survived...

...the 10 PM redeye from Seattle. I think I've been awake for 32 hours or so, but... I wouldn't really trust my ability to do math at this point.

snotty in seattle...

3/4 of us have come down with a cold on this trip. My wife blames Airplane Germs. I blame the fact that the Universe hates me. My sinuses feel like they are stuffed with wet laundry. Seriously, my head feels like it weighs 10 pounds more than usual.

So, we're back in Seattle. The wedding was lovely, if a bit Idahoey. One question, though... Is there a team of Country Music Researchers stationed in a secret laboratory somewhere, constantly working to produce new and improved Father/Daughter wedding dance songs?

Anyway... back to groaning and sniffling...

at least they seem to have the internet in Idaho...

I just got back from a rehearsal dinner where I narrowly avoided country line dancing.

Scary.

I have no idea what the actual wedding reception will be like, but I hear there will be free martinis and cosmo's, so... that may make up for it.

really fucking tired in Seattle...

Ugh. Long long day. And the kids weren't even bad, but just... ugh... y'know? Looooong day.

The sister-in-law's house smells of dog, but they have a pool table and a Wii, so I'll manage.

could I be more clear...?

Hi, Dr. Professor Dave
I have been trying to reach you for about 3 weeks now
I checked my grade for this class but i don't understand why I got WF for this class
Hope to hear from you soon

Thank you so much

Soo Dent


Soo,

Basically, the grade of WF is the same as an F, but means that you stopped coming to class and doing the work and basically "Withdrew" yourself after the withdrawal date.

You turned in no work after midterm (the two papers and the reading journals,) did not take the final, and were absent for most of the last month of the class. I'll ask (The Other Guy) to check the attendance records to be more specific. The attendance policy on the syllabus and official University policy makes it clear that missing more than 4 or 5 classes is grounds for a failing grade. But apart from that, your final percentage score was 28%, so a passing grade was not justified.

Dr. D.

sigh (almost) of relief...

Ok. Grading is done. I was up until 2 AM last night, and finished the rest this morning. I have 24 hours to "relax" now before we have to pack for Seattle. I'm spending the day ripping movies and TV shows for the kids to watch on my iPod during the many long drives and plane rides. Although I just remembered today that we're flying on JetBlue, which has individual TV screens. You'd be surprised just how much Animal Planet a kid will sit through on an airplane. Lots.

(As for my entertainment, I am bringing fiction with me on the trip. A book with a plot. Not a biography of a dead scientist. Not a compilation of historical sources. Not a textbook full of equations. A novel, god dammit.)

I have one more thing to do before we go, which is to submit my damned book manuscript, which I finished a week and a half ago, but I still need to polish up the bibliography, If I get that done, I can enjoy the next week with a completely EMPTY HEAD.

*EDIT* Done. All of it. Now, the sigh of relief is complete.

superquick bullet updates...

* wife and daughter camping, alone with boy for weekend
* birthday party i was to take him to, cancelled. thank god
* grading left to do. not in the mood for it.
* house needs cleaning. ditto.
* must go shopping. need cat food, possibly new shirt and tie for wedding.
* packing for the west coast monday, leave tuesday. ugh.

pant, pant....

Nothing like starting the day with a nice SPRINT to the train. Had to drop my daughter off at another school for a field trip today, so my schedule was a bit screwed up. But I still made the 7:31, even if I did have to run for it. (Good day to choose QUARTERS to pay for the $2.00 parking too.)

My college’s graduation is today, the larger university graduation is tomorrow. This is the first year I’m going to both. It’s kind of a waste of time, really, but I look at it as a good 4 hours that I’m forced to be on the train so that I can grade papers without distraction.

Grading is going ok this semester, actually. The stacks are big, but manageable. The difference between having one stack of exams to deal with and two is immeasurable. I’ll have to use this “early final” method every semester from now on. The only thing I have to figure out is an incentive to make students come to the last 2 weeks of class if they’ve already had their exam. I’m thinking graded-in-class activities are the way to go.

Anyway, I could probably find stuff to babble about if I stare at the screen long enough, but I really would like to finish off this stack of reading journals, if for no other reason than - I don’t want to carry them back home this afternoon!

OMG!! CHOLESTEROL!! LOL!!!



I swear to you I honestly misread this at first. Packaging deisgners in the instant-messaging-age need to be more careful of their kerning.

brief tv recaps...

* OMG! BEN SHOT LOCKE! WTF?

* Yau Man was robbed. For further proof that there is no God... “Dreamz” was not struck dead on the spot by a fucking lightning bolt. Earl did what he had to do. And you can say he double-crossed Yau to win also, but here is the difference. Earl was smart enough to realize that if he voted off Yau, he had a chance to win. But Dreamz was too stupid to realize that if he went back on his deal with Yau, he had absolutely NO chance of winning the million at Tribal Council. So it wasn’t a “strategic” move on his part at all... it was just stupid.

* PS - what the fuck is with this new pirate show? Nothing in the commercials seems to distinguish it at all from Survivor, except the occasional skull-and-crossbones. My guess is that it will be nearly identical, but they will call tribal council “walking the plank” and the Jeff Probst guy “the captian”.

* I know this is not a show worth commenting on... but it’s a show we watch as a family with the kids every Sunday. Do the evil mouse-eared corporate tools at Disney REALLY think we won’t notice when they turn one of their family TV-shows (America’s Funniest Home Videos) into a fucking hour long commercial for their theme parks and cruise lines? Oh, the winner of this week’s special show will win a Disney cruise and get to stay in the Cinderella suite? Well, unfunny mugging host guy, please do tell us all about the wonderful amenities they will be enjoying. FOR THE ENTIRE SHOW.

* (Meanwhile the oh-so-subtle advertising produces it’s predictable result...)

GIRL: I want to go to Disney
WIFE: Probably not this year, honey.
ME: Yeah... get back to us when you can walk from one end of HOME DEPOT to the other without complaining that your feet hurt.

* Once again to the fine corporate tools at ABC. I understand spinoffs, ok. They always suck, but the idea is a reasonable one... character we know... built-in audience. I get it. But if you are going to have a spinoff, be honest about it. Film a pilot. Give it a name. Put it on TV. And ask us to watch it. Many of us will. Do not chop up the pilot into chunks and sloppily interweave it with our favorite show and bill it as a “Special Two Hour Grey’s Anatomy.” Because it was not. It was not special, nor was it Grey’s Anatomy. It was a mess, and it made me disinclined to like to new show because I was too busy being angry about being tricked into watching it.

And the male romantic lead is Tim Daly? That guy from “Wings”? Seriously? (Although what do I know. My wife was all hot and bothered over some 16-year-old she kept referring to as “Piz”.)

* I wonder if this is the last season of ER? I think I’ve made the full transition from not caring to not enjoying to not watching, but I’d tune in for the final episode just to see what kind of idiotic ending they would conjure up. I think the whole show should go out like Dr. Whatshisname with all the helicopters falling on him. I’m hoping that the whole fucking hospital will get hit by a comet or something.

aches, pains, and the rest...

* My right ankle has been bothering me on and off for a while now. I happened to glance at it the other day when I was sitting watching TV with my bare foot up on the coffee table and it was visibly swollen on the outside, next to my Achilles tendon. It looks for all the world like some kind of muscular thing... a strain or a sprain or or some kind of sports-related injury. Which is odd, considering the only sport I engage in is sitting watching TV with my feet up on the coffee table.

* My left middle finger ACHES. Oh, how it aches. It always feels like I need to crack it. And sometimes I do, but it doesn’t help. It actually makes me wince and sometimes scream. I’m beginning to be able to see down the road to a point where arthritis will go from being a nuisance to actually keeping me from doing things. I should play lots of guitar now before my hand turns into a claw.

* The allergies are still bothering me, but the latest is that they have come down hard on the Boy. He looks awful. He’s been constantly stuffed up for about 5 days, and his eyes are intermittently swollen shut like he just lost a big prize fight. (“Cut me, Mick... cut me!”) We took him to the doctor on Saturday and got a Zyrtec prescription, but couldn’t fill it until today. (Fucking insurance companies.) Allergies. Bah. My prediction is that he inherits my wife’s asthma next. Because what’s a nerd boy w/o an inhaler.

project status...

The writing is done. The 5000 word chapter came in at 5996 words. I'm having some gin (to celebrate!) and working on the bibliography.

yay.

possibly most bizarre email ever...

I've mentioned a few times here that I have a couple of physics and astronomy lectures posted to YouTube. They were originally put there for my students to download, but, weirdly enough... some of them have had more than 2000 views. There are a few embarassingly glowing comments about how awesome this science dude is, but they pale in comparison to the email I recieved last night...

Hello Dr. Dave!

My name is Gary Weinrib. I live in Thunder Bay Ontario Canada. I'm a 38 year old single dad and recovering addict. I just want to let you know that your lectures have helped me get my life back on track and can say that since i'v started listening to your uploads I'v been clean 3 months.

It may not seem like a lot but to a daily cocaine and opiate user it's the world. I'v been inspired to buy a meade ds-2114 auto star telescope and several books on physics and astronomy and take immense pleasure in observing the stars and planets and listening to your lectures.

As soon as I feel I have grasped enough about physics and astronomy I hope to take some sort of class in Canada and apply myself full time to this field. It may take years but I can tell you If not for this new found passion they would be years I would not have had otherwise.

You probably never expected your work to teach someone how to stay sober but I can tell you that the stars and you have changed my life and have given my and my 8 year old son something better.. Thanks so much for this..

Truly
Gary Weinrib

Who knew that I could market my astronomy lectures as a substance abuse program? I think I'll call it - "Bored Straight"


(Seriously, though... if this guy is for real, it's a very nice email. I plan on burning him a CD of the entire course and mailing it to him this week.)

unappreciated marital reference of the day...

WIFE: (speaking of picky eaters) I don't think it has anything to do with parenting. I think there are just two kinds of kids in the world.

ME: Those with loaded guns, and those who dig?

signs that the guy sitting across from me is a tool...

1) Wardrobe - Business on top, party on the bottom - striped dress shirt and tie, suit coat, jeans. (Not a blazer mind you... clearly a suit jacket.)

2) Oakley sunglasses

3) Gold bracelet

4) IBM ThinkPad (The most soul-less of all laptops!)

5) Blackberry

not the day i intended...

i’m not making the best “choices” lately. something needs to be done about this.

down to business...

Ok. So. Writing. I’ve managed to go from 3940 to 4613 words in the past hour on the train, which is ok, but only reinforces my nagging feeling that I’m going to come in way OVER the word count for this thing. Which is just shooting myself in the foot isn’t it?

I’ve made some real use of the Dave-o-Pedia this ride, which is cool. (My folder full of site-crawler content leeched from the Wikipedia) and now I’m looking at my document in Omni Outliner and “folding up” all the sections that I consider DONE. It’s a handy thing to be able to do, and one of the reasons I enjoy writing in OO.

It would be nice to be able to FOCUS this afternoon and get this mostly done with.

fighting the brain...

instead of writing, i’ve decided to spend the train ride staring out the window and self-loathing. well... it’s not so much a ‘decision’, per se.... it’s just something that sorta happens. i had a student email me recently about... well it was hard to figure out what she was asking, really... but it had to do with suggestions to get over certain kinds of mental obstacles to getting things done. it was hard not to say... good luck, i’m 37 and still haven’t figured it out.

weekend, and beyond...

Friday: I was supposed to write all day. I did not write a single word. I am fucked.

Saturday: I did some yardwork and housework, but nothing particularly noteworthy. In the evening my wife and I sat down to watch Dreamgirls, but we didn’t get 15 minutes into it before the noisy Puerto Rican neighbors called us because they saw my wife knitting through the window and decided we were too pitiful and invited us over. After 3 shots of Jack Daniels “Single Barrel”, started to have fun. Reminder... buy curtains.

Sunday: Random shopping that accomplished little. Many tantrums. Watched the finale to The Amazing Race. Most boring finale ever, compounded by the fact that all 3 teams remaining were kinda unpleasant. Did laundry, went to bed early.

Monday: That’s today. Thinking of springing a pop-quiz on my physics class, just because. I have my “annual review” with the department chair today, which is kinda of a misnomer, because we’ve never really had them before. I should start making a convincing list of reasons why I haven’t published anything in... umm... forever? I need to sit down and WRITE in the meantime. This book chapter thing needs to be OFF my plate before the final grading push starts next week. Planning to perfectly time my afternoon cup of tea so that I won’t need to sleep on the train.

Tomorrow: Write. Go to committee meeting. Write some more.

boy art...



After 8 years of rainbows and unicorns, it's about time someone around here started drawing some EVIL KILLER ROBOTS!!

dave's frivolous purchase of the day...

Did I say frivolous? I meant FRUGAL! After all this was on clearance for 50% off at Target today! Which means, I didn't spend a hundred dollars... I SAVED a hundred dollars!!

Try to argue with that logic... I dare you.

I was actually quite dissatisfied with it at first, since I quickly discovered that you can not change the outgoing MIDI note number assigned to each of the 8 pads. They are assigned to the general MIDI default numbers for kick, snare, hi tom, lo tom, crash, ride, hi-hat... which is fine if all you want to do is emulate a standard kit, but if you want to play a MARIMBA instead of a drumkit... you are stuck playing weird random notes instead of a SCALE.

I was actually considering taking it back, but then I found a freeware program called MidiPipe that hijacks the incoming info from the MIDI port and can remap all the note numbers before sending the info to GarageBand!!! So i just need to make different config setups for each of the 8-note combos I want for different GarageBand samples. Cumbersome, but it works.

Anyway, the point is... yay, toys!

books of the moment...

Inspired by the always inspiring LadyGypsy, I decided to devote a photo-post to the question of "What Books Are You Half-Assedly Engaged In At This Moment". It's quite a list.


Beginning on the nightstand, we have James Gleick's biography of Isaac Newton, which I read quite a while ago, and am browsing again to decide if I want to assign it to my Physics students in the fall. Under that I have the new poshumous Tolkein book - "The Children of Húrin" - which normally would be too geeky even for me, but I read two really good reviews of it and I figured... what the hell. (You can also catch a peek of my black-satin sleepmask at the bottom of the stack there, for napping on sunny days or for getting to sleep when the wife insists on reading until 2 AM.)



At the foot of the bed (I was reading it while the kids took their baths) is "Digital Video Hacks", which I purchased a few days ago. Since I now have access to a $2000 High-Def video camera at work, I need to learn how to shoot things at least SEMI-professionally. Downstairs on the windowsill, I have a copy of "iMovie and iDVD - The Missing Manual" that i'm thumbing through for the same reasons...



Inside my school bag...



... I'm carrying a 700 page biography of Albert Einstein by Albrecht Fölsing (translated from the original German!) It's a pretty scholarly bio... nothing like the fluffy thing that has popped up on the "New Releases" shelf at all the bookstores. And yet it's surprisingly readable, despite the fact that I HATE biography as a genre in general. Anyway, it will be the semester-long out-of-class reading for my Relativity students next semester, and so I've been spending my train rides reading it and writing a study-guide for it.



Lastly, on the floor next to my TV chair, I have 4 undergrad relativity textbooks... "Gravity" by Hartle, "Space, Time, and Quanta" by Mills, "Introduction to Cosmology" by Ryder, and "Exploring Black Holes" by the venerable Taylor and Wheeler. I've been poking through these for weeks looking for examples and problems that students with minimal algebra skills can deal with. I'm having only very limited luck. I'm learning a lot MYSELF, though. Which as we know, is why I teach these classes anyway.

So... there you are... a peek at my horribly boring "recreational" reading!

my thursday in 5 easy steps...

1 - fill wheelbarrow with shovelfulls of grass, dirt, and rocks from future flowerbed.
2 - dump grass, dirt, and rocks behind shed.
3 - fill wheelbarrow with shovelfulls of slightly less-rocky fill dirt from side of shed.
4 - dump slightly less-rocky fill dirt into future flowerbed.
5 - repeat until tired, achey, and filthy.