However, I guess I do have an excuse… I have been spending most of my time reading, writing, and trying to have a social life. In fact, tonight I was caught up with my homework and could have stitched, but instead I went out to dinner with a friend and afterward we took a nice long walk.

Anyway, although I haven’t stitched much over the past six weeks, as you can see by the picture I have managed to stitch a bit on “Summer’s Magic,” my latest SAL with Dawn.

Friday is the last day of my second summer class, so maybe I will have time to stitch and blog a little more in August… here’s hoping anyway!

I understand the need for a company to make money. However, I am sadly disappointed that you have decided to abandon the majority of your users (educational institutions and poor graduate students) in favor of the all-mighty dollar.

I have used the freeware version of your product since I cut my FTP baby teeth using version 1.X to learn FTP basics as a poor graduate student. However, I recently learned that you have decided to do away with the free version for private and educational use. Professional software is expensive and for those of us who need professional software but work in education (an area that the government is always quick to cut) it is a great disservice to begin charging this segment of your user population. In an era where open source software is quickly coming of age, it seems a better business model would be to expand your free product, not do away with it.

Thanks for memories SmartFTP, but I am afraid I will be re-investigating my free FTP options.

FireFTP here I come!

Sincerely,
Renée, education professional and part-time poor graduate student.

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As soon as I have time to play with all the new bells and whistles (not tonight, my nose is buried in Romantic Poetry) I will be sure to put together a post entitled “Why Firefox is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.”

And if you haven’t upgraded to a REAL browser yet, do it today! What are you waiting for?!

At West Texas Town University, we have two summer terms and I am taking a class each term this summer. These graduate-level English classes are what are referred to as “shortened format” and will meet Monday through Friday from 8:30-11:30 in the morning. My Summer I class (Romantic Poets) meets June 17-July 3 and my Summer II class (Folklore) meets July 8-July 25. Although I am sure I won’t want to do much more than sleep in August, at the moment I am quite enthused about these classes and extremely pleased that once I have finished them I will have 9 semester hours, or about ¼ of the coursework, for my English Master’s Degree complete.

However, since I am still working full-time I had to do some creative rearranging of my schedule in order to fulfill the 40 hour a week commitment to the University that will allow me to take these classes for free.

In all honesty I am extremely fortunate to work for a department on campus that doesn’t keep to a traditional 9-5 schedule. In order to serve our clientèle, the library is not only open on the weekends but until 10:30 in the evenings as well. This, as you can imagine, has served me well when coming up with what everyone in the library has begun to refer to as my “crazy summer schedule.”

At first I was going to attend class in the mornings and then head to the library to work a full eight-hour day which would have had me getting off work at around 9:00 every evening. This sounded like a doable situation until something began to nag me: If I was going to be taking classes, it was only logical to assume that I would have homework. Now, while I can probably get away with doing a little homework every now and again in my office, I came to the conclusion that overall the University probably wouldn’t approve of paying me to sit around in my office reading Romantic Poetry and writing a critical analysis of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

And so the time-sheet figuring began anew. As part of my job responsibilities I am required to work one evening a week and if I was willing to work eight hours on both Saturday and Sunday I could easily make up the time that I was going to be in class. However, something told me if I were to implement this solution of going to class five days a week and working seven days a week I would be burnt out before the end of June.

In the end I found a middle ground between the solutions. I sacrificed half of every weekend of the weeks that I will be in class, I agreed to an eight hour day on the day that I work my evening shift, and all the other days I will work a six hour day so that I can do homework during those evenings on my own time.

It’s a good thing that the library doesn’t open until noon on the weekends though… usually by then my hangover is gone anyway.