Screaming, Laughing, Crying

• This story of Rush Limbaugh bragging about intimidating a journalist sheds some light on why I prefer to remain outside any limelight. More germane to a blog such as this, one has to be careful which fights one chooses in the academic world. Rob is still struggling even after having left it. Me? I nearly erupted on the phone with an administrator today. I put in the paperwork a month ago to buy some equipment, and was told two weeks ago that the purchase order would be sent out in a day or two. Yesterday, when the vendor told me no PO had shown up, my phone call got passed up to an "assistant director." I still had a folksy, friendly tone when I was asking what was holding things up, and she had the nerve to reply "Ahh, if we could be on top of things 24 hours a day..." as if giving them weeks was the same as asking for a 24-hour turnaround! The nerve! The higher one goes up the administrative ladder, the closer one gets to reptilian.
  
• If you like these types of right/left brain things, you might check out this animated gif of a dancer. Some people see her going clockwise, some counter-clockwise, and a surprising number see her going different directions each time they look. Me? I can't see her going any other way than clockwise. You might look at her first before reading what is very likely a silly interpretation of any result.
  
• Keeping with the fun theme, you might check out this site which generates cool ASCII pictures from regular ones. They've got some samples there.
  
• Breaking with the fun theme, have you heard about this Carnegie Mellon CS prof who's dying? A really bitter-sweet story from the always lovable folks at the Wall Street Journal, believe it or not.
  
• Sticking to no theme at all, I've got a Windows notebook here which keeps losing its network connection because there's another machine on the same subnet with the same IP. I've tried using DHCP as well as a registered IP address I have. Clearly, IT can't configure a DHCP server correctly, but I've notified IT a couple times, so my strategy is to leave it on 24 hours a day in the hopes that whoever else has the same IP will complain enough to get the problem fixed. Am I jerk? Or am I learning?