Subject to Change

If MPS raises taxes more than 16%, why is it not reasonable to expect a 16% increase in test scores?

How about at least a 0.16% increase? Is that too much to hope for?

A while back, Pete Fanning said that I should Cafepress some slogans.

I thought I’d give it a shot.

I think the Cafepress thing is kind of neat, but I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it up.

This is the tree next door. My guess is that the leaves will drop on November 12, the day after leaf pickup ends.

In past years, Kelly and I have handed out candy by the handful and still wound up with plenty extra.

This year, the kids came out in droves! We had to hand out one piece at a time just to be sure there was enough, and we still ran out.

The only difference I can think of: no Packer game. You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves if you’re skipping Trick or Treat with the kids to watch Brett Favre toss the ball to the opposing team seventeen times.

This morning I was raking the leaves. I briefly considered the irony of raking them into a pile around the fire hydrant, and lighting it ablaze.

I know. It creeped me out, too.

Elliot said:

… I was reminded that after Pearl Harbor one of the Democrats’ sainted presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, imprisoned 120,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. Remind me again, after 9/11, George Bush (whom the Democrats paint as the greatest enemy of American civil rights we’ve ever seen) imprisoned how many Americans?

It was actually worse than that. FDR captured and imprisoned Japanese living outside the US, too. I’d like to see someone TRY to explain the difference.

Update: I’m reading the comments over this at Elliot’s place. Liberals astound me. “George Bush” has rounded up a few hundred to a few thousand people suspected of dealing with or BEING the enemy. FDR imprisoned over a hundred thousand people who looked like the enemy. There is no parallel.

If there are people in Gitmo who are truly innocent, I will happily apologize to them or their surviving relatives forty years after the war is over.

Word has it that Governor Doyle managed to use his magic semi-veto pen to spend $800,000 on the KRM railway (that doesn’t exist yet).

It’s a total waste. We could’ve built a bike path in West Allis with that money!

Oh yeah… Nevermind.

Some Halloween themed videos for you all!

Death is My Co-Pilot:

The inmates perform Thriller:

Don’t forget to take the kids out this weekend!

Wiggy has your Trick or Treat schedules.

The big test I’ve been studying for was yesterday. I feel really good about my chances of passing it. I’ve figured that I either nailed the thing or had no clue that I didn’t know what I was doing. There’s also the possibility that I didn’t properly fill out one of the many forms properly along the way and I’ll be lost in the system.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Principles and Practice Exam (or Professional Engineer) is a major deal in the engineering profession. Passing the test allows you to become licensed as an engineer in the state that you took the exam. Only a licensed engineer can review and approve engineering drawings. Each state manages its own testing and licensing, so many unlucky engineers take the test more than once in their career. Others choose not to ever take the exam. For my discipline, electrical engineering, there are many careers you could choose from where the PE license doesn’t matter much.

This is the second test like this that I’ve had to take. A few years ago I passed the FE (fundamentals) exam. The problems on that exam were actually much harder, I think. They covered material from all engineering disciplines, not just electrical, and there were more of them. That exam doesn’t really do much for you, except that it’s a requirement to sit for the PE exam. Both exams are multiple choice. The FE is closed book with a large reference book provided. The PE is open book. Don’t let the multiple choice fool you. The people who write the test are very good at making sure the three wrong answers are ones that you can easily arrive at if you work the problem wrong.

Both tests are an all day affair, four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon. I don’t remember how many questions were on the FE exam, but the PE is split 40/40. Afternoon questions on both exams are supposed to be tougher. On the FE, you pick an engineering discipline for the afternoon. On the PE, electrical engineers need to choose a specific aspect of electrical engineering. I picked computers because I don’t hate them as much as I hate power/motors and controls (Laplace transforms and diff. eq.). Looking at the sample computer problems, I thought the afternoon test might actually be easier for me. I guess it was, because I finished an hour and a half early. I might have been the first person out of the room. That probably means I screwed up big, right?

I wasn’t looking forward to yesterday, because the only studying I’d only managed a few hours of studying outside the 22 hours of review classes I took. I wasn’t having much luck working the example problems, either. It wasn’t until I finished my first pass of the morning section in an hour that I felt like I had a shot. I went back over questions that I skipped or marked for do-overs until lunch time. By the time I was through, I had confidence in 72% of my answers. That’s really good! A weighted 70% is typically a passing score on the exam, which works out to getting about half the answers right. Knowing that I felt good about more than 70% in the morning and about 65% in the afternoon gives me some confidence that my score is going to be good enough. I won’t know for sure for another two months.