Troll's Wonderhome

4:21pm: I dun bagged me wun!
Yee-haw! A plagiarist, that thar is!

Gods. How stupid are these kids? Listen to this one.

Okay, I rant over and over again in class: do not plagiarize. I may catch you. Then you'll be in a world of hurt. And it's not like the US, where the little bastards can use a credit card to buy their papers on the web: we're talking Eastern Europe, these kids don't have the funds for this.

So I start going through student papers. I hop on my e-mail, because some of 'em send it to me by e-mail instead of a hard copy. I start rummaging through the text. Huh. Not really on topic. Hmm. Not quoting the documents. Well, this puir wee bastard is off to C- land. (I'm a very easy grader).

At some point, I do my Standard Plagiarism Check. Low and behold, but I get a hit! Hmm. Let's try another sentence -- oooh, another site! After I hit 3, I give up.

Mind, it was very well done for a cut and paste paper -- usually, the things are blindingly obvious, since the transitions are god-awful. This 'un had actually gone to some trouble to smooth out the transitions, or got lucky in what they cut and pasted.

Sweet! So it's off to the Dean's Office on Monday for the both of us. That's one. I wonder if I can get four -- that's my record for a semester. Sadly, I don't have as many papers as I did in other classes. But I always could get lucky!

HRB Index: 86 (-3 from catching plagiarist; +1 from being insulted at how badly the plagiarism was; +4 from freaking out about getting work done)

Current Book: Between the Devil and Deep Blue See by Someone ZorakZoran Forgot. Non-fiction, on the social life of sailors in the 18th century. Waaaay too much Hobsbawmian influence. : P

4:38pm: What shall my iBook theme be?
JPi recently souped up her shitty Lombard (blech!) and made a

4:38pm: What shall my iBook theme be?
JPi recently souped up her shitty Lombard (blech!) and made a cool Mars icon for it. Sweet!

My damn iBook pisses me off so much, it's becoming very tempting to scrap the thing and get a nice new (slaver, slaver) 14" G4 933Mhz. Yum. it ain't a desktop machine, but it's a close cousin. Wow, I could actually run OS X! I could have a decent-sized HD! I'm giddy with the very thought.

That means I'd have an extra iBook -- I can renew Apple's "we'll repair the damn thing any time it breaks" plan, and it seems to make more sense keeping a spare than the $200 I might get if I sold it.

So what should I do with the old one? It's very tempting indeed to make some jazzy decorations for it, of one sort or another. Of course, if it got *too* Jazzy no doubt Apple would say "bite me!" with regards to the warranty. Hmm.

But since you can scrape off the white paint and replace it, it is sorta tempting to do something crazy...