I forgot about a whole province ...whoops?

I just read through the current term's course offerings for a particular program, and there's nothing listed that I wouldn't be interested in taking.

To put it another way: even though this particular program rejected my MA application, I'm going to try again with a PhD app. My fingers are cautiously crossed.

The idea of a shortlist is getting quite silly. I think it'll grow and shrink quite a bit over the next few weeks, but I hope it'll be finalized quite soon. My spreadsheets are mocking me.

THIS IS MY HAPPY FACE.

I am done that ancient left-over paper. Hooray.

Now on to the next thing. At least I don't have anything overdue to work on.

Communist! COMMUNIST!

When I'm teaching, sometimes I say something that's the most crazy socialist stuff I've ever heard anyone saying, and it's coming out of my mouth. It's hard to temper that when the entire course is designed as "Be It Resolved That: The US is EVIL."

The reading this week was about the development of communications regulation in the US, and I ended up talking about net neutrality and the BBC (not connected, but as tangents). One student asked a really good question about why Brits submit to the collection of license fees, when Americans would have none of that. That let me talk about the reading's central point about how the use of a technology can be shaped by the regulations which surround it, and how US decisions 85 years ago resonate today on how TV works.

But the course has been designed to reveal how American media and government interests are longstanding bedfellows. It's hard to not sound like a crazy conspiracy nut.

Term(inal) Paper 2: Electric Bugaloo

Terminal paper is still terminal.

I have to teach tomorrow and I'll be there on no sleep and lots of fretting. Tomorrow's tutorials are going to have a lot of students-working-in-small-groups rather than me-teaching.

Term(inal) paper

This term paper is a protracted nightmare. I've had one minor panic attack over it already, and tonight I'm barreling through as much as I can (with the assistance of two lovely and forgiving and wonderful and smart people that I think I may have promised my soul to) in hopes of shooting a draft at the Master Editor (mom) in time for tomorrow morning.

You may have noticed that Halloween is an unusual time for a term paper to be due. It is. This paper was due May 21, 2009. That's many days ago. As I said: protracted nightmare.

A side note: I wonder if the profs I've been emailing about potential PhD supervision notice/care that all my emails are time stamped ca. midnight?

Fail, internet, fail

I'm oh-so-close to having my write-ups done for a major scholarship application, so I figured I'd find the online app and start filling it out, since by "oh-so-close" I mean "need to finish tweaking this sentence here".

And the website is gone.

Just... vanished. The award - to the best of my knowledge - hasn't been discontinued, but the government website that hosts the web application has its metaphorical fingers in its metaphorical ears, and can't hear me a-knocking.

I've been trying on Firefox, I tried IE, I even dug into the depths of my ancient desktop to find a copy of Netscape 7.1... and the page won't load. The rest of the internet seems to be there. Just not the one page I want right now.

Maybe when I get back from buying hummus this situation will have changed.

Same old same old

I have four (possibly five) major important big-time things to do before the end of the month, and not too many days to do them in. However, taking the optimistic route, by Halloween I'll have completed:

- two more major funding applications
- the final as-yet-incomplete term paper
- the meat and skeleton both of my conference presentation
- abstracts relating to that stack of CFPs
- possibly (hopefully) tightening a few loose guy-wires on an old term paper with an eye to publication in a journal

Oh, and the marking/grading of 50 tests. That job I'm paid to do, yeah.

The state of my directed reading is fairly dire for a number of reasons; I'm going to check in with people of power and influence in the morning to determine how this will end up.

Same old same old.