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			<h1>Reservations</h1>
			<p>Day 00566: Friday, 2016 September 23</p>
		</header>
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>20 unfinished weblog entries in <a href="/en/weblog/2016/07-July/">July</a></li>
	<li>26 days until mobile service ends and I renew on a tablet plan</li>
	<li>24 days until my old domain registrar can no longer counter my charge dispute</li>
</ul>
<p>
	I&apos;m having reservations about Sweet Home.
	I don&apos;t know a whole lot about the place, but it seems to be another tiny town like Coos Bay.
	I&apos;m not sure if Sweet Home is larger or smaller.
	It lacks the country&apos;s main big box store, which is a sign that it&apos;s smaller than Coos Bay, as at least Coos Bay&apos;s Siamese twin had one of these big box store locations.
	Regardless of how you feel about big box stores, they do make a pretty good size indicator of a town.
	However, this city actually has T-Mobile coverage, unlike Coos Bay.
	Coos Bay is just too small of a town for the smaller of the two main <abbr title="Global System for Mobile Communications">GSM</abbr> carriers of the country to reach.
	Assuming that I can get my GT-i9100M on a T-Mobile prepaid tablet plan, I&apos;ll be able to cut a third off of my bill just because I&apos;ll be in T-Mobile&apos;s coverage zone.
	That said, if the town&apos;s too small to find work in, it could be a disaster.
	If I can&apos;t find local work, I&apos;ll need to branch out to nearby towns, which by bike, will take some time to get to.
	Add that to my schoolwork, and I won&apos;t have the time to keep up with everything.
	I suppose that all that I can do right now is hope for the best.
	I&apos;m going to need exam proctors too, and I was counting on being able to recruit a public librarian to help me with that.
	I&apos;m not even sure if Sweet Home is large enough to have a public library! I was about to try to research the subject, when I realized that the point was moot.
	Sweet Home has <strong>*public schools*</strong>.
	Most school teachers are going to be in favor of education, so surely one of them would be willing to help me out.
	I need to keep calm and keep things such as that in mind.
	I have no proof that living in Sweet Home will be awful and stressing about it won&apos;t help me out any.
	I need to keep an open mind about the town and focus for now on my studies.
</p>
<p>
	Vanessa had me help them place an order online.
	I explained that we might not be here when it arrives, but they wanted to order their item now anyway, hoping that it&apos;ll arive in time for an upcoming event.
	Hopefully they&apos;ll receive it on time without issue, it&apos;s not very far in the future.
</p>
<p>
	My mother was having computer issues as usual, dur to their insistence on using one of the buggiest operating systems on the planet.
	They wanted to print a <abbr title="Portable Document Format">PDF</abbr> file, but Adobe Reader was refusing to print anything.
	I tried using the free software on their machine to show up Adobe Reader, but LibreOffice Writer didn&apos;t work out either.
	Unlike Adobe Reader, it actually would talk to the printer, but also unlike Adobe Reader, it couldn&apos;t figure out the strange <abbr title="Portable Document Format">PDF</abbr>, due to different page orientations.
	Reluctantly, I tried the also-installed Microsoft Office, but that did even worse.
	Microsoft Office couldn&apos;t even make sense of the <abbr title="Portable Document Format">PDF</abbr> file, instead displaying a jumble of garbled characters! As LibreOffice was able to print the file, just incorrectly, I was able to determine that the problem wasn&apos;t the printer; it was Adobe Reader.
	It was time to install a read <abbr title="Portable Document Format">PDF</abbr> reader.
	I was in a bit of a rush as I wanted to get my mother&apos;s problem fixed quickly, so I just searched for a free software <abbr title="Portable Document Format">PDF</abbr> reader without doing the proper research that I should have.
	I found <a href="https://www.pdflite.com./">PDFlite</a>, a free software solution that seems to work perfectly, but there is a catch.
	It&apos;s a Windows-only application.
	I should have looked into finding something that was cross-platform instead of recommending Windows-only software.
</p>
<p>
	It&apos;s been over seventy-two hours since I set up my line of service through T-Mobile, so I tried to set up my T-Mobile account again.
	The registration form continued silently failing! I contacted support about it, but before they could locate the problem, I did some experimenting and located it myself.
	T-Mobile was actually silently complaining that my password had non-alphanumeric characters! I informed them of the problem, which the support representative seemed to already know about, but hadn&apos;t thought to check.
	I guess that they don&apos;t have people try to use actual secure passwords very often.
	I didn&apos;t feel like arguing about it though, and simply asked that they please talk to their technical team and, at the very least, get an error message set up for when a user&apos;s password doesn&apos;t match T-Mobile&apos;s expectation.
	They reasonably agreed to do so.
	With that out of the way, it was time to check on the T-Mobile Tuesdays website! However, that didn&apos;t go well at all.
	The website informed me that T-Mobile Tuesdays aren&apos;t available to prepaid customers without the proprietary application! What&apos;s with the discrimination? I mean, I could understand if T-Mobile Tuesdays weren&apos;t available to prepaid customers at all.
	I wouldn&apos;t like it, but it&apos;d be clearly yet another attempt to trick customers into choosing a postpaid plan over a prepaid plan.
	Likewise, if participating in T-Mobile Tuesdays required that <strong>*all*</strong> participants use the proprietary mobile application, both prepaid and postpaid customers, it would be a clear sign of that T-Mobile was trying to get potentially-malicious code running on more T-Mobile devices.
	It might include usage-tracking software or something.
	Again, it wouldn&apos;t be in any way good, but it would make sense.
	However, to require that prepaid participants use the proprietary mobile application while allowing postpaid participants use their choice of either the stupid application or the website makes zero sense to me.
	What does T-Mobile gain from that? I talked to support about that, and they didn&apos;t understand why the website wasn&apos;t working in conjunction with my prepaid account.
	They said that they&apos;d get back to me in another seventy-two hours.
</p>
<p>
	I wrote up my discussion board response for the week.
	The statement referenced in the first paragraph is that teachers are the fountain of all knowledge.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I can take that statement in one of two ways.
	My first reaction was to take it at face value.
	Basically, employed educators are the only available source of knowledge.
	I hope that you don&apos;t take that the wrong way, but that is patently false.
	While I&apos;ve learned much from educators, I&apos;ve also learned much from other types of people, such as friends, employers, and family, as well as through my own experiences.
	Books and the Web are also great sources of knowledge.
	After thinking about it a bit, I came to a second interpretation.
	While I don&apos;t believe that it was the intended meaning of the statement, it could also be taken to mean that no knowledge comes by default; it must be learned from somewhere.
	For example, a friend could be a teacher to you, as could your own past mistakes.
	In this case, it would mostly be true.
	There is a limited amount of knowledge that might be instinctual, but the heart of the message could be that everyone is a beginner at some point, and one can&apos;t expect to know everything without having first been introduced to the knowledge in some way.
</p>
<p>
	The roles of student and teacher seem to be a bit flexible, and depends on the environment that a specific teacher wishes (or is required) to create.
	In most classes that I&apos;ve been in, the teacher was a leader, showing students how the work was to be done, then leaving them alone to accomplish their task.
	If the student had questions, they could always come ask the teacher, who would be happy to help.
	I&apos;ve also been in classes though where the teacher tries to bring everyone to the same level.
	People that are struggling get help, but students that are trying to go above and beyond the requirements are told to knock it off and just wait for the rest of the class to catch up.
	It&apos;s not a good situation, especially for those of use that firmly grasped the material.
	I&apos;ve also been in one strange course in which the teacher was trying to be a peer to the students.
	It was bizarre and, probably because I wasn&apos;t open to change yet, quite uncomfortable.
	I think that I&apos;d think nothing of such a situation these days, and it might even work out pretty well, but I haven&apos;t run into that situation since.
</p>
<p>
	Learning environments can be set up a number of different ways, depending on both the school and the specific course.
	In offline courses, I usually see student desks arranged in a grid and the teacher up front providing a lecture.
	The layout and material might be a bit different in some sorts of courses, such as the course I took in which we instead acted in a black box theater instead of sitting in desks.
	In most types of courses, this seems to facilitate learning quite well for those of us that are actually trying to learn.
	For online courses, I&apos;ve seen a couple different types of learning environments.
	One would be these discussion forums.
	I think that in theory discussion forums can facilitate learning well if run correctly, but to date, the only discussion forums that I&apos;ve seen have had major flaws.
	I&apos;m not sure how to make graded discussion forums work better though, as you have to weigh measurable participation against students posting what they actually need in order to learn.
	It might work out better to have two discussion forums; one for measurable participation with specific discussion questions and one optional forum to actively seek help and share ideas in an unrestricted way.
	The other online learning environment that I&apos;ve seen was in the form of live seminars.
	In addition to the seminars requiring everyone to be online at the same time, technical issues (both from my end and from the ends of others) made them nothing but a cause of frustration.
	Furthermore, partially due to the software required for the seminars being a known security hazard, I had to quarantine it it in a hypervisor.
	My computer is a laptop, so it doesn&apos;t really have the most computing power.
	Adding a hypervisor and a second copy of the same operating system to the mix wasn&apos;t doing it any favors, so the experience was laggy and difficult to work with.
	It was not at all conductive to learning, at least in my case.
	I&apos;m quite thankful for University of the People&apos;s minimal software requirements.
</p>
</blockquote>
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