Laptops in the classroom

I've finished my first week back to school, and one interesting thing to note is policy on laptops in the classrooms. There isn't any official school policy, as before. Also as before, various professors have different opinions on laptops.

One of my professors appears to have a love/hate relationship with laptops. One of the first things he made clear is that he's a bit hesitant about students using them during class. This is because he does not approve of people playing on Facebook when they should be paying attention to the lesson, since it distracts other students. (It will also distract Facebooker, but he didn't mention that. I guess he figured that if you're going to be so easily distracted that you'll be distracted with or without Facebook.) That said, he doesn't rule them out because people can use them legitly for taking notes. Also, we'll be getting all our readings via PDFs he's emailing us, and he'll let us read them on our laptops instead of printing them out if we really want to.

Another professor embraces laptops and smart phones, considering them valuable resources that can be used to answer random questions that may arise during class. (I've used my netbook for this in the past, and probably will again.) He didn't address the issue of no Facebook and no texting, interestingly. Maybe he just trusts his students to stay on track in class?

I don't recall my other two professors saying a word about laptops. Or phones, for that matter. Which is a bit odd now that I think about it, since I'm pretty sure phones were always mentioned on the first day of class in the past.

It'll be interesting, maybe ten years from now, to see if I can get a student to compare their own experiences to this post. I wonder how much will be the same and how much will be different.

For the record, I'm using a four year old little HP netbook for taking notes. Yes it's old, but I admit to being a tad attached to it, and it still runs decently.

Young woman with laptop

Birthday Loot

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey

Let's see, what did I get for my birthday?

First of all, I got the new iPhone 5S. In silver. I'm not sure exactly what advantages it has over the old designs, although this one does have the definite advantage over my old one in that it has twice the memory. I'd been getting tired of having to delete things in order to get new music from iTunes.

There's also an iPhone case I still haven't received yet, but which is coming. (By the time I requested it there wasn't time for it to arrive before my birthday. Oh well...) It was pretty water colors and says "wibbly wobbly timey wimey!" And it's cute. :)

Tall One got me my own sonic screwdriver. I suppose it isn't a real one, since human technology isn't up to Doctor Who's standards, but it goes on my key chain and it doubles as a tiny flashlight. Which is pretty neat.

Oh yes, and the kukri. My boyfriend got me a kukri. Which I like.

Last, I bought some new Heather Dale music as a present to myself, and I have got to share one of the songs. I couldn't find the exact recording on YouTube, so instead here is a live performance.



I'm almost in love with the sweet colleen of the nut brown hair after hearing this song.

The ducking autocorrect

I actually resorted to profanity a few days ago.

Without going into details, let's just say that I wound up sleep deprived for a very stupid reason, and I was maybe a little ticked. In trying to discuss and resolve the situation I actually resorted to using a few bad words to express my frustration.

That's where I learned that my iPhone's autocorrect doesn't exactly exactly approve of me using profanity. For one thing, it turned fucking into ducking. Which doesn't make any sense at all, especially since I'm sure I spelled it correctly. It also pulled a John Green and turned a (misspelled) bad word into Dickinson. Which I may have found more amusing if I weren't half asleep despite the two coffees I think I had drunk by that time.

Moral of the story? My autocorrect may try to make me say some rather inappropriate things at times, and even succeed in doing so on occasion, but it disapproves when I try to say bad things myself.

I think my iPhone has double standards.

The good news is that I've caught up on sleep, the profanity inducing situation seems to have been resolved, and my supervisor at work was very understanding about me being a zombie that day.

Duck by X posid

And now, a duck. Since autocorrect would probably approve. And if it doesn't, it can go to he'll.

Autocorrect fails

Autocorrect on the iPhone can be quite useful. If you write something that isn't a word it'll change it to another word that you've used before.

Or anyways, that's how it's supposed to work.

I am fairly certain that I have never used the following words, yet somehow my autocorrect knows them and thinks that I want to use them when talking to my friends:

Hooghly
Fallon
Tories
Stegner
Jape
Inge
Geri
Bergen

These are either names or words whose meanings I don't know. If I ever wrote them it was a typo, and only once. Oh, and my iPhone also thinks that I might want a misspelled word autocorrected to "stab era" or "pro ledges". Yep, it's autocorrected a single word to both of those things.

And then it sometimes likes to change words that are spelled correctly. Such as changing "of" to "I'd". What the heck??

Oh, and for a couple days it was turning "brb" into "Ben". That was fun to explain to my boyfriend! "Sorry, if I call you Ben I actually mean brb..."

As useful as autocorrect can be, it can also be rather weird. And entertaining at times. I confess that my guilty pleasure is reading bad autocorrect fails online. :)