It's the first day of

It's the first day of the fall semester, here at UNI. It's supposed to reach 92°F today, so it's toasty warm, and crowded on campus. I've already been asked directions by freshmen at least 5 times. So far, the highlight of my day was watching a Goth chick, wearing too much makeup and far too many black clothes for the heat, strutting her stuff all tough, then getting nailed by a sprinkler that's watering the new sod. Her "cooler than thou" atttitude was completely destroyed.

Argh, our dryer died tonight.

Argh, our dryer died tonight. Well, it technically still functions, but when you hear the sound of metal-on-metal coming from your dryer, it's probably best to stop using it. It came with our house, and I'd estimate its age at around 20 years, so there's no way it's worth fixing. I ordered a new one from Sears, we'll pick it up later this week. Normally I'd want to see it in person, but I checked Consumer Reports' site, found a model they suggested as a "Best Buy" then saw it was on sale at Sears.com, and the sale ends in 1.5 hours. So, I ordered online, and they should e-mail me in 3-5 days and tell me to come pick it up. It's Sears Item #02662802000, Mfr. Model #62802 if you're interested.

Watching an episode of Trading

Watching an episode of Trading Spaces today, I think I found the carpet I want to put in our basement. It's called Legato Carpet, and it's sold at Home Depot. It looked neat on TV, all you do is stick it down, but it looks a lot better than the standard low pile peel and stick carpet. After a bit of walking on it, you can't see any seams, and if you ever stain a piece, you can just replace it. This seems like the perfect solution for our basement area, that we just use as casual TV room. I may have to head out to Home Depot tomorrow to buy a box of it, and give it a try. It's about $2/square foot, I think, but that doesn't seem too expensive, if it looks nice.

Interesting, my employer is listed

Interesting, my employer is listed as second in the US News & World Report ranking of Midwestern public universities granting Master's degrees. See, if you get specific enough, you too can be in the top 5! For instance, I'm the number 1 search result on Google for "Seth Bokelman", what are the odds? Actually, there is another Seth Bokelman in the world, believe it or not, but he lives in West Virginia, and I think he's in high school still, but I digress. Why UNI is second, I don't know. I can certainly think of several dozen other schools in the Midwest I'd attend before UNI. In the state of Iowa, here are the valid reasons to attend UNI, in my opinion:

1. You're majoring in Music, Education, or Business. 2. You got a free ride scholarship. 3. Your mommy wouldn't let you leave the Cedar Falls/Waterloo area, so you're living at home. 4. You went to ISU or the U of Iowa for a year, but couldn't hack it, because the profs didn't babysit you, or you couldn't make friends, even with 25,000-30,000 fellow students to pick from. 5. You couldn't even get in to ISU or the U of Iowa.

And that's pretty much it. UNI is not a research school, the focus is on undergraduate education here (not that there's anything wrong with that). UNI doesn't seem to focus on being a leader in anything, however, and I've jokingly proposed several times that our school motto should be "Good Enough" as that's the prevailing attitude here. That's not to say I'm not grateful to work here, it just means I wouldn't encourage others to attend this school, given the other two excellent schools in our system, unless one of the above 5 conditions are met.

But still, the students come, though I don't know why. For instance, UNI has a Biology program, but the U of Iowa is a medical school, with a teaching hospital, and ISU is one of the best agricultural schools in the nation. Given that tuition costs for the schools are within 2-3% of each other, why would you choose UNI?

Well, all the college students

Well, all the college students are returning to campus in Iowa, which means our network connectivity blows. They're all plugging in their computers, which aren't properly patched, so they're getting hit with the Blaster worm and its ilk almost immediately. It's not affecting our computers here on the proper campus network, as we've got those ports blocked between the dorms and the rest of campus, but I know they lack that setup at ISU. Unfortunately, all three of the state universities share the ICN, our statewide fiber-optic network, and the ICN has been suffering under the massive load caused by all this garbage. It was so bad this morning, I couldn't get much work done, because our internet connections constantly timed out as the ICN routers were stressed to the point of failure. Fortunately, I found a workaround, I'm VPN'ed into my home network, which works well, as I can route around the ICN. I can do this, because Cedar Falls Utilities is my ISP at home, and they have a 100Mbit bridge between their network and UNI, so my traffic between work and home all flows down that pipe, rather than through the beleaguered ICN. I'm limited to 1.5Mbits of bandwidth (my upload speed cap at home) but at least it's stable! Update: I see Gary shares my pain with the ICN.