Nothing to see here, move along.

Not that this information is for anyone in particular... but if one of my friends did happen to mention that they might be interested, here it is.

The best vasectomy doctor in Ottawa

Cheers

PS Chris, that triple-bock wheat beer is truly the Devil's drink. Actually, I'm not sure that he'd want someone's soul after drinking a few pints of that.

Mike

Pyromania

No not the Def Leppard album, Renee.

This link is more for Brad.

How to start a fire with a chocolate bar and a coke can.

Cheers

PS Yes, this is a placeholder post, to fill in until I have time/inspiration to actually write something.

Sort of out of touch

Hi all, sorry it's been quiet in this here space. It's been hard getting internet time for the past week or two.

I've picked up a few weeks work at the Canadian Housing Information Centre in Ottawa, so I've flown back with the kids for the holidays. Cate will be following as soon as her exams are finished. I figured that a few weeks here would make me as much money as a few months working at McDonalds -- even after airfare, etc. -- and the kids get to see their friends and family at the holidays.

But I'm sort of hard to get ahold of while I'm in town. Actually, this is the best way to reach me. I can't access web-mail at work, but I can read blogs, so if you leave a reply to this message I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

It's been a busy couple weeks. I got the idea on a Wednesday, made the calls Thursday, got hired Friday, told them I couldn't start Monday (they weren't paying me *that* much), flew out Tuesday morning, started work in Ottawa Wednesday morning. I figure that I'll catch my breath just in time for the manic energy of Christmas/New Years.

Take care one and all.

I'll talk to you soon.

Cheers

Engineers vs Librarians

So to pick up a few extra bucks, I've been marking papers for one of Cate's advisors. It's a third year engineering class. I haven't taken a science class since grade 10 and flunked out of grade 11 advanced math. This falls in line with my philosophy that if they're dumb enough to hire me, I'm smart enough to do the job.

The course is on sustainability and other such issues in engineering so it isn't as math heavy as most engineering, I'm sure. It is mostly essay questions about environmental footprints and resource conservation.

I would love to rant about how poor the writing is, but the range is probably similar to any other cohort in any other discipline of undergrad. What I found funny was that the first thing I did when I started marking the first batch of assignments was to run an arbitrary (but not entirely random) sentence or two through Google to check for plagiarism. Of course I found a handful. I think that it worked out to between 5%-10% of the total number of assignments. Entire paragraphs cut and pasted without quotation marks, let alone attribution.*

Wikipedia was the most common souce, but it was just a significant minority.

So when I asked the prof whether I should bother to mark the papers with significant plagiarism she was rather taken aback: "I don't think that anyone has ever checked for plagiarism before. I wouldn't even know how to do it."

Engineers 0, Librarians 1.

Cheers

*Actually few included any sort of sources for their work. I became so jaded that I would only dock marks if they presented statistics or quantitative facts without acknowledging any outside sources. I mean, either they just made up the numbers, which is stupid, or they got them from someone else. Duh!

On this batch, I'm actually adding 5% for anyone who has included any indication that they refered to outside sources. I think that's more fair. I know that almost every one of them refered to outside sources -- well, except the ones who wrote really awful papers -- but I would be hard pressed to point to specific sentences that would prove it. So the ones who do cite their sources get a bonus to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys.

MT