A few weeks ago the spring 2012 semester at IIT ended.

This semester I took two classes: Advanced Transport Phenomena, and Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property Management. Transport was exactly what I expected – lots of high-level math, partial differential equations, assumptions, et cetera. The other class might’ve been better titled “How to come up with cool ideas and manage a small start-up business based around them” (so some entrepreneurship and a tiny bit of IP management). I got C’s in both of them, which is (for me) very bad; but at least I didn’t fail either.

My take-away lesson is that even 5 credit-hours is too many for one semester, at least while I have this job. Next semester and in future semesters I plan to take 3, max 4. This pushes my “graduation” date to 2 years in the future. My boss asked if maybe I could “focus more on school and less on work for a little while,” but “that’s what I tried to do this semester, and it didn’t work out so well.”

I’m not sure I want a master’s degree anyway. I have learned things, useful things, that I didn’t know before; but I could do that from taking individual courses or studying on my own. In one:one meetings my boss has mentioned that I might eventually be promoted to an engineer, and alluded that educational achievements might be a factor; but then again, I’m already at the educational level needed for entry-level engineering positions here, and mostly lack experience (which I am getting now).

The way I see it, I have a few different options.

• I can keep going the way I am; keep working as a technician as long as they want me to and plug along 1-2 classes at a time on a Master’s degree, then see what happens next;
• I can quit working on my Master’s degree, which opens up several subsidiary possibilities:
  • Focus full-time on this job and other aspects of my life (let’s just pretend that those exist for the moment)
  • Quit my current job, which opens up a couple more subsidiary possibilities:
    • Work on a Ph.D., at IIT or elsewhere (likely elsewhere);
    • Seek a more challenging and rewarding (financially or otherwise) job here (for example, in their engineering leadership development program) or elsewhere.

Knowing me as I do, I’m likely going to stick with the first option because it doesn’t require changing things. I am not convinced it is the best decision, and would welcome input from friends, people who have or are working on master- and doctorate-level degrees, and engineers.

My last regular post I mentioned that I was getting my mouth and car cut open (separately).

Clearly I survived my operation. As far as I know there were no problems, and I was off pain meds after about a week. I got all four teeth removed at once, which I guess is considered a lot, but it was all over at once. And now it’s over, and my mouth doesn’t hurt any more than usual.

The electrical problem in my car was related to the body work that was done after I got rear-ended. My car was repaired at a local Chevy/GM dealer during my first day back at work, and they even drove me to and from work that day. That was nice. It cost a bit, but it was nice.

That’s just about all I have to say about that.

It took me almost three months, but I got my WordPress installation migrated to a new server.

The web hosting service I was using went offline sometime shortly after March 1. Visitors to their hosted websites would get a 403 error explaining that they were going “out of business,” and that admins could still download content and backup sql databases. Unfortunately the only way I knew how to back-up a WordPress installation was though the WordPress interface (I did it once before when setting this up as a separate site from WordPress.com to begin with). Still, I backed up my pages and the database, and went looking for new hosting. I would’ve complained about the old hosting going down, but considering it was free, well, at least I got what I paid for.

My new hosting isn’t free, but it’s cheap (and I have a job now, not the six figures I was hoping for at this point, but enough to get by). I found an excellent tutorial for exactly this kind of situation, but my initial attempts to implement it were plagued with errors involving replicated PRIMARY keys, or something like that. I stopped trying after a little while, and school and work quickly got super busy.

I figured it might be related to some of the plugins I had, so today when I finally had time today, I ended up going a little more in-depth than before. All of the posts and comments should be here, as well as my personal options (though I think the theme is different), but social website integration (Facebook, twitter, not sure if I had G+ integration) history is all gone. No big deal, the important stuff is here!

Anyway, that’s that, and I’ll get back to writing fascinating stories about life in Southwest Michigan working for an appliance manufacturer and visiting friends and family one and two states over and going to school online and two states over in my favorite city soon!

Tomorrow I’m having my wisdom teeth removed. The bottom two are impacted (one full-on, one diagonal), and the top two need to go because the bottom two will be gone.

I’m taking the easy way – general anesthesia – so I will have a full day off work (I probably would anyway) and someone to drive me (which is really good, because I have to go to South Bend). I may be on pain medication for a couple days after.

Explanation for this explanation: I’ve been alluding to it on social networks lately and thought the full explanation would be helpful.

To make my weekend complete, I’m getting my car looked at. Electrical problems.

Benton Harbor has an actual mall.

While I’ve often complained about the poor layout of the sprawlingextended shopping area (with the stores and the parking lots and the streets that don’t go where you think they should), the area around the actual mall makes sense (ring drive surrounding parking lots).

My first impression of The Orchard Mall was “old and empty.” Not abandoned – it’s clean – but there weren’t many people there, and there were many empty storefronts, and quite a few underutilized ones (used as displays for other stores, community areas, volunteer organizations [the last two are nice, but I'm sure they pay less than retail outlets]). But the decor reminded me most of what I was used to seeing in the early 90′s (this includes the store logos – there’s a Payless Show Source with a sign I don’t remember seeing since the Griffith Kmart was a Venture).

My second impression was that it was kind of small. I’m used to malls having at least two levels, and being, well, a little bigger than this one. Considering how underutilized it is, though, I’m not surprised.

But it included some nice little things. A coin-operated model railroad, coin-operated little rides for little kids, one corner storefront had models of area landmarks); two used/new book stores (found I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay by Ellison and Asimov), an “electronics etc” store (it looks like the proprietor does repairs on computers and TVs himself), a “odds and ends” store (“great stuff at crazy prices” – cheap stuff), a couple of bigger stores, and an arcade.

It was worth spending part of an afternoon there, and honestly I’m surprised it took me so long to take the time to visit it. I’ll go back again when I have some time, maybe if I’m looking for some more books.

“I remember how hard it was learning to do long division.”

If I recall correctly, long division is certainly easier to learn and follow than short division. And besides, it’s just division. Why add the “long?” It makes it sound harder, yes, but it really isn’t. I know that, and if you really remember learning it then you should know that too.

A couple days ago one of my co-workers asked the group if we missed another coworker who had retired. And I thought about it, and I kind of did.

“As I experience certain sensory input patterns, my mental pathways become accustomed to them. The inputs eventually are anticipated and even missed when absent.”

I miss people, from family, college, high school, before. But I’m not especially outgoing, and besides I have a lot of things to deal with now and many future things and people to look forward to, so I don’t spend much time worrying about it.

One of my classes this semester is a business class disguised as an engineering/legal class. It’s required for my degree, otherwise I might have taken something else.

One feature of this class is that all or most of the work is done by teams. Now, this can be a good thing, but I live 100 miles away and never actually show up. As a result, I had a tough time finding a team to join, and I have the impression they weren’t entirely thried to take me on. That’s off topic, I desired to complain about it anyway.

In addition, we’re expected to read a book about innovation and “beating the devil’s advocate.” Now, I got a kind of sad/twisty/defensive feeling when I first heard that, because often I am or am similar to the “Devil’s Advocate” which is “poisonous to creativity.” I see nothing wrong with my approach, having had much advice, training, and experience behind it, but now I am the bad guy.

See, I don’t seek flaws in ideas out of any kind of mean-spiritedness, nor do I want to be a barrier to progress. But when 15-year-old me took a poorly-assembled pile of ideas to my Eagle project advisor, I was told to go back, bring more detail, and come up with alternatives for easily-forseeable problems. And I did, and because of the plan and back-up plans the whole thing worked (on time, under budget).

That idea, that a solid plan should be in place before acting when possible, has served me well since then. Considering all the possible consequences and alternatives before acting is a good thing, not “the enemy.” (also it’s my personal definition of “conservative” in terms of personal philosophy [related but not identical to my def for "politically conservative" which is likely different from yours]).

So yeah, I can see where they’re coming from. But I can’t think of conservative planning and critical thinking as bad things. So maybe I’ll take up acting for the semester so that I can pretend to think this is a good way to do things. Despite (if I may be allowed to play Devil’s advocate for a moment) all of its obvious flaws.

Start with package macaroni and cheese (prepared, by necessity, with powdered milk instead of real milk). Add a cheese-like product known to improve the “cheesiness” of m&c. Scoop out a single serving, allow the rest to cool before storing. Slice up 1/2 Roma tomato. Sprinkle with oregano, garlic, and bacon or “facon” bits. Stir in. Enjoy.

I’m not sure which is financially better – staying in Saint Joe for the weekend, or going to Indiana or Illinois. See, if I go home, I spend a lot of money in gasoline and wear on my car, and gas adds up pretty quick these days (Note: $3.35 per US gallon is still not a cheap price, just less unreasonable; $2.00/gal is borderline between reasonable and cheap).

On the other hand, when I stay here, I buy things. Usually it’s just groceries or things I need for the house. A couple weeks ago it was a modular shelving unit and a TV to put on it. This week it was textbooks, textbooks that you can’t find anywhere because the number of people who use them globally are probably in the hundreds (low thousands tops). I never thought finding a copy of a book from 1959 would be this difficult.

I hate coupons. Using them is great, even if it’s $0.50 off something. What I don’t like is finding them and thinking “oh boy! look at all the things I can buy!”, then storing them, and a few months later going through them and realizing they’ve expired without me using a single one of them. It gives me a type of sadness, the type you get from missed opportunities.

That’s why I took myself out to lunch yesterday. I figured I would use at least one of those coupons, dammit. And that Steakburger was mighty tasty, even though the coupon saved me less than 10%.