dave has nothing to say about his job today, other than...

Fucking FUCKING, fuckitty-fuck FUCK!!

freedom is on the march...

Is everyone else as excited as I am about tomorrow's Iraqi election? I can't wait to see who wins. We should know pretty quickly too... since I can't imagine it will take too long to count the 300 VOTES cast by the people who manage to NOT be terrified of getting shot or blown up while voting.

Did everyone see John Stewart's recap of the Inauguration Speech that kept score of Bush's masturbatory use of the words Freedom (20-something times) and Liberty (17 times)? I don’t know whether to me amused by it or just frightened by the doublespeakyness of the whole thing... when Freedom and Liberty mean, "do what we say" and "or we'll make you."

When does the campaigning for 2008 start?

i [xxxx] a parade...

We're going to our first genuine Mardi Gras parade today. Don’t tell me it's not Mardi Gras yet... you see... every where else, Mardi Gras is just a DAY, but down here it's a 2-month-long celebration that closes school for a week and involves upwards of 20 parades and who-knows-how-many Formal Balls. It's just fucking bizarre. And we don’t really know what happens at a Mardi Gras parade, other than people throwing beads an other assorted crap at you. Whatever. We still feel compelled to go. (Meaning , of course, my wife feels compelled to go.)

I'm sure there will be much complaining about it... stay tuned!

pissing off the physicist once again...

We were watching Queer Eye and Ted was helping some football fan guy buy a new grill for his tailgate parties, and they were discussing buying a particular gas grill, even though charcoal cooks better... and the guy at Grills-R-Us starts salespitching for this gas grill and says...

"This penetrates the food right away, it cooks the food a lot more quickly, but it also cooks in the infrared spectrum, just like charcoal..."

Which is important, you know... because most gas grills cook using, ummm... COSMIC GAMMA RAYS!!

What the FUCK?

Infrared = HOT. Coals are hot. Gas is hot. Hot is hot.

If there is a difference between the quality of charcoal and gas cooking, it's about SMOKE... not about... the infrared fucking spectrum.

Jesus.

sober musings on alcohol..

I don’t know how much readers know about the whole "history" of me and alcohol. See, for most of my life I didn’t drink. At all. The reasons for this were fairly simple. But recently, I've started drinking. A little. The reasons for THIS are relatively complex, and I shan't go into them right now. Suffice it to say, what you are dealing with is a 35 year old person who is figuring out things about alcohol that most people figured out when they were 18. And the thing about 18-year-olds is that they don’t THINK as much as 35 year olds, so... being 35 and figuring out these things can be fairly tiring. Example...

WHAT to drink...

I can’t drink beer, because the smell of beer sickens me. As does the smell of wine for that matter. (What exactly is in beer AND wine both, other than alcohol?) That leaves hard liquor. And without a parent's liquor cabinet to raid - how does one decide really? It's too expensive to just buy one of each. (More on that later.) So I just picked anything that can be mixed with ginger ale (vodka, gin) or coke (rum). Because I really like ginger ale, and we always have some coke around the house.

HOW MUCH to drink...

So... having picked a beverage of choice (or two) the question becomes... what exactly is the POINT. Because as I see it there are four possible states you could be aiming for...

a) nothing
b) woozy
c) sick
d) unconscious

Now... which one should I be shooting for here? Because the 'nothing' seems like a waste, and the 'unconscious'... well, I could just skip the drinking and go straight to bed. Sick can’t be it, so it must be the 'woozy' that I'm looking for, but... quite frankly, I don’t particularly ENJOY being woozy.

HOW OFTEN to drink...

Can I drink on a Wednesday while I watch TV? By myself? What if I had a drink yesterday? When will this start to look bad? When will my wife start to freak out?

HOW WELL to drink...

Here is the dilemma. I can not IMAGINE spending $45 on a bottle of vodka. But at the same time I can't imagine DRINKING the crap that only costs $17!

It goes on and on, and if the whole experiment proves nothing else, it proves that DAVE THINKS TO MUCH TO EVER HAVE ANY FUN!! EVER!!

coming soon...

Things are just kinda ok around here. Work is still frustrating, but dealwithable... for now. Home, kids, wife... all that is just... there. I feel my sense of humor coming back, but... slowly. Perhaps soon, Dr. Dave's website will return to its once great anecdote-filled glory.

inside the mind of mrs. dave...

"Hey, I've got an idea... I'll give the 2 year-old some HOT COCOA in a NON-SPILLPROOF CUP, even though we don't even give him WATER, or ANYTHING in a regular cup, EVER, because he is JUST NOT EQUIPPED TO HANDLE IT , but that's ok, it's not my problem, although the FIRST THING my husband sees when he comes home will be his son RAINING CHOCOLATEY GOODNESS all over the kitchen floor and surrounding area and of course HE will be the one who has to clean it up since I have been at home with the children ALL DAY, and besides I'm trying to watch CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD on TV in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY!!

WHEN CHILDREN ARE AWAKE!!

AND EVERYONE IS SCREAMING!!"

Ahem.

yoga smackdown...

First of all, I should mention that Cute Yoga Kelly is back. This means a better class with more cuteness and extra special bendy-over parts.

Today's class was quite well attended, and there was even another GUY in class. And I've mentioned before what THAT means. Stupid Male Ego Yoga Compativeness.

Oh, man... did I make this guy look bad. "Having trouble with the tree pose, PUNK?"

He shan't be back, I would wager...

it scares away students AND weblog readers...

I don't have time to write today, because my online course started and I have to write a bunch of stuff for that. So instead of an entry, I've decided to post my syllabus here. Yeah, I know...

Zzzzzzzz...

--- --- --- ---

Course Description:

I first taught the "[NAME OF COURSE]" course when I was a full-time physics professor at the [COLLEGE I WAS STUPID ENOUGH TO LEAVE]. The intent of the course was to present a historical view of the science of astronomy, and to examine how our picture of the universe we live in has changed throughout human history. The course was a great success, and so when I moved on from the [JOB I DIDN'T HATE] to my current job, I was asked to continue teaching the class as an online course. I did this for the first time last semester. It was a dismal failure.

The reasons for this are varied, but the main reason was that the online discussions just did not progress quickly enough to allow us to cover all the material. I would post some questions and 2 days later a couple of people would post responses, then I would answer those responses, and all of a sudden it's takes us an entire week to cover an idea that I could have explained in 15 minutes in a traditional course. Clearly, the model I was using for the online course - I post a reading and some lecture notes and some questions and we all discuss them - was not working.

So, in thinking about how to conduct the course this semester, the goal was... to make sure there was always something going on in the discussion groups, and to give the STUDENTS more responsibility for bringing the "content" into the discussions. The model I've come up with is one in which there will be 10-12 forums, each devoted to a particular topic. These topics will range from ancient and Renaissance astronomy to black holes, the Big Bang, and extraterrestrial life. Rather than taking a sequential approach to the history of astronomy, we will take a parallel approach. Each forum will explore a particular period in our understanding of the cosmos, and over the course of the semester, we should develop a fairly complete picture of how this understanding has developed over time.

The Forums

Each forum will have two to three student "moderators". Your job as the moderators of a forum is to make sure the discussions in your forum keep moving, by posting interesting content and posing questions to myself and to the rest of the class. Each moderator should be posting something to his or her forum no less often than every other day. Everyone should be reading and posting to ALL of the forums at all times. This sounds like a lot of work, but I expect that not all forums will have high volumes of traffic at all times. It'll be my job to keep track of the discussions, to make sure no factually incorrect information is leaking through, and to point everyone in the direction of resources that will help you to get the information you need. It may get a little chaotic at times, and it may be hard to keep up with all the discussions in all the forums, but the alternative is having a discussion on a single topic that moves at a snail's pace because everyone is waiting for someone ELSE to post a message.

Resources

I'm not going to require a textbook for this course. Instead, I'll post a set of weblinks to good internet resources that I will keep updated over time as you all provide links to materials you come across on the web. I will also post a HUGE library of primary source material from Aristotle, Plato, Copernicus, Galileo... that will particularly help the historical discussion forums. I shouldn't have to say it, but I will... anytime you pull a chunk of text from a webpage or anywhere else, you need to CITE YOUR SOURCE appropriately.

Time

I expect you'll spend a couple of hours almost every day working on the course, between looking up resources, composing posts and questions, and reading all the forums. If this seems like a lot, remember, in an online course the workload is compensating for those hours we are NOT spending sitting in a classroom, PLUS the homework and other work outside of class.

Grades

Your grade will be based almost entirely on your posts to the discussion forums. One third of your grade will be based on the quality and frequency of your posts to the forum you jointly moderate. One third will be based on your posts to the other forums. And one third will be based on a comprehensive final paper, the details of which will follow sometime around midterm.

You will receive midterm reports around the halfway point of the semester informing you of your grade up to that point, with suggestions on anything you might need to do in order to improve your grade.

I should also mention that the [CLUNKY ONLINE INTERFACE] allows me to track how many posts you have read. I'll be making spot-checks every few weeks to see that everyone is reading and keeping up with new posts.

Final Thoughts

This method of teaching a class is a HUGE departure for me, personally. I'm not a big fan of discussion-based courses in general. I'm a scientist. We scientists like to LECTURE!! But that doesn't really work very well in an online course, so I'm hoping this little experiment will be a success.

Astronomy is one of my favorite subjects to teach, and I think teaching the HISTORY of astronomy is a good way to get a complete picture of our modern view of our place in the universe. Hopefully, over the course of the semester, such a complete picture will begin to emerge for us.

quit yer complaining...

Look people... I don't know what I used to write about every day when I wasn't fucking depressed, ok?! Gimme a break.

you'll get no more from me...

I see from comments to the last post that people seem to want "details" about the job situation.

Nope.

Talking (writing) about it will only piss me off, which I can't take any more of. Plus I don't want to wind up getting "dooced" over it. Suffice it to say - I'm done... I'm applying for teaching jobs as of now. Hopefully I'll be gone by August.

I leiu of that, I shall relate an amusing-marriage-related anecdote.

It's been a while since the sex happened around here. Quite a while. And I could really have used some stress-relief sex on Friday, given that my pulse was running at about 180 at work that day. But we were driving to Atlanta that night, and the drive was awful, and we crashed at the hotel, and... just... no way. And then Saturday, my wife got her period, and... so... it still hasn't happened.

On Monday, we got a catalog from Frederick's... you know... of Hollywood? I was reading it with great interest. Great, great interest. Valentine's Day is coming up - you see. And my wife's birthday... and our anniversary. All good excuses. Finally I had to close the catalog and say to my wife...

"OK... you need to take this AWAY from me until we have sex again, or else I am going to spend $800!!

news flash...

I HATE MY JOB!!!!!!!

(that is all)

have i mentioned lately...

... how flat-out AWESOME this season of The Amazing Race is? Oh my god... like a few weeks ago when they were eating the big bowl of spicy-Hungarian-soup and then Victoria started throwing up, and then the other people started throwing up, until finally even the Hungarian violin players were throwing up. Oh, my GOD...

Perfect... TV... Moment...!

Every week it gets better. Jonathan and Victoria get meaner and louder, Adam gets more and more whiny and juvenile and pussy-whipped by Rebecca, Lori and Bolo get more muscle-headed and white-trashy... Hayden bets bitchier and bitchier while her breasts just get perkier and perkier...

And yet, it STILL boils down to being a show about people buying plane tickets.

Absolute... Freaking... Genius!

state of mind...

I tried to do yoga this morning, and I just.... couldn't. It was weird... it was like neither my body nor my brain would LISTEN to me... the whole thing just made me agitated.

It doesn't bode well for the remainder of the day.

I finished the script I was working on... 3 days late and 1300 words OVER the target length. The voiceover guy has the copy now, so we'll see how it comes out, but I'm betting it'll be at least 45-47 minutes. (we'd like it to be 40... 44 MAX). Looks like I have to do some cuting, which believe it or not... is often harder than the writing was.

I think I'm going to slack today... as far as my REAL job is concerned, and work a bit on next semester's online course. I plan on running it COMPLETELY differently next time. We'll see how it works. I'm less than hopeful.

I need caffeine. I can feel a headache brewing.

obligatory macworld expo inspired gushing...

Have you seen it? Have you seen it?

The Mac Mini?

Must have one.

The iPod Shuffle? No... it's not a new dance... it's a whole new mp3-player paradigm. All storage, no interface. Brilliant.

Software? GarageBand 2 does real time music notation. iMovie now handles hi-def resolution. iWork? A new productivity suite with a wordprocessor that mimics the interface of Keynote. (I switched from PowerPoint to Keynote two years ago, and I get more compliments on my presentations than you can imagine.) And the awesome thing about my job is... I know I'll have my hands on ALL of it in a week or two, and it won't cost me a nickel.

Giddy as a schoolgirl!

i've said it before... I'll say it again...

It doesn't matter how skanky the videos on MTV are, it doesn't matter how naked they get on Desperate Housewives, there will NEVER be anything hotter on television than women's billiards.

And it's not about the bending over and it has nothing to do with how they LOOK... it's all about the skill and the focus and the ability...

Ok, sometimes it's about the bending over.

But really.... god damn... watching a woman run a rack of 9-ball, I would so totally do them RIGHT THERE on the table.

finally an "anecdote"...

This happened to me a few weeks ago, and I kept forgetting to write about it. The title of the entry SHOULD actually be - "Why Dave never got laid... EVER!"

I was in BestBuy on my lunch hour... killing time. It was the day I bought RotK - Extended Edition on DVD, so I had that, and I walked by the CD-boxed-sets and was just checking out the aisle... seeing if there were any boxed sets I didn't know about that looked interesting. There was one from "Alice in Chains" I had never seen. I picked it up... looked at the back...

Just then this BestBuy Salesgirl Person walks up with the old - "Are you finding everything ok?" routine.

Yeah... just... looking... thanks...

"Ok." And she just stands there. She doesn't walk away, like a proper salesperson would. "We have the new Nirvana boxed set, you know."

"Huh? What?" Dave looks at her, confused...

"She nods at the Alice in Chains" boxed set in my hand... "I just figured..."

To which Dave's internal reaction is, "Don't YOU go making ASSUMPTIONS about my musical tastes, BITCH! Because, personally, I think Nirvana SUCKS!!" But what comes out of Dave's mouth instead is something like... "Oh, Hmm... right... mumble." At which BestBuy Salesgirl Person walks away.

And it's not until 3 or 4 minutes later that it occurs to me... "Hey, could that chick have been flirting with me?"

I mean... maybe not... probably not.. you know? She was probably just trying to sell some CDs. But the fact that the possibility doesn't even cross my mind is the difference between ME and... well... every other man.

Just a reminder ladies. If you intend to flirt with The Dave... bring a fucking club.

apologies...

Sorry for all these short entries lately. The thing is... I've been WRITING all day at work... 4800 words on relativity this week, so.... needless to say, when I want to take a break from writing, pretty much the last thing I want to do is WRITE!

An improvement is on the horizon, I promise.

D.

correction...

The German-accented incarnation of the Donald-Duck-like Disney character mentioned several entries ago should have been "Ludwig von Drake"... not "Scrooge McDuck". That's a different Donald-Duck-like Disney incarnation, and the joke totally doesn't work that way, so I may have to actually go back and change it, it bothers me SO MUCH.

holy crap...

Where the hell can I get THIS woman's number and/or email address?!

r-r-r-elativiteee ees goot, ja!!

So, I'm working on this video about relativity, and I was thinking that we should include some of Einstein's OWN words... perhaps read by a voice actor with a German accent, or perhaps just someone doing a FAKE German accent. But I didn't want to wind up with someone sounding like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or worse... Scrooge McDuck, so I decided to see if I could track down some audio clips of Einstein speaking so we'd have some kind of idea what he actually sounded like....

The verdict...?

He pretty much sounded like Scrooge McDuck.

did you hear about Sandra Bullock...?

She gave, like $1.4 million to the Red Cross.

Ummm.... can I have my lousy two-hundred-fifty back now??

D.

i can still DO it, but...ummm... ouch...

I'm not a big one for "resolutions", but I DID do 15 minutes of yoga this morning for the first time since... crap... Thanksgiving? It wasn't as bad as it could have been, I guess... it felt REALLY good though... like my muscles were saying - "Where the fuck have you BEEN for the past month??"

So... here's hoping that the new 2005 schedule comes out at the "Y" today, and that they've reinstated at least one afternoon class - hopefully with Cute Yoga Chick Kelly.

it's always something....

I know I souldn't have ANYTHING to complain about when it's 74 degrees in January, but...

OH MY GOD I HAVE PUT ON MY FIVE YEAR OLD'S SHOES MORE TIMES IN THE PAST THREE DAYS THAN I HAVE MY OWN IN THE PAST THIRTY FIVE YEARS!!

I mean... it's nice that they can play outside in January and all, but.... FUCK!! Make up your mind!!