I'm back

I would have liked to have a bigger return post but the timing is a problem and I wanted to let everyone know as soon as I got my computer back.  So a shorter post it is.

First, computers can be repaired more quickly than heads.  My computer is better.  The rest of me is still feeling the after effects of the concussion.  It'll be another week before I could even consider this to be unusually long for a recovery.  Hopefully a week from today I'm fully recovered.

Second, I screwed up talking about the ides in this post, the Julian calendar added days to months AFTER the ides so none of the ides changed.  Our modern calendar, the Gregorian calendar, is a simple modification of the Julian leap year system which gets about a day out of whack every hundred years (but not quite every hundred years.)  When it was made there was a reset involved but it did not reset to the Julian intended standard.  Instead it reset to what the calendar was like around 300 years after that when certain church holidays were given dates.  Julius' idea was to get the Roman festivals on the right dates.  Gregory's idea was to get the Christian festivals on the right dates.  Hence the discrepancy.

Third, my school is going to shit again.  In a certain sense it never stopped going, but the new President seemed like a nice enough person and high hopes were had.  Those hopes, however, came crashing down when it turned out that while she wasn't as vindictive, sadistic, and evil as predecessor she was just as incompetent, shortsighted, and lacking in appropriate priorities.

The face changed, the policies didn't.  And finally the hammer dropped last week.  Based off of bad data and inconsistent accounting the layoffs started, they're not about to stop any time soon.  A reporter asked for the spelling of my name, but my words didn't make it into the paper and my image did only as another face in the crowd.

The good news, such as there is any, is that now that the stupidity has moved from plans to actions the response has moved from laconic to verbose.  Before a meeting about the future of the university was lucky to get 12 participants.  The one on Monday got over 200, this in spite of the fact that the Administration responded to news of the meeting by shutting down the entire building it was to take place in, restricting parking in hopes of preventing people from reaching it, calling the cops, and securing the doors shut by handcuffing the handles together.  Plus the temperature was below freezing, so people had a strong incentive not to stick around once they realized they weren't getting in the building.  Wind wasn't nice either.  But like I said, in spite of all that, over 200 people showed.

When intentions turn to actions the people take notice.  The people you intend to screw over might not pay attention, but the people you're actively screwing over tend to notice.  The present administration at my school is learning that the hard way.

So, anyway, I have a computer again.  Look for there to be posts here again.