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		<title>A panic-filled essay rush &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/10-October/19.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>A panic-filled essay rush</h1>
			<p>Day 00592: Wednesday, 2016 October 19</p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/10/19.jpg" alt="Chinese lanterns" class="weblog-header-image" width="811" height="480" />
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>249 scheme-specific <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>-parsing classes to write and add to <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a></li>
	<li>1 free elective left in my associate degree program</li>
	<li>4 free electives left in my bachelor degree program</li>
</ul>
<p>
	Perhaps this the upcoming term is a good one to only be enrolled in one course during.
	Theoretically, we&apos;re going to be moving soon, so having less coursework could play in my favor.
	I&apos;m still not too happy about what course that I have to take though, as it&apos;s not at all helpful toward my degree.
</p>
<p>
	I finished up my <a href="/en/coursework/POLS1503/Global_pathogens_and_GMOs.xhtml"><span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> essay</a> finally.
	I went over it after completing it to check for basic errors, but it would have really helped if I&apos;d finished it early like I usually do.
	Each day that I have to reread my essays is another day that I find small ways to improve them.
	On this essay, I made each in-line citation into a link to the specific entry in the references section that it corresponded to, but the University of the People submission form stripped all my <code>id</code> attributes, breaking the links.
	I had to remove the broken links to avoid causing confusion for whatever students end up reading my work.
	I almost skipped rereading my <a href="/en/coursework/UNIV1001/A_conflict_with_T-Mobile.xhtml"><span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span> essay</a> today, but I thought better of it and did go over it again.
	I&apos;m glad that I did! I found several mistakes and things that I needed to rephrase.
	This is exactly the kind of touch-up work that I am unable to do on my <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> essay due to having only completed it today.
	I mean, I did reread it after finishing, but that&apos;s nu substitute for rereading it on several different days.
</p>
<p>
	Strangely, after my panic-filled essay rush, I sat down for some unnecessary schoolwork.
	Though I&apos;ve already made every discussion reply that I need to for my grade, I submitted four more posts in response to people that had directly addressed me.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Sure, if you redefine the word &quot;religion&quot;, science would be one.
	In that case though, environmentalism, veganism, the free culture movement, and several other things would be religions as well.
	That&apos;s not necessarily a bad thing, but it&apos;s important to take into account.
</p>
<p>
	Funny story: I&apos;ve actually heard that some modern scientists believe that the big bang never happened.
	One current theory states that perhaps the universe always was.
	According to this theory, the universe isn&apos;t expanding either, and the blue-shift of light from other galaxies is explained by some quantum mechanics principle that I don&apos;t understand.
	Quantum mechanics always confuse me.
	In any case, our existence wouldn&apos;t prove the big bang, as our existence doesn&apos;t rule out other theories.
</p>
<p>
	Yeah, medical professionals of old might have though I was mentally ill as well, as I&apos;m asexual.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I can&apos;t say that there&apos;s no way of anything in particular.
	There&apos;s always a chance that I&apos;ll lack the specific skills that they&apos;re looking for! All that I can do is try to do my best to learn the best skills that I can, especially critical thinking skills.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I&apos;ve never been a fan of those &quot;11 - 1 = 1&quot;-type &quot;mathematical&quot; solutions.
	That second method about chopping off the corner of a polygon to form another polygon is very clever though!
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I completely agree that the person working in the freezer had no excuse for not knowing that it was a bad idea to stack full boxes on an empty box.
	Not only do you risk a collapse like that, it also blocks access to the already-open box, so you have to prematurely open a new one.
	If they&apos;d put any thought into their actions in any direction, they wouldn&apos;t have done that.
	I just think that &quot;common sense&quot; is the wrong label for actually thinking things through.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	My program advisor wrote back saying that I don&apos;t need to send proof of high school completion after all, as the school does indeed already have it.
	They also said that I might be able to register for different courses during the late registration period.
	They did not elaborate on that, but said that in future terms, there should be many more courses available to me.
	They didn&apos;t say this, but it&apos;s possible that my account is under some sort of probation due to this being my first term at the university.
	Once this term is over, the probationary period may be over, which might be when new courses become available for registration.
</p>
<p>
	Thankfully, there are no essays this week.
	This week&apos;s section of the course has been made available, along with part of next week&apos;s course material.
	Next week will include the final exams.
	This week&apos;s course materials include a course evaluation for each course, which I believe is for the students to provide feedback about the courses.
	However, both evaluation are closed,listing close dates in the past.
	I believe that these were evaluations for past iterations of the courses, and that at some point, the new evaluation forms will be made available.
</p>
<p>
	I wrote up my main response for the discussion assignment in <span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span>, which asked us to talk about one failure and one success that we&apos;ve had, then explain why we felt that these were a failure and a success.
	I didn&apos;t have time to complete the <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> discussion assignment response, but I got started on it, and will finish it tomorrow.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	If you thumb through my <a href="https://y.st./en/weblog/">journal</a>, you&apos;ll probably find several failures that I&apos;ve had, though nothing particularly outstanding is coming to mind right now.
	I did fail to convince my mother to switch away from Verizon recently though.
	Verizon&apos;s been ripping my mother off for years, and finally, it looked like they&apos;d had enough.
	I showed them better, cheaper networks.
	For a mere $30 <abbr title="United States Dollars">USD</abbr> per month, my mother could have unlimited talk, <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr>, and data transfer with no overage fees! With Verizon, they&apos;re instead paying over $100 <abbr title="United States Dollars">USD</abbr> for limited data transfer, monthly threats of overage charges, and frequent arguments with the carrier.
	I put pressure on my mother to switch, brought my mother pamphlets showing several very good deals that they could get to replace Verizon, and even came in-store with my mother to debunk misinformation from the Verizon representatives and get the representatives to expose Verizon&apos;s inadequacies.
	It was all in vain though.
	Alas, my mother is a creature of habit, and would rather complain about their situation than actually do anything about it.
</p>
<p>
	Why do I consider my efforts toward this goal a failure? Well, my mother signed away another two years to Verizon to get the latest iTrash, which of course raised their bill even further.
	They&apos;re bound to both Verizon and Apple again, and I won&apos;t have another chance to try to brake the awful cycle again for at least two years.
	Next time that they complain about Verizon, all that I&apos;ll be able to do is say &quot;I told you so.&quot;.
</p>
<p>
	The most memorable goal that I set for myself and successfully met was that of getting a five-character domain name in the form &quot;{one character}.{two characters}.&quot;.
	I&apos;ve wanted a short domain name like that for years.
	I finally sat down and started doing research on all the <abbr title="country code top-level domain">ccTLD</abbr>s available, and one by one, I checked to see which <abbr title="country code top-level domain">ccTLD</abbr>s allowed registration by foreigners and which allowed registration of single-character <abbr title="Second Level Domain">SLD</abbr>s.
	I checked registration renewal pricing, I checked initial registration pricing, and I checked which domain names had already been registered.
	I kept detailed notes on my efforts and findings, most of which were lost due to a hard drive failure later.
	While the bulk on my notes were on my efforts, the process, and the experience and were lost, I do still have most of the notes on <a href="https://y.st./en/URI_research/ccTLDs.xhtml">my findings</a>.
	After nearly a month of research, I had a list of what I thought at the time were the most likely chances for me to find the domain name that I had wanted for so long.
	I couldn&apos;t do any further work in isolation though, and had to actually reach out to the registries themselves, along with one registrar that seemed to be tied to an expired domain.
	One by one, each registrar that even wrote back to me turned me down, until the <a href="http://www.nic.st./"><code>st.</code></a> registry said &quot;yes&quot;! Fortunately, I waited a bit to take them up on their offer, because I soon after suffered from a hard drive failure.
	I normally have a full backup of everything, but I had just backed up my data and wiped my laptop, removing the primary copy.
	By the time that I tried to restore my data from the backup, I found that the drive on which the backup resided had died.
	I lost all my files, including my encrypted password database.
	In losing that password file, I lost my passwords for every account that I had everywhere.
	I lost all my domain names that I had at the time, due to losing the password to the accounts that I had at my registrars&apos; websites, and had I bought my new short name already, I would have lost that too.
	It took some time to put the pieces back together, but I did manage to buy that domain, one week after I&apos;d initially planned to finalize the purchase.
</p>
<p>
	Why do I feel that I was successful at acquiring a short domain name? Try running <code>whois y.st.</code> on your command line and see for yourself! That&apos;s my legal name and contact information that reside in the whois database.
	I use that domain daily for <a href="https://y.st./">Web</a>, <a href="mailto:contact@y.st">email</a>, and <a href="xmpp:y@y.st"><abbr title="Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol">XMPP</abbr></a>, among other things.
	I used to use it for <abbr title="Internet Relay Chat">IRC</abbr> as well, though my <abbr title="Internet Relay Chat">IRC</abbr> server is currently offline.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
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			Copyright © 2016 Alex Yst;
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