Happy Thanksgiving everyone

Hard to believe so much time has passed. I fully meant to get back into writing but this semester has been one of the craziest that I can remember is a very, very long time. Even without the extra drama (more on that later), I suspected it would be buzy. I am taking a grad course in cryptography and the prof loves programming. I’ve written more code over the last few months than I had had previously over the last few years. Still have one more program to write – this one is based on some algorithm his thesis advisor created. Not even sure how I am going to attack it yet. If that wasn’t enough, I still have to write a 20 page paper. I am less concerned about that because I know fair amount about the topic already.

Now for the unplanned. We got a new dean a couple of years ago but he didn’t last too long. He got ousted my some of the faculty over the summer. Much of it was do to financial issues he made worse. In a nutshell, we are in bad shape. Now we have an interim one to help get us back on out feet. That leads us to our own drama. Our chairman left over the summer to become a dean with another school. Our new dean decided we should go through an external review to help decide our future. That took place last monday and tuesday. Fun. It’ll be interested to see what comes from it.

I also have one other big thing to do. Our university to get a certification from the NSA and I am the one who has to organize the info. That has to be submitted in about 3 weeks. The info is coming together to I am hopeful it goes smoothly.

On the positive side, I am leaving for a conference in a little more than a week. This time it is in DC and while I will probably be doing some of this work while there, it will be good to get away.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.