School ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Brian Bilbrey January 15, 2012

Physical Therapy with a Chance of Walking

Marcia continues to make stellar progress with her PT exercises - straight leg lifts that could not be done without an assist four days ago are now done on leg strength alone, and twice as high as before. Rockin'! She's also doing 10-15 minute sessions of laps on the main floor of the house with her walker, and pain management is improving daily. Some neighbors dropped by today, with conversation, balloon, and chocolate to share with Marcia - she enjoyed the little bit of company, I think. MLK day tomorrow, then I'll do some work in the ensuing four days,…

Brian Bilbrey December 20, 2011

Process and Paranormal

Process and Paranormal - it's not a Jane Austen parody, although those are surprisingly popular these days, especially those with zombies baked in. I'm just thoughtful about two different things right at the moment and rather than make progress on anything, I'll stop and discuss things here. * * * Process is much on my mind not just because of my on-again, off-again forays into the land of productivity porn. My in-field class this upcoming Winter session has Pressman's Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach as the text. Software engineering is all about process (as is personal and work productivity). I'm…

Brian Bilbrey December 6, 2011

On the value of shorter class sessions

With this Fall Semester, UMUC fully transitioned all of their classes to an 8-week format. Most classes previously had been 12 or 13 weeks in length. The price is the same, and the number of units granted for completing the class are the same, but the material, and time, there is less. Here's the pertinent commentary from one of the course evaluations I've written this Fall: This course suffers from the shorter (8 week) session length. The ONE value of the shorter courses is that they're shorter. It's like 1.5 quart ice cream for the same price as the old…

Brian Bilbrey November 13, 2011

Another week spins by

Whoa! Really? Mid-November? Where are the years going? This week the 'A' for my Social Gerontology course landed at the Academic Records Office at UMUC (I made that name up, but it sounds good). Of course, the class wasn't about whole societies getting older, civilizations dying, etc. Mostly it was an overview of the field of research into anything nontechnical on the subject of aging. You could, I guess, call it Gerontology for non-science majors. As usual, I learned some stuff anyway. The biggest thing I learned, though, was this: To do well in school (as I didn't do the…

Brian Bilbrey November 5, 2011

One Nation Under A Groove

Thanks, Funkadelic, for brightening up my afternoon! * * * Busy week (huge surprise there, eh?) - four days working at the office, including a day of racking new gear and helping to get the electrics run properly for the new gear. Friday was an appointment in the morning, followed by writing and coding for school. I'd been working on the final paper for the Social Gerontology class for a couple of weeks, and yesterday I finished it and submitted it. In the evening, I worked on the Java project that's due on Sunday evening (or, confusingly, Monday, but I'll…