still clueless after all these years...

Wife: So, my period started without warning today...
Dave: Oh yeah? Without warning, huh?
Wife: Yep. Oh, also, you forgot to buy chicken nuggets at the grocery store.
Dave: Oh, crap... sorry. Anyway... WITHOUT WARNING, huh??

speaking of...

"I should be grading". That should really be the name of this weblog. If I ever completely re-constitute this thing... THAT is the new title. I should head over to blogger and grab that URL right now.

In completely unrelated news... people who claim that the "Fall Back" of Daylight Savings Time gives you an "extra hour of sleep" obviously have never had kids. Because when you have kids, the time change means an entire week's worth of kids getting up at 6:00 AM, because children don't operate according to clocks, they operate according to some combination of sunlight cues and Lucky-Charmes fueled bio-rhythms.

Speaking of Lucky Charms, I've always been curious about those store-brand generic cereals. You know... "Toasty-Os" and "Choco Chunks" and "Tiger Flakes" or whatever. I mean... how complicated can the formulas to sugary breakfast cereal be? It seems like the copying them couldn't be too hard. So one day a few weeks ago I picked up a box of "Magic Stars" for the kids, just on a whim. Boy was I wrong. These things are NASTY! The crunchy bits aren't quite right, the marshmallows shapes don't have the proper styrofoamy texture... it's just all wrong. Oddly enough, though, the Boy prefers them to the actual leprechaun-endorsed real thing. So now we have to buy them BOTH. And now I find myself constructing imaginary ripoff cartoon mascots for the cheap ripoff breakfast cereals. Like maybe an angry Scottish gnome. "Aye, they're aboot to pilfer me Magic Starrrs!!"

Speaking of Lucky Charms, I've started eating fistfulls of them again. Between that and Halloween candy, the diet has pretty much gone to hell lately.

Speaking of Halloween... we carved pumpkins last night. Meaning... the kids drew faces on pumpkins, I carved two and a half jack-o-lanterns myself, and the wife made the whole process take twice as long as it ever should by insisting in saving the pumpkin seeds and goop. You can BUY roasted pumpkin seeds for like 99 cents, y'know? You can also buy Halloween costumes instead of sewing for 48 hours straight every Oct 29th, but god knows... only the parents of future sociopaths make their children wear store-bought costumes!

Speaking of costumes... while we were out shopping for bits of this and that for the "Glinda The Good Witch" costume, on Saturday, we swung by Circuit City to pick up my belated birthday present - a Sirius radio for my car. My wife thought she bought one for my actual birthday but it turns out it was just a mounting kit! ("Wow, thanks, honey, I... umm... honey...?") I can't say I blame her... the packaging was VERY unclear. I didn't realize it until I opened it. Anyway. I have a Sirius One now, which is the little tiny visor-mounted one with the one-line display. I think this thing was designed by a bunch of guys who were fired from Microsoft for not thinking hard enough about good user-interface design. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to set the fucking FM presets. And the FM transmitter on it kinda sucks, so I get a little background static no matter what channel I use or where I mount the thing. Right now it is clipped to my parking brake handle, which is actually far more convenient than it sounds. The static bums me out, though... and I'm now convinced I need a new car stereo... one with a front AUX jack for the Sirius and the iPod. I just need to convince the WIFE of this "need".

Speaking of the iPod... I spent a good bit of the weekend fucking with it. I had downloaded a bunch of crap from Google video... bootleg Pearl Jam concerts... Bronowski's "Ascent of Man" series (complete but for episode 9, DAMMIT!)... a BBC documentary about the Goths and Barbarians by Terry Jones... and when I tried to put these things on my iPod... none of them worked. They would show up in the "Movies" list, but when you hit play, it would just play the audio, and show a still from the movie as "album art". I fucked with these movies in every way I knew how to fuck with them, and it wasn't until I put a movie back on there that I knew had worked in the past and the same thing happened, that I decided the problem WASN'T with the Google videos... it was with the iPod. I eventually did a full reformat and reloaded everything and it all works fine now... all the movies play normally. I suspect the problem was related to the fact that I was manually managing the contents on the thing by connecting it to TWO different Macs, which it appears not to like very much. So I'm gonna have to rethink all my music-library-management plans.

I spent an equal amount of time fucking with the TiVo and copying videos off of that (download from TiVo to PC, process videos to mpeg2, ftp to iBook, burn to firewire drive) only to find that two of the shows I recorded were nothing but an hour of blackness, due to a problem we have with our bedroom cablebox intermittently and inexplicably shutting itself off. Fuck. And one of them isn't due to be shown again any time in the near future. It was for my class, too. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Speaking of movies... I also figured out how to use the programs MacTheRipper and DVD2OneX to do things to DVDs that one really should not be doing to DVDs, unless one is backing up one's own store-bought DVD collection for safekeeping. Which is of course all I would ever use it for. Welcome, visitors from the MPAA, FBI, and Interpol!! (Is it me, or are videos with the Interpol warning just inherently scarier than the FBI warning? Like, if you copy a video from Europe they send some '00-level agents out after your ass.) This DVD2One program is like magic. It puts a full length DVD movie onto a SINGLE regular 4.3 gig disc, which means it must be compressing the video quite a bit, but really... I couldn't tell. Of course, the video I copied was March of the Penguins, which you could replace with a blank white screen for half the film without affecting the overall impression. Anyway. It works.

Speaking of work... I should do some, so I think I'll put an end to this. And put some headphones on to drown out the snoring fucker behind me.

Oh... speaking of irritating fuckers... one more thing... the "what to blog about" book claims that you should try not to always bitch and moan and complain about stuff in your blog all the time, because nobody wants to read a blog written by a grouchy old curmudgeon every day. That's not true, readers... is it?? IS IT???

dave is shilling for apple again...

For those of you with kids and teens thinking about Xmas... Apple is clearing out their refurbished last-generation iPod Shuffles for dirt cheap. I just bought my 7-year-old one of the 1/2 gig models for $29. ($36 with tax and shipping). The 120 song capacity won't satisfy a real music buff, but if you want your elementary or middle schooler to be the only kid on the bus with a real iPod... this is a pretty amazing price.

(The 1 gig shuffle is going for $59)

I'll be kinda depressed-sounding for christmas...

So, I love Aimee Mann. My enjoyment of her music runs back to "Voices Carry" and all the way up to her latest few albums. In fact, I just received one of her concerts in the mail via Netflix. I recently decided that she is one of those singers who I just enjoy on a purely timbral level... that she could sing pretty much anything and I would find it enjoyable just because I enjoy the sound of her voice so much. I thought.

So...

Q: Is there any type of music that Aimee Mann could sing that would NOT be an enjoyable experience?

A: Umm... Christmas Carols?

Ick.

NaNonFicMo...

You have all no doubt heard of NaNoWriMo, and perhaps even the newly minted NaBloPoMo, but if you're like me... none of these endeavors really appeals to you. I already post in my blog almost every day already, and I don't exactly feel like I have a NOVEL in me trying to get out. But it occurred to me last year... why should the budding FICTION authors get all the inspiration?

How about if all of us science and academic types take the "novel" out of NaNo and spend November working on that first textbook or collection of essays or those papers and articles that have been sitting around unwritten inside our heads for a few years. How nice would it be to take 20 - 30 minutes a day to just sit and TYPE, and to have 30,000 - 50,000 words to show for it by December 1st?

Who's with me? Should I start working on a logo?

speaking of white space...

I noticed for the first time the other day that the text on this blog is all crampy. When there is a descender on one line and an ascender below it, the two characters actually TOUCH. I checked the template, and sure enough, the "line height" for the main text was set to 100%. I increased that to 120% to give a little more breathing room around the words. Hopefully the change improves the readability a bit.

Do I have better things to do today than "sprucing up" the blog? What do YOU think...?

sparse, but gets the gears turning...

The book I mentioned in yesterday's post is called No One Cares What You Had For Lunch, by Maggie "Mighty Girl" Mason. I picked it up while I was at B&N, without really flipping through it. Had I flipped though it, the formatting might have caused me to put it back down. The subtitle - "100 Ideas for Your Blog" is to be taken literally... there are exactly 100 ideas here, one per page, in list format. So since some of the ideas are kind of short, there is a LOT of white space! I don't know what I expected... I guess I expected a more narrative, book-like approach.

Anyway, despite the fact that the whole book could probably easily be packed into about 30 pages, some of the ideas were really good to read. And not even because I intend to use *exactly* those ideas, but because they got me thinking about similar ideas, or just thinking about what the blog has been lacking lately. For example, one suggestion is to write about something you collect, and why, and all that. And it got me to thinking about my guitars, which I own a dozen or so of. And it occurred to me that a list of my dozen guitars would be interesting only to guitarists, but every one of them has a story... a biography that could be written about it. Each one means something different to ME, which is why I can't get rid of any of them, and why an essay about each of them would make for good blog reading. So I've written three episodes of that and I'll let it leak out slowly over the next few months.

It also convinced me to add more personal touches to the blog. Last night I decided to try a new feature where I would pick up my guitar and improvise for 60 seconds and post that to the blog every week or so. Not that it will be any good or polished or finished... it might suck most of the time. But it will be more ME than almost anything I could write in words.

So. I'm not sure the book is worth $15, considering all the content could fit into a few lengthy blog posts, but it got me thinking, and if this blog gets a tiny bit better because of that... maybe it WAS worth it.

it exactly cancels out, like matter and antimatter...

A kinda hot ("older-but-sophisticated" hot) woman just sat next to me on the train, which almost NEVER happens. Pretty sweet. Then she pulled out her "Ann Coulter" book.

Ew. I just ogled a Republican!

when are you gonna come down...

I'm sitting on the train sipping a grande earl-grey-with-lavender tea and watching a documentary about Elton John that I TiVoed off of VH-1 Classic.

God, Dave, you are so GAY!!

You know what? "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" is a damned fine album. So, fuck you all...

what size do those "Emily the Strange" t-shirts start in...?

I was getting ready to leave for work this morning and I spotted this drawing in one of my daughter's open school notebooks...



I'm not sure what to make of it. Isn't 7 years old a little young to be getting this "goth". (The text reads - "Belongs to dark woman.")

The "glyphs" are just.... creepy.

"i need two 50 watt halogen par-30 floods at 112 E. 23rd street... STAT!!!"

A saw an Asian guy this morning heading uptown carrying one of those big extendible light-bulb-changing poles and pulling a small rolling suitcase. He seemed to be in a hurry. Do rich people in Manhattan really employ emergency light-bulb-changing-and-delivery services?? How much do you think such a thing costs?

i don't know what my problem is...

... but I can't seem to wake up when I want to anymore. I set the alarm for 5:20 and I wake up at 6:05 and the alarm is turned off and I honestly don't remember doing it. It's kinda freaking me out. Plus I'm always getting to school later than I intend to. It makes me feel like a loser.

I need to decide what I'm doing this morning. Sometimes on Thursdays I take it the train a few stops past work and hang at the B&N for a while. I could grade papers. But I also really need to plan a lesson today for physics class. The midterm is over and it's time to start a new topic and I really haven't given loads of thought to how I'm going to introduce it. I usually enjoy midterm... both my physics and astronomy classes move from the basic stuff to more interesting stuff, but this semester... I dunno... I don't think either class is going particularly well. The changes I tried to make to the physics class kind of backfired, and the astro class feels pretty phoned-in.

Ok... here is glimpse into my "process". I got freaked out just now about not knowing how I was going to fill the class today, so I took 10 minutes to write up a set of classnotes for the day. These are them.

Huygens - mv^2 is conserved. What's that all about?
Mess with kinematics equations. Look for v^2. Hand wave until you come up with 1/2mv^2=mgh.
Talk about two sides of equation. On one side, an object "has height" on the other it "has velocity". You can kinda think of it as one kind of thing changing into another.
Define the mgh side as "Work". Coin term "energy".
Energy is a familiar term - do brainstorming "types of energy" activity.
Energy is conserved - transformed. Total E in universe constant as it changes forms.
Define energy more precisely as "capacity to do work".
Types of energy seem very different, perhaps even "abstract". What IS energy? Play Feynman audio lecture.
Read Bacon for HW?
If leftover time, do some roller-coaster-type energy conservation problems.

That is as organized as you will ever see me get.)

Some blogger recently wrote a book about what to blog about when you can't think of anything to blog about. I think I may need to look for this book. I feel a certain lack of inspiration. Any requests?

i should know better...

...than to blog about what an awesome day I had, because today is starting out just the opposite. I woke up late... too late to catch the train I wanted, with barely enough time to catch the 6:43 if I hurry. I rush out the door and drive slightly faster than usual until I get about a mile from the intersection with the country road that leads to the train station and it is CLOSED. Fire or something, the cop wasn't very clear. Now you have to understand, the train station I go to is in the middle of NOWHERE. I have no idea how to get around this roadblock. I only know one other route to the station and that involves going about 3/4 of the way back home, and then around in this big circle... and I don't really know the roads, so I had to stop at a gas station and buy a fucking $5 map...

Needless to say, I did NOT catch the 6:43. So I'm on the 7:31, which gets in a little later than I like when I have a morning class, but I'm going to try to roll with it. We'll see if there are any more inconveniences awaiting me today.

As for now, I'm gonna grade astronomy homeworks.

readers speak... dr. dave listens...

(... eventually.)

A few people blamed RSS feeds for the steadily decreasing readership of the blog, but I don't buy it. By my count, only 15 people access the Bloglines feed, and not too many more are using other readers, I wouldn't guess. Besides, I only publish a partial feed, which means that the RSS people should have to click through to the page anyway. If they are reading that is.

And then a few OTHER people took the opportunity to hassle me for not offering a full-text RSS feed. It isn't the first time. So, in the name of keeping my dwindling readership appeased, let it be known that "second order approximation" is now available as a full-text RSS feed.

Spread the word. And quit yer bitchin'.

not a half bad day...

Finished writing the midterm, got it printed and copied, had a nice long chat with someone I haven't chatted with in far too long, sent two very important emails, got copies made of 2 readings for tomorrow's class... if I finish the 2nd midterm on the train home, it will have been a very productive day indeed.

GIVING midterm was another matter altogether. Out of 15 students, SIX took longer than the allotted hour and forty minutes. I did NOT intend this to be a hard exam. Either I have a particularly slow bunch of students, or I'm a complete failure as a science teacher. (Thanks to the always helpful Mimi Smartypants for pointing out that it could actually be BOTH!! She always knows how to cheer me up.)

Yawn. This tea isn't working. I decided last week that somebody needs to make a "Fast Acting Caffeine Inhaler"®. *pssht* ZING!

Ok. Short nap... astronomy midterm done. It's shorter than usual, cuz I'm gonna have to grade almost 30 of the damned things. Next semester I'm going to have a class of 40! I smell a multiple choice final!

slow decay...



This is my monthly hit-count on the blog since a year ago. Pretty fucking depressing isn't it? That's like a 50% drop in page views. I can't think of any explanation other than I must just be boring people to death until they wander off.

pretty much a waste...

My wife invited her Mom to stay with us for a whole week right at the time when she (my wife) was facing a book deadline. So she's spent the whole week locked in the basement office while her Mom surfs the web and watches TV. We haven't even taken advantage of the free babysitting, and today is the last day she's here. If I were the mother-in-law, it would be a long time before I bothered with another one of these visits.

I've not exactly been "with it" in terms of the blogging lately. Nothing major is going on, but a lot of little stuff is adding up to a fair amount of busy... everything from pumpkin-picking to exam writing. Which I have to get back to when I finish this post. One of the most depressing teaching moments is going back to last year's exam to prepare this year's exam and realizing... fuck, there's no way my students this semester could answer these questions. I'M A COMPLETE FAILURE!

I made some contacts at The Old School last week that I need to follow up on. Turns out that the school has expanded into other ventures, including a public charter school in Manhattan and some sort of "Teacher Education Institute" that I know nothing about. But the woman heading it up said she could really use my help as an "integration mentor" ("buzzword buzzword") and that we should set up a meeting. If it means getting the $100/hr consultation gravy-train up and running again, I'll "mentor" whatever the hell she wants. So I have an email to write.

One of the things I noticed at The Old School is that everyone is starting to look older now that I've been away for 4-5 years. Which of course means that *I* must also look 5 years older to THEM. Which is just depressing.

I'm dozing off, which I really don't have to time to do. So I'm gonna go write the last few exam questions and maybe that will leave me time for a nap.

accomplishments before 8:00 AM...

* Read over student research proposals for meeting this afternoon.
* Looked at old Astro sample midterm and decided it was good enough to use again.
* Made sure I was ready to talk about Intelligent Design in my philosophy of science class today, just in case the guest speaker thing I have planned falls apart.
* Got tea spilled on my bag by some lady on the train.

the main event...

Well, despite all the chaos of yesterday, this morning's talk went fairly well. It's a little weird to go back to talking to high school kids... I had forgotten about the whole not-paying-attention thing. Well... at least the talking-to-each-other thing. Sometimes my college students don't pay attention to me, but when they do, they at least have the decency to shut up and sleep.

I miss this school... I miss the asian art and the swedish furniture and the african drumming classes. It's a fucking mental institution below the surface, but I still miss it.

I'm hanging out in the cafe now... waiting for all of the lunch periods to rotate through so I can get a chance to see everyone that I might care to see. (And probably a few people I'd rather not.) Lunch looks good today... sweet and sour tofu and fish cakes... yum.

I'm not looking forward to the drive home. It's probably going to be 5 hours. I may see the kids before bed, I may not.


(addendum: not)

a very bizarre fucking afternoon, thank you...

So... I'm giving this talk in the Hamptons tomorrow, which means I had to drive to the city today. That's a bad enough way to start the day, sitting in traffic at the Lincoln tunnel. But the fucked-uppedness didn't even BEGIN until I tried to LEAVE work.

Around 3:00 I go to get my car from the parking garage... it's one of those inner-city elevator garages... I park in the same one every time I drive to work. (Once a year, basically) The guy takes my tag, I pay my 20 bucks, and he goes to get the car. I walk over to the sidewalk beside the elevator door, see the thing coming down, the doors slide open and just before he pulls the car out of the elevator, I notice that there is a 12" high steel barrier at the bottom of the elevator that hasn't retracted yet and...

Crunch.

The parking attendant drives my car right into this steel barrier. The bumper crumples like a plastic cup. The guy quickly backs up and gets out of the car and runs his hands over the bumper, which has popped back into shape... "No damage, is fine, see? No damage." he says in a Caribbean accent of some sort. I just shake my head... fine, whatever, my wife already drove the fucking van over the TOP of the bumper, what does it matter if there are a few more creases on the bottom. I grumble into the car and drive away.

Halfway down the block, I hear it... the sound... the unmistakable sound of things scraping on the road that should not be scraping the road. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...

I quickly pull over to the curb and jog back to the garage. "I'm going to have to fill out a damage claim", I say calmly, and the attendant predictably begins to flip out. "What damage? No damage! I see!! Small bump! No damage!!" I explained about the large chunk of car dragging the ground. "You show me! Where is it? You show me!" Ok, mon... I show you... I just have to drive it around the block.

I slowly circle around.. down seventh back up sixth to the garage... drag, drag, scrap, scrape... and go to pull back into the garage entrance. When I get there, there is a guy trying to cross the sidewalk... older guy, 50's maybe, unshaven, glasses, flannel shirt, cargo pants. I was going to let him cross in front of me, but he stopped and let me pull in. There was something... odd about him... I took a second look...

It's David Letterman.

My brain takes a moment to process the sight of a bearded Dave Letterman (clearly on hiatus this week) here on 13th street.

Dave (me): Oh, umm... Hey, "Dave"...
Dave (Letterman): Howzit goin?

Ok. Well. This is not the time to chitchat with late night talk show hosts... I have to go yell at someone. I get out of the car and show the attendant the bit of dangling vehicle. He seems to accept it happily now, with a smile and a nod as if to perhaps suggest he knocks bits of cars off all the time. He walks off, I'm not sure to where. I walk into the garage office, where someone is standing at the counter.

Yeah. It's David Letterman again. Or it's him still, I should say. He's picking up his car.

Dave (me): These guys busted my car Mr. Letterman, are you gonna let them get away with that?
Dave (Letterman): Don't worry about it, I got it. Forget the insurance, I've got it covered.
Dave (me): Heh, right. Thanks.
Dave (Letterman): What did they do?
Dave (me): They pulled it out of the elevator before the gate was all the way down and... [mimes "smack" with fist]
Dave (Letterman): Ooooh, yeah. Heh, heh...

I go back to quibbling with the parking lot attendant, who comes up to me with a handful of plastic clips that fell off the plastic piece hanging from the underside of my car and tells me that he can fix it, or take it off, or I can bring it back some other day and they can have a guy...

No. There is no "other day". I live three hours away. I drive into the city once a year. I know you guys have insurance, I know there is a procedure for this, I just need to know what it is. He wanders off again.

Dave (Letterman): [surveying damage] All these scratches on here? Did they do this?
Dave (me): No, that's from when my wife backed into it in the driveway with the minivan.
Dave (Letterman): Mmmm...
Dave (me): They crumpled the bumper like a plastic cup, though... now there's a big chunk of the underside handing off.
Dave (Letterman): [peeks under car] Oh, yeah. Nice.

The parking lot attendant returns with a incident report form for me and a silver Porsche Carrera for that OTHER guy.

Dave (Letterman): Well, good luck...
Dave (me): Yeah, I'm not expecting much.
Dave (Letterman): Heh...

So, I fill out the form... Dave Letterman drives off. I spend 15 minutes yanking the big dangling piece of plastic the rest of the way off my car, and then put it in my trunk.

End of story.

So. This goes on my anecdote shelf right next to the Thunderbird that burst into flames and the Chevy Malibu that lost a front wheel at 55 mph. Why do all my good stories involve vehicular mishaps?

wake up, damn you...

My Mac has developed a nagging problem of crashing when I open the lid to wake it from "Sleep" mode. The screen is black but for the cursor, and the keyboard responds to hardware actions (volume up/down, CD eject..) but nothing else. I have to do a power-button hard-restart, which I fucking hate. It's been a while since I've had a chronic OS-related glitch. Hardware glitches? All the time. But operating system problems... this may be the first.

Anyway, that's as far as I got with the Blogging this morning before I switched over to Keynote to work on an updated "Fate of the Universe" lecture. Busy week. Two faculty/committee meetings, the Mother in Law arrives tonight, and tomorrow I drive to the Hamptons after work to give a talk at my old school on Friday. I also have to write some midterm exams at some point. I'll try to put something in the blog in the meantime, but my brain is a whole lot of elsewheres right now.

the great throbbing headache in the park...

It is cold, cold, cold this morning... and the first signs of winter are upon us. The first day it's been below 32º when I leave for work. The first day I've felt the need to pre-heat the car before leaving. The first appearance of the scarf.

Yesterday we took the kids to the "Great Read in the Park"... a book festival thing largely devoted to kids' authors and stuff. We got to see Hi-5 perform yet again(*) and my daughter got to meet the author of the American Girls books and get her books signed. It was an ok day, but long and tiring... and the brief visit to the Times Square Toys 'R Us put me over the edge into throbbing headache land... not even a Starbucks grande and a stop at Uno on the way home were enough to bring me back. In fact, some of it may still be lingering.

I have three papers to grade today on the train, then I can move on to... well... grading MORE papers. But I must finish up this class first. Now. This morning.

One last thing to blog before I shut down. The new video iPod is set up and looking good. I put a few videos on there just as a "proof of concept" and they look amazingly crisp and nice. Some of the concert videos actually look BETTER on the iPod than on TV. (The White Stripes for example, is filmed in grainy 8mm... and the grains disappear at 640x480!) I haven't figured out the logistics of this thing, though. It's going to involve an inversion of my original setup. Before, I had a 10 gig iPod where I kept only stuff I really listen to, and I kept a larger 16 gig music library on my laptop. (Which still represents only about 1/2 - 2/3 of my full CD collection.) But now I have 30 gig available on the iPod, and my HD is getting crowded, so I think I'm gonna FLIP that... keep the full CD collection on the iPod, and keep the laptop down to about 5 gig of purchased music, essentials, and podcasts. In the interim, the old iBook/webserver is functioning as a cd-ripping machine and auxiliary repository for a more complete iTunes library. It's a big fucking mess, is what I'm saying. I know... there are worse problems to have.

Ok - off to grade...


(*) I find the show innocuous enough, but their perkiness can be a bit shrill in person. The Boy seems completely freaked out by meeting "famous" people in-real-life, so he spent most of the concert huddled in our laps, despite claiming to have had fun afterwards. The big Hi-5 news is the replacement of Carla and Shawn with Sydney and Yasmin. I wonder how it feels to be the Sammy Hagar of the under 7 set?

the day in brief...

1:52 PM: I'm at the MoMA, in the lobby, filling up my new iPod with music. I think it's gonna take a while. I went ahead and had it add everything, I figure it's easier to do that and delete later than to pick and choose. It bugs me that Apple switched to USB connections for these things. I was much happier with the FireWire.

Yeah. This IS gonna take a while...

4:00-ish: Decide to leave the museum just as everyone else in New York decided to COME INTO the museum. A 15 minute wait at the coat check commences.

The museum was awesome. The big hypnotic Jackson Pollack was the high point (gripping...) but there were plenty of paintings to love, all of whose names I jotted down for future reference. (I'll put links up here in the future if I get a chance). There was also an absolutely amazing video installation of the contemporary high-concept art sort that I usually poo-poo. If my feet weren't so damned tired I could have stared at it for much longer. Also, I will mention... the MoMA is full of Germans...very sexy... very blonde... Germans!

(By the way, I DID manage to weasel my way in for free.)

4:45: Walked through Columbus Circle. It's been about a year since I've been in that spot. It seems like much longer, but... almost exactly a year. Yeah...

6:13: I just finished a big cuppa tea and a chicken/asiago/focaccia sandwich-thing from B&N. perfect. I'm sitting in a student cafe at Juliard waiting for the lecture at 6:45 and filling my iPod the rest of the way.

11:26: So... I'm on the train. The Beethoven was great. A little more strident and uptempo than the recorded versions I know, but fun. The Lenore Overture rocked - it was nice to have something in the program that I didn't know forwards and backwards like the two symphonies. It was weird to sit in the 3rd row. You'd better like violins if you buy those seats, cuz that's all you're gonna see and hear. Anyway,the same thing happened that happens at every symphonic concert I go to... I fall deeply in love with some violinist or cellist over the course of the night and vow that if I ever have the chance to live my life over again, I will spend all my free time in grad school hanging out at the performing arts building trying to hook up with hot music chicks.

And then I'm waiting for the subway and the 4th chair first violinist who I'd been watching all night walks right up next to me on the platform. Times like this it would be good to know how to strike up conversations with women. Not like anything could have come of it... still. All I managed was some comment about the saxophonist on the platform who was playing a solo rendition of Beethoven's 7th for the departing concertgoers. I am exceedingly lame.

Anyway, my battery is about shot. I'm gonna leave it at that for now.

happy post birthday to me...

For those of you who missed it (which if my count is right would be... ALL OF YOU!) yesterday was the birthday of your humble narrator. It was a pretty uneventful day. The real action is today. Months ago I spent big bucks on 3rd row orchestra seats to the symphony, because they are playing my two favorite Beethoven symphonies the day after my birthday and if that isn't a sign to blow the maximum amount on tickets, I don't know what is. And since going to a late show necessitates leaving home before the kids get out of school ANYWAY, I decided to make a whole Dave's Post Birthday Newyorkapalooza out of it. Here is the schedule for the day as I see it...

10:50: Board train after a long morning of getting ready. I have my laptop, but don't plan to use it much. I have some magazines to catch up on and a science book to read for one of my classes. Equal parts work and fun. I packed everything I'll need today into my man-purse so I don't have to lug my usual messenger bag around the all day.

It is cold today - 34º this morning. Warmer now, but still chilly. Hopefully it will get up to around 50º by the time I get to Grand Central. Perfect temperature to wear a light coat and walk around and neither freeze nor sweat. Although when the sun goes down again, I expect to freeze just a bit.

12:20: Arrive in the city. I'm taking the trains on the other side of the river today - not the ones I usually commute on. The reason has to to with the scarcity of trains on my side of the river after 10:00 PM. Astute readers will remember the concert I went to a few months ago that left me stranded in Manhattan overnight. I'm pretty sure the London Symphony won't be rockin' it *quite* as late as Greg Dulli and the Twilight Singers did, but I don't want to risk missing that midnight train. All it takes is a delay on the subway. So I'm taking the Metro North trains, which have a 1:00 and a 1:50... just in case.

1:00-ish Arrive at the Apple Store. I may walk. I did it when I was trapped in Manhattan that night... it wasn't too bad. I plan to buy my new iPod, even though I haven't received the birthday card/money from my Mom yet. (Worst. Mom. Ever!) The wife gave the ok, though... so I'm not gonna hesitate. I will try to avoid buying too much else, although it's very hard inside the shiny glass cube that is the Apple Store to resist the hypnotic allure of all the shiny Appley goodness.

2:30-ish Arrive at the Museum of Modern Art. Half my decision to go to the MoMA today was based on the fact that I can get in free as a University employee. Needless to say, in transferring my essential belongings from the messenger bag to the man-purse, I forgot my University ID. Fucking hell. I do have some business cards, I think, but I'm not sure they will fly as proof of employment since they are things I ordered from VistaPrint and don't have an official university logo or anything on them. Oh well... it's not like I can't afford the 10 bucks, or whatever it is. It pisses me off, though. Anyway, being at the MoMA by myself means that I can sit in front of Jackson Pollack paintings for 10 minutes... something that my wife has little patience for.

4:30-ish: Think about dinner or something. Or just hang at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble for a while and fuss around with the new iPod.

6:45: There is a pre-concert lecture. I've never been to one of those. It could either be really interesting, or it could put me to sleep before the Beethoven even starts. Maybe I should have a big tea at B&N beforehand, but I have to be careful... too much liquid and caffeine and I'll have to pee in the middle of the 3rd movement. Maybe I'll skip the lecture. We'll see how I feel.

8:00: Concert... Symphony #1, Symphony #7, and some Overture. Orchestra seating - row C. I wonder if I can get a mosh-pit going?

10:15-ish: Head back to the train. If I'm lucky I'll make it there by 11:10, get back to my station by 12:35 and be home by 1:00. If I'm not lucky, well... I don't even want to think about it.

So. That's the plan. I'm gonna shut down the computer now and read some magazines. On the way home I'll post about how the day REALLY went!

when will i learn...

...not to sit in the last car on the train in the evenings? I swear, it's like the back of the fucking schoolbus. All the most obnoxious loudmouthed fucks congregate there in groups of 3-5 and talk the whole way home at volumes more appropriate for a bar than public transportation. And not just any old loudmouthed fucks, but New York Vinnie Goombah loudmouthed fucks, which I think are inherently more obnoxious than whatever loudmouthed fucks you may have where you live. The guy sitting next to me has a habit of punctuating his sentences by leaning forwards and then throwing himself back against the seat. It's like being kicked in the fucking kidneys every time he does it. So much for "napping". Sit still and shut up for fuck's sake.

The only antidote I've been able to find on the laptop to drown them out is Iron Maiden (Number of the Beast). I'm not even in the MOOD for Iron Maiden, but it's the only thing loud enough that I can hear myself think.

I'm tired. I'm tired, old, and cranky. Everyone just needs to go away. And you kids keep off my lawn too.

schrödinger's sink..

The other day in one of my classes, we were talking about quantum mechanics and the question of measurement - the fact that any measurement of a physical quantity involves an interaction with the object of the measurement, and that this by nature is not a purely passive act. For example, in order to find a set of keys on our nightstand, we could grope around in the dark with our hands - which might move them from their original position or knock them onto the floor. Of course we could just turn on a light. We think of this as being a passive act, but really it's not. When the light reflects off the keys it jiggles its atoms and molecules around a bit. The jiggle from the light isn't enough to knock the keys off the table, of course... it may just raise the temperature of the metal a teeny-tiny bit. For macroscopic objects like keys we can pretend that the act of looking at them (which involves poking them with light) has no effect on the object, because the effect is very very small.

But this isn't true for microscopic objects. If the object you are looking for is not a set of keys, but a single atom or a single electron, the act of bouncing light off of the object is akin to groping around in the dark. The light is apt to give the atom or electron a little *whack* and send it flying off in some direction. Thus our theories that talk about the locations and motions of microscopic objects have to deal with the inherent impossibility of making an observation of these entities without changing the very thing we are trying to measure.

It's hard to come up macroscopic analogies that illustrate the problems of quantum mechanics in a way that students can really connect to. I used some of my standard analogies in class (one of which involves a blind man with a cane trying to find a marble on the ground) and I felt pretty good about it. Then I left class and headed to the restroom to wash my hands of the accumulated dry-erase marker smoodge.

The restrooms on the 3rd floor of our building are single-service affairs, with locking doors, a single toilet, and one sink. The sink has one of those fancy automatic on-off faucets with a light sensor that turns on the water when you wave your hand under the faucet. But the sensor, being light sensitive, also turns on the water when you open the door and turn on the light! With quantum mechanics on my mind, it occurred to me that the sink was a good analogy to a quantum mechanical system. Suppose the door is closed and we wish to ask the question - is the sink on or off. We open the door... turn on the lights, and lo and behold, the faucet is running. Aah, but maybe it just came on when we turned on the lights! Maybe I could sneak into the bathroom with the lights off and stick my hand under the sink to see if I feel the water running. And wouldn't you know it, I always do!

It may be a silly example, but at the beginning of the next class I opened with this little story and the students in my class, having all used this bathroom before, immediately got it - any attempt to observe the sink changes the state of the sink. Just like an electron. Only wetter.

you wanna bet i'm not...?

Wife: Stop touching my butt.
Boy: Why?
Wife: Because you don't touch other people's butts. Remember in the store today I told you to stop touching my butt?
Boy: But I was trying to keep up with you.
Wife: That doesn't matter. You don't touch other people's butts in public.
Boy: (pause) What about my own butt?
Wife: If you're polite, you don't talk about or touch butts in public at all. Not even your own.
Boy: Come ON, Mom... you are NOT in charge of my butt!

aaah... refreshing!

I use Bloglines as my primary RSS reader for blogs and comics and various other bits of Internettery, and I have to say I'm loving some of the changes they put in place. I recently organized my feeds into concise topic-specific folders that help me keep track of new stuff in chunks, and preload stuff by topic into my browser.

The one change to Bloglines that really gets me, though, is the new notification box that pops up at the bottom of the left panel. Not because it's obtrusive and there is no way to turn it off (although both of these things are true) but because of the actual text that it shows while updating. While it is loading new content, the box reads... REFRESHING TREE... and no matter how hard I try, I can't read the word "refreshing" there as a VERB. I read it as an adjective. As in "My, that certainly is a refreshing tree you have hanging from your rearview mirror. May I ask where you purchased it?"

It's a very small thing, but the fact that every few minutes my brain is forced to think, even for a brief moment, about pine-scented-air-fresheners is causing a real lack of productivity, I think.

i should be grading...

I should be grading.
I should be grading.
I should be grading.
I should be grading.
I should be grading.
I should be grading.

Seriously... I should be grading.

deja fuckin' vu...

So, my car wouldn't start this morning. Such a lovely way to start the day. It was practically an exact replay of the thing that happened a few weeks ago, with the same solution... unscrew the (+) terminal from the battery, spray it with some cleaner, scrape off the excess corrosion, put it back together, and... vroom. What the hell? Batteries are not supposed to do this. Do I just need a new battery? The thing is, the battery doesn't appear WEAK at all. Weird.

Anyway, I'm late this morning but not TOO late. I have to prep for class, though, since I have little or no idea what I'm doing, and I didn't bring the textbook home that I wanted to discuss today. I can hardly complain to the students about them not keeping up with the readings if I'm not doing it myself.

One thing to note this morning - the number of cars in the train station today? Depressingly small. If I didn't just get Yom Kippur off, I'd be bitching and moaning about having to teach today.

OW! too hot in'da hot tub!!

We dropped another $2600 into our beloved contractor's pocket to have him build on to our existing tiny deck in order to make enough space for the hot tub that has been sitting at the end of the driveway for a year - a mocking reminder of the fact that we used to be rich and are now just the kind of white trash who keep an unplugged hot tub in their yard.

I spent most of this afternoon vacuuming, powerwashing, scrubbing, and re-vacuuming the year's worth of scum and dead-buggery out of the thing. What fun. It is currently filling with water.

The point is... there may be some steamy hot tub action in the near future. We may not be rich anymore, but dammit... we can still fuck in the hot tub whenever we want. That's worth something.

computer accomplishments of the day...

1) Performed monthly full backup of the laptop hard drive.

2) Upgraded the OS from 10.4.5 to 10.4.8

3) Figured out how to get videos from the TiVo onto my Mac. It's an insanely complicated process that requires passing through a Windows PC for a conversion step. But I can do it, and that's all that matters.

pant victory...

My month-long quest for a black fucking pair of dress pants that fit has come to an end. It seems like a simple thing... plain, black, flat front, 36|30 (**) pants... you'd be fucking amazed. I've searched for a month and found dark grey, or pleated, or fucking pinstripes, or 36|29... what the hell? 29? Anyway, I have pants, and I am happy.

(** 36!!!!)

busywork...

Spent the whole train commute reading administrative documents, answering emails, and cleaning out the inbox today, so... no big long T/Th blog post this time. The departmental and committee busywork is starting to kick in. It seems like there are a hundred draft-documents of one sort or another that need attention, and the committee meetings haven't even started yet. The Big Important Committee meets for the first time next week. I have to make a good impression there early on. Not having my laptop open would be a good start. Maybe I'll bring a serious-looking Levenger notebook and pretend to take notes.

I also have to revise the science major student handbook, a task which I foolishly agreed to be in charge of last year. Then I have to design the posters for the science department open house in November. This is a task which I am actually looking forward to, as any chance to exercise my "frustrated graphic artist" muscles is always a lot of fun. Apple's "Pages" software makes it insanely easy to create something that looks far too good to have been done by an amateur.

Uh-oh... the baby on the train who has been giggling and making cute, happy gurgly noises for the past hour has finally started shrieking angrily. That's good, actually. Saves me the mental energy of hating the parents.

"brazillian girls" on letterman...

Ok... seriously... what the fuck WAS that???

Is now the time on Sprockets when we dance?

passed over again...

First the MacArthur "Genius" Grants, now the Nobel... the indignities never cease.

Oh well, at least the physics prize went to someone I'd heard of for a subject I understand, for a change. In fact, I was actually present at the AIP meeting in Washington DC back when these results were first announced. (I was an undergrad.) And if nothing else, maybe the recent Nobel will make the topic of the cosmic microwave background more interesting to my astro students this year.

Speaking of research I didn't do, our science department is in the middle of drafting a document explaining to the administration why none of us does "real" research. This is necessary because the college is drafting new guidelines for professional scholarship, and we need to make sure that various administrators who are NOT scientists themselves understand clearly that you can't do science research without things like... oh... labs... equipment... computers... grad students... money...

We actually put together a list of schools that our school THINKS we are kind of the same as, and it tuns out that they all have science buildings! And observatories! And electron microscopes! And 5 physics professors instead of one! So it turns out we are not so very much like them at all. Meanwhile we're putting together a comprehensive list of the things we DO do that are not quite science research, but are EDUCATION research... and the things we publish that are not-quite-traditional publications. It's are a very delicate business... trying to justify what we do without sounding like we're making excuses. I mean... I'm a physicist who spent an entire year writing a PLAY... how the hell do you explain that to someone??

don't i have some work to do...?

One of those mornings. Nothing big, just lots of little stuff. Overslept by more than a half hour... don't even remember reaching for the alarm, but somebody turned it off. Accidentally marked all my new bloglines feeds as "read" when I fired up my browser... then had to go try to reconstruct them based on what I kinda remembered showing up bold a second ago. One of the NPR stations that comes in strongest during my morning drive has switched to some sort of irritating "independent music" format in the mornings instead of news. My transit account credit card wouldn't work in the machine when I tried to buy my monthly ticket today. Like I said... little stuff...

Meanwhile, it's really nice to be starting a week on a Tuesday. It's a much easier day for me, mentally. I plan to work on some grading a little before my noon class. We'll see if that really happens.

Spent most of the day yesterday cleaning the house. Got the living room and the kitchen floors done. Well, ok... Roomba did most of the work, but we had to pick up first. It sure is handy having a robot slave. At least our carpets will be tidy until the machines rise up against us.

The woman sitting behind me on the train smells really good. I thought about telling her so, but... that's kinda creepy, isn't it...?

I'm making detailed plans for my birthday-day-out, which is actually the day AFTER my birthday, next Friday. I'm thinking Apple Store + MoMA + London Symphony/Beethoven. The Beethoven tickets I've had for a long time... Symphonies 1 & 7, which are actually my two favorites. (The London Symphony is performing all 9 next week at Lincoln Center.) And I'm thinking of hitting the MoMA beforehand, just because I can get in for free and I haven't been since it re-opened. And the Apple store to buy my new iPod. I could just order it, of course, but I think I want the experience of going to the store and buying it in person. Of course that means I have to carry it around all evening looking all shiny and new and muggable in its fancy Apple Store bag. Hmm... maybe I'll go to the Apple Store AFTER the symphony.

I'm facing a bit of a conundrum re: the iPod. I had been planning on buying one of the new 30 gig video iPods for $249, but it turns out Apple is clearing out last-generation 60 gig models (factory refurbished) for $229!! Am I willing to trade double the storage space for half the battery life? Probably not, but it's tempting. Anyway... if I buy from the Apple store I can also pick up some accessories and other Apple doodads and hope that my wife doesn't look too closely at the credit card staetment. "No, honey... the iPod was $250, plus a case, and... tax, and... stuff... that comes to about $500..."

I think I have a new favorite shirt. I bought this grey dress shirt last time I went shopping for pants (failed!) because it was really soft and... well... grey! The first time I wore it, the sleeves were sort of weirdly comically long, which was kind of disappointing, but after washing it, they seem to have shrinked-up to about the right length. The best thing, though... it came out of the laundry last night perfectly smooth and unwrinkled. This makes only 2 shirts in my wardrobe that unambiguously require no ironing. (Two more are judgement calls, the rest are wrinkly cotton or god forbid, linen and need to be ironed for HOURS.) Anyway, this makes me happy. I may need to go back to the store and buy it in some other colors.

In pushing-40 news, I plucked a hair out of my ear canal last night that was, I shit you not, 3/4" long. And I mean ear CANAL... not like the outside stick-outy parts of your ear... this thing started way up inside my fucking head. Seriously... what the hell?

I discovered the joy of YouTube this weekend. Not videos of cute kittens or teenagers aspiring to be the next "Johnny Dumbass"... but music and concert videos. It almost seems like the more obscure you musical tastes are, the GREATER chance you'll find something cool on there. I found a bunch of live performances by the Afghan Whigs and PJ Harvey... even a complete performance of Philip Glass's solo piano album by some stern-looking Eastern European woman. (I took great pleasure in spotting her mistakes and fumbles during "Wichita Vortex Sutra".) I also picked up a freeware program for the Mac that can snag YouTube videos and send them straight to your iPod. Could I possibly waste more time than this? Perhaps by blogging for an hour and a half??

POSTSCRIPT: One last minor inconvenience this morning... there was some kind of power outage on Amtrak, which caused the trains from Secaucus to Penn Station to go down, which cause about a million more people than usual to try to cram themselves into the PATH trains. It was a bit Tokyo-esque down there. Anyway... I made it to work, so... time to "work".

a message for our jewish friends...

Happy Yom Kippur!! Hope you're all having a good day of... umm... atonement and... fasting and... stuff.

What I really mean to say is... Yay for living back in the North where there are Jews!!!. The day off was much needed.

weekend update...

Community yardsale haul - $200
Hauls back and forth to community yard sale - 5
Children with fever - 1
Children driving me crazy - 2
Shelves installed in basement closet - 2
Atempts to cut shelves to proper length - 3
Change in width of closet from front to back of shelf - 3/4"
Candy bars eaten - (innumerable)
Weight gain - none (for now)