Yeah, you know the rest.

What would that feel like? Would I be one of the first killed, or would I be one of the ones who gets a little warning and saves his classmates. Or would I be someone walking past on the sidewalk who notices the guy and takes him down before he has a chance to go through with it?

To anyone that even slightly buys into the “defender of the weak” crap Cho was reportedly spewing forth in his rantings, I'd like to point out that he didn't do a very good job defending random innocent people (most of whom didn't know him) from himself. People who kill random people because of an inability to cope with their own problems are nothing more than cowards.

So I did.

Since 2001, I took classes with Ross Zirkle as my schedule permitted. I remember the first day in his class and how he asked my name.

I was there when his sister died, watching how hard it was for him to talk about it in front of a few hundred students who wanted nothing better than to go home on a Friday afternoon.

He was always open to a student's individuality. He was always willing to forgive absences and give advice. He would talk to you, personally, about what you were doing, make cogent recommendations about who you should look at, what you might want to try. He was always enthusiastic about art, about teaching.

When I left school in 2005, it was with an incomplete in Ross's class. I had burned out on school in general, missed too many classes. For the next year, I had in my head “I've got to get back into the drawing studio and make it up to Ross.” In late spring/early summer 2006, I did get back in. Ross was the same as always, joking, cutting up, talking like Ross. (If you don't know Ross, you will have a hard time visualizing this, but any student of his would recognize the “Ross voice”.)

There was no hint of what was to come.

After I finished making up my absences, I got re-absorbed into my own problems. Later in the summer, probably less than a month since I'd last been in, Ross was diagnosed with cancer. It was not a mild cancer. It was Stage 4, which means it had already metastatized (spread to other organs). They gave him only until fall to live, but he beat those odds.

I did not discover any of this until I was preparing to return to school in December, attempted to take Independent Study with him again, and the advisor mentioned that they were not allowing Ross to teach it. I wound up taking painting instead.

When I came back to school in January, I saw Ross for the last time, in the hallway on my first day back. Same old Ross. I thought that I should take him out for drinks or something.

I never got the chance. Ross died Monday, March 12th.

There are few professors at UK with whom I have that have that level of interaction. Ross was the most important of them. Cheers.

There are several reasons that I get this way, I think. Being sick, is of course, an obvious one. Also, I'm back in school again to finish off my degree … Since I work full time (and third shift) my sleeping schedule is utterly disrupted by this. It's only two classes, but given my major, that still means I'm on campus for six hours, not counting driving time. Only 45 minutes of that isn't a class. I get two hours of sleep after work, at best, then I go to class, come home and get (at best) six more. In practice, I'll probably get more like one hour before and four hours after, if that.

I'm also a nontraditional student. I'm surrounded by people fifteen years younger than me, so I've always felt somewhat disconnected from social life … which is worse now that I'm only going part time. And even if I wanted to go do something with anyone I might make friends with, I'm usually too tired.

And too broke, at the moment. Money is a persistent issue. This is the worst time of the year for me, financially. I like my job well enough … if I wasn't carrying debt, the only serious problem with it would be that it's somewhat boring at times, and I can usually cope with that.

But I do, and I don't make a lot where I work … just enough to scrape by, really. My tax return provides the cushion that prevents me from having to live purely check-to-check. Counting groceries and gas and such, my income is actually a bit lower than my expenses, so that cushion gradually declines over the course of the year. About the only good aspect of this time of year is that it works out to be right before the next tax return. If my cushion ran out sooner, I'd be screwed.

Naturally, this means that I have pretty much no wiggle room in my budget for such niceties as “paying more than the minimum payment” or “health insurance” (my cushion would run out a hell of a lot faster if I carried that). I make little progress on paying off debt and such, and if anything major happens healthwise, I'm going to be very, very, very screwed.

Basically, what all this boils down to is, my current lifestyle is untenable. The problems that I have now are, at this rate, not going to get better faster than they will get worse.

I need a higher paying job. Ideally, a significantly higher-paying job. With that, I could get out of debt on a timescale that feels achievable, and start building a life that doesn't consist of living hand-to-mouth. I could carry a sane level of insurance. I could make progress on my retirement and some savings. I could eat more healthy things (healthy food is more expensive than junk food) to ensure that I live long enough to care about retirement. Get a better place. Get a better car.

Maybe even meet some girl who is actually interested in me.

It looked pretty cool, I admit. I might have bought one. But not now.

• No third party apps. Deal-breaker for that alone. Closed computing is not only uninteresting to me, it's actively repellent.
• Locked to Cingular. Yes, I know the service has to support visual voicemail and other such. I've absolutely zero interest in Cingular. T-Mobile works just fine for me.
• Apparently you can't change the battery, much like the iPod. Is this some weird Apple design philosophy or something?
• It only has 4/8 gigs. For that price, I'd better be getting at least 20 on the low end.

That is all.

Some stuff that I read fairly regularly:

Gunnerkrigg Court - Spacemonauts!

Wapsi Square - My favorite character is Katherine Gilchrist

Megatokyo

Ozy and Millie

Penny Arcade - Often funny, but often too crass for my tastes.

Short Packed - Similar to PA.

El Goonish Shive - I prefer warped over crass, yup.

Dresden Codak - Just discovered this one. It has Tiny Carl Jung as a character, and Nikola Tesla turns up, so those are plusses.

And some I haven't read in awhile:

Sluggy Freelance

Real Life

General Protection Fault

Avalon High - Largely defunct

RPG World - Defunct?

Nekobox - Essentially finished?

Eversummer Eve - It was updated so slowly that it was hard to remember, and now the archives appear to be subscription only

From BBC news:

Dr Alan Stern, who leads the US space agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto and did not vote in Prague, told BBC News: “It's an awful definition; it's sloppy science and it would never pass peer review - for two reasons.

But Dr Stern pointed out that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have also not fully cleared their orbital zones. Earth orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids. Jupiter, meanwhile, is accompanied by 100,000 Trojan asteroids on its orbital path.

Read the rest here

I'm still considering Pluto a “true” planet … whatever the hell that means. Why do we need a definition of a “true” planet, anyway? It's not like the Great Maker is going to be sitting there on judgement day informing us how close we came to the “correct” definition, and what fabulous prizes we have won as a result.

Or more. You can increase the number. Let's have dozens of planets! Sedna! Ceres! Xena! Even Quahogg, or whatever the hell it is called.

But it's too late to have less than nine. You can't decrease the count without a very good reason, and I don't think this qualifies. Something like “Pluto? That's no planet; it's a SPACE STATION!” might work…

The IAU definition relies on an arbitrary distinction, so I have no issues with making my own (just as arbitrary) distinction. A body can be considered a planet if, in order of importance:

• it is too small to undergo nuclear fusion (stars) or anything more catastrophic (black holes, neutron stars) and is not a remnant of such,

• it is basically a regular spheroid due to the influence of its own gravity,

• it would be considered a planet if it were found in some other context.

Some additional factors, which are neither definitive nor required, but do increase the qualifications, are if:

• It has an atmosphere beyond trace gases.
• It is geologically active (for whatever reason).
• It has a significant presence of liquid water.
• It has satellite bodies.

A body can be both a moon and a planet.

If it was ever widely considered a planet for a period of not less than twenty (20) years after the start of the twentieth century, it is grandfathered in until such time as the Millenium Falcon reports back that it turned out to be a giant space station after all.

I also note that the line between planets and other celestial bodies is (and probably always will be) fuzzy. The universe is a strange place, and when it comes down to it, all we are doing here is saying that we'll call one lump of matter X, but that a different lump of matter isn't really X.

Incidentally, “dwarf” is an adjective, just like “jovian” and “terrestrial”. If we are going to say that dwarf planets aren't really planets, then shall we say that the gas giants are truer planets than Earth?

I think it makes a lot more sense to say “Yeah, there's lots of planets out there. We'll teach the terrestrial and jovian planets, but as for the dwarf planets … they're obviously planets — just look at the name — but there's just too bloody many to cover them all. Except the ninth planet, Pluto. We stopped counting after that.” It'd piss a lot less people off, I think.

OK, technically it's not IN SL, per se…

The galleries are 2003 and 2004

(Look for the red borders, which appear on any image updated in the last week or so.)

:(

Also reminds me of a few episodes from Babylon 5.

To put it another way, skepticism is only one tool in my toolbox. I have others. But when the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat every problem like a nail.

But that's another topic entirely, and on the linked entry, at least, I'm in full agreement. The PR guy in question should be removed, posthaste.