Well, I just had a rather embarrassing moment at the store. I was standing in line, waiting to pay for my things; I was next to be rung up. The guy at the checkout said to the lady in front of me, “You’ve got one more 2 liter of Pepsi here, too.” I glanced forward and saw 10 or 15 large bags of potato chips as well. The checkout guy then told the lady her total: $67 and some change.

I put the 2 liters of soda, the chips, her total, and tomorrow’s date together, and commented, “Wow, looks like you’re getting ready to have a big party.” The lady just looked at me and smiled slightly. She said nothing. Okay, I thought, so much for small talk…

As she was pushing her cart away, though, I looked at its contents. Only two 2 liters of soda. No bags of chips. She had a lot of different things, including a rather large assortment of household cleaning stuff. I looked at the checkout counter and saw that all of the bags of chips hadn’t belonged to her - I was looking at a display of chips, simply situated next to the checkout counter. D’oh.

No wonder she wouldn’t talk to me. Yeah, lady, looks like you’re getting ready to throw a big party with a cart full of Windex and scrubbing pads.

Ugh.

Hrafn from Think Artificial tagged me a few days ago with a meme to write 7 things about myself. So, without further ado:

1. My love affair with RPGs began quite early. When I was 9 or 10, I discovered a copy of Dragon Warrior for NES at a yard sale and bought it for $5. Many late nights weren’t spent boop-boop-booping around that fantasy land of skeletons and green and red slimes. RPGs are still one of my favorite game genres, 15 years later.
2. When I was a teenager, I avoided haircuts if at all possible; my hair was often down below my shoulders. My bangs could cover my whole face, hanging down to the front of my neck. My hair has migrated now, however; I prefer a shaved head, but I also sport a goatee at all times.
3. I’ve never tried any illegal drugs, not even the relatively minor league marijuana. No desire to, either.
4. My thumbs are double jointed, and I delight in twisting them backwards and popping them out of their sockets to make people squirm. I don’t have any other double jointed fingers or limbs, alas.
5. I have the awful habit of biting my nails.
6. I have a birthmark on my right eye which is more or less like a small cataract that doesn’t get worse (ophthalmologist’s explanation, not mine). My eye appears fine, but my right eye vision is substantially blurrier than my left.
7. When eating, I really dislike for my different foods to get mixed on the plate; I don’t want corn bumping into my mashed potatoes, or my biscuit sitting upon a serving of green beans.

The rules of the meme said I needed to tag 7 people, but I must say - I’m not sure I can. Between Hrafn and Edrei, they’ve very nearly pointed to all of the folks I’d tag. There are a few left, however - Liz at LearningNerd, Gordon from One Man Blogs, and Tom. Of course, you three aren’t obligated to do this - but I’d certainly like it if you did.

In keeping with making myself accountable, I figured I’d let everyone know how my exercise habit is coming along. There’s good news, and perhaps inevitably, bad news. But the good news is really good, and the bad news isn’t catastrophic. So:

The Good

The good news is, I’ve stuck with the exercising. I’ve not been exercising every day, but when I started the routine, I hadn’t planned on exercising every day. My goal was every other day, which I’ve largely achieved. Why every other day? Because my primary exercise has been punching bag work, which, due to its high impact nature, you shouldn’t do every day. I have, however, been doing other stuff as well: crunches, squats, push ups, and some weight lifting.

All in all, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made. I’ve not been obsessive about checking my weight, but I know my arms are already more muscular and a bit more toned. At any rate, exercising every other day is certainly a heck of a lot better than sitting on my butt and not doing anything at all.

But, like I said, there’s bad news, too…

The Bad

The not-so-good news is that I’m not going to be able to do punching bag work for a while. No, I didn’t break a hand (though I have twisted my wrists a few times - ow). Last night while I was doing my workout, I thought I saw some small, white particles falling around the bag. A few more punches, and I was sure I saw them. I gave the bag a really hard punch and looked up at where it’s mounted - white dust was in the air. Uh oh.

Upon further inspection, I found lots of those little white particles on the floor. These turned out to be pieces of, um, plaster. Apparently, all of the stress from the bag bouncing and swinging around has been silently taking its toll on the woodwork where the bag is mounted. In other words, if I keep using the bag where it’s at, I’m probably going to destroy the woodwork, and perhaps even some of our ceiling. That doesn’t sound particularly healthy, does it? That, and the Missus probably wouldn’t appreciate the destruction of our ceiling very much…

There are stands available for punching bags, but those run around $150 (or up); doable, but they look rather large, and I’m not really sure where I’d put such a device. There are also wall mounts, but again - I’m not really sure about a location for one, and honestly, I’d be afraid of the whole thing ripping down one of our walls. As I’ve mentioned before, a carpenter I am not.

So, for the time being, no more punching bag at home. I’m a bit bummed about it, truth be told, because I’ve really been enjoying it, but I’ve run out of ideas as to where to put it, and destroying the house in the name of fitness just isn’t going to cut it.

The Ugly What Now?

What’s the game plan now? Well, I’m going to keep exercising, that’s the plan! While I can’t use my punching bag currently, I’m going to keep doing the things I mentioned above, as well as start adding some other stuff into my routine. I’m aiming to alternate between upper body and lower body workouts, so I need to figure out what exercises will allow me to “cover all of the bases”, so to speak - I don’t want to neglect any muscle groups, as that can lead to injury (or so I’ve read over and over).

I’m not, however, going to stop exercising while I plan it all out with half a dozen books and three different color coded notebooks. I could do that, and I have such things in the past, but not this time. I’ll work on the details while I keep the routine going. I refuse to get bogged down in nitpicking over every little thing right now. The primary thing is to keep myself exercising regularly.

Warning! This entry has major spoilers about the mid season finale of Battlestar Galactica, “Revelations.” If you’ve not seen it yet, well…

Alright, are all of the folks who’ve not yet seen it off the ship? Good. Moving along.

“Revelations” blew me away quite a few times. I never expected the four Cylons to be discovered half way through the final season - I figured it’d happen in the last 3 or 4 episodes. Even more shocking, though, was the arrival of the Colonial Fleet at Earth halfway through the season. I expected that event to take place in, say, the next to last episode of the show. As finding Earth has been the primary end point of the entire show, now that they’ve arrived at Earth and found it to be a smoldering nuclear waste, the question is: where to now?

It’s possible that Earth isn’t totally destroyed, but I can only think of one explanation for that, and it doesn’t hold up very well. It’s possible that the landing crew from the Galactica landed in an area that recently suffered a nuclear war, and that the rest of the planet is still teeming with life. This is a real stretch, though - you’d think that if they can plot courses through space and pick up ships on Dradis, they’d be able to do some sort of planetary scan. That, and I gotta’ say - it’d be pretty lame if the second part of the season started out with Adama going, “Oh, oops - we landed 300 miles too far this way, over here everyone, hooray!”

So, let’s assume that Earth is toast - then what? Honestly, I’ve no idea. The Colonial Fleet just heads off into space again, hoping to come across a habitable planet? That doesn’t seem right, and I’m not sure if half a season is enough to start up another story arc anyway. And where are the other Cylons?

I had expected the Colonial Fleet to arrive at Earth, followed by the arrival of the Cylons, leading to a final gigantic space battle. The inhabitants of Earth might even jump in and help take down the Cylons, and everyone lives happily after. Now, though, I’m lost as to where the show’s going. What do you all think?

(One other note: does anyone else think that Tory’s name is a nod towards the Loyalists of the American Revolution? Out of the four revealed Cylons, she’s the only one who really went back to “her people.”)

Last week, I spoke to one of my history professors who I’ve had for many classes. He was telling me about how in the class I had with him last semester, four people turned in plagiarized papers of the blatant sort - they went online, copied, and pasted.

In this professor’s syllabus, he outlines very clearly how he deals with plagiarism: you flunk the course. He attempted to flunk all four of them them, but the students got around it by simply dropping the course, as the withdrawal date had not gone by yet. He went to the dean, hoping to get some support on keeping their grades as Fs; however, the dean ended up backing the students. They were allowed to drop the course and simply get withdrawals on their audits, rather than the Fs. His line of argument was that they were still being punished, as they had to pay for the course anyway, and they’d have to retake the course.

I think such an argument is bogus. Yeah, they had to pay for the course anyway, but shouldn’t there be more punishment than that? Aren’t universities supposed to represent a bit of integrity? Allowing them to drop the course and simply get a “withdrawed” on their degree audit allows them to more or less erase the fact that they tried to cheat. Having an F on their audit wouldn’t broadcast the fact that they tried to cheat, I realize, but at least it would affect their GPA, which in turn might have effects down the road if they wanted to go to graduate school.

How do you all think academic dishonesty should be dealt with? Is receiving an F for the entire course too drastic? Perhaps an F on the assignment would be more suitable, but I think plagiarism (especially of the deliberate sort as described above) is a serious offense, and should be dealt with with a serious response. Admittedly, though, I’m biased - I work my butt off to do well in my classes, and it drives me up the wall to think that people are getting similar grades simply by cheating.