In Brief

(I’m still here)

1. I took Tuesday and Wednesday off last week, to “celebrate” finishing marking all exam papers and submitting all the results two full days before the deadline. I took Tuesday and Wednesday off this week too to do, umm, nothing, really.
   
   
2. My sister made fun of me for watching The Lake House on Astro again. I don’t understand why, as I think that it is a decent enough movie and like it, and I watched it at the cinema with her the first time. Definitely, Maybe last night was good too. I watched it with my brother.
   
   
3. After upgrading the network with higher speed and bigger bandwidth, and finally wiring the campus for Wi-Fi, the university has now offered blog hosting for staff, powered by WordPress. Supposedly, it is to encourage academic staff to communicate and collaborate in research, but so far the more active blogs I see are by administrative staff – mainly from the IT department – doing run-of-the-mill personal blogging.
   
   
4. The overall failure rate for my Intro to Econs classes last semester was 23 percent. I thought that that would come out at the Board of Examiners (BOE) meeting, but apparently it didn’t because they weren’t our students. I wonder if it came out in the BOE meeting of the other kulliyyah.
   
   
5. Already, I know of two students who are applying to resit the paper because they cannot afford to repeat the course for another semester after expecting the last to be their, well, last. One already has a job waiting for him in his home country. Another also has a job waiting, plus he’s getting married next month. It means that I’ll have to prepare another exam paper.
   
   
6. DSA 2008 ends today. I preregistered as a visitor, as I did in the last two editions, and still in the end didn’t go. As much as I like defence tech, I enjoy reading about them more than actually seeing and holding the real things. I realized this after queuing for two hours and passing through three security checkpoints with metal detectors manned by armed Marines to board the Big John during its then supposedly final visit to Boston in 2005.
   
   
7. I’ve already bought tickets for Iron Man next Wednesday.