Category: Grad School

Friday Morning

It’s off to Pittsburgh this afternoon to meet my hubby for a weekend of random yet targeted exploration.

As of about midnight last night, I wasn’t 100% sure I was going to make it. First, there was car trouble starting on Tuesday. That’s not yet resolved, so I’ll be taking Mark’s Oldsmobile rather than my Buick (yeah, we’re geezers…). Then, my Thursday resulted in a veritable flood of last minute work that made it seem almost as if there were a conspiracy to keep me in Winston-Salem and in front of my computer for about four days straight. But I got past it and had some lucky breaks this morning, so things are now looking good for an early afternoon departure.

Otherwise, it was a very good Thursday, which brought some potentially very good news, about which I shan’t elaborate at this time. Not only that, but they weren’t out of anything at the Elliott Center salad bar at lunch, which is a minor miracle. And I got to spend most of the day getting paid to look at old newspapers. So I shouldn’t complain. Not that that’s ever stopped me before…

A Saturday Afternoon in Winston-Salem

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It’s one of those peculiarly southern things: a week-old pile of snow in a shopping center parking lot with a sign in the background showing the temperature to be a fairly steamy eighty degrees.

In other news:

  • Richard Florida is still an ass.
  • Yer humble host has landed himself a very nice internship starting in May. If it’s a named internship, it looks better on a résumé, right?
  • Yes, I probably am way too old to be getting all excited about internships, but still…
  • Apparently, we live in one of the only houses in America that has increased over six percent in value since 2006, or at least so sayeth the tax assessor. And I thought it was a buyers’ market.

Anyway, since I promised you Winston-Salem in the title and really only delivered in the first paragraph, here’s an otherwise unrelated photo of what used to be our train station, surrounded by lots of dead kudzu:

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Maybe There’s Hope

So maybe someone really will hire me some day:

When the world entered the digital age, a great majority of human historical records did not immediately make the trip.

Literature, film, scientific journals, newspapers, court records, corporate documents and other material, accumulated over centuries, needed to be adapted for computer databases. Once there, it had to be arranged — along with newer, born-digital material — in a way that would let people find what they needed and keep finding it well into the future.

The people entrusted to find a place for this wealth of information are known as digital asset managers, or sometimes as digital archivists and digital preservation officers. Whatever they are called, demand for them is expanding.

Boilers and Books

Interestingly enough, the textbook I bought from Amazon UK because it was cheaper than buying it domestically arrived today with a flyer for a service contract from British Gas that might have saved me money on my boiler as well.

Assuming, of course, that the boiler and I were in the UK.

Scary

The high school friends people I barely knew and didn’t really like in high school have been coming out of the woodwork and accosting me on Facebook of late. I don’t really do Facebook; I find it rather annoying, and I keep my account open mostly for school purposes and because I’ve occasionally been contacted by old friends I actually did want to hear from again. But I’m thinking of pulling down my high school affiliation because there’s pretty much no one from those days that I ever want to hear from again.

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On a completely unrelated note, it was a beautifully cold, gray, rainy day today, and I noticed this view out my window at work. The photo doesn’t really capture it at all, but the combination of the rooftop, the smokestack/chimney thing in the background (that you can’t really see), and the overall gloom sort of gave this really enticing Dickensian London feel.

Again, the photo doesn’t really capture it. maybe I should’ve skipped it. Oh well.

Buy American?

I just saved over twenty bucks on a textbook by buying it from Amazon’s UK site rather than the US site. It’s the same book, but it apparently costs less to sell it and ship it across the Atlantic than it does just to transport it across a couple of states. Go figure…

Alas…

I seem to have returned home bearing a nasty cold alongside the other souvenirs.

It’s kind of hard to believe that my five-week break from school is sixty percent over before it really even seems to have started. It was a really intense fall semester, and I was sort of looking forward to a few moments of calm. They sort of never came, what with the trip to Fresno in December, followed by the actual holidays, and the big road trip to Pittsburgh last week. I have a lot of things I really want to catch up on before things get crazy again:

  • The major renovation of Groceteria, moving it into the PHP world using a content management system (Joomla, to be specific) and integrating flickr photo albums to make the image hosting easier and more logical.
  • Back-correcting old links in Otherstream now that it’s a WordPress site. This is becoming less and less of a priority, I must admit.
  • Catching up on all the home video.
  • Getting a sports blog set up for one of my clients. While typing that, I had the brilliant idea that they might consider using Twitter, making it all easier for me and cheaper for them. We’ll see how that works out.
  • Posting about the just-completed trip, not to mention the one from six months ago that I never really covered either.
  • Reading about fifteen books I have piled up in the office.

I have my doubts that I’ll get it all done.

Randomly Wednesday

Wow. Is there anything you can’t get from Sears?

More random thoughts for a rainy Wednesday afternoon:

  • This amused me far too much this morning when I was stuck in the lab with not much else to do. I’d really like to see a similar one for San Francisco, but it’s not enough of a priority that I’m going to look for one right now, because…
  • I’m off to Fresno with my mom tomorrow for an early Christmas with Mark and the in-laws (and also for breakfast at the Chicken Pie Shop). There will be a brief lunch stop to see friends in San Francisco as well.
  • As of this morning, the semester from hell is more or less officially over me. The exciting bibliography is turned in, the giant XML file is done, and my contributions to the group project are complete, at least for now. Next semester, we’ll be trying to publish the damned thing.
  • Should you find yourself inclined to acquire one, be forewarned: Time Warner’s DVRs are garbage. Biggest pieces of shit I’ve ever seen. We’ve already given up on one and returned it, and the other will probably follow soon. It’s not just the lousy interface; the actual hard drives are no good, either.The great thing about our big switch, though, is that it’s made me realize I don’t watch much TV these days anyway, freeing us to save lost of money by moving back into the land of ghetto cable.
  • Off to Dewey’s now for sugar cake and Moravian cookies.