~Saturday~ I was up at 7:30 and out at SAS by 8:15 for the STC Judging Training, which went from 8:30-1:00. Anna, Jen and I signed up during the 10:30-10:45 break as Team 2 for the Online competition category, as Jen and I had to leave at 11:15 to do our volunteer stint at NC State’s University Open House, which went from 10:00-2:00 today.
Later in the day, Anna let us know that our team’s kimono had been yanked opened and an additional person had eked in. We have four pieces of work to judge between now and December 4th: one a reference document, two promotional materials, and one training module. We will assess them in such areas as: audience definition, goals or purpose, writing, content design, overall quality, organization, table of contents, indexes, searchability, and usability.
For a reason unbeknownst to me, at the very last second instead of getting on the beltline to head to State, I exited on Blue Ridge Road. HUGE MISTAKE. The North Carolina State Fair is in progress, and Saturdays is one of the more popular days to attend. I waited about ten minutes just to go straight across Blue Ridge Road to get back on Wade Avenue. Once doing so, I took Wade Avenue all the way to Oberlin Road to get as far away from the fairgoers as possible.
University Open House is when NC State opens its doors to high school kids and their families for a chance to check out potential interest in attending State after graduating high school. I represented our Office of Information Technology organization, and we provided information about the computing services we offer to keep the campus running. Unfortunately, most people thought we were a “major” they could choose that would some day lead them to working in the IT industry. A good portion of our answers sounded like this, “No, that would be the College of Engineering (which awards both electrical and computer engineering degrees), and its booth is over in the Carmichael Gymnasium.”
The information booth about NC State’s Department of Entomology was around the corner from ours, so I took a gander over there, as it’s almost always one of the most often visited booths. The man there, who I assume was a professor, had a praying mantis on the top of his head kneeling in his hair, a tarantula (a hairy fucker) the size of—and sitting in—the opened palm of his hand, and in front of him on the table were bugs—as big around as those plastic traveling toothbrush cases and about four inches long—tunneling in a tray that was marked, “Hissing Cockroaches” (big, ugly fuckers).
In terms of people-watching, it was interesting how some parents were all take charge—to the point of asking the questions themselves as in, pointing to their son or daughter and saying, “S/he’s interested in…”, some parents were all about making/letting their son or daughter formulate and ask their own questions, and a fair number of them seemed to have their proverbial “hands up in the air” over their kids—either just keeping their distance from them and/or looking at them from afar as if they were aliens. It also occurred to me today that the daddies of high school seniors are just about my age.
At just before 2:00, Jen and I (mostly Jen) went on a mission to distribute our Computing@NC State papers throughout the student center, and then at 2:00, we packed up our information board and headed out of there.
At home, I worked a crossword puzzle for just a little while, before having a long talk to nappy. Glorious.
In spite of Carl and Bill’s absence tonight, dancing ended up being fairly decent, at least until we got cut off at 10:10 instead of 10:30—an executive decision by Brigner, because “there were no dancers down here.” In attendance tonight were: Rick, Michael, Rob, Steven, and Ernie. I had a two-step with Rick and a couple with Rob.
I hung out with Joe after dancing, and we eventually made our way over to Legends. I didn’t stay there very long, as this guy tried to mooch a drink off me, and losing him on my way to the bar, I slipped out the Hargett Street door and headed home.