I just finished reading a conference paper submission written by a graduate student. His writing was simply impeccable if you ignore his inability to construct sentances, use english grammar, and weave a clear thought through the entire text. How does this happen? I suppose the answer is obvious. Bad writing is American.
First, we teach our kids that they only need one language in life: English. Then we fail to teach them how to use their one-and-only language since they might feel bad about themselves when they make mistakes. Finally, we treat them like two year-olds their entire life by innundating them with media written at the level of intelligent slugs.
So maybe bad writing is inherent in being American? But I would rather like to blame public school. After all, what successful system gives institutions money before they do their work and provides no measure of accountability to those it claims to serve? And the media? Just an inevitable product of those schools.
I just turned in my last assignment for the term. It feels great to be done. I look forward to a summer of research and personal projects. Ah...the sweet relief of summer.
One of my morning traditions is racing out the door. It's not that I don't get up early enough, but I forget how long it actually takes me to get loaded in the car and take off. So after racing out the the car, I realized I had forgotten the cell phone inside. I came barrelling back through the door past Emily who was coming down the stairs. Without me saying a word, Emily shouted out "Daddy forgot the cell phone!" It's just amazing what a 2 year-old can notice.
Of course, after saying this, Emily got a gleeful look of satisfaction on her face. Almost to say, "Hello world! Look at me! I just identified what is going on." She was laughing, not at my air-headedness, but from delight in her own ability to make an observation. Kids are amazing.
I'm sure you've seen it before. In my case, that's my media harddrive dying. I wouldn't be surprised if it had finally croaked of old age, but this sucker is only a couple months old. In fact, this drive is my fresh replacement from the drive I just RMAed.
Who's to blame? I blame Western Digital for making a crummy harddrive. Come on! This is my second drive to die in almost as many months. It seems that WD's jump to 250 GB wasn't without it's problems.
Needless to say, I'm transferring as much as I can on to the Maxtor 120 GB drive I recently bought as a backup drive. Given my success with Maxtor in the past, I hope this drive has a more positive future. Of course, I'll keep RMAing my Western Digital drives until I finally get one that works!
BTW, if you haven't discovered "smartmontools", then open a terminal and type "emerge smartmontools" right now! (Or use "apt-get" if that's your thing.)