summer school...

What have I done?

I mentioned I’d be spending some of my summer teaching gifted classes at Vassar. But I don’t think I’ve given the full story (which I only found out last week) of exactly HOW MUCH
I’ll be teaching.

There are two three-week sessions in July/August. They want me to teach FOUR classes in EACH three-week session. That’s 150 classroom hours in 6 weeks. That’s as much teaching as I do during a heavy three-course semester in FIFTEEN weeks. I’m screwed. And I haven’t even told you the grade levels.

Physics Fundamentals - grades 9, 10, 11
Space, Time, and Relativity - grades 7, 8
Life in the Universe - grades 4, 5, 6
BLAST OFF with Rockets - grades 4, 5, 6

Yes, you read that correctly... half of the teaching will be elementary schoolers. I will be so fucking drained after 6 weeks of this. I may require hospitalization.

sheep in brief...

The “Sheep and Wool Festival” was mercifully small, and therefore brief. Highlights...

* A border collie rescue organization had a booth there. I NEED A BORDER COLLIE! WITH ONE FLOPPY EAR!!!

* We got to see a demonstration of sheep herding /slash tormenting. I would like to get inside of the brain of a border collie. I bet it would sound like this - ”sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep... sheeeeeeeeeep.”

* The festival snack bar was selling various lamb concoctions. Which seemed kinda gross actually. I don’t know why. Come see the sheep! Pet them! Shave them bald to make socks for yourself! Then EAT one!! Anyway, the snack bar also sold hamburgers and hot dogs, forcing me to comment - ”They should sell sheep-dogs. Get it?! SHEEP DOGS!!!”

I kill me.

One the way home thru Connecticut my wife spotted a “Christmas Tree Shops” off the highway (If you don’t know what one is, I can’t really explain it, other than to say it has nothing to do with Xmas or Xmas trees) and she pulled some kind of Starsky and Hutch maneuver with the van to get us to the offramp. I was about to whine and complain until I noticed that the Christmas Tree Shops was right next door to a Guitar Center! So the Boy and I went in to ogle guitars for an hour while the womenfolk shopped for cheap garbage. The Boy is inexplicably attracted to any guitar with fire or lightning bolts on it.

”Oooh... Daddy! This one is pretty... um... I mean... like... COOOL pretty.”

Yes. Yes it is.

Anyway, the Mother in Law visit is going fine so far. But I have to say, I was very happy to go to work this morning. Having her around has the kids a little keyed up, so... the house is even more noisy than usual. There is also more FOOD around than usual, which is causing me to eat non-stop. My stomach is not well. I should post a little sign next to me on the train that reads “Sit Someplace Else... Trust Me.”

baaaaaaaa...

I almost... ALMOST got out of tomorrow's Sheep and Lamb Festival when the wife decided that the kids would be too whiny and unpleasant, but then they whined all night about NOT going, and now we're all going again.

Sigh.

Maybe I can get some reading done in the back seat of the van.

they may need a restraining order...

The last NYC Apple Store fell through, so I don't want to get too excited, but I have a few words to say about this recent announcement... and those words are...

FIVE

MINUTE

WALK!!!!

help desk....

As you might imagine, I get a reputation around work as the Mac Fixit Guy. As a result, I’ll be spending part of next Tuesday afternoon helping a colleague who owns a used clamshell-style G3 iBook. She needs to remove the previous owner’s administrative restrictions that keep her from removing any files or applications. I have a few ideas how to get around it, including...

* Booting from a CD-Rom and deleting the offending applications.
* Re-installing OS 9 from disk.
* Just loaning her FrankenMac so that she can finish this project that requires her to use OS-9 legacy software. (Which is the only reason she has the clamshell iBook in the first place.)

The only question is... would I be going to all this effort if said colleague was not...

* thin
* blonde
* cute

ghost train....

I swear to god there used to be a train around 8:57. There seems to no longer be. The next train is at 9:54. Fuck.

I could go to the cafe and grade, but I’ve already had my first cup of tea in the car, and I hate to take up cafe space and not order ANYTHING. So I’m blogging in my car. Kinda sad.

I have a big stack-o term papers to grade today, so that’s the plan for the train, and for part of the afternoon. But we also got the 2 new Macbooks in at work, which means I get to play around with them for a bit also. I brought my 80 gig hard drive in for transferring things around. I need to find all my most sciencey software to load them up with. I’ll also be putting a few of my most heavily-tracked GarageBand compositions on there to see if it handles them better than my PowerBook. If so... the MacBooks may be coming to visit Dave’s house a lot this summer.

(Still no sign of the big 24” iMac... sigh.)

The semester is wrapping up, which means I’m ignoring all my classes and planning hard for the Fall. This year it actually MAKES SENSE, though, since my summer is quickly disappearing. And if I’m teaching all of these gifted classes at Vassar in July, I won’t have time to think about anything but that for most of the summer. So I really do need to get my shit together with regards to my books and course materials for my 3 Fall classes. I’d like to have my 200-page historical physics course-packet thing all ready to fly with commentaries and essays and questions. And I’d like to have a full semester’s worth of problems picked out for my Einstein class. And I’d like to have a formal structure for my online astronomy course already in place on the first day of class. Big plans. We’ll see.

Jesus... is it 9:54 yet?

earth day...

We celebrated Earth Day on Sunday be getting covered in it. The first half of the day was spend blowing money at Home Depot on plants, trees, and flowers, and the second half of the day was spent digging holes. Which, as you know, is one of my favorite things. It’s why I spent 15 years in college. So I could get a good job, buy a nice house, and dig fucking holes around it all weekend.

Actually, it IS kinda nice to have something growing in the yard. We’ve been here close to 2 years now, an have done little or nothing to the outside of the house. There is lots more to do, though. I think the plan for this weekend while my wife’s mom is here is to have her watch the kids while we go to Lowe’s and argue about what to do with the front walk. I swear... instead of those “How to Install a Front Door” clinics, Lowe’s should offer free couples counseling.

in memoriam...

Flippy Finn

April 2007 - A Few Days Later In April 2007

Cause of Death: 5 foot fall, Asphyxiation
Suspect: Overenthusiastic Feline

y'ouze all come back now...

It was a nice day today, so I went out to crawl under the hot tub and figure out what the deal is. We finally got it up and running over the winter, then we went out there one night and found the breaker tripped and the hot tub EMPTY. I put some water into it today and found the source of the leak - it's a fitting between one of the pipes and one of the motors. Hopefully I'll be able to tighten it by hand once it dries off, and maybe seal it with some sort of plumbing goo.

I feel like a dick complaining about a leaky hot tub, but the thing is... we can't really afford to have it fixed. We bought this thing when we were RICH. We are not rich any more. In fact, I've decided my life is like the Beverly Hillbillies in reverse... I was rich in Alabama, then I lost all my money and moved to NYC.

"Come and listen to a story 'bout a man named Dave
Took a high payin job', sold himself like a slave
Well, come to find out that the job was kinda SHITTY...!
So... they fired his ass, and he moved back to the CITY"

If anybody needs me i'll be out back by the Ce-ment Pond.

writer's blech...

I'm supposed to be writing today, but I can't seem to drag myself downstairs to do it. The problem is that I've wrote all the sections on things I know about, and now I have 2000 more words to write on things that I really DON'T know anything about. Or enough about to write without doing, like... research and stuff. And I really only have a week and a half to finish this damned thing.

Why can't it be as easy as my other "book"... the one I use for my intro physics class. It's a compilation of historical sources and essays that stands at 200 pages now. I wrote a 200 page book! Of course, I wrote it by pasting together things that other people wrote 300 years ago and tossing in a couple of 500 word essays here and there. But still... it seems like an accomplisment of sorts.

demons? effectively battled.....

Fought the urge to nap both before and after work. Physics exams are graded. Only two giant piles of term papers left to go!

play money.....

The end of the fiscal year is fast approaching, and I have to finish up my $1000 of “research expenditures” I’m allowed in my contract. Basically what this means is every year, I can spend $1000 on stuff I would have bought anyway, but that I can pretend are for my “research” and get the university to reimburse me. Mostly these expenses come down to computer junk and books.

So besides my Dell monitor and my RAM, last night I bought some new Logitech speakers and a podcasting USB interface with a high quality microphone for recording my classes. Coincidentally, it turns out that one can also plug a guitar into it. How about that?!

I bought 2 books today at B&N and that puts me within $50 of my target.

sleeping and waking.....

I feel like such a bad blogger lately. I never seem to have both something-interesting-to-say and the-energy-to-say-it at the same time. So I either find myself staring blankly at my laptop screen or, well... asleep. Neither of these activities is particularly productive.

And it’s not like I’m not producing things... it’s just that I’m producing unimportant things at inopportune times. Like yesterday, I stayed home to help watch the kids, which I did very little of, but I did expand the course packet for my fall class from a 96-page document to more than TWICE that. And yes, that activity consists mostly of cmd-C, delete, and cmd-V, but... look! I have a 200-page THING now, that I MADE! It’s kinda cool.

Needless to say, grading and immediate course planning... non-existent as usual.

Things are still a mess around town. I had ti use a map to get to work. I don’t understand just blocking a road, and then putting up no detour signs or alternate route suggestions, just... Nope! Can’t go this way! Figure something out!!!

I’m dozing off as I write this, and I’ve only been sitting on the train for 10 min. I swear, I hope I never have to teach a 4:00 class, becuase this is the absolute WORST time of day for me. I should get more sleep, though. That would help.

Blah, blah...

(Zzzzzzzzzzzzz...)

"second order approximation" welcomes our new robotic overlords...

As I mentioned a few times, it's bulk pickup week around town, and today I watched a guy walk down our street, ripping the power cords off of every electrical appliance people had put out to the curb. I have no idea what he's up to, but my best guess...? Evil Robot Army!!!

Oh, and speaking of robot armies... I saw the trailer for the Transformers movie the other day, and I saw lots of explosions and and I saw transforming robots with spiffy special effects, but what I did NOT see, was OPTIMUS FUCKING PRIME. Oh, I saw a transforming 18-wheeler alright, but it was BLUE.

BLUE!!!!

Do NOT fuck with Optimus Prime, people. THIS IS MY CHILDHOOD YOU ARE MESSING WITH!

what's wrong with this picture...?

It's so hard being a scientist... who would have thought you'd have to proofread your kid's PAJAMAS?



I'm thinking I need to write a letter to the folks at Carter's.

it was too wet to play...

The wife has to do taxes AND work on a deadline today, so I played hookie from my office hours to stay home and watch the Boy. Then it turns out my daughter's school is closed today due to flooding across the region. So, now I'm on duty with BOTH kids all day. Crap.

The flooding is a mess. My route from the train station last night involved so many road closures and detours that I had to call my wife on the phone for help navigating home.

Also, the rain has totally ruined the town-wide-swap-meet (aka, bulk trash day). All that perfectly good garbage, wasted!

this does NOT look safe...



One a' them new-fangled underwater trains, no doubt.

(PS... the phone works again)

technoglitches...

I was going to post a picture of the 10" of standing water on the train tracks at Hoboken this morning, but all of a sudden for no apparent reason, my Mac refuses to talk to my phone. So instead I will just say...

Fuck, it's raining a lot.

deriving while intoxicated...

So for the past few days I've been looking ahead to next semester trying to figure out what sorts of topics I can do in General Relativity with a bunch of undergrads who haven't had calculus. I was drinking my aforementioned newly-purchased Jack Daniels and got the idea to try to derive the classical expression for the deflection of sunlight in a gravitational field based on the equivalence principle and some absolutely ridiculous simplifying assumptions. (Such as treating the Sun as a CUBE with a constant gravitational field only at its surface!)

When I got an answer, it looked like GM/Rc^2. Then I looked up the actual classical expression derived by Newton, who no doubt used CALCULUS and assumed a ROUND Sun... and the naswer was 2GM/Rc^2.

The exact corect functional dependence, off by exactly a factor of 2 despite ridiculous starting assumptions? This is the kind of shit that doesn't surprise a physicist after a while. It's fucking magical sometimes, even when the answers are WRONG.

not at the same store, i should add...

I had to stop at the grocery store on the way to pick up the boy from preschool, and along the way I stopped and ran a few more errands. Among them... I stopped for guitar strings and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

I imagine this is very much like what Keith Richards' Friday afternoons off are like.

does this negative electric charge make me look fat?

Dave's Book Chapter Typo of the Day...

"The muon was discovered by American physicist Carl David Anderson (1905 – 1991) in 1936. It is a particle with properties that are identical in every way to the electron but one - the muon has a much larger ,ass"

OMG!!! WORST ADVISEE EVER!!!

ME: "Did you make an appointment?
HIM: Uh no.
ME: "Did you look at the course listings?"
HIM: Uh no.
ME: "Did you go to the registration fair?"
HIM: Uh no
ME: "Do you have any idea what you want to concentrate in?"
HIM: Uh. Can you get like... a music major in this school?
ME: Uh... NO!

He's a transfer student who seems to know nothing about the school, even after spending a whole semester here. As if he threw darts at a map. What the hell am I supposed to tell someone who seems to have no idea what they are interested in? Take a few years off from college and get yourself a fucking personality?

rainy day rant...

Listen, people... I know it's raining and you want to stay dry, but this is New York City... YOU CAN NOT WALK DOWN THE SIDEWALK CARRYING A FUCKING PATIO UMBRELLA!!!

brain, off...

God it feels good not to have to THINK today. I was working on something URGENT from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM yesterday. I hate “urgent”. It’s not that I don’t plan on being productive today, but I’m working on things that won’t be urgent for 3 months. (Never mind the things that will be urgent in 2 weeks that I’m ignoring.)

I’m teaching 2 physics classes next semester (and an online astro class) and I need to pick the readings and books and stuff. I’m waffling over the biographies. I think I’m going to have my Relativity class read a scholarly biography of Albert Einstein (by Albrect Fölsing) but I haven’t decided about the intro class. I was thinking about “Galileo’s Daughters” by Dava Dobel and James Gleick’s biography of Isaac Newton. Both of those are short and fairly good reads. But I worry that any writing I assigned from those would get in the way of the problem sets and other historical papers I’m going to want them to read. Anybody out there with good ideas on how to assess out-of-class reading without having the students write summaries of every chapter?? I suppose I could just put biographical questions on the exams that they would know only if they read the book, but I never do that. My exams typically only test in-class material. And it’s all complicated by the fact that I’m also thinking about having them read one of Galileo’s Dialogues, which is a LOT of difficult reading. And then I think about the Perfect Bio Prof’s classes and how much more work her classes are than mine, and I think well, FUCK... maybe I SHOULD be raising the bar. And then I think... but I kinda like the good-cop reputation... Dr. Dave’s class are really good and interesting, and challenging without being a nightmare when it comes to the workload.

Bleah. I’m indecisive.

The sick thing is, this is the part of teaching I enjoy the MOST!

if i jump up and down and squeal, does that make me a bad parent...?

So, I just found out that the wife is taking the kids to her parents' in Chicago for a whole week this summer. WITHOUT ME!

Yay for Southwest and $39 fares!

Now, who wants to come to NY in July and part-tay?

the thing about the weather is...

... I should not be wearing a scarf and taking allergy medication at the same time. If it’s still this cold, at least the plants should have the decency to stay dead.

take my RAM, please...

I just posted my first craigslist ad.

I feel so newyorky.

padmé...? is that you...?

I'm pretty sure I walked past Natalie Portman in the city today. I checked her height on IMDB... 5'3" which seemed about right. And she semed far too radiant and unreal looking to be just a regular person who kind of looked like Natalie Portman.

the past few days...

Somehow on Friday I managed to write around 700 words, bringing my book chapter right to the halfway point. This is fine for now

Saturday we cleaned for the Easter Bunny, since it was clearly going to be too cold to hide eggs outside. When told of this, the Boy responded “But the Easter Bunny has a big costume to keep him warm!” The wife wondered aloud what the Easter Bunny looked like inside the suit, and I answered - “Exactly the same only slightly smaller”.

It snowed on Easter morning and the Boy woke up with a 101º fever. The wife is also sick. Enuff said.

The kids got “Webkins” for Easter. As best as I can tell, this is like MySpace for stuffed animals.

Last night I decided I was in fact going to use a Keynote presentation to teach today’s class on Schrödinger and spent all evening ignoring the TV and working on it.

This morning it was 28º. Check the calendar, folks... what the fucK?

On the train in I worked and worked and worked on class and had no time for blogging. The two hour trip seemed to be over in 20 minutes.

I taught about the Schrödinger equation today, and I think most of the kids in the class probably understand it just fine as long as they don’t think about it too hard. And really... what are the chances?

Today while getting on the train, I notice a maintenence worker looking at a valve on the side of the train with what can only be called “perplexed incredulousness”. This can not be a good sign.

I’m listening to some very old Philip Glass on the headphones and it is irritating-me-to-sleep.

Ok. all caught up.

dave's potential headache cures...

Caffeine? No
Advil? No
More caffeine? No
Nap? No
More Advil? No

Gin? BINGO!

do not let the wife and kids go to Petsmart alone...

conversation I wish I had on the subway yesterday...

Me: Dude, is that a Zune?
Dude: Um. Yeah.
Me: So. You're the one, huh?

running circles...

Fuck, I forget why it is I never do labs or classroom “activities”... it’s fucking EXHAUSTING! I spent a whole class running in fucking circles today. And this was with a classroom full of 20 year olds! How am I going to feel this summer when I’m doing this every day with a bunch of middle schoolers?? I’m beginning to regret my choice of summer employment just a little.

Oh, and speaking of gifted programs... this weekend we are visiting a new “school for the gifted” that is opening near us. We are probably NOT sending the boy there, since they seem too new to really have their shit together, but we still want to be aware of what’s going on there, since both my wife and I are somewhat involved and experienced in gifted education. Actually, I’m MORE interested in them becuase thy don;t have their shit together, since I plan on raising questions about their science curriculum, which they presumably don’t have, and well... I have written a curriculum or two in my time.

I smell consulting fees!

before...



after...

as you can see, the emperor is pleased...

you can't tell from my crappy cellphone, but it has an amazing picture...



only problem? if i work on this thing too much it will start to make me HATE my dim little laptop screen!!

crunch...

Tomorrow I will be teaching something normal, oft-taught, and unnecessary to prepare for. Good old Heisenberg and his eponymous uncertainty principle. And a computer activity will take up much of the time in the other class. There has been far too much thinking this week, I need a break. Also, I didn’t have my Recommended Daily Allowance of caffeine today, so I have a headache.

In other news... a bag of Doritos is a bad choice for the train if you plan on watching a movie on headphones.

umm... laundry day...?

I ask you... a black demi-cup pushup bra under a ratty white Hanes t-shirt...? What the hell kind of look is that? These students... I swear...

death is bad for me...

I spent the train ride home enjoying another episode of “Six Feet Under”on DVD, and I think I’ve decided that it isn’t healthy to think about death this fucking much. A normal perosn watching this series on HBO six years ago would get a couple of episodes a month, but I’ve been watching several a week sometimes. That can’t be good for you.

stop it...

The bio professor who I would be really attracted to if I ever Iet down my guard for a minute and allowed myself the luxury of thinking that way looked REALLY hot today.

I hate it when she does that.

a watched shipment never arrives...

Both my new big monitor and my new big RAM have shipped. I’m obsessively UPS tracking them to see which one gets here first. The monitor is in New Jersey, and the RAM is in Kentucky, but the monitor seems to have stalled while the RAM shipment is “on the move”. In preparation for the monitor’s arrival, I’ve cleaned the guestroom desk downstairs to comfortably accomodate it’s 20” of DVI-LCD pixelly goodness. Just think how much more I’ll be able to write with such a big screen! I bet it holds 4 times as many words!

interference...

The topic for the day in physics class is deBroglie waves and an introduction to the wave nature of matter. It’s something I never feel like I teach satisfactorily to these students. I mean, there is nothing too complicated about E = hf, but I never feel like I can give them enough conceptual motivation for the idea. Which is probably not possible, since I get the impression that deBroglie basically pulled the idea out of his ass, but still... I hate presenting quantum mechanics as “magic”.

It’s going to be tough to get any work done for the rest of this week, since the wife is trying to get me to blow off my office-hour days to have Family Fun while the kids are off for spring break. Umm... yeah, I think I have a meeting. Or if not, I’m going to set one up.

As for right now, I should really be thinking more about this morning’s lecture, but I can’t keep my eyes open. Maybe I’ll think with my eyes closed.

no joke...

The wife made meatloaf cupcakes for dinner. With pink mashed potato icing. The children were not amused.

April Fools is one thing, but the dashed promise of cupcakes is no laughing matter. To quote the Boy - "Mommy, I hate your trick! You are my BEST ENEMY!!"