My realization of the morning: if I’m leaving midday on Wednesday for the Cape, coming back on the weekend … and classes start next week … I gotta get all my paper square before I leave town!

Well, another hurdle done. I scored high enough today to ensure a qualifying score to get into graduate school, no matter when my written essay comes back scored.

Not a bad use of my morning, if only as a recognition that my verbal skills were absolutely killed by my time in engineering school. I aced the quantitative part, which I wasn’t expecting to do. I’d hoped to ace the verbal, and I didn’t. Believe it or not, I was actually kinda mad at the verbal score. Oh well.

Back to work.

I’m all signed up to take the Graduate Record Examination. [Whew, $115 is pretty steep.] I’ll be headed off to Decatur on the 29th to go see if I can eke out a qualifying score. I’m so not worried, really. I’ve seen the studies that show that GRE scores strongly correlate to SATs, and well … I did okay on the SAT. I’m not even going to bother studying up for it—I’m just not that worried about it.

I love developing presentations, especially at the last minute. I’m a percolative thinker—I’ll think about a problem for a long time, trying on different ideas for size, and when the deadline draws near, I execute a plan. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.

The presentation I’ve put together could be seen as callous and brutish, but I think that it tells the truth. [I mean, when you're discussing motivations of students in student government, I think you have to bring up the fact that some people are there in small or large part to pad their resume.]

It’s also fun for me to do a presentation because I have a tendency to spend 90 seconds per slide where others spend 60. I counteract this by putting more data on a slide, which tends to make me quicken my pace a little.

Okay, time to finish my quick break and get back to the second half of this presentation …

I’ve got a meeting this afternoon to work on a training program with UAH’s SGA … again. Maybe this time, we’ll actually get this off the ground.

While I’m there, I’ll probably swing by the Registrar’s office and make sure that my conditional graduate school admission’s still good. Scott, being stubborn, wouldn’t fully withdraw me when I dropped classes a couple years ago. I need to know before I can start back to graduate classes. I’ll probably bring up what it would take to be admitted for a second baccalaureate while I’m at it; I’m not going to do it concurrently with the MSE—I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy—but I just want to know what the policy is and if it’s likely to change anytime soon. [UAH gets a new catalog soon.]

You know, I could get a second baccalaureate degree from UAH in Computer Science in two, maybe three years …

Hard to believe that it’s been three years since I graduated; three years ago today, I hired in as a full-time, salaried employee at TBE. Come August, I’ll have been at TBE for six years; also come August, I’ll return to UAH to pick up a MSE in Engineering Management.

The words to the fight song of The University of Alabama in Huntsville are as follows:

We are the Chargers who wear Blue and White
We have the courage and the strength to fight
Shout the battle cry—U! A! H!
Have pride in your Blue and White!

This is sung twice through. If you are not ready when the UAH Pep Band begins playing it, well, suck it up and join in on the next line. Then, when the second verse starts, GET LOUDER.

Punks.

[P.S. Many thanks, Randy. You listened well.]

[P.P.S. This will make so much more sense when The Exponent's online arm gets their crap in one bag and publishes this week's paper, which includes Randy's letter...]

[P.P.P.S. I should bring my voice recorder to a hockey game and sit there with George and sing the fight song, then put the audio up here.]

I have always been amused by this: EM 666: Engineering Project Management.

So, so appropriate.

[Yes, I'm looking into graduate school.]

Tonight, the UAH SGA was to put on a foam party tonight, starting at 2100.

The bottom fell out up here on Monte Sano at 2105.

Sucks to be them.

This is the first year I haven’t helped put on the foam party since we started doing them in 2001. I wonder if they even knew how to do it.

Here’s the funniest thing I’ve had happen in a while: I just checked my cell voicemail and found that UAH’s Dean of Students [note: not her real title] had asked the SGA Secretary to call me and find out if she, as Dean, had the power to act ad hoc in concert with a couple of the SGA officers when they don’t have enough legislators.

Yes … two years after graduation, and they’re still asking me for advice.

Freaky.

[What they wanted to do was okay, by the way.]

Now, why did I get this f**king degree again?

It’s so lovely to “celebrate” this anniversary in the manner I have today. On the list of Really Craptacular Days I’ve Had At Work, this goes right below the day I started worrying about getting laid off when we had no work in the shop, and I’m not sure if it goes below anything else. Wait, there was that day when my Canadian customer was going to force us to violate all sorts of good aerospace practices and ship hardware early. Yeah, I remember marching all the way from the clean room up to my vice president’s office—in shirt and tie, in August, across our newly-blacktopped parking lot, at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon—all too well. His secretary could smell my anger before I opened the door to the office.

Wahoo.

I think I’m going home now. They’re testing the alarm system in this building at 6:00 p.m., and while I’m used to being here that late at night recently, I’m afraid that hearing the alarm system test might provoke an unpopular, unhealthy Pavlovian reaction.

Idiots. Idiots. Idiots.

I went to an SGA meeting tonight. I went because Leonard, Anthony, and I had discussed going after Heather had told us all that had happened.

It’s abundantly clear to me that SGA has regressed, and I think that the fundamental problem is that people don’t know what their duties and responsibilities are.

I have a solution for it, but it has a cost: I [and maybe Anthony] would conduct a training workshop for all new SGA members. For a not-insignificant fee, we’d prepare a series of presentations [and perhaps small quizzes] to show everyone how the SGA interacts.

I really don’t think that many people—and I’m talking even some Exec folks—have a good top-level view of what’s going on. I’m seeing Executives legislate and Legislators execute. That’s what got us into trouble before, and we’re seeing all the same problems all over again.

Yeeeeeeeeeeesh.

Tonight, Anthony, Leonard, and I sat while Heather regaled us with tales of the latest foibles with UAH’s SGA.

See, I built a lot [not all, but a lot] of what the SGA is today. Last year, I would be in the face of the people doing stupid things with “my SGA”. This year? I’m just amused at it all.

I have achieved Alumni Apathy.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to the SGA meeting on Monday night to go amuse ourselves, though.

I know that my Wondergeeks readership might not have seen this, but I’m dropping grad school.

Y’all get me back now. What’s this? Weeknights, save for hockey trips, are free?