More Dreams
For some odd reason, I've had a cluster of odd dreams about earning a second (even a third) doctorate, frequently in education. (I've occasionally speculated about earning another in economics or theology, not to mention a law degree. I know in terms of the latter economist Don Boudreaux did that. My motivation wasn't so much to become the next Perry Mason or judge, but an interest in intellectual property.) I seriously doubt I want to start a second academic career at an age when most people are starting to think about retirement. My first doctorate (in Management Information Systems) is enough. There is a lot of pain and pressure one has to go through for the privilege of getting to be called "Dr." for life: endless reading, papers, grueling coursework and exams (particularly ball-busting research courses), qualifying exams (major, minor, and oral), and then the year-plus of grinding out an original dissertation. It's probably inevitable you have some related nightmares.
(Real life can often be worse than a nightmare. There was this very shapely coed who had flirted with me in the past, perhaps a bit too aggressively for a socially inept nerd. I'm a natural southpaw and used a left-handed desk in the front row. So I show up for my ball-buster research design final exam and couldn't find my usual desk. So I start searching for the desk; the coed has it in the back of the classroom with her feet propped up on the seat. All the right-handed desks in class and she picks out the desk I use! I'm pissed and repossess the desk. But she's wearing this sheer black see-through blouse, no bra, and I'm looking at the largest pair of female breasts I've ever personally seen. So the exam starts and literally for the first 10 minutes, all I can see are those boobs while staring at the exam paper. I eventually got back on track, and I ended up doing well (I got one of the 2 A's in class, which is fairly strict for a graduate class; it was the only class I shared with my late best friend and office mate Bruce, who was really sweating out whether he could salvage a B. C's are really bad in graduate school.)
The related dreams often involve the bureaucracy. This is no joke. When I published my Master's thesis at Texas, I really couldn't afford the $500 to have it professionally typed (math symbols didn't come on standard typewriters), printed and bound, but the university would rigorously enforce various stylistic standards on margins, etc. In the most recent incarnation, I show up to register for classes and can't because of all sorts of red tape, meaning I lose a whole semester. In an earlier variation, I show up for graduation, only to find there's been some paperwork glitch and I'm not in the graduating class.
I'm not sure why the field is education, although I've researched and published a lot on documentation, which involved a lot of reading in the education and applied psychology literature. I became obsessed with documentation or the lack thereof as an APL (computer) programmer/analyst and how to design more effective, usable documentation, which included certain criteria like learnability and readability. So I literally read thousands of papers and books in the reference disciplines. Now any familiar reader knows I'm a persistent critic of the public education establishment, so I'm not really sure what I would do with an EdD, but I remember being particularly impressed by the Paideia Proposal way back. I've always been an advocate for rigor and classic Western Civilization, and I've been a staunch opponent of multicultural nonsense. (The familiar reader knows I'm an open immigration advocate, and I've dated girls from different races/ethnicities; but I don't believe politics or politically correct disciplines should intervene in the classroom, particularly at the expense of Western Civilization classics.)
I really couldn't do it at the university level, where I taught mostly IT material, but I had tougher standards than my colleagues, typically more computer assignments that weren't mostly typing exercises, more up-to-date content (for instance, I required COBOL-85 programs when most commercial compilers had not been upgraded). Now I didn't dare to do in a business school what a computer science professor might do, like require a weekly program (my own first CS course at OLL required that, and our programs had to be compiled as a sister university, which meant I had 2 tries at getting my program code right.) Typically I might do 4 or 5 assignments. But to give an example, at UTEP I lost most of my data structures students to a lecturer who didn't require any programs. That's like teaching a cooking class without requiring students to prepare a meal.
So maybe an EdD would prepare me to open up my own private school with rigorous instruction and standards.
I did have a rare action movie dream the other night. The context was a long line of people crowded in a line for the city. I'm behind this woman in crutches and suddenly realize there's maybe an open stretch of a mile in front of her. So I take off and the line seems to end in an aircraft on US embassy grounds. I scurry on board, not to any available seat but somewhere in the tail section. So at some point I get the idea of checking for an open seat when I stumble near a patch of open sky 31000 feet up; I quickly get back to my original location.
I'm sure my readers have more interesting dreams, but I'm entertained.
Google, Password Managers, VPN, and More
Familiar readers probably know I have a separate practical computing blog. Now I'm in the process of drafting a related post there but as you know, I have long been interested in usability issues, and yes, even an MIS professor can get annoyed.
One thing is some problems that occur when I use my VPN. For the regular, non-techie reader, a VPN enables more secure Internet connections. So especially if you use less secure Internet connections, e.g., on the road in airports, hotels, etc. (when I started my current subscription, it was before a week-long business trip to the Florida panhandle), it's a necessity. Of course there are other technologies that can help protect your privacy, at least to a limited agree: incognito mode; the Opera browser promotes an integrated VP for browsing (note: not for other computer activities!); other browsers (one of them chromium-based) promote privacy safeguards, blocking trackers, etc.
Of course, Google's cash cow is advertising through its search and other services. Every once in a while, maybe after running some cleansing utility, I get a reminder that Google finances its free services through ads. But I've noticed at least a couple of things Google signals its displeasure while I'm connected to VPN: I have issues trying to send emails through gmail from my desktop email client; and I go through Captcha hell trying to use Google search. (To less familiar users, you might experience Captcha when a website asks you to prove you're a human by clicking a checkbox or say all the squares in a picture showing, say, a car or a sidewalk or whatever. It's one thing to do one of these; I seemed to get stuck into an endless loop of Google Captchas. Not good, Google; I can use other Internet search providers.
It's not the only thing; I have a number of different password managers, and at least one of them gets testy when it doesn't recognize my VPN IP. To a certain extent, other websites also make you jump through hoops when they don't recognize your IP. Now to a degree, I like the idea they are flagging possible hackers trying to access my accounts. But it's highly annoying because it makes the VPN experience more inconvenient; so, for example, I might have to disconnect from the VPN to send that email I had been working on and reconnecting.
Now, for those of you who don't blog, this item may not be of much interest and you might say, "Cry me a river." Blogger, the provider for my blogs, including this one, recently forced a change on us. (It does say it provides a link to switch back to the legacy format temporarily, as it works through any late-surfacing bugs, but it lies, at least for this blog; I've noticed I see a newer blog with the link. This one, for which I recently celebrated my twelfth blogiversary, must be the unmentioned exception.
Now I'm not a Luddite; but to be honest, I much prefer the legacy mode (a similar observation to Reddit, but I think they still support the legacy mode under a tweaked URL). No, I'm not like the legendary WordStar user who resented giving up his mastery of key combinations which weirdly made him feel like he had accomplished something. I prefer the legacy appearance, and for those of us who do a lot of switching between compose and html mode, this new interface is an unusable pain in the ass to work with.
Now, particularly in my daily/miscellany and social media posts, I use a lot of embedded objects: Youtube videos, tweets, and Facebook posts. There was a simpler, more direct, easier integration between html and compose mode. In the new html mode, you don't have item separation; spacing in html mode doesn't translate to spacing in compose mode, nor to objects in compose mode remain separate in html mode. So say I want to insert a video between two others. It's like I have to parse a giant wrapped around html ball for relevant iframe tags. I often subsequently have to tweak formats, lines, and headings subsequently in display mode. It was simply much easier to work with in the legacy mode.
Entertainment
- WWE. I thought they were going to spark a feud between female brand/tagteam champs Sasha and Bayley. You can sense a taste of it when each volunteers the other into a qualifying match for her own belt. But my guess is WWE is saving that, and also Brock Lesnar, for if and when they resume live crowd events. They seem to be teasing a Braun Strowman heel turn for SummerSlam, jobbing to The Fiend Bray Wyatt. WWE is also featuring some Fight Club type gimmick "Raw Underground" under Shane McMahon, complete with sexy dancing girls.
COVID-19 Shutdown Diary
I've occasionally mentioned one of my nieces, a hard-luck primary school teacher who started her career around the time of the Great Recession and was subsequently laid off by a Colorado public school. She struggled for a while and later moved down to my youngest brother's house and taught for modest wages for a private school in the far San Antonio suburbs. Her youngest sister, also a teacher, but a junior high math teacher, had started working in a Kansas local school, and she got a job offer in the same town. My older niece met some guy I think at a fitness club; they started dating, got married, and had a son. I don't know the story, but I suspect my nephew-in-law has an anger problem and was physically abusive; I think he has also had job stability issues. My niece and her son went to live at my sister/brother-in-law's home in Colorado; at some point, my niece and her husband reconciled, and they moved to his home state Missouri. (I was worried because there was no family support in Missouri other than a cousin living across the state.) Long story short, my sister and brother-in-law "retired" and moved to his family's home state of Ohio. I don't know the details, but my niece and grandnephew ended up moving to Ohio, and I think she is finally divorcing her husband. But in the interim she's had a hard time finding a subsequent permanent teaching job since leaving Kansas and has gone through a series of jobs barely paying above minimum, I think more recently working as a substitute teacher, hoping to get her foot in the door for a full-time job. I don't know pay rates, but I get the feeling subs make half or less of full-time teachers.
Why mention her here? Well, one obvious thing is the difficulty of finding work in the COVID-19 shutdown. I know--I lost a job offer last November which fell through over paperwork issues and I was going through some phone interviews when the crisis started, and all of a sudden the interviews no-showed, and I never got any followups. Again, I don't know the specifics but I don't think my niece's estranged husband has ever provided any significant child support. She has done whatever work she could find; I think she's worked part-time in the past for Costco. So I heard from her recently that she's finally got a classroom this fall at a private school. Now the second reason for pointing it out here: when does school start, and is it in-person? The latter question is, of course, being highly debated nationally. Yes, in-person. I'm sure there will be mitigations. For example, when I attended third grade in Catholic school, the first thing we did was attend morning mass. Because of the need to fast then well before mass, Mom would pack for me a breakfast (generally my favorite: a boiled-egg sandwich) as well as lunch. So we would eat breakfasts at our desks after mass. So you don't have to assume the risk of a larger cafeteria lunch room.
Separately, Gov. DeWine (R-OH)'s false positive test created headlines as a meeting with Trump was quickly scrubbed; hours later, a second test was negative. Among other things, it points out the potential bad effects of contract tracers relying on bad information. You always need to worry about false positives and false negatives of testing, known risks.
On a different note, Tom Massie, one of my favorite pro-liberty Congressmen, recently took an antibody test (which indicates a likely acquired immunity) with positive results and intends to donate plasma.
Finally, and I recently tweeted about this, Trump again reiterates spectacularly wrong talking points that cases are an artifact of testing and the US has one of the lowest morality rates. The truth is the disease spreads without regard to testing. More widespread testing may reveal more asymptomatic individuals who have or have had the disease. Perhaps other countries' results may be impacted by more limited testing availability, but to some extent there might be a correlation, say, to higher hospital utilization. But generally, as the novel coronavirus starts to ebb in the general population, we should see the rates dropping, not increasing. That hasn't been the case as of late spring. On the other hand, Trump is bait-and-switching fatality with mortality rate. For example, you could have 2 small towns with high fatality rates of COVID-19 infected persons, but the country has a low mortality rate overall because it's tightly contained. The US may have a lower fatality rate due to superior healthcare facilities, but because the spread of the disease is across nearly the whole country,the mortality can be higher overall. So the US has roughly a quarter of global cases and global deaths, but only about 5% of the global population. That's nearly 5 times the rate over the rest of the world. That's not good, people.
Whereas I don't blame Trump for the pandemic, his resistance to testing has not helped contain the disease, and he should be held accountable.
