Friday, October 17, 2008

A Few Quick Notes 235

-While we had some rain yesterday, things seem to have turned around today. We had a pretty nice fall day as far as I can remember, though I feel as though I spent much of it inside.

-Yesterday my class was canceled. It seems that my professor was ill. The result is that the presentation that I was supposed to give yesterday has been postponed until next week, which is fine with me. Now, instead of preparing for a new topic I can spend this time trying to catch up on other work that has started to pile up.

-Because some of my time was freed up because of the canceled class I felt that I could take the time to head to Point Pleasant Park for a stroll, which is a trip that I have been meaning to take since I arrived. As expected, the visit was quite nice, though it would have been even better had the skies not been overcast and threatening showers. Maybe I will try to head back at some point in the coming weeks, but I can see that I might be on the busy side.

-Yesterday Neil and I got around to mailing absentee ballots for the upcoming American election. It ended up costing us $2.17 per envelop to send our ballots to US. This seems a little high as they weren't particularly big envelops, and as it only cost the New York Board of Elections 97 cents to send them to us. Can it really cost that much more to send things from Canada to the US than from the US to Canada?

-It seems that I can avoid my TA obligations no more, I will finally have to start working on the three lectures that I have to give at the end of October. On Monday I will get a final confirmation of the topics/unit that I will be covering. Unfortunately, this really doesn't give me all that much time to prepare, and as I still don't have a copy of the text book I imagine that I will even have less time. Anyway, how long can it possibly take to prepare for three one hour lectures that I have never given before? Surely not more than 2 or 3 hours and I can probably count on the class jumping in with contributions to fill up any extra time I have. Oh, I also need to come up with an assignment/essay topic that relates to the as of yet unknown lecture topics.

-I recently had a few ideas about the recent Canadian election and proportionality, if they come to anything I may try to post them here. Basically I am trying to find a way of determining if the elections are becoming more proportional or not, or if there is even a trend in either direction.

3 comments:

Donald McKay said...

You were ripped off by Canada Post. The envelope should only have cost about $1.92 to send. That is what mine cost.

Cameron said...

2.17 is the after tax price, though I still feel that we were ripped off.

Cameron said...
This comment has been removed by the author.