I ran into Courtney on the way out to lunch and she told me she'd been unable to rent a car due to the furniture events going on out in High Point. I told her I had to leave work at 4:30, and she said she'd be ready to go then.
We had book club lunch, and everyone was there but Mary. Janet caught us up on the particulars of hers and Beth's commitment ceremony, which is going to be at 5:00 with dinner following at Aurora's. I hope to be able to leave there by 8:00, the absolute latest. She mentioned that besides the preacher, I'll be the only man there.
We left work at 4:30, and on I-40, she realized that she had left her suitcase at work. She said she'd go back and get it later tonight. I dropped her off, and then headed over to State.
Our "Spring '05 Registration" meeting went well. Dr. Dicks told us that we had to sign up for a 15-minute session with him sometime the rest of this week, or on Monday, to fill out a planning document, which tells them what courses we plan to take to fulfill our requirements in the program. This helps them to plan which semester to offer which courses, and makes sure we get the kinds of classes in we need (i.e., the correct number of application courses versus theory courses).
I asked about any status update on the PhD program, which was only that it still seems imminent, even with the chancellor change, so that's good news. Lars asked how many hours the program was, and Dr. Dicks said about 63 hours. The Master's program is 33 hours, so that seemed very high, which he could tell by our reactions. "Well, the courses are weighted differently for the PhD program. Your dissertation is actually a big chunk of that 63 hours, so it's not like you're going to take 20 3-hour courses. I said, "It's like the Double Jeopardy round then, classes are worth double their value." Laughter all around.
Other people asked some good questions, too, including Jennifer's, which was wanting to know a little more about the Capstone class, which is basically the equivalent to doing a thesis (which is not required) for our program. You have to decide on a project you're going to do for that class, which you do the first couple of weeks of the class, where you meet twice a week for the class. Once you decide on your project, you turn that in, and all six faculty members of the MS program have to agree that it's a worthwhile project and approve it. Then you have 10 weeks to work on it, and then spend the last two or three weeks working on how you're going to present (or "defend") your project, do a couple of rehearsals with the others in the Capstone class (as you all present your projects over a couple of days, and have to coordinate them), and then actually defend the project in front of the faculty.
Class started directly after that half-hour meeting, and it was a decent class. Dr. Dicks told the class that I had made a couple of suggestions, one of which was to explain the checks, check-plusses, and check-minuses, which he did. Then he told them about reading one of the check-plus papers, and he read one from the last group, which was Lars'. He also told us what he liked about it, which helps us to better understand what he looks for in them.
About three-fourths of the way through the class, my cell phone started vibrating in my pocket. Even though it was on vibrate, it was still audible to Erin sitting next to me, and she looked at my pocket as I pulled the phone out to press the "ignore" button to make the call go directly to voice mail. I pushed it, and stuck the phone back in my pocket. As I took my hand away, you could hear a little voice talking in my pocket. Erin was looking down at it. I pulled it back out, and noticed that it said "Mike Cell" on it, and I hit the "end" button. Back it went in my pocket, and two seconds later it started vibrating again. Again, I saw it was Mike Cell and hit ignore. Same thing again. The next time it rang (GRRR!) I looked at the phone and saw that I was hitting the "answer" button instead of the "ignore" button, and that explained all that. I hit the ignore button, again seeing it was my brother, and shoved it back in my pocket. Two seconds later it starts vibrating again... the voice mail indicator letting me know I have a message. I put the thing on SILENT.
Outside, I called Mike back as his message was a Happy Birthday message, which was nice. We had a brief, but nice talk, and I told him I wanted to see him over Thanksgiving.
I got to the board meeting a little after 7:30. Arthur, Robert, and Jan were there, and while my laptop was booting up, Wayne arrived. At the end of the meeting, Jan announced that she was resigning as co-chair on December 31, 2004, but would still be on the board if we wanted her to.
At home, Courtney was still working on her publication due today. We laughed and laughed and laughed about the instructions she was having to put in the README file. "Go to the bin/asic directory and delete the following files if they exist." Then, go to another directory, and delete this file if it exists." We started saying, "Go to the bin file and erase yourself, if you exist." "Call the Helpdesk to see if you exist." It got hysterical, and she being as punchy as she was, was dying with laughter. Calling the Helpdesk... "If you think you exist, press 1. If you don't exist, don't do anything." "If you're not sure you exist..." God, we laughed.
I caught up my journal on my laptop in my room, while she used my connection to finish up her work, which she did by midnight.