The World of Stuff .com

A legacy

On Thursday, during first period, when I’m a TA in Mr. Mumtaz’s class, Mr. Mumtaz received a visit from Mr. King, an assistant principal. Mr. King wanted to have maps made of the school auditorium and the gym so that people would know where the exits are, and so the authorities would know how to get in and stuff. I guess he figured it would be a good task for Mr. Mumtaz, a computer teacher who would have access to all kinds of advanced computer drawing tools for the latest in floor-plan-rendering technology.

Mr. Mumtaz said that he had the two best people for the job: me and Joe, another TA. So, early in the morning, the four of us set about to make some rough sketches of the gym and the auditorium. In the process of going around and finding the exits, Mr. King mentioned how audiences in either facility all tend to leave through a single exit, leading to a human traffic jam. So we went over possible ways to divide the sections of the seats so that an equal number of people would be assigned each exit. This would also come in handy in case of a “situation.” You have to consider these things when you’re an assistant-principal-type, you know.

When we got back to class, Joe and I opened up Microsoft Visio and got to work. Visio is a program to make diagrams and things. Mr. Mumtaz uses it for flowcharting in the programming classes, and, fortunately, we don’t have to do a lot of that. So neither of us was really familiar with the program, but we stumbled through it — actually, I should say Joe stumbled through it as he did most of the drawing — and managed to make something that looked good. I came up with color-coordinating the various sections and their respective exits, as well as drawing the arrows between.

Yesterday, we finished, and Mr. King came in to have a look. He was very impressed, and surprisingly, he had only a few minor suggestions to make, which I implemented after he left. (I also hid our initials in each picture, but they might be too small to be seen in print.) Soon, our diagrams will be laminated and posted in the gym and the auditorium, and we’ll have left our mark on the school. It’s an obscure mark, to be sure, but it’s nice to know that I’ll have helped out the school in a small way.

I’m really glad I’m lazy about upgrading WordPress, which powers this blog. Version 2.1 came out recently, and I decided to wait for the bugfixes before upgrading from 2.0.4. Upgrading WordPress is a pretty painful process. It’s like pulling out all of your own teeth except two and putting in new ones by yourself with only an instruction manual as a guide. That’s the best analogy I can think of. But anyway, I even held off on upgrading to 2.1.1, and I’m glad I did: after a few days, WordPress developers had realized that a cracker had inserted malicious code into the files for that version. They quickly made version 2.1.2, which removes the added code, available.

How do you spell “definitely”? D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y.

This is probably the worst car wreck I’ve ever seen (a picture of). Keep in mind that that’s just one car. It appears that only the driver’s seat, the dash, and the driver’s-side doors were left intact — luckily for the driver, who was unharmed.