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Admittance, grammar rants, Roe vs. Wade for men

News ·Tuesday March 7, 2006 @ 15:02 EST (link)


Dining room Good news: I've been accepted into the Professional Masters Program (PMP) in Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E) at the University of Washington (UWa.), as a Graduate Non-Matriculated (GNM) student, which lets me take a few courses and see how I like it before enrolling (which also requires taking the GRE and getting letters of recommendation).

Move status: We're still moving a few boxes every few days; we've moved all of our books and most of the dishes we don't use, camping gear, some DVDs, and some office supplies. We had a little trouble with the blinds (couldn't move them) but the seller told us they're just really heavy; knowing that we wouldn't damage them by pulling harder, we had no trouble moving them. We have a Budget truck reserved for the weekend of the 25th and some helpful guys from work to help move the larger items.

Speaking of work, I took a chap from work (MS from MS) to the airport last Friday. Here's a sad story about bears. Louis Voyer, a travelling preacher, sent us some news of his recent US trip (he calls Mississauga home). In other news, my bug count's low and I'm having no trouble hitting my goals even with all the new areas that I've been assigned.

Mini-rants: The pairings "might could" and "might would" are awkward and, to me at least, sound uneducated. "Might" takes an infinitive, so the first would be correctly "might be able", and the second is redundant and collapses to just "might".

The accounting firm of Gipson & Woodruff, P.S., based in Kirkland, sent a form letter to our new house, proffering their services. This letter container two errors: "effect" for "affect" (common, but still inexcusable), and "The congress" for "Congress" (which should be capitalized when talking about the U.S. Congress, as they were). Needless to say, I'm not inclined to let a company that lets such shoddy prose out of their doors do my taxes. I prepared a scathing letter (in Word 12, natch) but I probably won't send it.

Thank you all for allowing me these rants.

A case dubbed Roe vs. Wade for men is in the Michigan courts now (comments, news articles). In a nutshell, it argues that men that don't want a child shouldn't have to pay child support for it, since the woman has the choice of abortion or adoption. In some egregious cases, men have been hit up for back support payments for children several years after the fact, have been tricked into fatherhood, or even end uup paying for kids that aren't theirs (the state sometimes doesn't even stop the required payments, much less returns the money). The guy filing the suit doesn't expect to win, but he expects to bring the issue to peoples' attention; that he has done.

I was having some trouble with my RAS connection to work; I called the helpdesk and the issue was elevated to tier 2 and they managed to get me a fix, in the form of an IPsec service update. Yay.

Recent books/movies: