Just ran through the Lattice Multiplication video. This is a completely new approach to me. When did this show up?

About 10-15 years ago, I think. I hate it -- it's the sort of thing that would be interesting to teach as an extra thing to kids who already know multiplication, but most of the teachers teaching it don't actually understand it well enough to explain correctly why it works, and so they just teach it as a series of steps to follow, which leads to all sorts of problems down the road.

I took that test Kat linked to, but it irked me. I do believe you have a certain innate amount of intelligence and some people have more than others. That doesnt mean that there aren't lazy geniuses who never learned how to do calculus, or that an average person can't work hard and understand it better than a smart person who didn't.

I think my coffee this morning must have been decaf - I have a pounding headache and I'm about to fall asleep at my desk.

Maybe a burrito will wake me up. Only one way to find out.

They made me rewrite my juror survey. Because it was in green.

I filled out my immigration papers for Jamaica in green, and they made me fill them out again in black. And the woman at the counter very blankly told me she only had a red pen, so I was SOL with her.

It's a requirement to fly with a black pen now? That's not in the documentation I got.

Allyson, are you at the courthouse downtown, near the Walt Disney thingummyjiggy?

As a university student, would you ever tell your teacher you didn't like reading? An anthropology teacher?

Gah. I can't even imagine that. Makes me want to shake my cane.

Omg so bored. So bored.

Allyson, I hope you aren't at one of the courthouses where they don't let you read! I sat in voir dire once for several hours (it was a very boring voir dire) and they wouldn't let us read, because they said it was disrespectful of the court. I nearly died of boredom.

She wouldn't let me mark in red pen, because she says they find it dispiriting.

Wait, they're university students? They can't handle red pen? They need to pull up their grown-up panties and FUCKING DEAL WITH IT. If the most "dispiriting" thing to ever happen to me in college was red pen, I would have been goddamn Pollyanna.

I'm sort of surprised you're marking college level papers on hard copy in the first place. I miss my red pencil so much.

I'm sort of surprised you're marking college level papers on hard copy in the first place.

How do you mean? I mean, it's the Third World. They weren't even all all printed out--one had a handwritten cover sheet.

When I got married I found out that all official documents in Louisiana must be filled out in black ink. Our rabbi told us while he helpfully traced over the info in our marriage license application for us, since we had filled it out with the blue pen provided by the Parish clerk.

ION, I might just have pissed off a coworker royally. Thankfully, it doesn't matter because she's in Cleveland.

I took on the responsibility of updating/correcting an big spreadsheet of data--it covers a bunch of property nationwide, and tracks them all on a large number of variables. Except nobody had updated it in a couple of years, and some of the data for my region was wrong. So I asked, and the folks at HQ said, "Go for it!" and I started fixing it all up--corrected the macros, fixed the errors, resorted it so it made sense, added new things to sort on (they had some things coded by color, so you couldn't even sort it automatically, so stupid).

But I've run out of data to check it against, so I sent email to a woman in Cleveland asking for her spreadsheet of data on this type of property. Because she has to have one, right? I mean, I have like four, all for different purposes. It's a bit too much to keep all of that in your head.

She gave me some bullshit answer that someone at HQ had the master spreadsheet, but that's just the one I am fixing.

So I emailed her back, asking if she does, in fact, actually track this stuff, or does she manage the information in some other way.

And I'm quite sure the answer is that she doesn't track this stuff at all. Which I will be sure to share with my boss: this is why they need me to be in charge nationwide. Not that they will ever do it...