What's old is new again...
Sep. 6th, 2012 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarWell, had my first day back to school for the fall/winter term today. It seems like I just finished my summer term... oh, yeah... I did just finish :(. I haven't seen my mark yet for the 3rd year probability and statistics course (expecting a decent mark, if not a good one), but my women and gender studies mark was posted: I got an "A". Woot! [I got an "A-" on my Canadian politics course earlier in the summer].
Things went reasonably well for the two classes I had today, hung out with some classmates for lunch (it's not as awkward in this, our collective 4th year, as it was in say 1st year, heh), then stayed and worked until after 4PM on characterizing the DC power supply for the spectrometer layer of the muon tomography system we're building in the basement at Carleton. I am nominally working 5 hours a week for the school year on the detector and possibly other projects at they come along (there are several in the proposal stage including a giant ground-based solar weather observatory with an architecture quite similar to the one I proposed for the nano-satellite project earlier this year, heh). This term I am taking the following courses:
And as for the title of the post... what's old is blogs like this. I made a decision yesterday to finally walk away from Facebook. Not only was it a timesink, but it seemed to generate more than its fair share of drama over the summer. I had been considering walking away from it for a while, but I the scales finally tipped... nicely, just in time for me to start school (that certainly played a factor for sure). When asked if it was forever, I replied, yup... archiving my account (just waiting for the email notification that it's done) and moving on... it was a long path that led me to this point (again, no particular thing precipitated my decision). I will move my online presence to either my own web server (I have one in my living room running Wordpress already) or will pay for another service. One other major contributor to my decision is the very wise observation that someone made about Facebook: "it's free because you're not their customer, you're their product". While free access to the service is certainly compensation, I have become progressively more uncomfortable as they have grown as large as they are and have started to leverage our participation into real power to shape society. I'm not particularly in agreement with where and how I see them applying that leverage. I hope to spend more time writing and commenting over here instead (it's new again) :).
Things went reasonably well for the two classes I had today, hung out with some classmates for lunch (it's not as awkward in this, our collective 4th year, as it was in say 1st year, heh), then stayed and worked until after 4PM on characterizing the DC power supply for the spectrometer layer of the muon tomography system we're building in the basement at Carleton. I am nominally working 5 hours a week for the school year on the detector and possibly other projects at they come along (there are several in the proposal stage including a giant ground-based solar weather observatory with an architecture quite similar to the one I proposed for the nano-satellite project earlier this year, heh). This term I am taking the following courses:
- 3rd year Numerical Analysis (Honours)
- 3rd year Elements of Quantum Mechanics (I took the course last year, but had to drop out because I got really sick for several weeks in the middle of it, I was doing well in it otherwise, and expect to do well this time around)
- 3rd year Advanced Dynamics (motion of systems of particles and of rigid bodies)
- 4th year Computational Physics (mostly statistics done on computers, crosslisted as a graduate course for particle physics, yikes!)
- 3rd year Feminist Thought (the 2nd of 4 "core" courses I need to get a minor in feminist studies, I'm signed up for #3 in the winter term)
And as for the title of the post... what's old is blogs like this. I made a decision yesterday to finally walk away from Facebook. Not only was it a timesink, but it seemed to generate more than its fair share of drama over the summer. I had been considering walking away from it for a while, but I the scales finally tipped... nicely, just in time for me to start school (that certainly played a factor for sure). When asked if it was forever, I replied, yup... archiving my account (just waiting for the email notification that it's done) and moving on... it was a long path that led me to this point (again, no particular thing precipitated my decision). I will move my online presence to either my own web server (I have one in my living room running Wordpress already) or will pay for another service. One other major contributor to my decision is the very wise observation that someone made about Facebook: "it's free because you're not their customer, you're their product". While free access to the service is certainly compensation, I have become progressively more uncomfortable as they have grown as large as they are and have started to leverage our participation into real power to shape society. I'm not particularly in agreement with where and how I see them applying that leverage. I hope to spend more time writing and commenting over here instead (it's new again) :).
