s just easy for me to just trust the club player’s judgement when it comes to passes and stuff like that because I kind of understand what’s going on from when I used to play all the time back in my first year at Kansas State. I just wish that my friends that are playing with me wouldn’t take it personally when they are looked over for a pass and don’t touch the frisbee as much as they do when they are playing around. Those club players are doing the right thing, and it’s up to the casual players to bring themselves up to the level that makes them a good person to pass to… mainly by learning where it’s good to be.

Either way, I’m happy to be back on the field and playing again in the summer league. I was really pleased the Koke, the league organizer, and Rich, the Rock-a-Belly sponsor, both recognized me from playing a couple years ago. I know I was never really that good, so I’m really pleased that I was fun enough to play with that they remember me and were happy to play with me again.

The process to get starting selling plasma was surprisingly involved. Dan and Llama and told me that during the summer the plasma center was pretty much empty, so there was rarely any wait at all. Unfortunately, Monday that just wasn’t the case. Not only was Monday a very busy day, but it was also the day that every “new donor” showed up to get in on the action.

I don’t know if that’s completely surprising, since Monday was also the first day of their new higher “donor fees”. (They call the amount of money you receive in payment for plasma a “fee”, which seems backwards to me… but anyway.

This was also a good day for me, because you have to wait two months before giving blood to the American Red Cross before you can give plasma for cash. My last donation to the ARC was April 5th, 2005, so I just barely scraped in.

I arrived at the facility around 3:25 or so, and to my surprise my good friend Patrick Milligan was already sitting in the waiting line. The first time selling plasma is quite the involved affair, requiring a physical and a load of paperwork. Pat had given plasma before, but over six months had lapsed so he was again considered a “new donor”.

I signed my name up on the “New Donor” clipboard and picked up a three ring binder of medical information that I needed to read. It was interesting the number of pages that were included in the medical paperwork, not because there was a lot of information, that seemed normal. Instead, it was immediately apparent that a little bit of the income from the establishment was from participating in test studies. Makes sense to get as much use out of the samples as possible, I just had a kneejerk reaction to the amount of data that was going to be available to government entities from my donations. I really don’t have any legitimate complaint, and I definitely agreed to participate in all of the studies… just the libertarian “privacy alert” alarm went off in my head and I gave it a double take before I consented.

The second step in the process began in a small office next to the front desk where I began providing clerical information for the facility. Proof of local residency, identification, etc. I also answered a series of questions and a nurse (LPN? whatever) came over and checked my veins and gave me a color rating. I’m a “red”, whatever that means. She described it as I had good veins, they were just a little small. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that, but it did make sense from some of the problems that the American Red Cross had given me in the past. After that step, I went back to my chair and sat a while longer.

The second step was being called into one of four tiny hallway like rooms that kind of remind me of the doors from Let’s Make A Deal. Not that they actually look like those doors, but they do call out names like, “Travis Bradshaw, door number one, please,” which made me laugh. After entering the room I was weighed, pricked on the finger, squeezed into a capillary tube, blood pressure taken, and then finally temperature taken. The kind nurse (actually, probably not a nurse, maybe an LPN?) explained how things would normally happen compared to how things were happening on the first day. (Not much difference.)

After the initial examination, I sat around for quite a while longer until I was called up for a urine sample collection. It was explained that this was to test for proteins and… something else… a liver test I think, I don’t remember. They seemed to emphasized that only a couple things were being tested for, probably so people that smoke pot don’t get nervous. This was also the first time I got an idea of the “thriftiness” of the facility. Rather than some fancy urine sample cup, I definitely was handed a small (9oz, actually) translucent solo cup with a black line drawn on it with a sharpie. I kind of liked the idea that this was a “thrifty” place. It sits well with my “private companies do it better” mentality and using a solo cup instead of an expensive urine sample cup sounded like a good place to save money to me. I filled my cup and left it in the bathroom (the same bathroom that was the public bathroom as well, the aide had to stop someone from going in until she could take care of the sample). After providing the urine sample, I went and sat down for a while again.

The next step, after a much longer wait than last time, was for an “actual nurse” to give me a physical. She mentioned that she was the only nurse on staff (which by that I’m pretty sure she means she’s the sole RN) and that I wouldn’t really be seeing her very often unless I needed some testing done. We went through a pretty exhaustive examination: breathing, heartbeat, liver/kidney/spleen pain, reflexes, etc. Pretty much everything that I would picture in a physical with the exception of the inguinal hernia check. Then there was a long question and answer period with the goal of recognizing anyone in a “high risk group”, a little comprehension quiz for the AIDS handout, and then the signing of all of the research contracts and permission letters. After the lengthy physical I went back and sat down in the waiting room again.

Then, my name was called to go back to the blood letting chambers. Actually, the “blood letting chambers” were nice white rooms. There’s three (maybe four) of the rooms with stub walls to about four feet and then glass paned the rest of the way to the nine foot tall (or so) ceiling. Six nice recliner bed thingies (like Cleopatra-style-ish) in each room-icle, three along each of the side walls. Next to each recliner stands a very fun looking extraction machine. It has several round things (pumps, I guess), a little cylinder that spins around (probably a centrafuge to seperate blood parts), two IV bags hanging from the top, an alpha-numeric LCD display at the top, and a slightly complex routing of little plastic tubes.

After plopping down on the table, the aide Jenn came over to explain the process and get me started. By this time it was already 6:30pm, and it was clear that the staff was less than pleased about having to stay so late. They close at 6:00pm, but apparently they take anyone that comes in before 6:00pm. I wasn’t the last one, but that didn’t save me from a little bit of crap from Jenn as she strived to get out of the place. On a related tangent, it is really impressive the number of quite attractive ladies they have working at the plasma place (both Jenn’s included).

The plasma extraction process itself is a little tedious, but interesting. First a green set of indicator lights illuminate on the side of the machine, that’s my cue to pump my fist. A person continues pumping to keep the vein open while the machine pumps out blood. After that, things are seperated, then they shove the red blood cells back in with a bit of an anti-coagulent. Repeat as necessary until 880mL’s of plasma have been collected. After that, the aide removes the plasma and begins a cleaning process on the machine that flushes the machine with saline and then gives me a saline bag to rehydrate.

After that saline and a fifteen minute wait, I’m good to go. Jenn (a different Jenn this time) hands me a PIN number that is used on a little ATM on the way out that dishes out the cash.

The entire process was completely painless. The first time through it wasn’t actually extremely good money, since I was there from 3:20 until like 8:20. But as I found out today (Wednesday) the perks improve.

One of the keys for plasma “donation” is that they need two samples within 30 days for a donation to be usable for them. So they have their price structure set such that the second donation in a given week is always more valuable than the first (with two per week being the maximum).

So today I arrived at 3:45, was out by 5:20, and was promptly paid forty dollars in cash! Very nice. This is pretty good money for very little work, and could even increase my reading time by bringing books to occupy my time while bleeding. I’m thinking I might keep doing this for quite some time.

Whelp, unfortunately the parking fiasco had one more hurrah before dying. After making my blog post, I had more or less forgotten that all of my posts that are flagged “work” get scooped up by an aggregator in the department and displayed on a dedicated page on the official support site in the department.

Dr. Wallentine, the department head and my boss’s boss, ran across my blog post and was (quite understably) unimpressed with my irreverent treatment of the event and my less than kind words for Dr. Gustafson.

Importantly, it certainly appeared that this was an official use of department resources, since the articles in the Systems Team Blog are harvested from my personal blog here at tbradshaw.net and then reformatted onto the department website.

The bad thing is, the blog post was completely work inappropriate, and I know it. I just didn’t even think that it would end up anywhere at work. In fact, looking over my recent blogging history in my “work” category, I wouldn’t consider any of those blog entries professional or “work appropriate”.

As such, I’ve asked Sterling, my boss, to remove me from the department blog aggregator and purge me from the cache. My current blogging style is very off the cuff and informal and I don’t want to have to worry about staying professional when I’m writing to the blog that my friends and family read. In hindsight, I should have been aware of this issue of syndication from the very beginning.

However, after the fallout, things seem to be going very well. Dr. Wallentine is no longer directly upset about me misusing department resources, since I didn’t. I think we might very well be receiving a blogging guidelines/policy for blogs that show up on department web pages, and I think that’s good too. Employee blogging is a new issue facing the establishment, and I think it’s good that our department will tackle this issue directly and clearly, rather than having to worry about vague conceptions about what is appropriate.

Also, with this in mind, I think that continuing with the planet.cis.ksu.edu blog aggregator idea is no longer an intellegent thing to do. It’s clear that Dr. Wallentine would like any blogging rhetoric on department resources to remain professional, which is very consistent with a moderate approach to employee blogging that’s often seen in the professional sector. This means that either the participants of the planet cis site would have to be very carefully selected (I certainly wouldn’t pick me!), or they will have to be moderated.

I think both options really kill the viability of a planet site, at least the ones that I like to read. Part of the fun of a planet site is reading not only about the professional endeavors of the members of the “planet”, but also about the entertaining posts about life, issues, politics, hobbies, or whatever that the members of the “planet” have outside of their professional interests.

I think that if there is going to be a planet cis, it would be better to privately host the site at like www.planetcis.org or something so that the professional and the unprofessional posts can be shared as a community.

Either way, I’m certainly sorry for the stink that my parking jerk post has stirred up. It leaves me with two clear options, either be more careful about what I say or to make sure that what I say isn’t reproduced in any official way at work. (I prefer the latter.)

I’ve blogged about Dave Neary’s economic commentary before, but he’s up to his rediculousness again. I don’t know why I bother, but it’s just too painful to read and not rant about.

Here’s the offending remark:

When you spend money, that money has a value to the economy which is more than what you spend. If you buy a shirt for $30, the shop owner uses that money to pay wages, buy groceries. So out of your $30 maybe $20 recirculates into the economy, and then that gets respent. Typically your $30 purchase is worth about $60 to the economy.

Imports are dead money. It’s money that is getting taken out of the economy. When you buy an imported product in the supermarket, then a lot of what you pay is going to the importer, and from there going out of the country.

That’s basic economics 101.

Holy crap! Does anyone really buy that? This is not basic economics 101, this is basic logical fallacy 101. This is a poor rip-off of the “money multiplier effect”, something intimately and unseparably tied to fractional reserve banking, mixed in with the broken window fallacy, the most classic of big time economic idiot moves.

First, the idea that spent money multiplies. No, it does not. Money circulates, yes… but money always circulates. There’s a given amount of money in the money supply, and no matter who has that money (whether it’s the software developer, the shop owner, or the grocer) the aggregate money supply is exactly the same. That is literally economics 101. (Though, I think we call it econ110 here at K-State.)

The belief that money spent multiplies is yet another incarnation of the classic broken window fallacy. The original handling by Fredric Bastiat is great, and there are many more explainations of the broken window fallacy as well. Now, in this case it’s being used for a “buy local” claim, but if anyone thinks spent money really multiplies they are no doubt going to fall into the BWF as well, so I figured I’d head that off at the pass. (The “real” money multiplier effect happens only as an effect from fractional reserve banking due to banks making loans with money that exists only on paper.)

Next, the idea that “imports are dead money.” Bah, rediculous. Two cases. First, if the import purchased with local funds was a better value than local purchases, then the local aggregate “treasury” has made an efficient purchase, acheived more value in (now) local goods, and will have more money to buy value after the purchase is made. This is one of the most key points of What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen by Frederic Bastiat, where the broken window fallacy snip came from.

Second, if this is an international purchase as he suggests, then the transation also serves as a currency transfer to those that would typically not have the local currency. And where is local currency worth spending? That’s right… locally. If a person were to mail me some Francs, they would be nothing but paper for me here in Kansas. Unless I were to have a transaction that I would like to make in France, then possibilities open up. Local currencies will eventually be used for purchasing local goods, because that’s all they are good for. (Of course, an important caveat would be if any local service providers sold currency from foreign lands, which certainly is the case. Then the wheel would turn many more times and may not get much farther than the currency merchant. However, it doesn’t change the strategy that a locality should always specialize in whatever they are best at… because if the best thing a locality has to offer is currency exchange, well then the problem certainly isn’t people not buying locally.)

Anyway, another rubbish economic post from Dave Neary. I’ve kind of intentially stuck with Fredrick Bastiat for my sources, since Neary appears to be in France, you’d think when a country as proud of their history as the French has such a profound thinker, they would listen to him. (I’m kidding, every country ignores great ideas and the U.S. is probably the absolute worst at it.)

Whelp, I’ve done it again. I’ve screwed up and forgotten to turn in my time cards for work, lots of them. It’s been three or four time cards since the last one that I’ve turned in, and I haven’t gotten a paycheck in close to two months.

It’s obviously no one’s fault but my own, I’ve just forgotten to do it almost every day. The real gotcha is that I know that it will take several weeks after I turn them in for the money to actually come in, so the marginal cost of each day’s delay gets rationalized away. Long story short, it’s been forever since I’ve gotten paid, and I’m starting to suffer. I’ve already missed going out a couple nights now (raising the ire of that really cute Yankee’s fan), and more urgently I find myself about three days away from leaving for Pittsburg and New York without a dime to my name.

But I’ve found a stop-gap solution, as the title of this blog entry would indicate, I’m going to get into the business of bleeding for cash. I’ve talked with Llama and Dan about the process, and it seems that a dedicated college student can land 50 dollars a week (65 the first week) selling plasma. A person can give two times a week, and they only require one day gap between “donations”. This means that tomorrow I can head into the plasma shop for a physical and initial blood letting, wait a day, go in Wednesday for another blood letting and be ready to leave for El Dorado late on Wednesday (or maybe Thursday morning). It should be more than enough money to handle a tank of gas to get to El Dorado and my train ticket from Philly to New York and back.

I’ve always been a little leery of selling plasma. Mainly because getting sick for me is a major problem (being allergic to medicine and all) and so I rarely like any idea that involves me weakening my immune system. But it’s looking dire enough that I can’t think of any other short term solutions.

So let the bleeding begin!

Yeah, I’m pretty much suckered in now. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft on Dan’s account now for several days, amassing probably 20 hours or so of gametime. It’s really fun. Really really fun.

If there was some kind of linux client for World of Warcraft, I would have been suckered in a long time ago with the playful allure of the WoW environment. But now I find myself facing the worst trechery. I’m going to have to install Windows in order to play this game. Barf.

Until my most recent installtion of my workstation, I had always left a partition open on my primary hard drive for Windows. However, after over two years of freedom from that kludge of an operating system, I had given up on needing Windows again and ditched that vacant partition. Now I find myself downloading a Knoppix disk so that I can resize one of my ext2 partitions and make room for a sizable Windows partition again. Previously I would leave like 3 gigs, just barely enough for Windows itself to rest. WoW needs 4 gigs of space by itself, so I’m looking at like 10 gigs of space sacrificed to the gaming environment.

I still have reservations, no doubt. I don’t know if I really want to start being a “gamer” again. But my experiences so far with WoW have been exceptional. Not that I’m expecting a emmaculate ride through the game, quite the contrary, I’ve been playing the game with a critical eye, looking for those things that would make this game fall short. The more that I look at the game though, the more that I’m impressed. It’s not perfect, not even close, but they’ve taken into consideration almost all of the major “failures” of previous Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games that I’ve studied. While they certainly haven’t solved all of them, there are a number of solutions that I’m really pleased with.

• Questing System - I refuse to grind in a game that never ends. I’ve been a huge proponent of the grind in games like Secret of Mana. I love being a little higher level than necessary for a given quest or story line, and it has always been worth it to me to grind a while to minimize the replay of story elements. However, in finite length games I’m grinding so that one day I will never grind again. A MMORPG cannot provide that promise. The game by definition never ends. The questing system obfuscates the typical grind with a relatively engaging story experience that provides things to “do”, rather than just freefrom grinding. I think that it’s mostly solved.
• Length of Play - While most of my gaming sessions with the game have been quite long, the length of the average quest and task has been very manageable. It seems quite possible to just hop on and play for like 30 minutes and then leave with almost zero consequence. Perfect. I’m a little obsessive with games, I always have been, and any kind of punishment for quitting early would have meant I would be hooked.
• Things like Resting Bonus - To further encourage the casual gamer, the WoW team has implemented a number of nice features specifically targeted to keep the casual gamers (which is what I want to be… not a hardcore gamer like I could be) happy. Questing was an easy example, but it goes much farther. For instance, they reward players for resting. That’s right, they will reward a player for not playing. When a character comes back into the world after not playing for a while, they recieve up to a 200% experience bonus to everything PvE (Player versus Environment) they do. Awesome. So if classwork gets busy, or work gets busy, or QuakeCon comes… a player isn’t necessarily “missing out”, because when they get back they will be getting double the experience to catch back up and increase the excitement.
• Immersion - One of my final requirements for this kind of game to really be worth my time to play is a certain level of immersion. If I’m going to spent a couple hours of my valuable free time playing a game like this, it needs to be at least as good as watching a movie. That is, I want to be immersed in the experience in a fashion that takes me someplace fun and lets me hang out there for a while without longing to do something else. I’ve been playing the start game for the Orc race so far, and they do that. There’s great music, fun scenery, and more that’s keeping me engaged. I really found myself kind of in awe and giddy the first time that I visited “Thunderbluff”, this massive city of bull-people on the top of some huge bluffs. The music kicked it, the city was revealed, and I really felt like I had stumbled on something freaking cool. It made the 10 minute walk there worthwhile.

It really reminds me of Morrowind, only better. Morrowind had some features that really would keep me addicted, but not necessarily in ways the I liked. You had to keep trucking through long long missions and travels, because if you saved and quit for a bit… you wouldn’t remember what the heck you were trying to do before. WoW seems to have fixed this. It seems like something that a person could pick up as a medium to long term hobby and not need to dedicated enormous amounts of time to the game in order to have fun.

Yeah, so it looks like I’m going to really start playing. *sigh* Which means I’m really going to install Windows.

The only caveat at this point is that I haven’t got any money to buy the game. Llama said that he has a guest pass, but it only lasts for 10 days. Since I’m going to be leaving for El Dorado here in a couple days, then spending a week in Pittsburg and New York the next week… it really wouldn’t make much sense to start that guest period now. But whenever I do, the game data is completely saved so that when I purchase the game all of my character information will still be there. Right now since I’m playing on Dan’s computer. I know that as soon as I get my own account I’ll lose all of the progress that I’ve made so far and be forced to do a lot of “replaying”. Eh, it was pretty fun though. I don’t think I’ll mind too much.

So yeah, I’ve fallen to the Dark Side. I’m going to install Windows and start playing a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Anyone else out there that’s really really late to the MMORPG scene that would like to join me on this new adventure in hobby time management, you should. I’m going to be starting here in a couple weeks as a Horde player on Deathwing.

So much for holding out… heh heh.

Drunk on enlightenment from reading some of the economics greats like Ludwig von Mises, I began my pursuit of an economics minor to accompany my computer science degree. It works out pretty well, me getting a minor, since my computer science degree is pre-req blocked to a relative snail’s pace.

Unfortunately, the enlightenment of an economics education has continually grown stagnant and slipped into a disenchantment with the field. Time and time again I’ve been assaulted with just how corrupt and intellectually bankrupt the entire field appears to be, especialy the more “advanced” a person delves into the subject matter.

I don’t even know how in depth I want to bother writing about my dismay with modern economic study, but I’ll do my best to be concise.

First, the assumptions rule. Most economic theories (and all that are considered “legitimate” by the economic mainstream) are completely emperical. That is, one never has to fully explain why something took place, only that when you are done with your theory it matches some existing data on economic trends or statistics. But there’s a big catch. If a profound thinker–with their equally profound preconcieved notions about how the world should be–finds that his or her theory doesn’t match with existing data, then that profound thinker is encouraged to add as many “assumptions” as necessary to mold the model into the data.

Let’s clarify that. If a person makes a model that doesn’t quite fit, then a person is allowed to make stuff up to explain the descrepancy away and make the model fit. Most of these assumptions are incredibly logical, but all share a common bias. Well, not that they all agree on which way to be biased, but they are all biased. Coupled with my next complaint, these assumptions become deadly.

Complaint two, political influence on the “science”. The largest influence on economic study of all time is simply the political process. This is where the bias problem leading to assumptions gets hairy. When I read the Austrian schools’ work, based on a praxeological study of economics. It felt good, like I was reading about how things really happen. The farther along I get in mainstream economic study the more clear it is to me that all of the mainstream economic theories have almost nothing to do with “how things really happen”, they are explicity designed for a primary purpose: how can the current power structure manipulate society. Period. That’s all modern economists do. They design economic models such that governments can politicize people’s lives and make policies to manipulate whatever variables are put in front of them.

And there-in lies my largest beef, a combination of these two complaints. Every single mainstream economic theory and model starts with one enormous assumption: that it is possible for a single powerful group to understand the actions of all people sufficiently, through mathmatics and “economics”, and that those powerful people should take action to “improve” the natural state of things. This assumption is so prevalent that any possible indication, even through terminology choice, that this core assumption is false is stricken from the field. The first example comes to mind when Friedman was researching the Phillips curve. His research showed fairly clear evidence of the idea of “natural unemployment”, and called it such. However, the very idea that a certain amount of unemployment would be “natural” is not a very politically convenient way to describe anything. So it was renamed, to NAIRU, or Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment.

The reason why? My third complaint. Unnecessary complication. This happens constantly in economics, and I think it’s for two reasons. First, obfuscation. Some of the economic theories that are still used largely in policy decisions are about as logically sound as carrying canned food in a wet paper sack. It’s obvious to anyone with the right tools and knowledge in front of them that the emperor has no clothes on. That’s clearly unacceptable, so the information is obfuscated. “Natural employment” is a pretty simple term. It implies an amount of unemployment that is “normal”, “okay”, “natural”. What does Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment imply? Or better, what does NAIRU imply? Nothing. It means nothing to anyone outside of the field. No “common man” can just look at NAIRU and understand what is being talked about.

This seems hyper-prevalent in the mathmatics used with economic models. They are unnecessarily complex. As a perfect example, inflation is typically represented by the greek symbol, “pi”. Why? Why is it necessary to take an incredibly well known constant representation and make it something else? How about something like expected inflation? It’s often “pi” to the power “e” (like, the natural number cursive ‘e’). What? That’s a constant to the power of another constant… that’s not a “variable”. If anything, that should be a subscript, to indicate that it is, indeed, a different value than “pi” to the “e”. All of the math examples of models in economics do similar things. They just throw away centuries of established mathmatic convention to represent the models in an inconventional way. Why? I think it’s just to make them seem more complicated. Because, honest to God, none of the math in economics is difficult. Everything done in economics, down to the most complex idea economists can imagine, has a quite succinct notation already prescribed by the mathmatic community. The goal is clearly to make things seem harder than they are.

The second reason I think that economic theory is intentionally overcomplicated is a desire for self importance. I don’t know exactly why economists have an inferiority complex, maybe mathmaticians and physicists picked on them too much when they were undergraduates, but a lot of the complication is clearly pomp and circumstance to make the economic theories seem really profound and complex. I can’t seem to think of a worse way to make economic ideas. I figure since economics is really the study of the way that humans make decisions, a really profound idea should really make sense to everyone… I mean… everyone reading is going to be a human that makes decisions…

This pompous attitude seems to continue through most works. I think this was really well pointed out by one of my favorite authors, P.J. O’Rourke in his book Eat the Rich where in his first chapter he analyzes Economics (probably the most used economics text book in the history of man). It went like this:

“Marx was the most influential and perceptive critic of the market economy ever,” he says on page seven. Influential, yes. Marx nearly caused World War III. But perceptive? Samuelson continues: “Marx was wrong about many things… but that does not diminish his stature as an important economist.” Well what would? If Marx was wrong about many things and screwed the baby-sitter?

This is pretty much the exact same introduction that we received in econ510 this year for the Keynesian theory. I’m going to paraphrase, but use blockquotes anyway for parallelism:

“The Keynesian theory states that wages and prices are inflexible and do not quickly move due to price floors like minimum wage and labor contracts from unionization of workers.” Makes sense so far, but then my instructor continued, “This is definitely the case Europe where unionization is very common, but here in the U.S. we have very little unionization in comparison and only about 5% of the population works for any kind of minimum wage. However, the theories are very influential for making policy and is the primary source of economic models in our time.”

What the hell!? If the two primary assumptions that hold up the entire Keynesian theory are not true in the U.S… why the hell is this an influential theory for making American policy? It attacks the brain!

The more I study mainstream economics–especially macroeconomics–the more discusted I am with the entire field. The only intellectually honest ideas I’ve ran into are those from the Austrian school, which I had found before I started a “formal” economics education. I asked about any inclusion of the Austrian school in econ510 to my instructor. He kind of smiled and laughed and said that a marginal benefit based economic theory was really more of a microeconomic thing and didn’t have much to do with macroeconomics.

Sigh. Nevermind that Ludwig von Mises wrote some of the most profound literature on the business cycle ever penned by mankind. Forget all of the amazing analysis of current macroeconomic indicators in works such as The Theory of Money and Credit. I mean, the guy wrote Socialism decades before the USSR fell, and it was an macroeconomic play-by-play of what actually happened when the iron curtain started to crumble.

As far as I can tell, the Austrian school work is the only work that hasn’t been proved wrong yet. I thought that’s how science was supposed to work. After something is proved wrong you either “fix” it with new information or trash it and start anew. A college economic class is just packed full with “this is important, it has been proved wrong, but it’s still important for reasons that you can’t understand without being an economist.” Dogshit. Just balogna.

As far as I can tell, the entire field is just intellectually and morally bankrupt. It’s about servants of the political power structure making up complicated ideas to encourage those in power to take action and gain more political power, whatever the long term cost might be. I guess I’m just disgusted because when I started reading economics, political economic philosophy of all kinds, I started with the best. Now in a major university I’m just trodding through slop. From the Wikipedia article for Ludwig von Mises I found the perfect quote for how to end this rant of a blog. A description of what the field and study of economics should really be:

Von Mises argued that economic science could not be verified or refuted through the analysis of observable data. Economics was an a priori science like mathematics, logic or geometry. Moreover, economics was just a part of a larger social science, which he would later call “praxeology”—the logic of human action.

It’s been a relatively busy week at work, thanks to an event called the Engineering and Science Summer Institute (ESSI) that was happening on the engineering side of campus. I don’t know much about it, but apparently it’s like a week long summer camp for high school students (Juniors, I think? Maybe some seniors?) to spend in the engineering department, checking things out.

Part of that week is rounded out with lab sessions for students that have interests in the various majors offered by the engineering college, and Dr. Wallentine asked me to lead the section for interested CS students with the assist from Nathan Bean. Nathan and I had worked together for most of the cis690: Games Programming class that we did this semester, so it was a natural fit.

The mission was to present two 1.5 hour seminars that highlighted the Dodgeball modification that we created during cis690 to the students, let them have some fun, and try and illustrate that in order to make fun games, you needed a good CS education. Well, that’s a bit of a misnomer, since a good portion of the programmers in the gaming industry are self taught, but the point remained that a person needs to be a great programmer if they want a shot at making great games.

Nathan and I ended up splitting the sessions right in half, with me proctoring the first session and then Nathan handling the second session.

The plan for the first session was really simple. First, we play the dodgeball modification and have a good time. Next, we open up the source code and poke around. Third, we changed the speed of the dodgeballs to whatever speed the individual student felt like checking out. Forth, we went over a little bit of console based compilation and troubleshooting, and fifth we played more dodgeball.

Towards the end of the class we grew a little tired of the slow or lightning fast dodgeballs and ended up playing a little standard Quake 3: Arena just for fun. It wa s a little less educational, but it was certainly a great time. I took the opportunity to just rove around and talk about the CS program while they played, and even answered questions they had during the gameplay. It was pretty much a no-holds-barred Q and A session overlapped with a great multiplayer gaming session. Much fun.

The next day I ran a little late but had time to grab up a good tutorial/lecture combo to use, in case Nathan had problems with his DirectX based framework. We were going to make some Vortex grenades. However, it didn’t turn out to be necessary, as Nathan presented the entire 1.5 hours based on his 2-D sprite framework that he had written for the session. It wasn’t as exciting as the Quake 3: Arena coding, but it definitely gave them some simpler problem sets that they could really understand the entire problem domain and solve themselves. In contrast, the Q3A coding was pretty much complete hand holding on my part, since there’s just no way that high school students are going to rip through linear algebra on first glance.

Overall I think it was a positive experience, and I was really pleased by all of the students that showed up. There were six of them, (I think), and all of them appeared to be having a good time both playing and coding in the game. I’m completely worthless at remembering names–which is compounded by the fact that we didn’t even ask them their names, heh heh–but the group ran the entire gambit. Here are some of my highlights:

One student (the Metroworks kid) went so far as to toy around in the source code the entire first day rather than play Quake 3: Arena with the rest of us, which was cool. I enjoyed giving him pointers as he explored the codebase on his own, but I didn’t really have any good stuff for him regarding the dodgeball source code. Regardless of whether he could really dig into the Quake 3: Arena source code–which he can’t yet, he’s a Java guy and probably hasn’t really done anything with pointers before–his enthusiasm was awesome. He’ll make a great geek.

Another student (the not-so-geek kid that looked at parts for his car on the second day rather than code simple 2-D games) was fun during the Q3A session, and even though he had never coded any C before in his life, he kept up fine. He also taunted me into playing some Q3A with them at the end. He boldly asked, “Why aren’t you playing?” To which I replied, “Oh, I would school you kids.” and he followed with, “So, come on.” So I got to play some dodgeball and later some Quake 3 with all of them… and schooled them thoroughly. Very fun.

Another student (the small school kid) and I had a brief discussion about the elements covered in the curriculum and I found that he’s currently a victim of the “buzzword packers”. He still thinks of being a masterful programmer in terms of languages or APIs that one knows. For instance he described his rather astute high school knowledge as “I know C and a little C++”, you know… like C++ is some how a harder difficulty that comes right after C. He had acheived level C and was working on C++. He was clearly very book smart and has amazing potential. I hope that he comes to K-State here in a year or two and quickly works himself out of the “buzzword” rut. Computer science is so much more than the sum of buzzwords or some clear progression through languages. And I bet he’s book-smart nerdy enough to do his homework in the higher level math classes and really rip open some of the theory stuff if he wants to. We’ll see.

Another student (the iBook kid), that seemed like one of the more well-rounded students, was curious if he recent purchase of an iBook was going to be a detriment for pursuing a CS degree at K-State. I had to laugh, since I had my PowerBook in my backpack, but Nathan and I assured him that he’d be fine. He also was curious about the possibility of a CE and CS dual major. I think that Nathan and I did a good job kind of defining that both degrees were great, it just depended on how much a person wants to do hardware versus software. I laughingly mentioned that I wouldn’t touch CE with a ten foot pole, personally, because I don’t like hardware that much, and I think we ended up encouraging him to go for it, because you can always just drop one of the majors later if you don’t like it.

Some of the students also got my email address and I pointed them to my blog, in case they want any help with anything. I offered to point them towards any information regarding the CS major, K-State, or even just any general programming stuff. I think it would be very funny if I ended up mentoring some incoming students.

Which brings up my biggest qualm with the two days of having fun and teaching the high school students. I am just not a good role model. I mean, I’m really passionate about computer science. I absolutely love it. I love encouraging people to program, trying to widen horizons to new langauges like Python or operating systems other than Windows, and sharing how much I love living here at Kansas State. And I’m good at it, both at computer science and the public speaking skils that it takes to relay that passion.

But I’m not a good student… I just don’t live my life the way that makes a good role model for incoming freshmen. I can tell them all about what I think would be great for them to come in and be awesome little overacheivers, but then if they ask me how long I’ve been here. I’m like, “3 years. Yeah, I’ve been in college for 6 years, coming up on lucky number 7. Nope, I’m not a graduate student. I’m still an undergraduate student. Yeah, I’ve still got a couple more years to go.” Normally my modus operadi is to lead by example. In my work as the Director of Volunteer Services at QuakeCon, a team captain for The Relay for Life, or whatever… I always lead by example.

But I don’t think anyone would appreciate me advocating my lifestyle as a “good” way to go through college (even if it’s good for me). Could you imagine?

“Yeah kids. Take your time and enjoy yourself… move into a house with four of your best friends, build a full-service bar in your basement (computerize it), put a giant hot tub on your deck, start a beer pong league–become the champion, jello-wrestle beautiful women at the Jager Olympics, blow lots of money to start putting a computer in your Jeep, buy a motorcycle and drive like an idiot, be a roadie for your roommate’s metal band, come rediculously close to going broke and failing out, but then barely scrape by (maybe) again and again, underachieve in the classes you don’t like, don’t do your homework, drink several nights a week and be a recognized ‘regular’ at–at least–two local bars in Aggieville. It will be difficult, it will take the better part of a decade, but you’ll be a good person.”

I mean, I’m really happy with my life. I’ve accomplished a lot through all of my side projects (and I do a lot more scholastic stuff than the previous paragraph makes it sound like, but I was just emphasizing). But like Charles Barkley was famous for saying, “I am not a role model.” Importantly, I don’t even regret all of the “goofing off” I’ve done. I flat out love where I am… so I can’t even tell someone “don’t do this” and not be a giant hypocrit.

However, I’m getting the hang of things and becoming a better student. Hopefully by just being honest and not sugar coating my life, I can still give some good advice. After all, after over 6 years, I’m getting to be an expert at just about everything college life has to offer. (Except for graduating… clearly.)

One of the classes that has been dragging along way past the end of the semester is my econ510 class, Intermediate Macro. Well I’m really happy to report that it’s finally over!

The saga started when I overslept on the Wednesday of Finals Week, right through my econ510 final. I had misread the finals schedule and I thought that the final was on Thursday, and sleeping in that day was especially awesome… so I didn’t think anything about it. It wasn’t until I was chatting with Cole later in the day and he asked, “So what did you think of the exam?”, that I was blindsided with the news.

After a bit of finaggling and a discussion with his department head, Yasin got back with me that Thursday and informed me that I would be allowed to take an essay exam, but it wasn’t going to be during finals week. Which was perfect, because I needed to leave Kansas immediately and I couldn’t have taken it right away. So when I returned from Boston I contacted Yasin to arrange for a final. He offered that Friday the 20th at 11:00am. Perfect.

I studied my butt off for the final, which required quite a bit due to the final bias of the book, and showed up Friday morning. Unfortunately Yasin fell ill and was unable to proctor the exam. I was leaving for Kansas City (which didn’t really get blogged) for the weekend plus Monday and Tuesday, so we scheduled the final exam for Thursday the 26th of May.

Now I probably should have studied before that final as well, but by this point I had agonized over the gradebook for too long. I needed exactly a 50% in order to solidify my D in the course, and like a 95% to steal a C. Well, scoring a 50% or above is easy… while scoring a 95% or above was asking for direct divine intervention… something I’m not yet so bold as to do. So rather than studying the night before the retake (since I had already sacrificed the previous Thursday night studying for the final that didn’t happen), I felt confident enough that I went out of the town for a great Thursday night.

Because of my rather arrogant approach to taking the final, even after I finished the final and guessed that I did fine… I was kind of nervous regarding my results. So, unsure of myself, I sent an email to Yasin to ask if he had finished grading my exam. Well he just got back to me on Tuesday to let me know that he had posted my grade on K-State Online and that it would be reflected in Kats soon.

The final exam score? A very comfortable 66%, coasting nicely into a 64% in the class. My arrogant gamble that drinking in Aggieville on a Thursday night would be a adequate study method for an econ510 final turned out to be a solid one that payed off in spades. I coasted into my extremely important D in econ510 with a solid D on the final while never missing a beat for a great night on the town.

That’s where the pun comes in the title. It was an “intermediate” success in my econ class… which is “intermediate macroeconomics”… get it? Heh heh.

So the only class left is cis690 - Games Programming, where I’m still sitting on an I (Incomplete) from when I left in a hurry during finals week. I’m still nervous, but confident I can get the A necessary to round out my grade “straight”.