Profunksticated

Random stuff:

The Spouse plans to petition for a recount in the recent school board election in our NJ township. Now that the absentee ballots have been counted, she is behind the third-place candidate (who is the only incumbent running this year) by only five votes of more than 3,400 cast. She plans to show election officials a pattern of impropriety, including the incumbent refusing to leave a polling place when told to leave by election officials and a poll worker at one site almost getting into my wife’s face because she was slightly within the 100-foot distance from the doors.

I’ve spoken to my landlady, who also is a teacher, about the results. She recalled that she helped a fellow teacher with a Virginia school board campaign some years back. Of course the teacher played up her educational credentials, just like my wife. But that woman lost. My landlady’s blunt assessment is that “no one gives a damn” about educational credentials when it comes to school board politics. She suggested that if my wife runs again next year, she hold her nose and try to align herself with the local political establishment.

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I saw the movie Obsessed with some friends at an early Sunday morning showing in Virginia. I sat with my arms across my chest for about the second half of the flick with a scowl. Why?

I really wasn’t feeling Idris Elba’s character Derek being put out of the house by Beyonce’s Sharon because he DID NOT MENTION that some crazy woman on the job was trying hard to come on to him. And Derek, unlike a lot of men and to his credit, didn’t bite. If I’m Idris/Derek, I’d have morphed into Stringer Bell and had the bee-yotch whacked.

Sorry, if that’s me, I’m gonna be real pissed if my wife tries to put me out behind a failure to say something. I’m not moving. She may have a right to be upset. However, not saying something, as a marital offense, doesn’t rise to the level of being asked to leave the home. And many men will tell you that the reason they won’t say anything is because they fear receiving precisely the same irrational reaction Sharon exhibited.

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I just wrapped up my first course in the IT master’s program, which was Managing the IT-Enabled Enterprise. Now it’s on to Business Architecture and Process. One thing disturbed me. We were assigned to review and comment on each others’ final group papers, describing a restaurant’s IT environment and action plan.

I found two of the papers appalling in that they were filled with misspellings, bad grammar and busted syntax. And this is supposed to be graduate-level work? I wanted badly to say something, but all the comments are open on a thread for everyone to see, and I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. I initially chalked the bad writing up to students for whom English is not their first language. I see that here at work all the time and have to clean up that writing. I checked the authors’ names on one particularly bad paper, but those names indicated to me they were born right here in the United States. I’m thinking I may speak with my academic advisor about that.

Fortunately, my group’s paper was relatively clean, thanks to yours truly.