Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I was in Oakwood for the Mensa testing session a few hours before the soldiers arrived. We finished at 530 pm, much earlier than last time, which turned out to be a good thing.

I was able to check my students’ exams during this time. There were a lot who passed, and the few who got below 60% got way below 60%. I only have to check the bonus part today, because, to my own shame, I have not memorized the 20 brightest stars.

In my introductory programming exam, I’m hesitating to remedy the points I gave to the bonus part of the exam, which is for the flowchart of the given programs they were supposed to analyze. It’s not often that a student gets almost 70 over 45.

Last Friday, I failed to bring up that my thesis advisee had also submitted his paper for proofreading. There were some typographical and grammatical errors that made me note that he should follow the corrections given by the word processing software. There was no table of contents and no page numbers. I also had him reformat his tables, which did not have dividing lines between the columns and was a little confusing. His theoretical background and methodology, if a little too in-depth, was nearly flawless.

It’s telling that I only got to see the full results of comparing his software with existing programs in the paper. But they were acceptable. He could have used more screenshots, and there was no appendix, which should also contain the user’s manual.

The two glaring omissions I saw was that he did not include occultation of the visible planets by the Moon (although he showed it for the stars) and he did not trace the path of the Moon for a given period of time, only the visible planets. At the same time, he only showed examples for Mercury and Venus, and none for Mars to Saturn, whose retrograde motion is more emphatic. Lastly, he did not give the user free rein to determine the duration for making the trace. He only specified is as one month or one year. From what I remember of his software, the display is also a little too small, compared to the pull down menus of existing programs.

But if he takes those into consideration, I foresee approving it in a week or two.

Onto Monday, at 630am I contacted the school’s Wireless Information Services. It said that as of 12pm, classes for June 28 have been suspended. I assumed, correctly, that this meant 12pm Sunday. I went back to sleep, waking up and turning my phone on again near lunchtime.

There I saw another text message from one of my co-teachers, in another format, giving the same announcement, from the Office of the Interim President this time, with a request to pass the information on.

This, I believe, is prone to abuse. Last year, I received two such messages on consecutive days of continuous rains that just changed the date, as anyone could have faked to destabilize the school administration (to borrow from political analysts the past few days). Why not just forward the message from the wireless service, so that it could be verifiable? And here were my co-teachers using the same suspect system instead of the reliable one.