Turtles. Definitely turtles.

Today's Random Sequential Indicator is 6.5:  That's how many hours we have to go until until Christmas! As I publish this, Christmas begins less than a full-night's-sleep away. So I hope everyone has a great holiday and survives their families! Remember to take breaks :)

Now on with the blag.  I may have mentioned this, but ECE 371 (Microprocessor Design) was the highlight of the term.  The content was interesting, the assignments were fun, and the professor was awesome.  This all came as a bit of a pleasant surprise, as I really didn’t expect to enjoy assembly language programming in the least. 

Don't worry, this shouldn't make sense.

For everyone not familiar with assembly language, here’s a crash course: It’s a programming language used to talk directly to hardware, and give it extremely simple, basic instructions.  It is so simple that a program to display numbers typed by someone on a monitor would take literally thousands of lines of code to create, since each instruction really can’t contain much more than “add these two numbers together” or “check if this button has been pressed yet”.  Sounds boring on the surface, but the real power becomes evident when you are NOT waiting on a user for inputs.  When it is just hardware talking to each other, things start moving VERY fast.  As in, you could check to see if that button I mentioned earlier was pressed thousands of times in a second, and respond nearly instantly if it had been.  Or a robot could check to make sure it is standing upright a few thousand times every second, and quickly adjust its balance if it starts to fall.  I might not be making it sound like it from this explanation, but basically with a microprocessor you can control just about anything that inputs or outputs an electrical signal with incredible speed and accuracy; the applications are endless. 

For anyone who has experience with assembly language, all I have to say is: Yes, I agree it’s a really shitty development environment, but somebody has to do it.  It makes a lot of sense to me, and for some reason I enjoy it, so it might as well be me.

The other reason 371 was awesome was who was teaching it.  (He reminds me a lot of Mr. Renner, my favorite teacher from high school).  He is a really sharp guy, he’s very helpful, he is extremely knowledgeable in his field (He wrote the book on microprocessor design… No, really, he did.), he really enjoys his work, and he has a great sense of humor.  Which brings me to the reason I decided to write this post.   Many of the following quotes were simply too good not so share, and they have all been reconstructed from my notes as accurately as possible, so I hope you enjoy. 

·             “So, what happens when you supply a logic high to the Intel PXA270 reset port? Well, it turns on.  With the miracle of electronics and all that stuff.”

·             “I’ve been up here waving my hands around for quite a while, is there anything that anyone doesn’t understand, or should I continue?”

·             “Don’t try to keep all of this information in your head.  Unless your head works better than mine”

·             “I always complete the projects I assign just to make sure there are no problems, and this next project was a little tricky.  But, all I had to do was change one setting then my LED started blinking and I threw my arms up and started running around the house.  These things are still exciting even after all these years”

·             “What is 100 times 10?”  *Silence* “Now, don’t everyone take your shoes off all at once here…” (‘To take your shoes off’ is a bit of slang he invented meaning ‘to get down to business’)

·             “What do you do when you get your first job, and your boss gives you your first real design project, and it’s impossible?  You freak out, jump around, throw your clothes everywhere—but you can only do all that for five minutes.  Then you check to see if anyone else already figured it out.” 

·             The previous quote was A reference to his ‘5 minute rule’: “When given an impossible task, you get 5 minutes to freak out, but then after your 5 minutes are up, you have to get to work.”

·             “This ‘Talker Board’ is great: You can make it say anything you want—unless it’s X-rated.  Unless you bring headphones, then you really can make it say anything.   Ok, since I am being recorded that’s as far as we’ll go with that…”

·             “Why do you want your product to be able to be assembled by a robot? Well, because you don’t have to buy them coffee every day.”

·             “What do you do while you are waiting for your device to be fabricated? That’s easy—you just sleep under your desk until it’s done.”

·             “What do you have to add to asynchronous memory to make it synchronous? Oh, I don’t know… Turtles or something, I think…”

Remember, all of these were actual quotes from an EXTREMELY technical and detail-oriented class, which in many cases made them even funnier.  As an added bonus, he also teaches 372 and 373, meaning I will get to take his class every term this year! So expect more awesome quotes from him in the future!

Return to the Land of the Living

I made it through another term.  Barely.  I’ve been done now for nearly a week, and I’ve been graciously making use of my brief opportunity to avoid contact with society to, well... avoid contact with society.  It’s been a while since I posted anything here, and I intend to bring everyone up to speed, but first, in the style of NPR’s Planet Money, I have a an indicator to share first.  For anyone who hasn’t heard the show, they always begin by sharing the “Planet Money Indicator” of the day, in which they first read off some arbitrary number, then tell you what it means.  The guy who presents the indicators has a reputation for always choosing indicators of bad things, as they usually have to do with unemployment or foreclosures or such, but if you’ve listened to financial news in the past 10 years that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.  Alas, I digress.   

Today’s Random Sequential Indicator is 0.4.   

That’s the GPA hit I took when I received the first B of my postbac education.  Yes, I got an Asian F in Calculus II this term.  Now, I know one B isn’t the end of the world, but if I said I haven’t lost any sleep over it, I’d be lying.  I’ve never felt more cheated out of a grade in my life, my 4.0 is dead, and I have absolutely no recourse.  Not once were course evaluations offered or even mentioned, and if I bring my concerns forward now, AFTER I recieved my grade, I would  just sound like a whiney student upset with his grade.  And I assure you that though that description matches, I have good reasons to be upset.

I know this must sound ridiculous: A postbac student who has already met the requirements to receive graduate funding complaining about a single B in a subject which is supposed to be difficult, in a course that was taught at a community college.  So I’ll stop—right after I say this: I can count the number of questions I got wrong on all of the tests, homework, and exams combined on one hand.  Tell me, does it sound like I understand 80% (a B’s worth) of the material?

I have good news as well.  First, a brief review:  I was feeling really nervous about ECE 221 (Circuit Analysis) at the beginning of the term.  I had never done anything like it before, and I hadn’t completed either of the prerequisite courses.  Story of my life, I know.  So I studied my ass off, and got 100% on the first midterm.  The material was new but not difficult.  Around week 7 or 8, I went into the second midterm with 100% on my tests, over 100% on my homework, and 100% in my lab section, and received a 72%.  That really shocked me, and so I studied my ass off for the final but only pulled a 78% on it.  Had you asked me a few weeks ago which class I thought I would get a B in, I would have said 221 for sure.  My calculations put me with an 85%, which is the sturdiest of B’s, really, but thanks to the miracle of everyone else failing too, I scraped by with an A-, which given the circumstances, I am completely satisfied with.

Finally, ECE 371 (Microprocessor Design) was certainly the highlight of the term in terms of both my final grade and my overall enjoyment of the content and assignments. Despite being tricky at times, it was very interesting and rewarding, and I enjoyed it a lot.  Also, the professor teaching that course is my advisor, so it was absolutely unacceptable for me to get anything short of an A.  I did very well in 371 from the start (including getting a 95% on a test that took place a week earlier than I was anticipating, due to faulty notes) so while I knew I would probably be getting an A, it was a real relief to see that it had actually happened.

All things considered, I ended the term with a 3.6, so I doubt my cumulative GPA is much below 3.9.  That’s it for my academic debriefing, more posts to come soon…

Formula 409, Surprise Programming, and Exploding Integrals

This will make sense later

What an interesting couple weeks it's been.  Especially if you consider being repeatedly broadsided by the unexpected and moderately toxic to be interesting.  Because if you do, it’s been absolutely fascinating.

Exploding Integrals

I guess I will start with the most recent development...  When I started writing this, I was on the bus, on the way home from my second midterm in the calc class from Hell.  Unsurprisingly, the midterm was also a beast: The test itself was only 2 pages long, but as anyone who has taken calculus knows, integrals have a tendency to really blow up in your face once you start opening then up.  Even if you haven't taken calculus, you've probably stumbled into a classroom where someone just got done teaching a math class and seen that and every whiteboard and in the entire room is completely full of equations and math problems.  Well, there's a very good chance that it was a calc class, and that all of the writing on the boards was actually just one problem.   The test itself was only 2 pages long, but I filled up 7 and a half additional pages.  You know it's a bad sign when the professor comes to class with a stack of tests in one hand and an unopened ream of paper in the other.  

We'll see how I did on that test.  After speaking with some students after class, I seem to have missed the last problem (which was worth 12% of the grade) and if that's true, I automatically have a B (assuming I didn't miss anything else anywhere else.)  And remember, on the last test I got all of the answers right and I got a C.  So that’s awesome. 

Surprise Programming

My microprocessors midterm was an entirely different story; I was pretty prepared for it because it’s an awesome class and I really don’t mind doing the reading or homework, so it actually gets done.  Furthermore, we had a big project due this Thursday (the day of the test), which actually made for excellent review.  Anyway, Tuesday morning I woke up and really didn’t feel like going in, especially since we were just reviewing for the midterm, which I had been studying for all weekend.  I decided to do the right thing and go in; even though it was my only class that day, a little more review wasn’t going to hurt.

When I strolled into class, I noticed a few odd things… It was very quiet, the class was unusually full of people, and, oh yeah—EVERYONE WAS TAKING THE MIDTERM.  Because guess what? The midterm wasn’t on Thursday—it was on Tuesday.  I sat down and took a look at my notes.  Yep, there it is, right on the first page, underlined and in large letters: “MIDTERM: TUES NOV 8”. So really I have no clue what happened, but at the time I had larger things to worry about.  Like finishing the midterm with an hour less than everyone else in the room.   The professor allowed anyone who wanted to come to arrive an hour early to the midterm—an opportunity that anyone would be crazy to turn down, or forget about.

I’m really glad that the professor for that class taught us the 5-minute rule before I found myself in this situation.  If you haven’t heard of it, the 5-minute rule is a commonly-used tactic in engineering.  Here’s how it works:  Lets say your boss gives you an impossible deadline. Or you show up an hour late into a midterm you didn’t know was happening.  First, you totally freak out. Flip tables, yell, throw in some of self-pity or rage; just go crazy. It’s your five minutes and you can spend it how you like.  But after the five minutes is up, you have to start working.  You can start small, but you have to start.  

And even though I’m making a big deal out of this, I do think I did pretty well.  It was very shocking to walk in on it in progress, but I was pretty prepared.  Not to mention it was an open-book/open-notes test, and ultimately not very hard, especially if you had some programming under your belt, which I did.  As an added bonus, I looked like a total badass, strolling into class an hour late like a boss, “Pshh I don’t need the extra time for this bullshit test.”

Formula 409

This is a hard one to start, because drinking stories are just generally not something you should generally post online under your own name.  But I really think that the explanation that comes at the end of it is more vindicating than it is embarrassing, and ultimately, I am just proud of the story.  So much for my chances of going into politics…

We went over to a friend’s house for Halloween this year—They love Halloween, so they always throw a big party.   They also have a large home, so since there was drinking involved, the events were likely to go late, and drunk people were likely to be on the road, a few of the guests (ourselves included) decided to just stay the night.   We played charades, had a great time, and drank a little more than we would have if one of us had to drive home that night.  Or rather, I did.  I quite frankly don’t remember so much about the night.  What I do remember, though, is that the amount of drinking I did was certainly not capable of making me as violently ill as it actually did.  One moment, I was totally fine.  I was a bit toasty, yes, but certainly not drunk.  The next, I was experiencing their beautiful bathroom from a whole new level.  Then I woke up in bed the next morning totally fine.  No headache, no hangover, not even that tired.

I was so embarrassed.  I’ve only been sick from drinking two or three other times in my entire life, and I am pretty sure all of them were in college, so they don’t even count.  Everyone who had planned on staying decided to take off.  I’m sure no one would tell me this because they are all too nice, but I think I pretty much killed the party.  I couldn’t remember anything from after I started feeling ill.  And all of this at someone’s house, whom – despite the fact that we have become very good friends and love spending time together—we have really only known for the last 6 months or less.  

Fast forward to last weekend.  We are at Life of Riley’s, watching the Ducks with some friends.  Not the hosts of the party, but friends that were there nonetheless.  We order a round of beers and my friend mentions that I must be feeling better.  He says something about 409 that I don’t quite catch, and I stop him.  A few other people have mentioned 409 lately, and every time it was in relation to that Halloween party.  And he explains everything…

Apparently, towards the end of the night someone spilled a drink on the carpet.  Anyway, it was promptly spotted and cleaned up using 409. No big deal.  But my cup was right next to the spill, so while the area was being liberally doused with 409 to keep wine from staining the carpet, my glass was accumulating a good deal of the spray.  Someone offered to get me another glass and I said not to worry about it, that a little cleaner wasn’t going to hurt, and I finished my drink before they could react.   Knowing me, I probably made a joke about it strengthening my immune system.  Then shortly after, I ducked into the bathroom and ended the party.   Of course I don’t remember ANY of this.  Everything in this paragraph is pieced together from what I have learned from the other guests.

So in the end, it was good to learn that I was merely poisoned by toxic cleaners, rather than being an out-of-control drunk who vomits in the homes of new friends.  And I got an awesome story out of it. 

Like I said, an interesting couple of weeks.

Greetings from Week 6

Or “Why I am not on Twitter: This is my idea of a brief update”

So, in no particular order, here’s what’s going on in my life:

Crunch

Has this ever happened to you? You’re listening to the radio, and a commercial comes on—you change it, only to realize that every other station decided to play commercials right then as well...  Of course not.  Who listens to the radio anymore?  But regardless, that’s a good way of describing how midterms are going.  Just when I thought I was starting to get a handle on things, it turns out I have three midterms, two projects, and two graded assignments due.  So that sucks.

Movember

For the first time in quite some time, I have absolutely no professional obligations, and since I have never participated fully before, I am officially partaking in No Shave November, which Urban Dictionary defines as:

The month of November in which you don't shave any hair of your body but instead you grow more bestial, brutish, and manly.  It only becomes acceptable to shave again on December 1st.

"Before" -- Taken on November 1st

I have plans to take a picture every day, but we’ll see how successful that is.  Regardless, I should have a wicked awesome beard in about a month.

Predictions

My initial predictions regarding how interesting and/or difficult my courses would be are, as usual, painfully inaccurate.  Calculus is killing me, no thanks to the horrid teaching.   The material isn’t hard, but the professor makes it hard. Circuit analysis is boring but quite easy.  My microprocessors class is still a bit up in the air: It’s certainly my favorite class, but my grades on the homework leave a bit to be desired.  Basically my worst, hardest, most frustrating class (Calc II) is the one with the easiest content.  Go figure.

Roommate

I have a roommate now!  Beth and I had been talking for a while about finding a roommate, but it didn’t seem even remotely like a real possibility.  We certainly weren’t going to put an ad on craigslist, and we couldn’t think of anyone that we knew who needed a place and we wanted to live with.  Long story short, a good friend of mine (one of my groomsmen, actually) needed a place to stay in Portland with very little notice, and after giving it some thought, we decided to give it a go. 

Jackson

Not much to say here: He’s getting huge, just like we knew he would.  He no longer looks like an freakishly large puppy—now he just looks like a strangely small dog. 

What happened?!

Also, he desperately wants to play with Yoda, and she is most certainly not amused with this new development in behavior.

TWO!!

Really more of a thought than a fully developed idea… I am more than halfway through the term, and then I have only two more before I start my masters!! Holy crap! 

Intel

Again, not much to say here, but I am working on a resume that I will be submitting to Intel very shortly.  They are already looking for summer interns, so keep your fingers crossed for me.  Wait, no, I don’t believe in that crap.   But I do hope it pans out.

That’s about it for now.  I had better get back to coding ARM/XScale assembly language instructions…

What should I do?

My face

I promise this isn’t just another post where I just bitch and complain about how hard one of my classes is and then go on to get a solid A at the end of the term.  This is a cry for help.  That said, I have a bit of complaining to do first, just to get you in the right mindset before I ask the big question.  So I'll get right to it...

My calc II professor is probably the worst professor I have ever had.  She is the kind of professor that singlehandedly ends math careers and fosters the kind of aversion to math that 99% of the population seems to have.   I am comfortable admitting that she has successfully ousted my previously titled “worst professor ever” outright.  An impressive task, as when I wrote his review, I included such key phrases as “The university should be ashamed to have him teach under their name” and “His contempt for students, whether he is lecturing, answering questions, or simply conversing with them, is intense and palpable.”

Months ago, foolishly thinking I would have a choice as to which Calc II class to take, I looked around and found a shocking concentration of poor reviews for her class.  “It’s calc II," I remember thinking.  "It isn’t easy.  People bitch about hard classes.  No big deal.” But now I see how wrong I was.

Since I’ll be referencing it later, here is the most poignant review:

“[name removed] is the head of the math department and her teaching style shows that she is not afraid to lose her job.  She goes out of her way to not accommodate students who deserve better, and even though she makes mistakes on the board, she has very strict standards for formatting.  Her method of communicating those standards is to knock points off without telling anyone in advance how to do it right”  -- ratemyprofessors.com

The first few weeks, we blew through material at a blinding speed without any explanation of how to do the problems, which formulas to use, or why any of it works—just example after unrelated, confounding example for two and a half hours twice a week.  It was obvious that her preparation for the class was minimal, as her errors on the board were frequent and severe, with many problems ending at a dead-end situation and her moving on with a quick “Well, you get the idea.”

Unsurprisingly, and indicative of the quality of our instruction, the first test was a complete failure.  The class averaged 61%, and call me crazy, but I think that says a lot more about the instruction than it does about the students.  This fact, however served only to anger her, as she spent the first half hour of the next class delivering an sloppy tirade, in which she said that we deserved to fail, that we are one of the worst groups of students she has had, and that all of our previous math instructors were failures as well if we had made it this far.  Funny, since the ONLY problem I didn’t lose points on was the one that didn’t involve material from Calc II.  However, I did get the privilege of being called out and berated in front of the entire class for using my calculator on the test, even through we were advised to do so and I got one of the highest grades in the class because of it.   Also, as if the review above were some sort of perverse prophecy, I got the correct answer for every question on the test and received a C.  

Now, with the test behind us, we are back on the warpath, blazing through example problems without even the slightest of explanations.  There are probably still glaring errors, but now the class can't understand the problems well enough to spot them.  I guess that once we have the next test it should be pretty clear whether this teaching method is working out. 

I could really continue on like this for hours, but I have a serious question:  What the fuck am I supposed to do?  I am so frustrated by this entire class.  What I am describing here isn’t ok, but no one is doing anything about it!  I hate coming to class.  I’m pretty sure it’s obvious how frustrated, angry, and confused I am during “lecture” given intensity of my stare/scowl and volume of my sighs and groans.  Every day I have to attend this class, I leave feeling completely defeated and discouraged and I know I am not the only one.  Every rational part of my brain is screaming at me to go to her office hours, but then what would I say???

What should I do?  I mean, I have to go to her office hours… I have to say something, but I’m so upset about virtually every aspect of the class that I wouldn’t even know where to start, and I am afraid that my well-intentioned frustration and desire for a better education might come across as disrespectful.  Especially if I burst through the wall like the kool-aid man, rip some of my hair out, get all frothy-mouthed, and start throwing things, which is all very liable to happen.

So here's the big decision: do I:

A) Do what’s right.  Talk to her.  Voice my concerns, for the betterment of my education and the educations of others?

 B) Smile, and nod, continue to get screwed, and hope I can make it through the term without having aneurism or a sudden SIDs flare-up?

Jokes aside, I would love some advice.  What would you do?  Is there any way to professionally bring any of this up in office hours?

Sorry sir, but that's the official PSU policy

When I first started writing this, I had just made it through the first week of Fall term.  Sort of.  I had successfully endured the passage of time, but I was buried in coursework. My financial aid was over 4 weeks late, and I was generally just having a really hard time transitioning back to college.  I think going from a month of near-constant socialization, with no real obligations aside from not burning down the house, to having lectures to attend and frequent, difficult coursework with looming deadlines is just generally a difficult transition to make.  Fortunately by now, my head is now slightly more in the game, because as I post this, I’m solidly in the middle of the term.  As in: Calc midterm was on monday, Circuit Analysis was today.  Hopefully they both went well. 

Financial aid:

After a long and ridiculous battle, they decided to pull their heads out of their asses and give me my loans, which had been withheld for over a month because of some new mystery form I was supposed to sign but had no knowledge of, since the financial aid office never told me about it.  They were quick to tell me that they told me about it, but they didn’t ever actually… tell me... about it.  

Now, I like a false accusation now and then as much as the next guy, but I really loved hearing the words “Oh, we sent you three emails about that.  This is your fault for not checking your email” from—and I swear I am not joking—every single person I spoke to at the financial aid office throughout this multi-week ordeal.  I get notifications on my phone for every email I receive and this was the first time I had heard about these, but being too nice for my own good, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and checked my pdx.edu account on their server (even if I delete the email from PSU from my personal email, it is all archived on this server.)  Unsurprisingly, there was nothing there.  So after that, I nearly had an aneurism every fucking time someone told me it was my fault for not checking my email.  DO NOT tell a computer engineering grad student that they didn’t check their email. 

Lab Switch:

Due to a clerical error on my part, I signed up for a Wednesday lab section for my circuit analysis class, instead of the Monday section that I can actually attend.   Oops.  No big deal though, right?  Wrong. 

At UO, I would have gone online and just switched sections, which would have taken a few minutes, tops.  PSU, however, operates in some kind of perpetual, last-century hell-world when it comes to delivering information though, so I would have needed to fill out a form by hand and fax it to them, or mimeograph it and tape it to an 8-track then deliver it on horseback.  As if that isn’t bad enough, it turns out I missed some arbitrary deadline, so I have submit a formal petition to an appeals tribunal.  That only meets on Tuesdays.  And I need formal statements from the professor and both lab instructors.  

I swear, I couldn’t even make this stuff up if I tried.   

Remember: we are talking about switching lab sections here.  No money is even changing hands.   Furthermore, I’m going to start flipping tables if it gets denied, since I couldn’t attend the Wednesday section even if I wanted to.  I am convinced that it is the official policy of PSU to intentionally waste student time until they eventually give up on whatever request they originally needed.   And I am not a fan. 

Fall 2011: Classes So Far

Microprocessors

Professor Rating: Awesome

Course Content:  Very interesting

Difficulty: Pretty Easy

This is my favorite class this term.  The professor (who also happens to be my advisor) is an excellent lecturer, and knows the material inside and out. He literally wrote the book on this subject, and it shows.  He has a way of explaining extremely complex things in very easy-to-understand ways, which is a good skill to have generally, but is absolutely required for engineers.  He really reminds me of Mr. Renner from Sisters High School: his lectures are about 50% course content and 50% wisdom about the world/industry.  Not to mention he is hilarious.   

Added Bonus: learning machine code makes you feel like you can decode the matrix.

Calculus 2

Professor Rating: Awful

Course Content:  Pretty interesting, and highly relevant to other courses I am in.

Difficulty:  Harder than it needs to be.

How to summarize this class in one sentence …  Don’t read professor reviews when you can’t transfer out of the class?  Don’t give the head of the department a teaching position?  Check your examples for glaring errors before teaching them to the class?  Put more than 10 minutes per week into planning your lectures?   That’s all good advice, but none of it has been followed so far in this class.   I don’t really know how else to put this, but this professor simply shouldn’t be teaching.  She is arrogant, absent-minded, antagonistic, argumentative—and those are just the words that start with A’s...  And I especially enjoyed being singled out and chided in front of the class for using a calculator on a quiz, after being explicitly allowed and encouraged to do so.  (“I just didn’t think you would use your calculator for ALL of it…”)

Added Bonus:  She grades notoriously hard and hates giving partial credit.

Circuit Analysis

Professor Rating: Strangely out of place

Course Content: Dense and Uninteresting

Difficulty:  Hard

This class would likely be easier had I completed the prerequisites—one of which being Calc 2—but even if it were easier, it would probably still be incredibly dense and dry: it’s all formula memorization.  The professor is clearly very well-versed in her field, and I don’t doubt her education at all, but she has a strange, oddly whimsical approach to circuit analysis.  This is a science; there are right and wrong answers, and there are correct and incorrect ways of applying an equation, yet she has this do-what-you-feel, everyone-is-different, lecture style that is totally inconsistent with the material itself.  It’s like she should be teaching interpretive dance or scrapbooking, but instead we are talking about arranging op-amps and resistors.  Very odd. 

Added Bonus:  All students are blackmailed into purchasing a bullshit software license in order to do the homework and therefore pass the class.

  

Catch-44

Thats a double catch-22, by the way, and yes, I am about to blag about a parking ticket.  I realize how pathetic that is, but I just want another human being to acknowledge the absolute absurdity of this entire ridiculous situation.  Furthermore, I think I am a better writer when I am irritated.  And it suffices to say that presently I am at least a mite embittered over the situation at hand.

It all started a few months ago when I paid money for the service of being able to park on a public street-- and seeing that written out just now actually made me a little more upset.  But I digress.  I payed my fee, displayed the permit on my vehicle, and went out to dinner.  When I returned with a full hour of parking time remaining, I quickly tore into the yellow envelope which had been painstakingly and artfully folded into a fist with the middle finger extended and lovingly nestled beneath my windshield wiper.  Ok, I lied about the folding part, but lets face it, thats essentially what it represents.  Being a somewhat reasonable adult, I gave the ticket the benefit of the doubt, and checked to see if my time had expired.  Nope, more than an hour left.  Just like I thought.

That marked the beginning of the madness.  Because what the hell else would you get a parking ticket for if you paid for your parking?  I did mention I paid, right?  Because I did.  Now isn't the time to get arrogant and self-righteous-- wait, this is a blog! Of course it is.  I always pay the meter.  Every time.  And if that's wrong than let God strike me down from this chair, which I have draped a body pillow over in order to make it more comfortable.  I'll allow a pause to see if anything happens...

Now that that's cleared up, allow me the liberty of informing you what I got a parking ticket for, because its so unrelated to the physical act of parking that a even legal scholar with an emphasis in traffic law wouldn't stand a chance at guessing. I got a parking ticket for not having any license plates.

So to recap: I got a parking ticket for not having plates, which aside from having nothing to do with parking, is simply not true.  Our car has a license plate on the rear.  Thats how it was when we bought it.  When we bought it from a licensed auto dealer.  And its not like this is an uncommon sight, anyway.  There was actually another car parked less than one block away with no front plate and it had no ticket.  It was also a Mercedes SL550, which cost upwards of $105,000 new.  But I am sure that had nothing to do with it.  Nothing at all.  But again, I digress.

My eyes went back to the citation itself, which let me tell you, was a sight to behold.  Despite being printed, which would imply that there was some level of legibility and consistency desired when it was produced, it is a veritable menagerie of bafflement, as everything was jumbled up and printed in random order on top of existing text.  Either that, or the time issued really was "OREGON", and I was in violation of the law "$55.00" The actual citation number, which I assume is moderately important, was completely illegible, as it was printed directly on top of the words "PARKING VIOLATION".  The date wasn't much better.  Really, I have no choice but to include some evidence at this point, since after all, a JPEG is worth 1024 words.

The citation number, as it appears on the ticket. 

The date, as it appears on the ticket.

Uh, what the fuck? Am I expected to solve genius-level captchas in order to understand something as mundane as a parking ticket? Apparently so.  However, the illegibility issue was actually a very welcome development.  I remembered reading an article about getting out of trouble on lifehacker, so I looked it up...

"The city government loves their parking tickets. So many of these things get handed out that you could end up with one even if you didn't break the law. Either way, the first thing you want to check for is a mistake. According to parking expert Eric Feder, if anything on the parking ticket is wrong—from the date to the location to the cited violation—you have an easy out. You can even get out of a ticket if the writing is illegible. If anything is off or wrong on your citation, contest it and you should be able to get it dismissed without much trouble." 

--http://lifehacker.com/5811657/how-to-get-out-of-the-most-common-kinds-of-trouble

Score.  That was exactly what I remembered.  It's funny to me that this article even emphasizes that illegible handwriting can be grounds to excuse a ticket, since I'm sure that's exactly why the city of Portland prints their tickets. But, when they come out looking like a dot-matrix printer just wiped its ass on a used Safeway receipt, you're not really accomplishing much in terms of legibility.  Furthermore, none of the field names corresponded to what was actually printed there.  My license plate number is listed as the date,  and the address is listed as the receipt number.

So, I was feeling pretty good at this point, because I basically have the most fucked up parking violation ever, and it was issued for breaking a non-parking law that I didn't actually break. There was no way in hell I'm was going to pay this thing.  I flipped the envelope over and sure enough there were three options on the back, which are summarized below:

1. PAY TICKET: Submit the full payment, thus pleading guilty and waiving your right to a court hearing. 
2. POST BAIL WITH EXPLANATION: Submit the full payment along with a written explanation as to why you contest.  Your explanation is waver of your right to a court hearing, and you consent to any judgement rendered.  The court may refund some or all of the bail, but will not consider any explanation without bail.
3. REQUEST COURT HEARING: Submit bail, along with request for hearing.  Request will not be considered without bail.

Wait-- that's not the summarized, thats the full text!  Sorry about that.  Here is the summary:

1. Pay.
2. Pay.
3. Pay.

Oh, Portland Circuit Court, you sneaky, sneaky bastard-- every option involves posting the full bail amount!  And, according to the ticket, any payment is considered a guilty plea!  Here's that catch-22 I was taking about:  To plead not guilty, pay the fee.  But if you pay the fee, you automatically plead guilty.

But being the naive person I am, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought, "That's crazy-- I am reading into this too far.  They probably just want the check to hold onto in case I don't show up in court.  Surely they wouldn't accept it as a guilty plea and cash it before the ruling even happens."  So, like a pig to the slaughter, I mailed in my hearing request, along with a check.  

The hearing request was interesting to write to say the least.   All the information they asked for was illegible, so ultimately I just photocopied the ticket and included a copy, since I haven't won any international cryptography awards yet.  It couldn't have been more than two days later and the funds were whisked from my bank account.  That was over a month ago, and as of yet, I've received no notification of my court date, or any other contact from them at all.  All I know is they took my money without question and didn't even give me a fucking receipt.  And I was pretty clear that I was requesting a court hearing...

But spite is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, and I am nothing if not spiteful.  If they are that willing to take my money before even considering my case, I might as well delay the court case well into the next decade.  It's not like I have anything to lose at this point.  Also, I will be requesting an ASL interpreter for Beth at the last possible second when I finally do show up.  On their site, it says they want 48 hours notice for any translation or interpretation, but guess what: they are legally obligated to provide an interpreter if we ask for one, regardless of notice.  Basically, I will be doing everything in my power to make this the most expensive parking ticket to prosecute that the City of Portland has on record, and I will have a blast doing it.   Hey, who knows... I might even get my fifty bucks back!