hey! i have an idea...!

Let's go to BOSTON for spring break!!



Motherfucking fuck.

living in a fisheye lens...

The weird focus around the edges is probably due to the different distances to the background objects - I'm hoping the focus will be clearer when it's pointed at a flat, uniformly lit classroom wall.

Anyway, $20 from a weird little Hong Kong gadget website, and can now shoot lectures from my MacBook that show the whole board instead of just the middle section. The only downside being that the videos will have the slight appearance of being seen from the viewpoint of the Discovery's HAL-9000 computer.

daddy...?

One of my kids saw me reading this book and, for a moment, thought I had made a book with a picture of myself on the front...



That wouldn't be so funny if I didn't get this result once from a computerized "find a famous person who looks like a picture of you app"...



Silent Dave Strikes Back!

overly obsessive...

... with a little thing called "VERSION CONTROL":



The weekly drafts of the book also get backed up in THREE places.

taking a break from the sabbatical…

Heading into the city on the train today. Enough stuff piled up that needs to be taken care of in-person to justify the twenty-some-dollar train ticket. Plus there is a big faculty meeting today, and I figured I could earn some brownie points for showing up. Comes to meetings while on sabbatical!! So dedicated!!

I guess it's been a while since I've posted an update about the writing process. Things are going ok. I'm not smashing my daily word counts like I had been at the beginning - lately I've been just as likely to put in a 750 word day or an 825 word day as the 1100 - 1200 words I was knocking out in January. But I think that's ok, because I've been spending more of my mornings tweaking things that are already written, and thinking about the bigger picture stuff - including how the book is going to fit into the actual class it's being written for. So I've added some things like discussion questions for the chapters which hadn't been part of the original plan, and which take more thought than just writing.

I did take some time off from the book, but it was mostly intentional - a week to go to a conference, then a few days when the wife's Mom was visiting. It took a while to get back into the rhythm of working, but I'm still pretty happy with the progress overall. I passed the 40,000 word mark last night, and the book (as currently formatted anyway - paperback novel sized) is around 165 pages. Enough chapters are finished that I'm starting to drake the final touches - things like graphics and display-equations and whatnot - formatting stuff I've been putting off. My guess is, I'll start working seriously on those things in April.

In non-book-related news, I started back running the other day. It was 50º, so I suited up and did two ½ miles with a little 1-minute walk break in between. It was a little huffy-puffy, but not as bad as it could have been considering I've been away from it for 3 months or so. As my karmic reward for exercising, I came down with the flu less than 12 hours later. The universe can fucking suck it.

no wonder my students score so poorly on exams!

I was excited by the news that YouTube was automatically captioning its videos using Google's speech recognition technology, until I went and downloaded the resulting caption file for one of my physics lectures.

A representative excerpt...

"that's a lot satisfactory right not
trying to construct the theory of physics
based on physical on actions
the situation is this a little interest in that
in fact the equation the same collectors of
of are animated charge
the attraction between and as evil the subcontinent
and the charges one chart are square
needs a lot reputation
and love electricity
the little traction
are identical in four
it's the non-stop but did not stop doesn't square
it's like a new mechanism
for wind interesting affected
there's no mechanism explain why the reluctantly
it was simply up and your goal
um
equation figured out how much force
so as a attempts
to give some reality of wars
people cannot yet is the field
the way it works is
instead of saying the earth
nationally tax them
which is
or miles away
the ceiling or does is create
the gravitational field
the gravitational field
exas and the states it's leader
you go out going to represent the people
um
but for rose
but it
and he played of mass in a gravitational hill
that message cases acceleration"

I'm pretty sure it puts the "um..."s in the right place. That's about it. So much for free transcripts of my lectures, I guess.

it seems impolite...

...not to buy a laptop desk from Ikea when they NAMED IT AFTER YOU!!!