I know I know…

I promised to write more but here it is early April and this is entry #1 for the year. As always alot has been happening. We seem to ahve survived the time change, the first in Indiana in over 30 years. As someone who is not a native Hoosier, I have had a hard time understanding everyone reluctance to follow daylight savings time but we finally entered the 20 century. I give us another 30 years ago before knocking on the door for the 21st.

I once again have come to the realization that I am horrible at managing my time if given a log deadline.  This semester I am taking an independent study related to techniques and countermeasures to spam. This (well phishing) seems to be a big research area going on at the main campus. In any case, it’s something I’ve been dealing with and last summer configured our email server to go a pretty good job at blocking it. So here it, a month left in the semester, and very little real work done. Good thing I get to include all my stuff from the summer as part of my "research". Now I need to start writing and of course, analyze my results. Looks like I’ll need to lock my office door a bit the next few weeks.

Other than that, life has been good. I just found out that I am getting the staff award for the entire school of science. It’s a nice surprise because not too many in the school understands my job. Its one of those things that if things are going smoothly, no one really knows you exist. It’s only when things break that people grab the pitchforks and torches to hunt you down. Not that there haven’t been problems. My current one is with an intern I resently hired. For those of you who have read my entries before know some of the other intern problems I’ve had. Now I have another. I don’t fully understand the nature of the his issues but do know that BJ did spend about a week in the hospital for observation. what I have observed is a lack of motivation and no the failing/dropping of half his classes. The latter I do understand. Just from listening to him, he expects everything to be spelled out or handed to him. There is no way you can surive a computer science program that way. I guess if he washes out, problem solved. Even if not, he has made me realize that there needs to be a more formal setup for handling student interns. I am working on the details now but semester "contracts" and an initial probabtion period should set their (and my) expectations better. We’ll see how it chakes out.

Stay tuned…