Irregularly Andy

Quite crazy start to the quarter.

Well, hi! I haven't posted in quite a while, so I think I should do so now.

I've been mostly pretty busy for the last few weeks... With housemate changes, Campus Crusade meetings, planning, and events, and getting prepared for the new quarter of teaching here at RIT, I've just been focusing my energies elsewhere.

But, today is the third day of classes. Things are going okay despite a terrible Monday morning. Here are some of the setbacks that presented themselves on Monday morning around 8am:

1. Two thirds of my 8am class doesn't show up. They were all sent to the wrong room by the RIT class sheduling system. Someone from the office went over to the room to fetch them (the start of class was thus delayed for about 30 minutes) -- It turns out that my Tuesday/Thursday class would have had the same problem (of being sent to another (yet entirely different) incorrect classroom had someone not double-checked the rest of the 320 course sections for us). (everyone knows where they're supposed to go now)

2. My DCE account was deleted by the University AGAIN! (such is the life of an adjunct, apparently). So I had no way to sign in and see where my students had actually gone, get a class list, or sign in to the academic advising system. Also, my web site is gone because of this. (looks like my account is back, but now I have to reconfigure things again)

3. I discover that one of my textbooks for the class is actually in it's 2nd edition of printing, which is fine... They've improved the book quite a bit... But I didn't know about it, so I don't have a desk copy and most of my handouts refer to the wrong page numbers and chapters, etc. (my desk copy has not come)

4. One of the two front projectors in my classroom is not displaying at proper brightness, so anyone that wants to see what I'm demonstrating has to move over to the other side of the classroom. (this has since been fixed)

5. I had no teaching assistant for my first section of the class. (thankfully I was able to find someone that will do a great job and he was hired yesterday and will be there (for that section) from now on)

That was most of the problems. Not insurmountable, but quite a fascinating dump of issues all at one time.

Outside of that, things are going pretty well. Campus Crusade is going pretty smoothly with about 250 Freshman Survival Kits given out so far to people with an interest in CCC. A lot of good contacts to follow up on and invite to meetings and events. The "Church Tour" where we're carpooling students to a different church each week went well with about 30 students going along to visit NewSong Church. About 50 people attended our Freshman welcome "Rootbeer Kegger". Matt and I also lead a freshman "Connection Group" meeting for the first time last night and our main 4 guys were there. This Thursday is our first Full meeting of the quarter at which Mark Randall will be our main speaker...

Mark (and his wife Kristin) just had a baby on Labor (get it?) Day. Zachary is his name. This is the busy time of the year for Mark with the new students arriving to campuses. (Mark is the Rochester CCC area 'director') And new ministries are growing on most of the local campuses at this point. It's pretty exciting, and this year for the first time, we'll be doing our own special Rochester CCC Fall Retreat instead of going to Buffalo's event like we have for the last few years. It will be kind of sad not to see the buffalo folks, but it will be exciting to have so many nearby Rochester students to get to know and potentially coordinate events, etc. with.

Pauley has fully moved into the apartment... This happened a while ago, but things seem to be going well. Although he works pretty crappy hours, he's been able to hang out with Jeff and I a little bit more than Briant used to be able to...

It's time to get ready for the new season of Television Shows... Looking forward to checking out a couple of new shows, but mostly I'm psyched up about the new season of Survivor and the new Season of Alias. Enjoyed watching the final episode of For Love or Money 2 last night. Hard to believe it turned out the way it did. That was some pretty good "Reality TV"... I just wish they'd bring back The Mole!

I'm actually typing this entry on a PeeCee instead of my nice comfortable Mac, so if I see hard and callous, that's why. :) Actually, they just apparently put PCs into the offices of all adjunct faculty (instead of equipping us with a laptop, I guess)... Not my top choice... seeing as how I'm teaching 3 sections of one course which uses Mac OS X as it's main operating system... But I've always claimed to be "Cross-Platform" so this is probably good medicine... Even if it does taste terrible going down...

So, my sister, Teresa, is finally giving up the administration of this absolutely HUGE discussion board that has been a part of her website and is devoted to her designs and so forth. Just needs to focus or her business more and on dealing with the squabblings of administrating a Bulletin Board less. Not that she won't continue to be involved and post on the board, it's just that she can't afford to be the one fielding all of the complaints and requests and so on. It sounds like they're going to build a volunteer administrator's team which should work well. A lot of folks on the board (and this is more of a virtual "community" than just a board... seriously there are topics for personal counseling and recipies and all matter of other discussion -- there are over 3000 registered usernames -- although that might only represent about 2000 or so actual individuals)... anyway, a lot of folks on the board are worried that the board might go away or that the atmosphere will change greatly because someone else will be the main "administrator"... They needn't be worried... I know there have already been many qualified people willing to co-admin the board, the people in the community are immensely concerned with it staying a comfortable and welcoming place. Interesting side note: The bulletin board is probably about 90% (or more) female users (mainly because the majority of Cross Stitch fans are female), and it gets (on average) about 32,000 page views PER DAY, about 757 posts, and about 1.2 Gigabytes of data is processed each day. Since it moved to it's current location on ezboard.com there have been over 20,400,000 page views and 645,000 posts.

Board Games are also going pretty well. Hoping to see between 10 and 20 there tonight.

Well, time to go to lunch.

Posted by Andrew at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)