The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, June 28, 2003

Drug of a nation

I'm highly amused, and believe me, I'm taking my amusement when and where I can.

In order to watch TV, the kids have to “buy” time with plastic tokens—10 tokens earns them an hour of television (past a free 30 minutes). To earn the tokens, the kids have to perform chores and each chore they do earns them one token (and it's not like the chores are all that hard—I mean, take your plates from the dining room table to the kitchen, a distance of all of ten feet or so) and we have a way of keeping track of which chores the kids need to do, and which ones they've done, yada yada.

There are other things they can buy with tokens, like fishing time, going out to McDonalds, renting movies, etc, but the cheapest thing they can buy is television time and computer game time (10 tokens/hour).

Heh heh heh.

The Younger had nearly fourty tokens saved up, and Older maybe half that amount. And a couple of hours of TV goes by mighty quick. They even figured out that a single token buys six minutes of television viewing.

And yes, they bought time in six-minute increments.

Heh heh heh.

Am I bad in reveling in schadenfreude?

Heh heh heh.

“A plagiarized article about plagiarism!”

Two Florida Atlantic University researchers who published a paper on detecting plagiarism stand accused on committing the very wrong they set out to prevent.

“A plagiarized article about plagiarism!” is how Michael Heberling, a professor from Michigan, reacted when he saw the FAU team's article.

Retired FAU business Professor William Ryan and FAU graduate student assistant Lindsey Hamlin published their piece on plagiarism in last month's online edition of Syllabus magazine.

Via Joanne Jacobs, Plagiarism article sparks copycatting duel

I'm experiencing lots of schadenfreude today. In this case, it's my old alma mater, FAU, and in other news, ex-FAU administrator Carla Coleman President Anthony Catanese is arrested.

FAU is such a fun school …

Update on Tuesday, July 1st, 2003

My friend Ken Maier just wrote in to clarify that it wasn't Anthony Catanese that was arrested, but Carla Coleman.

I'm going to have to work on my reading comprehension skills now …

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