Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I'm typing while I'm in the second of my two Graphics One classes today. The students are currently in a "Biomedical Science" talk which is being given in the auditorium. All the laboratory classes right now (which means ALL the classes right now) were required to attend, then resume their regular sessions when the seminar ends at 12 noon.

I'm also downloading the last of four documents for my students' exercises today, the largest one at 3.1MB. It's much faster (finished in less than 10 minutes) than how long I took during my 8-11am class just to save a 380KB and a 1.03MB file. I got the third file, at 2.95MB, a little earlier at roughly ten minutes also.

I guess the fact that I'm the only one hogging the line right now (not like the 25+ simultaneous requests for file transfer earlier) that made things easier.

Of course, this not only meant that my first class students did the exercises in the wrong order (the third one with the smallest file size first then the second one) leading to some confusion about some of the instructions given, but also that they did not get to do the two largest (one of which was supposed to be the first) exercise.

I guess we'll just make up for it next time, along with the fact that this second class will only have two hours to finish all the exercises.

Now, on to yesterday's astronomy event: I didn't get to see it. Just like with most of the metropolis (at least according to the news) despite the fact that this was the first day in more than a week that the sun was shining and part of the blue sky was finally visible, there were still clouds that impeded our location from viewing the planet Venus' transition in front of the Sun.

Not that it would have been a really impressive sight for most people without a telescope though. It would only be a little larger than a sunspot, which isn't detectable with the naked eye either.

It's just that lately, the masses have been drawn in by headlines announcing certain astronomical events as being the last time a certain positioning of heavenly bodies would happen in decades or hundreds of years.

There was the proximity of Mars and the "intensive" meteor showers. The interest even spilled to the recent lunar eclipse, which really isn't such a rare event.

And at least the last two phenomena were satisfactorily seen without magnification. Very few people were able to appreciate the increase in size of Mars while just standing in their backyards or in the street looking up.

If only it meant that the masses would have more than a tabloid-headline passing interest in astronomy. But that continues to be my wish.