I am … unhindered by talent

Yesterday the missive below came from our Chancellor (Sam Schuman). That’s a nice bit of pro-active thinking, getting on top of it before it’s a complete mess. Now one wonders what kinds of similar thinking is happening at the community, state, and federal levels? I can certainly imagine this being an enormous problem for people skating on the edge of homelessness or people (like many elderly) on fixed incomes.

As we all know, costs of fossil fuels of all types are going up dramatically. This is, of course, obvious at the gas pump. It is, at this point, less obvious when we think about heating our homes and offices. We are monitoring this situation carefully, in terms of UMM buildings, but we are also concerned for students (and other members of our community) living off campus.

Students living in rental housing who are responsible for their heating bills should anticipate costs that are about DOUBLE those of last year! We are worried that this may pose a very serious fiscal challenge to many of our students.

Shortly, the Financial Aid Office will be staffing a table at the student center with information about this issue, and materials for seeking supplemental funding to help with unanticipated heating costs. I’d personally encourage all students living off campus to mull this situation, and take appropriate steps deal with this new challenge. If there is any way I or any of us can help, let us know!

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Ooooooo … Dave passed along the text of his father’s wonderful poem “Scab sandwich” which he shared at the banned book reading last week!

Not for those with faint dispositions…

Read the rest of this entry »

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Actually, I really hate mean, stupid people who take take advantage of weak spots in software to keep me from doing useful, helpful things.

Last night one of our major UMM CSci web servers got hacked quite maliciously. This was not the polite “You have a security hole that you probably should fix, but I won’t actually damage your data” sort of attack, though. This was “Oooh, I got in, so I’ll delete tons of data, change other data, and see if I can leave backdoors for myself” sort of attack.

And it’s my fault.

Well, of course it’s not really my fault (never blame the victim!), but I left the damn door open. We were notified of a security problem back in September and I fixed it in one place but forgot to fix it in a second place. And, sadly, locking half the doors doesn’t secure the house.

Hmph.

I have a boat load of stuff I need to be working on. I’m terribly behind in my grading, there’s lots of committee work that needs attention, in theory I’m organizing a trip to the Cities day after tomorrow, etc., etc. And now some foul twit decides to get his jollies by pooping in our sandbox.

I’m going to go cry.

Unfortunately, a significant reason that I’m behind on all this other stuff is other computer problems, including something like 30 hours in two weeks on a hardware problem on the same server that just got hacked. And our family news site is hacked and I’ve had no time to deal with it.

When I logged in to write this, there was a comment that said “I love you”. From a wanna-be spammer advertising mortgage insurance.

Did I mention that I’m gonna go cry?

So here I sit rambling incoherently instead of getting real work done. I needed to vent, though, so I don’t snap at some poor student later. I’ve been IM’ing with Apsu and venting at him as well. I’m way behind on helping him with a paper he’s working on (in the same way that I’m behind on a paper with the Grandiloquent One) and his response was brilliant:

I’ll just keep bitching until you’ve caught up and gotten your work done you overcommitting psychopath.

Yeah.

“Overcommitting psychopath”.

I think I’ll end there.

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Thursday night saw the “formal” kick-off meeting for the campaign to pass November’s school levy. There had obviously been many meetings before that, initially to just get this thing on the ballot in the first place, and more recently just to track what the School Board was up to and get ready for this larger meeting. But Thursday was over 30 people, where we’d been running 6 to a dozen for months, had an agenda, brochures and flyers, and sub-groups working on specific tasks. Crazy! We even raised $700 to help pay for campaign materials, and sold out an order of 80 lawn signs, which was pretty darn cool.

The turn-out was still University heavy, but a lot more balanced than any previous MARQS event. Even if it’s possible that the U community can carry this thing on their own, it’s clear (to me, at least) that we don’t want to go that route. Having a significant part of town resenting the U community for “imposing” higher taxes on them just isn’t a happy thought. Luckily the last two school measures (the 2000 levy that the state revoked a year later, and the vote 3 years ago to build the wonderful new elementary school building that just opened) passed with substantial majorities that included major support from across the community, so hopefully we can get the same broad support for this levy.

Oh, and WeatherGirl got to do the welcome and overview of the meeting (damn near killed her - she hates public speaking - but she handled it fine) and got elected MARQS treasurer :-). And almost every “official” speaker went out of their way to point out how wonderfully useful the MARQS website is. It’s a really nice example of how a decent tool (WordPress in this case) and a focussed webmaster who cares (WeatherGirl in this case) can make something really useful without a huge amount of effort or getting all fancy. I think it’s indicative that there are 32 posts from several different people and 9 “static” information pages (that have in fact been edited and updated quite often). If we’d tried to run this by just editing static HTML (which is how it started life) I can pretty much assure that it would have updated much less often and be much less useful in many important ways.

Now we have to make good on all this promise and get this thing passed. Gooooooo TEAM!!!!

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