I’ve had a very busy time over the past two weeks with my students having a major website development assignment due. Out of a class of 88, I’ve had around 12-15 students coming to see me nearly every day.

If we just consider the poorest developing countries, what is the best kind of assistance we could give them? Malaria nets? Drinking water? Measles vaccines? Antibiotics? Food? Or birth control?

Everyone knows that donating money to charity is a good thing. But which charity? How do you decide which charities to give money to?

I've attended a few academic conferences now, but this is the first time I've been part of the organizing committee on any of them. Part of my responsibility is to help coordinate the double-blind peer reviewing process, and it’s been quite an eye-opener for me.

I’ve been taking Spanish classes every Monday night for the past three months. Tonight I started the level 2 intensive course – 2 hours every Monday and Thursday for the next six weeks. Back when I signed up, I figured that I’d be over the busy part of the semester by now. Look how well that prediction turned out.

Whenever I’ve installed MSN Messenger, I’ve always unselected all the other stuff that comes along with it: email client, writing client, photo manager, toolbar etc. I figured my needs were already taken care of in those areas. But recently a colleague raved about Windows Live Writer, so tonight I downloaded it and gave it a try.

This has been a crazy semester for me. I'm redeveloping both of my courses, which is a bigger challenge than I thought it would be. I'm teaching some new technologies that I haven't used before, so there's a lot of learning involved before I can even start preparing lecture and lab materials. I barely get time to do the other things that I'm now responsible for at work, let alone any kind of social activities. My car seriously needs a mechanic but I just haven't had time to take it. I have a serious issue with the radiator or radiator hoses which means I need to pour about a 3L bottle of water into it every day or two. Fortunately I'm only doing short trips so it doesn't have time to heat up much, but the noise it's making is quite unsettling.