Today is a new beginning for someone, just not for me.

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This morning, I got up early to drive my sister to school. It’s the first day of 11th grade and her schedule is a total mess, so she wanted to beat the crowds to the counselor’s door.

It’s a strange feeling to drive the old roads on the first day of school. I’m out of high school eleven years now. The building hasn’t changed on the outside, but the traffic through it (and around it!) is not the same traffic that greeted me. It’s a different world there, and I’m a different person.

It’s easier to notice how much things change when you’re in school. Every year is a new start, and a new chance to make your mark. Entering tenth grade (the first year of high school in our district), you’re terrified, but entering eleventh, those fears are gone. Entering twelfth, you’re terrified to leave and anxious to get out all at the same time. College flows the same way; your life is delineated by semeter and roommate and building. You know when each year has passed. You know (if you have time to stop and think about it) how much you’ve changed from one year to the next.

Once that routine is broken, it’s not so easy to tick off the changes. I measure my time by the movement from one cubicle to the next, by the change in supervisors and the change in responsibilities. Without the seasonal terror of a fresh start, one day runs into another, and one year starts to feel much like the next.

I wanted to stop this morning, point out the sites that were important when I was an eleventh grader. Here’s the tennis courts where I got cut from the team. There’s the house where we hung out after school sometimes. There’s where the pay phone I used to call Dad to get a ride home was tucked in at the end of the band hall. There’s where the science teacher lived, there’s where the twins lived, there’s the pizza shop that was a gas station that used to sell smokes to the kids when the truant officer wasn’t around.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s not my junior year, it’s hers. She’s got her own demons to chase and her own memories to forge. And I have trainees to teach, special projects to complete, and a routine to maintain so that each day can continue to blur into the next.

An Introduction to Science, the Kansas Way.

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The Kansas Board of Education will soon be voting to determine whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught side-by-side with the theory of evolution in their schools. Obviously, such a decision is highly important, as it affects whether or not science teaching in the United States continues to go to Hell in a handbasket. To whit, I present a excerpt from one of the letters that the Board has received:

I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

Take this seriously, please. Go learn more about FSM and Pastafarianism and why we should all address this important educational issue. Science is, as Wikipedia defines it, “Reasoned investigation or study of nature, aimed at finding out the truth. Such an investigation is normally felt to be necessarily methodical, or according to scientific method – a process for evaluating empirical knowledge”. Faith, on the other hand, is “as the affirmation of belief without an ongoing test of evidence, and even despite evidence apparently to the contrary”.

If we’re going to teach our students that science=faith, we might as well choose the stupidest possible faith to set equal to science, because we’re already destroying their ability to reason and think.

Entertainment! Nifty!

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So Nighthawk was looking for a natural language interpreter when he came across a site with interactive fiction. Those of you who can actually remember the eighties might know “interactive fiction” better as “text adventure games”, though many of the “games” on this site aren’t really games so much as interactive stories. We went through 9:05 and through Photopia — they’re both excellent, you should try them. But you have to run/install stuff to get them to work, so you probably won’t be able to check these out at work.

On miracles and mental breakdowns.

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Yeah, so last night at about 11:30, I was working on some code for a little side-project while watching the Phillies game and generally trying to spin down from a crazy day. I got about 2/3 of what I needed done, and I tried to push a new stylesheet up to the system, when suddenly everything choked. Dreamweaver, which is prone to the occasional odd error message, informed me that it couldn’t upload the file in question because, well, the file didn’t exist, or maybe I didn’t have permission to use it.

And, well, that’s bunk, because I’m the ONLY one with permission to use these files, and this particular one had been uploaded mere minutes before. So I logged on to my web host and decided to manually upload the file instead…. only to discover that Dreamweaver wasn’t lying; the directory I was working in was empty. So were most of the others. Most of the pages here woudn’t load, and a good chunk of my other work was just plain gone.

Panic ensued.

I sent a note to the support team, waited a few minutes, and watched as one by one entire directories just poofed. No backup files, no forum, no wordpress… Another panicked note to the support team. This time, a response: they’re aware of it and working on it and it’ll be up within the hour. But that was at 1 AM and I have to be to work early today for a meeting. (yay meeting.)

Did you ever go to bed at night and wonder if everything you’d done was going to be there in the morning? Not a comfy feeling. I think I “get” Neverending Story in a whole new way now.

After a fitful night sleep, I’m back, and so is everything else. The support team was, as always, good to their word. And I am immediately applying what I learned. First, a backup was done. (I do these regularly, but not regularly enough.) And second, I’ve added a link to my Xanga blog in the links section. Strangely, when everything else was disappearing rapidly last night, the homepage was still there, so the links section was still functional. If all else has failed, I’m relatively sure Xanga will still be standing, and since it doesn’t live on the same server as everything else, it’s a decent place to post updates when I can’t post updates. Of course, in case of catastrophe, homepage mileage may vary, so you may want to make note of that one somewhere if you haven’t already.

So anyway, mental breakdown over, and I have to get my butt to work. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours contains fewer heart-attack inducing elements for all of us.

Should’ve become a rock hound.

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It’s likely to be a “many mini-posts” kind of day for me. So far, everything I’ve read on my Daily Comic List has made me want to go, “Ooh! Read!”.

I have that problem a lot with Schlock Mercenary. But then, nothing makes me happier than a plot-heavy space opera with science lessons scattered in for good measure. Today’s a bonus: it’s on earthquakes.

Makes me wonder what I’d be doing for a living if I’d’ve signed up for a geology course in my junior year of college instead of computer science.