so i'm a flasher now.

buy nothing day was very very good to me. i got a 50 dollar flash drive for ten bucks. i needed it REALLY BAD. none of my schools would put zip drives in our offices, and only one school had a zip drive in one of the classrooms. i don't have a cd burner, so i was always emailing myself sttuff and wondering how it was going to come out on the other side (deformatted, usually) or else i was dragging around that infernally huge zip drive everywhere i went. the flash is so cute - it's the size of a lighter. bless the geek a million times who invented that thing. i love it, i love it, it's so unusual when i can make my life this much easier.

obligatory holiday update: remarkably, no one in my family commented on my weight over the holiday. it was nice, but weird. kind of like having my head on the guillotine and waiting for the blade to drop, but it never did.


here's a really interesting article about the chicago city college faculty strike. the full time faculty ended up getting a lot of their demands met and the adjuncts/part-timers that refused to cross the picket line got canned. what a position to be in. i'd like to think that if i was in the same situation, i wouldn't cross the picket line either. but i don't know, i'm more of an industrial unionist. the full-time faculty demands didn't include, as far as i can tell, job security protections and other benefits for part-timers. they should have all organized together. if the full-timers' union wouldn't represent the part-timers, a better strategy would have been to ditch the union and go with one big union. those students sure did stand up for their teachers, though.