Self-Handicapping — What’s Your Excuse?

2009 will mark my 5th anniversary as a teacher, and in that brief amount of time, I believe I’ve heard just about every excuse shy of “my dog ate my homework”.  Here’s a short list of some common ones:

1. I didn’t know there was homework.
2. You didn’t say there’d be a quiz.
3. “We forget things!”
4. I don’t have Internet at home.
5. My sister/brother/father/mother/aunt/uncle/neighbor/former-terrorist-buddy was in this weekend and I didn’t have time to work on it.

Sometimes, excuses fly before a test.  Such as:

1. I didn’t understand the material
2. I studied all weekend (my personal favorite)
3. I didn’t have time to study
4. I studied the wrong thing.

I had never thought about it before, but an article in January 6’s NY Times suggested that these types of excuses actually serve as hedges to our egos.  No one likes getting a bad grade on a test (believe me, I’ve had my share), and so to offer up some kind of excuse hedges their bets: if they do good, then they beat the odds.  If they do bad then, everyone already knows why and its no big surprise.  God knows I’m guilty of this.

It was interesting reading this article from that standpoint.  I think I’m going to make a concious effort NOT to try to provide pre-excuses before anythign I do.

Where’s Castlecops?

Happy new year everyone!  Hopefully everyone made it through the end of 2008 ok and are getting a good rest before hitting it hard again in 2009.

It was brought to my attention that Castlecops, the fantastic malware database we used to look up HijackThis entries, closed on December 23 — the day after our last day of class.  As someone who used this site regularly, this came as quite a shock — this site’s departure is definitely a blow to the malware-fighting community.

After doing a little research, I discovered that the entire Castlecops database was moved to htttp://www.systemlookup.com, and it’s being continuously updated by security expert volunteers.  The site is being maintained by Javacool, makers of the SpywareBlaster tool that we play with in the NSA 266 (Troubleshooting) class.

So, update your bookmarks!