Short rants.

[Baroquen131]

I'm sure I'm going to have a whole new list of short rants tomorrow...

And you are a master at ranting.

Surpisingly, as annoying and busy as life is at the moment, I don't have anything to vent about. I'm sure that will change soon enough.

[blueberryale77]

Things I want to rant about but don't have time because I have too much homework...

Excel
AutoCAD
Sketchup
ArcView GIS
Powerpoint
MS Word
Excel
SPSS
InDesign
PhotoShop
Excel (my very least favorite of all software in the world)
and any other computer applications I will have to use in the future...

Oh, and a special shoutout to Windows Vista, which doesn't work with several of these programs but its extremely difficult to buy a computer without it!

[rolliefingers]

Excel (my very least favorite of all software in the world)

This program should be bound, gagged, tortured and killed, as recompense for the torture it's put the human race through.

[Baroquen131]

Rather than start a new thread, I thought I just use this old one, as this rant should be short. (And it might be "just me").

Why on earth does the Orioles TV crew bump up their crowd mikes so much? I can barely hear the announcers! It sounds like there's a jumbo jet running in the background at RFK when we know there's only about two dozen people to begin with. When you can hear the heckler more clearly than Buck or Thorne, that's a problem. I couldn't even tell Miggy was talking during the start of his "interview".

AND - it's not MASN (overall) because the Nats channel was much more tolerable.

AARRGGHH!

[ixcuincle]

several things pissing me off today :

1) MASN - Dish...angry that I live in the Orioles region yet can't pick up Orioles games
2) damn roommates putting up TV so loud...this really really pisses me off and actually brought tension to a boil today as me and my roommate were actually face to face arguing about the TV being so loud. It is a conflict I have had with almost every one of my college roommates , for some reason they feel the need to be rude and blast their crap loudly. I can't wait to graduate college and be rid of the annoying pest known as a roommate once and for all.

[BaltBird 24]

I rant Freddie Bynum.

[twoBshorty]

Lost mail. I got a notice that I had a package today, so I went to the campus post office to pick it up. I signed for it, the girl went to get it, and. . .no package. 5 minutes of searching ensued. No package. I'd already gotten something else overnighted so we figured it was a duplicate notification and I left. Checked Amazon. . .no, it was delivered at 10:32 AM! The (#&*$# post office lost my package! It's there somewhere, or they wouldn't have been able to write the tracking code in the signature log, but WHERE IS IT? There are $80 worth of DVDs in there, and if they don't find it, they better give me money, because Amazon sure won't. I'm so mad!

Update: Package located! I sent a complaint to the head of the post office and he called me personally about 15 minutes ago to let me know they'd found my package and I could come get it. So I have my DVDs now. Yay!

[ScottieBaseball]

Things I want to rant about but don't have time because I have too much homework...

Excel
AutoCAD
Sketchup
ArcView GIS
Powerpoint
MS Word
Excel
SPSS
InDesign
PhotoShop
Excel (my very least favorite of all software in the world)
and any other computer applications I will have to use in the future...

Oh, and a special shoutout to Windows Vista, which doesn't work with several of these programs but its extremely difficult to buy a computer without it!

Hey, AutoCAD beats the daylights out of Aperture. Trust me.

[MTOsFan]

This program should be bound, gagged, tortured and killed, as recompense for the torture it's put the human race through.

I honestly don't get this. I've used Excel extensively as well as just about every other spreadsheet software available in the last 15 years. They all have idiosyncracies (sp??) that limit their function. Excel is by far IMO the best of what's available. Granted I might use Excel in a different context than most. The biggest limitation I see in excel is the 65K record limit. Besides that it's a pretty solid program.

[twoBshorty]

This from a TLC reality show I just watched. . .

If you own a 37-acre "agritainment" farm and set up a 10-foot catapult with a 2000-pound counterweight so the visitors to your pumpkin patch can launch their pumpkins 300 yards into a field, this is extremely cool, but it might be less than smart to have your 9-year-old son operate the machine. In fact, it might be a bad enough idea that you will be forced to stop filming while you accompany your child to the hospital so a neurosurgeon can remove pieces of his skull from his brain when the catapult malfunctions and he is too young to recognize it or know how to get out of the way in time before it cracks his head open. When your son miraculously gets out of the hospital 2 days later with no lasting damage, the best thing to do is not to go fix the catapult so you can use it again. Burning it might be a better option, along with the enormous backhoe that you let your 15-year-old dwarf son, who is about 3 feet tall, use to move a two-story playhouse by himself. Men.

(Note: I am only teasing about this because the little boy came out absolutely fine. Don't worry.)

I don't understand my parents' philosophy, either. My 17-year-old brother is not allowed to operate our self-propelled lawn mower on hills, and I'm not allowed to touch it at all. We are also not allowed to climb a ladder one story to the garage roof. Yet my brother is allowed to fly to China unsupervised with his girlfriend and I was allowed to drive at night on the Beltway in the snow during rush hour exactly 4 hours after getting my license. Go figure.

[JamesI]

-Anal-retentive grading of chemistry problem sets and biology lab reports, especially when they're graded by TA's. You guys were in my boat 2 years ago. Show a little mercy.

As a former Physics TA, most of the time the anal-retentive grading was required. We were handed a solution and given very exact directions as to how we could give points to the students. So, there was little we were allowed to do to show mercy.

[blueberryale77]

As a former Physics TA, most of the time the anal-retentive grading was required. We were handed a solution and given very exact directions as to how we could give points to the students. So, there was little we were allowed to do to show mercy.

I wish I had been a TA at your school. I once had to fight for my right to give lower than a B to a graduate student on a midterm essay that my mom, who teaches freshman composition at another school, said would have failed in her class. It wasn't an English class, but this paper was ridiculous. Apparently there are "unwritten rules" in some graduate programs.

[square634]

As a former Physics TA, most of the time the anal-retentive grading was required. We were handed a solution and given very exact directions as to how we could give points to the students. So, there was little we were allowed to do to show mercy.

My older brother is a TA for an AI class at MIT. I think he has more leeway than the specific criteria that you described for physics, but it is MIT so it is going to be hard. I'm not sure how merciful he is as compared to other TAs, but he doesn't give out a lot of A's.

[twoBshorty]

Bio labs were graded by a TA last term, and I kept getting middle B's on them no matter what I did. It's like he changed the point values of various minutiae so I would always wind up with an 87. I didn't say anything until the last day, when we got our final labs back and I realized he'd taken off 2 points for failing to write the species name in the graph caption. For 3 graphs. That's 6 points off on a 100-point assignment, or over half a letter grade, for failing to write the Latin name for "garden tomato" in the caption. I HATE double jeopardy grading. If I make the same mistake over and over, don't keep taking off points until suddenly I have a wildly disproportionate amount of points missing for something completely stupid. Like taking off a point on a two-point problem because I mislabelled units. Are the units really worth 50% of the problem? Because next time I'm just going to write "micromoles per litre," and you'd better give me a point!

Anyway, on the last day, I decided, "What the hell, the course is over anyway" and took my lab up the chain of command directly to the professor and complained. He agreed that the grading was "excessive" and gave me my 6 points back. I pulled an A- in the class. Who knows what it might have been if I'd complained earlier? I know other students were having similar problems, and I feel bad that I didn't speak up and maybe gotten him to lighten up a little, because it obviously wasn't how the professor intended the labs to be graded.

[JamesI]

Bio labs were graded by a TA last term, and I kept getting middle B's on them no matter what I did. It's like he changed the point values of various minutiae so I would always wind up with an 87. I didn't say anything until the last day, when we got our final labs back and I realized he'd taken off 2 points for failing to write the species name in the graph caption. For 3 graphs. That's 6 points off on a 100-point assignment, or over half a letter grade, for failing to write the Latin name for "garden tomato" in the caption. I HATE double jeopardy grading. If I make the same mistake over and over, don't keep taking off points until suddenly I have a wildly disproportionate amount of points missing for something completely stupid. Like taking off a point on a two-point problem because I mislabelled units. Are the units really worth 50% of the problem? Because next time I'm just going to write "micromoles per litre," and you'd better give me a point!

Anyway, on the last day, I decided, "What the hell, the course is over anyway" and took my lab up the chain of command directly to the professor and complained. He agreed that the grading was "excessive" and gave me my 6 points back. I pulled an A- in the class. Who knows what it might have been if I'd complained earlier? I know other students were having similar problems, and I feel bad that I didn't speak up and maybe gotten him to lighten up a little, because it obviously wasn't how the professor intended the labs to be graded.

We were required on many problems to deduct 1/2 a point (often on 1 point problems) every time units were left off. I had students fail my class because of that, but I was not allowed to do anything about it. Sadly, for me it was how the professor intended labs to be graded. In fact, he kept them all at the end of the year to make sure we were grading them the right way.