When I was in elementary school, I got a Commodore 64 computer. A few years later, I upgraded to an Amiga 500, which was also made by the Commodore company. I have lots of good memories of those years (including getting in trouble in fifth grade for writing computer programs in class!), and my fondness for computing in general has never abated. I was disappointed, though, that the Amiga never got much support and the company went bankrupt in the early 90s.

Last week I finished reading On the Edge, a history of the Commodore computer company. It was a fascinating history full of interesting characters: the tempestuous president, Jack Tramiel; the elusive Irvin Gould, financier and Chairman of the Board; and the drunken party-animal chip designer, Bill Herd. I finally learned the source of Commodore's bankruptcy and my own disappointment in the support of the Amiga: bad management. I was enthralled to learn what was going on "behind the scenes" with events and developments I learned about at the time from reading the computer magazines at my junior high school's library.

All in all, it was an interesting retrospective at something that played a huge role in my life during some very formative years.

When I was a kid, I watched a cartoon series called "Star Blazers." It was about a group of astronauts that flew to a faraway planet to retrieve a device that would save the earth from poisonous radioactivity. They only had one year to retrieve the device and return before earth would be beyond saving. At the end of every episode, the narrator would say, "Hurry! You have only X number of days left!" where X would count down by a certain amount each episode.

This was terribly exciting for a young boy in the eighties - most other cartoons had no continuity from one episode to the next; you could watch them in any order and wouldn't lose much. But this was a serial space drama, an early Battlestar Galactica, if you will.

Unfortunately, that summer, shortly before the end of the series, my father took the family away while he preached a series of meetings in another state. When I got back, the series was over, and I had no idea how it ended. I always wondered.

Fast-forward 20 years or so, when I purchased the series on DVD. I sat down and started watching again from the first episode. Few cartoons, when viewed as an adult, live up to the memory one has of them as a child. This one stood up pretty well, however - and then I got to the episodes I had never seen. The last few episodes were amazing, with several plot twists that totally threw me. I loved it!

Last Friday, I watched the last episode. It was deeply satisfying, in a way that only something you've waited for 20 years can be.

I've had a rough week. I had about 60 5-page papers to grade, and I wound up getting about 14 total hours of sleep over the course of three nights finishing up the grading.

On top of that, one student turned in a paper that was 80% plagiarized from various websites. I had to fail the student for the semester.

Then I mentioned the situation to another professor and he chewed me out for about 45 minutes, saying that I had made assumptions and hadn't extended Christian grace. Since I respected this professor, it really hurt.

I'd really like to teach classes that I can test entirely through Scan-Tron.