A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

One of the reasons I wasn't accepted into grad school in 2002 (if I might make an educated (ho ho) guess) is that I had literally no clue about what I was getting into, and made many mistakes, surely enough to make my application look quite unattractive. Half of the reason for that is because I was too young and stupid to realize that I had built up a pretty good network of friends to ask relevant questions of, but the other half, it only just now occurred to me, is that I grew up in a household that only barely grasps the concept of higher education.

My mom went to college, but did so as woman circa 1950, so I assume that only went so far. And my dad nominally went to college as well, but did so on some kind of military ticket (he labored stateside as an enlisted Air Force cadet though the Korean War), and he didn't enjoy it and got out as soon as he could. As I prepared for my freshman year at UMaine - the same campus he'd attended - he broke it to me that that college would be a cold, hard, and boring time that I had to endure out of necessity. We were both surprised when I took to it much better than that. (And that there were no communal showers in the dorms any more. That was a real shocker to both of us. You don't know how long I spent that summer coming to terms with the idea of communal showers.)

Ricky went to a military college, so whatever; that's in a different plane of reality. Peter, then, may have been the first person in our particular lineage to attend a four-year program of the sort I'd recognize, though at a college I wouldn't otherwise have ever heard of, and with no particular post-graduate ambition. And finally, after my own graduation, there was full assumption from my own family that I was done with school forever, because what else was there? As I didn't have any college-based friendships close enough to survive the trauma of graduation, I had no reason not to assume that as well. And so it went.

Anyway, all this comes to mind now as I reflect on a conversation I had with Peter earlier this week. Amy and I spent Monday day-tripping through Maine, visiting members of my family where they each lived, since I wasn't going to see them on Christmas this year. For our third stop, we took middle-brother Peter and sister-in-law Janice out to dinner. While chatting, Peter asked about what Amy was up to academically, knowing only that she was "in college" in one way or another: "What's your major?" After Amy gave him a cogent summary of how she's working towards her master's degree in library science at a graduate program at Simmons, Peter paused to process this, and then said "So, that makes you a... junior, right?"

He nodded and made appropriate ah-yes-of-course noises when gracefully corrected, but I still think he has no concept of education past undergraduate school. And neither did I, up until I moved to Boston, years after my own graduation. So, yeah.

http://fjgallagher.wordpress.com/

Blog of Frank Gallagher, the dedicatedly brilliant personality who brought UMaine's student newspaper, The Maine Campus, to statewide prominence in the early-mid 1990s. He also made it an exciting place to work, enough to become the reason my undergraduate career took an extra year to complete.

Looks like he's joined the ever-growing crowd of people I know in Portland, ME, though he clearly keeps strong ties to his beloved San Fransisco.

In some ways he was the first real boss-slash-colleague I ever had, and I have been looking for this guy off and on for ages. He dropped me a LinkedIn invite just yesterday! I look forward to reading him once again.

Having a good time toodling around Maine with classicaljunkie. Keeping at it through Wednesday. We're in Portland now; yell if there's anything you think we should see. (Plans are to go gape at the Shipyard brewery and run around the downtown shoppy places.)

I was offline from Friday night on because of a lengthy power outage in my neighborhood followed by two days visiting places where there was hardly cellphone coverage, let alone wifi to leech off. During this dark period I diligently updated an enormous entry about what we did, mostly about the food we ate. I sympathize that you cannot wait to know whether we went for the pumkpin pie or the blueberry at Dysart's, but I must beg your patience, dear reader.

The multi-pronged hunt for work continues unabated. As soon as I regained Internet access in Waterville today, I had a meeting regarding one possible job and juggled three email conversations about others. It's good to make account of this, because knowing that I still have no active work during this trip has been quite stressful.

Finally removed long-dead links to mint.net and shopinmaine.com from my résumé. The former times out and the latter goes to a squatter page, but at least they went to the trouble of slapping a lobstah on it.

I remember a Photoshop collage we were using to promote shopinmaine. The composition accidentally looked like a skiier was fleeing giant blueberries rolling down the slope after him. And everything had feathered edges. There were probably some lens flares thrown in there too but I can't remember.

My field agents report visual contact with Wiis on shelves in the Portland Mall's Best Buy.

Sadly, the thought of willingly walking into a mall on Xmas eve, and then entering a store that is known to conduct bag searches on its customers (each of whom, it assumes, is likely an Oxycontin-addled thief - not a groundless assumption since this is Maine we're talking about), fills me with loathing, so I will probably give the opportunity a pass.

Still, it's interesting intel. Until now I haven't heard of Wii acquisition outside of those awarded to the first N people in that day's Wii Line, which is another phenomenon I shall have no part of.

I just learned that Bank of America bought MBNA in 2005; it took a while for the change to work its way down to the customer-interface level. (I acquired an MBNA credit card last year, apparently just before the purchase happened.)

My first thought was "there goes a big chunk of Maine's GDP" and lo according to this page I was right. BoA hurriedly set about shutting down most-perhaps-all of MBNA's Maine call centers, shifting work to various locations in South America. Sucks.

OTOH they gave me a promotional 2% APR on the big rent-paying balance transfer I took out last month, so, um, yay.

My former home just turned down $161,000 of federal education funds because they're tied to a requirement for abstinence-based sex ed.

A state official on NPR just explained that the decision comes because Maine's teen pregnancy rate has been dropping over the last 20 years, and is now one of the lowest in the nation (really? well, that's what she said); the state is concerned that the praise-jebus approach to sex ed would make it go up again. Hee hee hee I love it.