A Dixie Carpetbagger

I’ve finished all of my assignments this semester but one… my Database Fundamentals final.

I feel like Tantalus sitting behind a keyboard.  The exam is three printed pages (now covered with scribbles and notes), I have two pages (college ruled, covered front and back) of notes, flowcharts and doodles, and fourteen pages of answers, written out and ready to type up.

Nineteen pages of stuff… this is the longest test I’ve ever had.  The worst part is that one question (Section 1, Question 2- 15 points) covers Figure 4.7 (page 27/32).  We didn’t cover that in class, and when asked, the professor gave us the page number for Figure 7.5.  Figure 7.5 is the answer for the question, worked out and ready to go…

And the sad thing is I’m trying to figure out if the man’s playing mind games with us.  He said “try your best,” does that mean here’s the answer, or does that mean here’s your fast track to a F, or what?

The most frightening ten words in the English language are not “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” they’re “map this Enhanced Entity-Relationship diagram specialization lattice with multiple inheritances.”

select count(problems), severity
from classwork
where problems = ‘headache’
having severity >= 3
group by severity desc;

If I never see SQL code again in my life, I will be thankful.

Edit: final came out to be 17 typed pages.  And I have no idea if Sect 1 Q2 is what the prof wanted.  This simply reinforces my hate of databases.

The whole book which is here offered to the public has been written under the impression of a kind of religious dread produced in the author’s mind by the contemplation of so irresistible a revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of such amazing obstacles, and which is still proceeding in the midst of the ruins it has made. It is not necessary that God himself should speak in order to disclose to us the unquestionable signs of His will; we can discern them in the habitual course of nature, and in the invariable tendency of events: I know, without a special revelation, that the planets move in the orbits traced by the Creator’s finger. If the men of our time were led by attentive observation and by sincere reflection to acknowledge that the gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and future of their history, this solitary truth would confer the sacred character of a Divine decree upon the change. To attempt to check democracy would be in that case to resist the will of God; and the nations would then be constrained to make the best of the social lot awarded to them by Providence.

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Introduction.

Post continues…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tam has tips on preparing for emergencies.  It’s something I’ve always done.  (Not so surprising, being the kid of a Depression era child and a kid raised on a farm before rationing was phased out… )  To these tips, I have some to add:

• Your house is bigger than it looks.  You have dead space– behind furniture, unused rooms, crawlspaces, the attic (but please watch the weight), unused cabinets.  Heck, if you have a garage workbench with cabinets underneath you never use, you have tens of cubic feet of storage.  You can put stuff away, just be creative and the space can be found.
• Organize.  Tip 1 doesn’t help if you can’t find anything.  In my house, everything is sorted by type– canned foods, dry foods, liquids, supplies, clothing, etc.
• Hunt around.  There are companies out there that make food designed for long term storage.  There are also companies that make good, cheap water filtration units.  Here’s the UGA guide to what you need.

Now, you don’t have to prepare for Armageddon… but preparing for say, a month without power is a good point to start.  Here is a kit that will feed one person for 60 days.  Two should feed four people for a month, and take up a mere 7 cubic feet of space.  That’s 3.5′ x 2′ x 1′… which is the dead space under a bed.

… has a sucker been born yet?  Seriously, an egg cracker?  Dear Lord, you mean all these years the things were hard to crack?  I never knew, I just tapped them on the counter a few times…

Contrast that with this.  One thing I pointed out to a friend a while back was there is a growing divide between the Cans and Cannots.  (Or more accurately, the YES I CAN crowd and the YES WE CAN crowd.)  One group can do things themselves– the other needs assistance.  One can think rationally– the other needs leading.  One is fiscally conservative– the other is wild.

Two examples of this from my personal life.  One, I talked my best friend the other day.  He used to be far, far Left.  He now supports the Tea Party.  This guy voted for Kerry and Hillary… but he can think, and he knows business.  The second example is that Judge Napolitano is going to speak… at my college… on April 15th.

Expect someone from my college to make the news.  Except this time  it’ll be “don’t taze me, b ZUUUUHH THUD.”

I’m still around.  I’ve just been stuck in my house, with tons of classwork to do… mostly SQL work.

On the plus side, I now understand this comic.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.” – C. S. Lewis

Breda comments on the fact that recent events seem to be almost miraculous, but also fated to happen. Simply put, when a person is ignorant of history, their path is set. No matter how many turns they take, no matter how their pace changes… their endpoint is marked, and the only variable is how long it takes to get there.

To those of us who know their history, the path is clear… to quote Gator in the comments of Breda’s post: “now go back and re-read the first couple of paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. It’ll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

With a few changes, the list of grievances could’ve been written yesterday.  One line stands out, due to the fact that it rings so true now.  “In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.”

I think that the Founders knew that they were effecting history, and even the very patterns of future events.  Hopefully, we work under a rising, and not a setting sun.

Via Tam, a “news” post from an Indiana student newspaper. Said post reads like the writer was coming off a weekend bender, and was stuck between the “I’m so awesome” and “I’m gonna beat you” stages.

Run-on sentences, spelling errors, words that seem to be used to add punch or power to the piece, and a few pronoun association errors occur. This, from a writer for the student newspaper. I thought the student newspaper from my university was bad, but while most of the writing is drivel, it’s readable drivel. (The worst I’ve seen was the opinion piece that said that the tea parties needed to shut up, because we still had freedom… to go to Hooters, get drunk, and watch football. This was from a graduate student… from Vermont. He’s also an African-American.)

All of my writing classes have been taught by professors who held doctorate degrees, and any one of them would cringe at reading this article. As an example of how stringent grading is at my university, of my last two twenty-plus-page writing assignments, one was dead on, and the other had two errors- a spelling error and a pronoun association error in the preface. Both errors deducted two points; make six in twenty pages errors, and you make a “B”. I think my professor would have beaten this student writer with his keyboard for producing such low quality work.