does advil make a patch...?

Stabbing headache! In the morning! Part of this nutritious breakfast!!

I overslept this morning. I'm not sure why. It's one of those days when you know you must have hit the snooze alarm 3 or 4 times, but you really can't remember doing it.

I just sat here and did what I need to do to get ready for my classes... I think. Astronomy will be brief today. Maybe. I dunno. I'm not really "into it" this semester. Can you tell?

low battery...

Yeah... the laptop too, but mostly me. Not much downtime today... our usual Wednesday science meeting got moved to Monday. The I only have a tiny bit I need to do for tomorrow, so I can rest on the train tonight. Being this tired at 4:00PM doesn't exactly bode well for my big "nights on the town" next week, does it? Maybe I'd better scale down my plans a bit... scrap the city and head home for a nap, then TV, booze and PlayStation.

flying on "instruments"...

It's so damned foggy this morning that driving felt not unlike flying a plane at cloud level. I drove right past the fucking train station.

I feel a little more caught up at the beginning of this week than I did last week. I have my handouts all ready for my two classes today, and tomorrow too. Well. Kinda. I mean, they are written up, I just need to print and copy them. Oh... but I might want to print out this Michelson-Morley paper for my physics class. And this encyclopedia entry on the luminiferous aether from 1911. So maybe I'm NOT so ready. See... that's how it always happens. One minute I'm all ready, then I think of 3 more things I have to do, and...

Last night I had this vision that I might find myself AHEAD this week, since I had finished planning Tuesday's astro course. But then I remembered that I have to write the HW assignment for the team-taught course, so... so much for being "ahead". Maybe if I finish that this morning, I can still be a half-day ahead.

Or not.

At least I don't have to talk much in my acoustics class today... I'm making them derive the sine curve by measuring triangles with rulers. We draw the sine curve so often when discussing waves and stuff... I think it's important that students not lose sight of where it comes from. It ain't called "trigon-o-metry" for nothin'. They are going to hate me. I actually already scared 4 of the students out of that class, which was of course, my intention.

Anyway... time to make the donuts... I mean... the COPIES.

i'm sure i'll be having MY first soon as well...

Well... it's a busy weekend at the Dr. Dave household. And not all in a good way. First up, my wife's Dad had a heart attack late Friday night... minor, mostly. A little blockage, a little catheterization, he's fine. It made for an unpleasant Saturday morning of frantic phonecalls, though.

The GOOD news, although I am suffering from major guilt for considering it such, is that the wife is taking the kids to Chicago to visit him next week and leaving me alone for 4 days! I'm already compiling a mental list of things to do, and moving all the bad action flicks to the top of my Netflix queue.

Here's what I have so far...

- play drums all day Saturday, or until right leg gets too tired
- spend an afternoon recording and composing w/GarageBand
- watch "Underworld" on DVD
- go see "Underworld: Evolution" at the movies
- watch "Constantine" on DVD
- go see "King Kong" at the movies
- go see "Walk the Line" at the movies
- stay late in the city on Monday - go to a museum
- stay late in the city on Tuesday - do... something else.

...that's all I've got for now. Any suggestions?

Also, we got an estimate back for our basement job, and we're taking out a $15,000 home equity loan to do the work. Which means a hectic week of bringing up everything in the basement and finding some kind of place for it on the main floor, or in the shed. Fun. Actually THAT'S probably what I'll be doing all next weekend.

Anyway... I did some work this weekend, and I'm pretty much prepared for tomorrow's classes. Yay for that. Maybe this week will be marginally less... "AAAAAAAGH" than last week.

ack... urk... grk...

I'm having this problem lately where I put my messenger bag over my shoulder when I leave the PATH train, but since I'm still underground, so I don't put my scarf on right away... I wait until I get closer to the exit. Then when I get back to the office, I try to take my bag off my shoulder, but now my scarf is OVER my bag strap, and the whole thing winds up tangled with my ponytail in this scarfy, strappy, hairy topological nightmare.

If 3 or 4 days go by without any posts from me, I suggest you head to Google News and do a search for "professor + scarf + strangled".

a brief respite...

Know what I did during the whole train ride home, dear readers? I read a magazine. I read that fucker from cover to cover. Because it's Thursday and I have no classes tomorrow, and I'm hopping off the fucking hamster wheel god dammit, even if it's just long enough to read a fucking magazine.

It felt good.

There was also some napping, which also felt good. In fact, tomorrow I plan to sleep and sleep and sleep. And maybe read another magazine.

This is what I have to look forward to in my life... magazines and unconsciousness.

...

I'm flip-flopping about what to do in Astro class today, and whether or not to assign a particular reading NOW or wait on it, because if I WAIT that means we can't discuss Plato in class for another day and that will muck up my whole schedule. Maybe it's stupid to plan to devote a whole day to Plato anyway... since I never got around to inviting the colleague I was going to invite to speak about it, and I sure as fuck don't have an hour's worth of stuff to say about fucking Plato.

I HATE THIS SEMESTER!!

It just occurred to me that I should have invited the Religious Studies prof to come to class and discuss creation mythologies with us, too. Fuck.

And just now on the train I've wandered off through two tangents on my computer and wound up working on stuff that is REALLY NOT URGENT!! At least, not as urgent as planning the class I have to teach at noon.

it could have been worse, i guess...

Given that Wednesdays have all the stress of Mondays, only with a science department meeting in between my classes, eliminating any shred of prep-time for the afternoon course. Not that more prep would have helped any more, apart from giving me more time to practice my FLAT OUT WRONG explanation of the speed of sound at different temperatures. I gave a very detailed explanation of the physical reason why sound travels faster through cold air, only to put the equation on the board, which clearly implies that sound travels faster through HOT air (**). So I had to dig my way out of that. Not that it's always a bad thing to make a mistake in front of your students. There are some important scientific lessons to be learned from that (just because an argument sounds convincing doesn't mean it's RIGHT) and some important life lessons as well (even brilliant physics PhD's fuck things up now and then) Still, I'd prefer not to start fucking things up during the first week of class!!!

The morning class went pretty well, though. I was worried about filling the class time with what I had planned, and I didn't... not even close... so I just plowed on to the material I had planned for next week. Damn the syllabus! Full speed ahead!!

Dr. Dave


** My problem was, I had been thinking of the problem only in terms of the density of the air separate from the speed of the molecules. Cold air is more dense than hot air, and all other things being equal, sound travels faster through a denser medium. But all things are NOT equal in this case. The faster velocity of the molecules in hot air is a more important factor than the lower density. Simple mistake, but still irksome.

ouch... head...

I've come to believe that nothing good can come of a day when you wake up with this kind of headache. Even if the headache goes away... somehow things just never quite fall together into a not-sucking day.

Not to be a pessimist or anything.

I blame the treadmill. It was only 20 minutes, but I don't think one should go from sedentary to a full-out run like that. The headache is probably just my body's way of saying... "Dude... sit the fuck down. And don't do that anymore."

I'm facing down two classes today, both of which I have something planned for that I don't think will even remotely fill up the 1h 40m. So, I should really get on that, I guess.

incremental improvement...

Well, today was a marginally better day than yesterday... hysteria-wise anyway. But still, when it came time to teach my 12:00 class, something inside my head made it feel like it was already 4:00 PM. It was weird. The problem is a lack of anything even vaguely resembling downtime. I feel like I'm running on a little hamster wheel already just to keep up with these four classes... and I don't even have anything to GRADE yet.

A quick look at the rosters online reveals that I haven't even really scared anybody out of any of my classes yet. Damn my charismatic teaching!!

Anyway, the team-taught class went well. I did my "what is energy?" spiel that I do with 2/3 of my various physics courses... it went fine. I could do that in my sleep. Then I had my first History of Astronomy class, which was moderately scattered and poorly timed, but... I did what I needed to do. I'm taking at least part of this train ride to unwind with some music and writing and such, though, because I've been going non-stop since 6:00 AM yesterday. It feels like Thursday and it's only Tuesday.

Blah, blah, blah...

Maybe I'll just nap.

--- (one hour later) ---

Urg. That was refreshing in only the vaguest sense imaginable. Window/wall seats are much better for napping. Aisle seats, not so much.

With these four classes this term, there is no way I'm going to squeeze in any formal yoga classes. So now I'm back to trying to think of a way to fit in some sort of practice at home. Space and time the issues as always. Space may be less of an issue if we jump on getting the basement refinished. The guest room down there is going to be a perfect get-away spot. But that'll take a month even if we start tomorrow. Time is the bigger problem. Before I leave for work? Fuck, I wake up at 5:30 now... how much earlier could I even possibly get out of bed? Which leaves the evenings after the kids go to bed, and frankly... by the time 8:30 rolls around, the last thing I feel like doing is yoga... I'm ready for Sofa Time. Which I guess is part of the problem, really. Motivation versus inertia.

Then there is the whole issue of the treadmill/clothes hanger/eyesore cluttering up the bedroom. A few miles on that a week wouldn't hurt. Because even though I've finally stopped GAINING weight, it's not going anywhere by itself. I'd really like to get back down to the pre-depression-weight-plateau again. It probably wouldn't take a LOT of effort. Just some consistency. And less cake. (Mmmmm... cake!)

Well... my stop is coming up. Time to unplug. Maybe I'll do some treadmilling while the kids are in the bath tonight. Or some savasana... a coupla downward dogs. Or maybe I'll just hide under the covers.

Tune in tomorrow to find out which!

fucking crap...

Is it going to be like this EVERY Monday and Wednesday?? I felt like I was going non-stop all day... even though, really... I wasn't... it just felt that way. So everything I did came off rushed.. nothing disastrous... just little crap like forgetting to assign the homework I had prepared in physics class, and realizing on the train that I still had my presentation remote in my shirt pocket. My frazzled state of mind wasn't helped by sudden urgent realizations during my time in between classes like "Crap! I forgot to print my classlist!" or "Fuck! I need a SLINKY!!" (A thought which I'm pretty sure those of you who aren't physicists have NEVER had.)

I don't know why my anxiety level is so cranked up. Maybe it'll gradually settle out, but right now I'm worried that this semester is going to turn me into a LUNATIC.

One piece of good news today. My department Chair claims that both the Dean of the College and the Associate Dean have provisionally approved the spirit (if not the specific details) of my "Professional Development Plan" (so-called). Meaning that, as far as research goes... I can continue slacking off on my CURRENT research plan, and not be forced to invent some sort of NEW research program to ignore.

That's a load off.

Crap. What else? I feel like my blog is just going to dissolve into a Stressapalooza for the next couple of months. I don't really have anything clever or topical or randomly anecdotal to relate right now. Let's see... what are the kids up to? The Boy is finally Officially Potty Trained, have I mentioned that? Six days accident free, un-enforced and unsupervised poopings... this is what excites us nowadays.

The Girl started horse-riding lessons last week ("I say! Tally-ho!") and also her weekend classes... Saturday mornings... chess and art. Working both sides of the brain and all. Which means I have to play chess with a 6 year-old all the time now. Do you know how hard it is to "throw" a chess game when you aren't sure your opponent will even notice any of your bad moves? I think they need to program "Deep Blue" to pull THAT one off.

Ugh. Ok. The thing is... I really shouldn't even be DOING this. (Blogging) I don't really know what I'm doing in class tomorrow. I need to go over into the big master planning document and work on that. Stay tuned for more hysteria.

i've always wanted to drive a hovercraft...

Un-be-fucking-lievable.

It's not bad enough that I'm particularly extra-stressed about the start of this semester without waking up to find 4" of snow on the fucking roads. I got up extra early to give myself time to shovel the driveway (as well as large portions of the street) but it still took me 45 minutes (instead of 20) to slush my way to work on the mostly-uplowed roads. My neck feels like a fucking fist. I mean, I know I bitch about the snow a lot, and that's mostly all in good fun. But driving around in the driving snow on unlit, unplowed roads... that fucking sucks.

On the bright side, I don't have to stay home with the kids! That makes three snow days this winter... all of them on a Monday. WE HATE SNOW!!

we love the swedes...

I'd just like to announce that I am computing to you by the soft glow of $60 worth of brand new, stylish IKEA lamp light.

oooooooh....

aaaaaaaah...

We also bought a really awesome vanity and sink for the non-existent bathroom we plan to eventually have in the basement. Hopefully the contractor we had in to do an estimate won't come back with some kind of impossible figure, cuz this sink won't really fit in any of our pre-existing bathrooms. I personally think we should wait until summer to even start this project, but the Wife is itching to get her office downstairs. (The essential feature - a "door".) We have $7000 of accessible savings to get the project started, but I expect the estimate to finish the basement will come in closer to $12,000 - $15,000. There is talk of a home equity line of credit, but.... I hate the idea of going into debt for it... even if it's only for a little while.

Crap, this post was supposed to be about all the cool stuff we bought at Ikea, and it turned into something stressful!

Have I mentioned I have to go back to work tomorrow??

good for the munchies...

So, I look at the top of the box of Apple Jacks cereal we have for the kids, and it appears that they have some kind of "Hey Kids!" website featuring two ill-conecived cartoon mascots - Bad Apple and Cinna Mon.

Take a look at these guys for a minute. Am I wrong, or when you see a rolled up stick of fragrant herb wearing one of those knitted rastafarian hats... tell me you aren't thinking of something beisdes "breakfast cereal".

productivity checklist...

SYLLABI: Printed for all three classes. Although the admissions office needed to interrupt my print job once, and an Intern restarted the job leaving one of their pages in the machine, so my Modern Physics syllabus inexplicably has instructions for how to register online on the back of the last page.

POSTER: Delivered to printer. I just had a mild panic attack when I opened the .pdf file I burned for them and found it littered with spurious quotation marks between every word. But then I opened it with Acrobat instead of Preview and it seems to be fine. I assume that printers are saavy enough to check a file for gobbledegook before printing it, but you never know.

BIRTHDAY: Done. Went out in the rain and wind to Williams-Sonoma and dropped $86 on random crap I thought might entertain my wife... chocolate Belgian waffle mix, mini cheesecake pan, garlicky/herby dipping sauces, some kind of warm-chocolate-filled cake kit...

MEETING: A bit tiresome what with the hashing over in excruciating detail things that I just "wing" when I'm teaching a class by myself... but we seem to be fairly ready for the first day or two.

---------

That's pretty much it for today. I still have the ride home to get some more done. I need to look at all my classes and make sure I have an assignment ready for the first day, and that anything that needs to be handed out is already PRINTED out. I'm still not clear on what I plan to SAY on the first day in any of the classes. I should work that up today or tonight so it has time to roll around in my head and sink in before Monday.

MONDAY!!!

Have I mentioned that?

hour long blog-a-palooza...

So, this would be my last chance to get some shit together before classes start on Monday. MONDAY!! What the fuck... I had, like... a whole month off, didn't I?? What the hell happened to it? The problem is... as was explaining to someone the other day... I still have some conceptual work to do on these classes, and now it's time to dig in and do the concrete work... syllabi and actual lecture planning and...

Fuck, am I screwed.

I mean, yeah - the syllabi are all but done. I'll polish those off and get them printed this morning. But I wanted to start this semester AHEAD, and I'm starting it BEHIND. Or, at the most, starting it ready for day one. That is not good enough.

I'm considering talking to my Chair about this "team taugh"t course and saying.... yeah, I support team teaching and all, but as far as I can see, I'm not getting any "credit" or courseload-compensation for teaching this class, and I've got three of my own courses - one of them brand new - to wrestle with this term. When I'm not actively lecturing in this course... I'd like permission to get the hell out of there and actually prepare for my afternoon class. I can't see how I'm going to be able to do it otherwise. At the very least I'm going to be in the back of the room working on my PowerPoints, and I don't want anybody giving me shit for it. Because I'm looking at my class schedule for the week, and trying to figure out when I'm going to do what, and I can't see how it's all going to happen.

Ok. I need to talk about something else before I have a panic attack.

We bought a new Belkin wireless-G router for the house. God, what a difference. I knew that old one was fucked up. I think the antenna was disconnected internally or something... the range was just AWFUL. Now I get "four bars" in the bedroom, and the upstairs TiVo gets a signal of 70% instead of 32%. Maybe now we can actually transfer shows from one TiVo to another in less than 4 hours. And I won't have to switch over to my next door neighbor's network when I'm in the living room anymore.

Speaking of my next door neighbor, he invited me over last weekend to jam with him and his buddies. (He's a drummer.) It was fun, although one of his friends was a bass player, and the other was a kind of so-so guitarist, so I had to play lead all night. Not that I mind, but I was kinda looking forward to dusting off my bass chops. Anyway, it was ok, but they were a little too impressed by my playing for me to take them too seriously.

What else is going on today? I did mention that I'm on the train, right? Maybe not explicitly. Yeah. Well, I'm heading in for a meeting about this group-course, and I also have to trek around and talk to some printers about producing a poster for this conference a colleague is going to. My own damned fault. She got accepted to this conference that pertains to the team-taught course we're developing, and I send out an email saying, "Hey! We should submit a poster-session about the new course" and the damned thing gets accepted, and I kinda agreed to develop the whole poster myself. So, I did it... now I have to find a place to print out a big 3' by 4' color poster on fairly short notice. I also need to walk over to 7th Avenue and poke around Williams-Sonoma for b'day ideas for the wife. If nothing catches my eye, she's getting a spatula with a $100 gift card taped to it.

Great day to walk around Manhattan running errands, too... the weather is fucking freaky today. Rain and wind... but not ordinary January rain and wind. The wind was HOWLING at 6:00 this morning... woke us up, woke my daughter up... weather.com said the gusts were 35, but I've been through enough tropical weather to know 50 mph wind when I hear it.

Anyway, I come downstairs at 6:15 ready for a miserable morning, and I check the temperature on the little digital thermometer and it's 54º outside!! What is that all about? I walked outside and it felt humid and almost warm. Freaky. So it's warm and raining horizontally this morning. I'm sure that Manhattan will be littered with the little twisted metal skeletons of a thousand abandoned umbrellas today... I love that, actually. I don't know why. I should start a discarded umbrella photojournal or something.

There is an Asian woman sitting across from me on the train putting on her makeup. Regular readers will know that watching women put on their makeup on the train is one of Dr. Dave's most favorite things ever. Until they whip out that eyelash-curler machine, that is. That thing just makes me think of "A Clockwork Orange". I have serious eyeball-proximity issues.

Speaking of Asian women (cheap segue!) - we watched the Golden Globes the other night and were rewarded by having lots of our favorite shows and people win things. I'm not sure why that makes one feel good, but it does. Sandra Oh won for Grey's Anatomy (see segue), and I love her character on that show, so it was funny to see her accept her award all bubbly and giggly and weepy. She must really be acting after all, cuz the character she plays on the show... I'm not sure she's even SMILED in two seasons. I'm a bit disappointed to learn she's not really an antisocial curmudgeon in real life, but based on her guest and her speech, it would appear that she may be a lesbian, so... that earns her some coolness points back.

Felicity Huffman also won for Transamerica, and although I have no plans to see that particular movie, I've been a fan of hers since "Sports Night". (She's "smoky".) Plus, she and William H. Macy are just so cute together, you always want one of them to win something just so you can watch the other one on camera during the acceptance speech.

My wife's favorite show (Housewives) won for best comedy, and mine (Lost) for best drama. We haven't seen any movies this year, so we didn't really care who won those categories. We just got around to watching "War of the Worlds" for god's sake. Our Netflix queue should be titled - "Really good movies that have come out since you had kids, besides the 6 you actually left the house to see, three of which were Lord of the Rings and two of which were Star Wars."

Boy, I've pissed away this whole train ride, huh?

Ok, kids... that should make up for the mini-posts of the past few weeks. Next week, I'll be back to 4-day-a-week stream-of-consciousness-rambling glory. Until then, I have some syllabi to write and some panic attacks to have.

freedom, equality, and rainbows...

Yesterday was the (actual!) birthday of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and in the Dr. Dave household, we celebrated by watching the free DVD that came with the My Little Pony we bought for $2.50 on clearance at Target. Mock me if you will, but the message of the episode was entirely appropriate to the occasion...

"I have a dream today. I have a dream that someday... ponies WITH wings and ponies WITHOUT wings will realize that they are all the same after all, and they will frolic together on Butterfly Island."

Preach it, Brother.

something vaguely resembling "work"...

I spent a good deal of today poking around on the web, crossing things off of my professional-development to-do list. I identified 3 possible conferences to attend in 2006, and submitted an abstract to one. (Which will get accepted... it's NSTA, they take anybody.) The criteria were that they had to be close enough to drive to and/or be someplace where I could stay with a friend or relative, since I have little expectation of receiving "institutional support".

Anyway... I spent all day researching conferences and stuff instead of planning for my 3.5 classes. Oh... and I hung 6 of my guitars on the wall on the basement staircase. Avoidance!!

more cool things about living in/around NYC...

I just got fee tickets to a taping of "The Colbert Report" in February. I'm very excited. It's not the"Daily Show" but it's still pretty consistently amusing.

via www.engrish.com...

If I were of the opposite sex, I would be RUSHING to change the name of my blog and appropriate this jpeg as my header.

Engrish.com is one of my favorite websites ever.

a rhetorical question or two...

If Dave is too busy to write in his normal-everyday blog, does it really make sense for him to consider starting an entrirely new and separate science blog?

Do you think this will stop him?

syllabi for your viewing pleasure, part 3...

Science of Music and Sound

* Lect. 1: Course Intro
* Lect. 2: Waves
* Lect. 3: The Sine function
* Lect. 4: LAB: Mass on a Spring (or pendulum)
* Lect. 5: Simple Harmonic Motion
* Lect. 6: Simple Vibrating Strings
* Lect. 7: Fourier Analysis
* Lect. 8: LAB: Fourier Analysis
* Lect. 9: Physics of stringed instruments
* Lect. 10: Resonance
* Lect. 11: Physics of air columns
* Lect. 12: Physics of woodwinds
* Lect. 13: Physics of brasses
* Lect. 14: Physics of vibrating membranes
* Lect. 15: Physics of vibrating rods and plates
* Lect. 16: --- MIDTERM EXAM ---
* Lect. 17: The human voice
* Lect. 18: Sound reproduction: microphones and speakers
* Lect. 19: Digital vs. Analog audio
* Lect. 20: Audio compression, .mp3, etc.
* Lect. 21: Room acoustics
* Lect. 22: Diffraction and interference
* Lect. 23: Hearing and the ear
* Lect. 24: Loudness and the dB scale
* Lect. 25: Pitch perception and auditory illusions
* Lect. 26: Hearing and the brain
* Lect. 27: Music and emotion
* Lect. 28: Disabilities and savants
* Lect. 29: Review, Presentations, Final papers?
* Lect. 30: FINAL EXAM

sweet, sweet mass transit...

So, today I'm heading in to work for a meeting and some... god, who even cares... I'm out of the fucking HOUSE.

aaahhhhh...

Payback comes tomorrow, though. The wife is going into Manhattan to see a show and go to a professional freelancers shindig of some sort. So I'll have to do the 4:00 - bedtime shift by myself. I'll survive. But I should pre-prepare by making today extra-fulfilling. It's amazing how crazy I get if I don't get this concentrated 8 hour day of alone time for a few weeks. I'm a fucking hermit, I know, but... seriously...

Anyways, I need to pick up some textbooks and stuff from the office, and I need to pick up my student evaluations from last semester and make copies. (Stay tuned for the best quotes!) I don't really have much of a "plan" for today otherwise, though. Oh... I need to pick up a CD-ROM to pirate some text off of, too. Hmmm. Yeah. The thing is... I have these three courses. One needs very little work. One needs a moderate amount of work. And the other needs a fuckload of work. And I'm so paralyzed by the class that needs the fuckload, that I'm not working on the other two either! Same old insanity.

So, for today, I should pick up the texts for my music class, but work on the course packet for the astronomy class. If I get that course packet finished, I'll be able to put astronomy on hold for a while, and use my at-home work time to focus on the music class.

OK. Now I have a plan. That means I can goof off for a while.


I should mention that today is a big day for us of the Macintosh denomination... Steve Jobs is giving the keynote address at the Macworld Expo. And whenever Steve gives a keynote he always announces Something Big. All the Mac sites are drooling and speculating... the most common guesses are new Intel-chip-based iBooks and Powerbooks (dual core?) or some kind of home-media-center Mac, similar to the Mini. On the software side, the money is on iLife '06 and a preview of OS 10.5. Only The Steve knows for sure. "Speak to us, O Steve! We await your products and will purchase them at your bidding!"

Also... I saw a site hinting that TiVo may release TiVo-to-go for the Mac shortly. When that happens, you can kiss these blog posts goodbye, as I'll be watching the Daily Show on the train every day.

That's all I have this morning, folks. Off to do some real work.

accomplishments...

The wife and I did some cleaning of the basement... unpacking a few things and breaking down the mountain of cardboard boxes that never got broken down after the move. (We'll be "freecycling" the good ones.) It looks nice.

I also registered, paid for, and activated the domain name for "www.the-name-of-our-play.com". (Free hosting and a $15 domain name!) Nothing much is there yet, but it feels good to have it done.

Time to slack off the rest of the day.

it's a little known fact that she removes them at night....

So, yesterday, I'm helping The Boy find a clean pair of underwear (a lot of that going around lately) and we're both digging through a laundry basket full of stuff that has yet-to-be folded. At some point, The Boy pulls out one of my wife's bras and exclaims...

"Mommy's BWEASTS?? How did DEY get in here??

syllabi for your viewing pleasure, part 2...

Modern Physics

* Lect. 1: Course Intro: Mechanics Review
* Lect. 2: What is Light? Light as a particle/wave.
* Lect. 3: The ether. Michelson and Morley
* Lect. 4: Maxwell and electrodynamics
* Lect. 5: Galilean relativity and light... the dilemma
* Lect. 6: Einstein's postulate... the Lorentz transformations
* Lect. 7: Implications of Special Relativity
* Lect. 8: E = mc^2
* Lect. 9: The equivalence principle and GR
* Lect. 10: General relativity, spacetime and black holes
* Lect. 11: Relativity wrap-up
* Lect. 12: --- UNIT ONE EXAM
-----------------------------------------------------------
* Lect. 13: History of atomic theories
* Lect. 14: Radioactivity, electrons, Rutherford
* Lect. 15: Spectroscopy, the Bohr atom
* Lect. 16: Planck's quanta
* Lect. 17: Einstein and the photoelecric effect
* Lect. 18: Waves and particles, deBroglie
* Lect. 19: Heisenberg and Uncertainty
* Lect. 20: Schrödinger and wave mechanics
* Lect. 21: Feynman and the path integral approach
* Lect. 22: --- UNIT TWO EXAM
-----------------------------------------------------------
* Lect. 23: Particle physics - leptons
* Lect. 24: Particle physics - quarks and gluons
* Lect. 25: Feynman diagrams
* Lect. 26: Antiparticles and Supersymmetry
* Lect. 27: Unification and Strings
* Lect. 28: Particle Physics, Cosmology, and Unanswered Questions
* Lect. 29: Review
* Lect. 30: --- FINAL EXAM ---

cringe-a-palooza...

I've just spent the last hour gazing in horror at this gallery of bad tattoos. Seriosuly... nothing gives me LESS faith in the future of Democracy than the knowledge that each of the people who chose to place these images permanently on their body is also allowed to vote.

syllabi for your viewing pleasure, part 1...

History of Astronomy/Cosmology

* Lect. 1: Course Intro
* Lect. 2: Creation Myths
* Lect. 3: Motions of the Sky
* Lect. 4: Plato
* Lect. 5: Aristotle's cosmology and physics
* Lect. 6: Ptolemy's Almagest
* Lect. 7: Copernicus
* Lect. 8: Copernicus, Osiander, Bruno
* Lect. 9: Galileo's Starry Messenger
* Lect. 10: Galileo's dialogues
* Lect. 11: Johannes Kepler
* Lect. 12: Newton and orbits
* Lect. 13: What is gravity? (General Relativity)
* Lect. 14: The question of the Infinite. What are stars?
* Lect. 15: Cosmic distance scales
* Lect. 16: ---MIDTERM EXAM ---
* Lect. 17: Stars and fusion
* Lect. 18: The lives of stars
* Lect. 19: The HR diagram
* Lect. 20: The galaxy (Hershel, Hubble)
* Lect. 21: The deaths of stars
* Lect. 22: Galaxies and redshifts
* Lect. 23: Cosmology activities (sim-bang, hubble's law)
* Lect. 24: Evidence for the Big Bang
* Lect. 25: Inflation and the anthropic principle
* Lect. 26: Dark matter and the fate of the universe
* Lect. 27: Dark energy
* Lect. 28: Unanswered questions
* Lect. 29: Review
* Lect. 30: --- FINAL EXAM ---

idiots should not share their music...

I heard a Pretenders song on the radio ("Kid") today, and it occurred to me that I've always kinda liked the Pretenders, but not enough to actually BUY a Pretenders album. But I like hearing Crissy Hynde's voice every now and then, so maybe I should download some Pretenders songs.

So I called up my favorite P2P program tonight, and typed in "pretenders" and the same fucking thing happened that always happens... I get 3 songs I like and a whole bunch of crap hits from clueless idiots who have no idea what is in THEIR OWN MUSIC COLLECTION!!

Some samples...

"The Pretenders - Crimson and Clover": That was Joan Jett, idiot.
"The Pretenders - I Touch Myself": Um. No? That would be the DiVinyls. Or did you not HAVE the MTV?
"The Pretenders - Walking on Sunshine": Are you shitting me? Crissy Hynde should personally kick your ass.
"The Pretenders - Walk 500 Miles": No... the PROCLAIMERS!! The two irritating Scottish guys with the glasses? This one took me a while.

This isn't the first time I've run across this kind of thing, and it makes me CRAZY. I mean seriously... what the fuck is wrong with people??

yes, I realize...

...that my blog has sucked ever since school let out. You'll just have to suffer for a few more weeks. Like me.

Actually, maybe one day next week I'll be able to escape from this place and head in to the city. I should get right to work making up reasons why I need to go to my office.

It hasn't all been because of the kids, actually.... I 've just had a few more things to waste time on. The drumset, the playstation... also, my IM list has grown to the critical point where there is always someone interesting online to chat with. Not good for the productivity!

Actually, I HAVE put together a day-by-day schedule for all three of my courses. It ain't much (and I NEVER stick to them!) but having it laid out like that makes me feel a litle less overwhelmed by facing the semester. Although, the musical acoustics class... fuck am I screwed... I do not know this stuff well enough to teach it at the level I want to. Activities!! We need looooots of in-class activities. The less I have to talk, the better.

Anyway, I may post my daily schedules here as a substitute for actually sitting down and writing something. I know that some readers find things like that mysteriously entertaining.

big accomplishments for the day...

1) hauling out some trash
2) taking some xmas toys upstairs to the kids' rooms
3) submitting my textbook requests

all in one day. i need to lie down.

fuck, fuck, fucking-fuck FUCK...!



FUCK!!!

happy poo year...

Here in the Dr. Dave household, we've appropriated this holiday weekend as a good time for some potty-training... or rather, I should say... as a good time for stubbornly, blissfully, and repeatedly crapping our pants.

From the looks of last night's broadcast, I expect Dick Clark is spending the holiday doing the same thing.

(UN-CALLED FOR!!)