Category: Grad School

Update

Mark’s back in San Francisco now, and I’m all by myself again, wishing we could enjoy the rain and the gloom together. Over the weekend, there was pizza in High Point on Saturday (about which I had an interesting post written before it got destroyed), grilled pork on Sunday, and the traditional Monday morning breakfast at the Lighthouse. Mark has also now joined me in PHP-dom following his disgust with iWeb. It’s sad that Apple is doing such a sloppy job with what should be its showcase applications.

I’m pretty impressed that I’ve already migrated over all my journal entries dating back to 2006. I still have some cleanup to do, fixing internal links, etc., but it’s not taking nearly as long as I expected. I should have done this a long time ago.

Of course, things are starting to get a little crazy again now that classes have started. I’m doing the big graduate assistant thing, and have assumed control of the department’s website. I may also take another job working on a digitization project for the university archives if I can get permission. It should be interesting, even if it doesn’t pay much. Slave labor is, of course, the most efficient way to build one’s resume, right?

Speaking of the resume, a quick update this morning before I went to the dentist was apparently enough to secure me this extra position, despite my misgivings. It’s amazing how excited librarians and archivists get when you mention that you have web design experience. Maybe I will end up getting a decent job once all this is done.

Back to work now. The defintion of work gets hazy when you do 90% of it home.

Randomly Tuesday

Last night was one of those nights where the sleeping was not good. There was nothing really the matter other than the fact that I worked too late and didn’t give myself enough time to gear down before going to bed. Alas, it’s a busy time of the year for me, and I didn’t make things any better by deciding out of the blue that this week was also a great time to re-work this site.

I have a meeting this afternoon in Greensboro on how to be the world’s oldest graduate assistant, and Thursday and Friday are set aside to get prepared for the exciting fall season on MyNetworkTV and The CW so that I can turn my attention to the hubby when he returns on Friday afternoon. No weekend plans as such, other than some nuzzling and maybe playing with our databases.

Randomly in the news:

  • Apparently, a collection of college leaders believe that 18-year-olds should be given the right to drink again. I agree, in general, simply because I don’t really understand why 21 is the “magic number” where drinking suddenly becomes OK. If one is an adult for all other purposes at age 18, why not for boozing purposes as well? Yes, I understand the argument that raising the drinking age to 21 prevents some traffic deaths. Raising it to 37 would prevent even more, but no one’s suggesting that. I do not, however, buy the argument that we should do it simply because college students are ignoring the current law; there are plenty of good reasons to lower the drinking age, but that ain’t one of them.
  • Some community leaders are pushing to have Winston-Salem ban sagging pants. I’m with them all the way on an aesthetic level, really, but there remain those nagging questions of Constitutionality and appropriateness. As long as we’re banning clothing just because people don’t like it, how about including ugly shoes (a specialty of the current decade) and really stupid-looking facial hair?
  • Wow. Imagine this: holding the people who committed the crime responsible for its consequences rather than fining the victims. What a radical idea.

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Busy

I didn’t really expect to be busier after the semester ended than I was beforehand, but I’m in the midst of a big client project that’s taking much longer than I expected. I’ve been trying to at least update the video, so anyone who cares will know I’m still alive. More updates soon, though, including the story of how yer humble host may become the world’s oldest graduate assistant, and other exciting tidbits.

Maybe “exciting” is too strong a term…

Bottles and Books and Technology

What exactly does it say about me that when I recently stumbled upon a dirty picture of a boy impaled on a water bottle, I paid very little attention to the boy himself, nor to the slightly disturbing fact that he had a water bottle shoved up his ass, but immediately noticed that the bottle itself was from Publix, a Florida supermarket chain?

No, I’m not going to link to the picture here.

Other random thoughts during this brief break on a very busy Monday:

  • The hubby and I had lots of fun at the big Shepherd Center book sale last week, although I didn’t find any mislabeled pornography like I did last year.
  • After two semesters in grad school, I can safely say the idea that younger people are more “wired” and tech savvy than people in my age group is something of a false generalization. I think commentators are mistaking “nimble fingers capable of sending text messages really fast” or “familiarity with MySpace” for actual technological knowledge (like the ability to use a computer or put together a website).
  • This is a surprisingly useful service. I’ve recently used it to convert DOCX files to something I can use and to convert PDF files to Word or RTF format. It handles a variety of video and graphics formats too, but I already have most of these covered.
  • No, the photo above has nothing to do with anything else in the post. Thanks for asking.

Advisee alert

Spotted this in an elevator on the way to class last night. Are professors actually advertising for advisees now? Or is it just that this Dr. Westervelt believes she’s so bloody fabulous that there will be that much competition for her services? It just struck me as rather odd.

Of course, the inappropriate “decorative quotation marks” are another story entirely.

Randomly Wednesday

After tomorrow, my life becomes less stressful for five or six weeks. Until then, though, I’ll stick with the short attention span stuff:

  • So it’s an A in at least one of my two classes this semester. If you’re interested in reading any of my terribly exciting papers, let me know and I’ll hook you up.
  • Lately, I’ve been learning a lot more about the bowels of Mac OSX than I ever really wanted. I’m not sure why I’m having so many problems with odd file corruption issues. Tonight, it was an iCal calendar file (or three). Last week it was my email database. There was, fortunately, no data loss in either instance. I’m wondering of the problem is that so many Mac core applications are database-driven now. Or maybe that my hard drive really is dying.
  • All in all, though, it’s probably still easier to fix things like this on a Mac than on a Windows machine, which would probably require reinstalling every operating system since Windows 3.1.1, in sequence, and then hand-typing some DLL file before rebooting three times while chanting “There’s no place like Redmond.” And then doing it again.
  • All these really old Tonight Show episodes running during the writers’ strike are making me (a) feel old and (b) realize I didn’t watch much late night TV in 1993 and 1994. Which isn’t a surprise, actually.
  • Via digitizationblog: wow, who knew there was a PDF blog?
  • You know you’re really married when you have start having trouble sleeping because someone isn’t in bed with you rather than because someone is.

Whither Yer Humble Host?

So whither yer humble host?

Despite the fact that I haven’t been all that talkative online lately, depsite all the stress a week or so back, despite the occasional sleepless night, I’m feeling happier and more satisfied with life than I have in years, thanks.

A lot of very positive things have happened to me in the past thirty months, leaving San Francisco and moving back to North Carolina being at the top of the list. Returning to a part of the country that just works better for me at this stage in my life, moving with Mark into out first house, being in close proximity to so many more road trip opportunities, eating barbecue again, and reconnecting with my family have all been great (although the latter has tried my patience from time to time).

Not everything has been so rosy, though. My job quest, and the subsequent realization that I’m not really qualified to do much that anyone wants to pay me for, have been a bit depressing, and have led to some periods of financial tension and general mental anguish. I’ve had a significant chunk of family health issues to contend with, and I’m nervous about what the future holds. The insurance nightmare from last December and January gave me fits. And then there was that whole cancer thing. That kind of sucked, too.

But I’m feeling pretty damned good about everything right now. I’ve lost all of the excess weight I’d put on since moving back east, and then some. I’m getting some exercise, if maybe not quite enough. I’m earning a reasonable amount of money now, if not as much as I should be. And I’m in school, preparing for a profession that fascinates me, and thinking that I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. That’s pretty exciting, and I sometimes get all tingly just thinking about it.

I have goals and plans for the future. I have items in my calendar, and things I need to do, and research I enjoy, and projects that fascinate me, even if they do cause me short-term stress. In short, I feel like I have a reason to get out of bed every morning. To be honest, that wasn’t always the case a year or so back.

Not everything is perfect, of course. I need to find more robust sources of income now, not two years from now. My parents continue to age, and I continue to worry about how I’ll deal with the inevitable problems that will become more and more a part of our lives because of it. I could still stand to lose a pound or fifty. But my outlook is positive, I’m making progress, and as I said above, I’m generally happier than I’ve been in a long time,a dn plan to stay that way.

At least as long as I never have to face another week where I have to face all of the following at the same time:

  • Potential hard drive failure.
  • Disappearing domains and unresponsive registars.
  • Two big class projects.
  • My dad having emergency surgery on his shoulder.
  • My mom needing yet another explanation of how to check her email and downolad photos from her camera, while having a simultaneous emotional meltodwn because of my dad’s surgery.
  • A big pile of extra, unscheduled work, half involving a new client and the other half involving major changes in a job I’ve only had for four months to begin with.

Actually, I think I’ll be OK even if I do have to face all of those at once. I’d just feel sorry for anyone who had to be round me. And glad that I had a most wonderful and supportive husband.

Email

Good news du jour: UNCG is now offering the option of using Gmail for student email accounts rather than the suck-ass, miserable Lotus Notes/Domino web interface that was required upto this point — and that looked and acted like it dated from about 1995, and that didn’t even allow POP access. I can now use Apple Mail for all my incoming mail again, rather than having to access some stupid, cumbersome web-based program for the school-related stuff. I am very much the happy.

Stuff

No more 1997 road trip stuff at the top of the page. I’ll miss that. Maybe on the twentieth anniversary, I’ll actually post some of the video.

Sadly, I don’t really have anything exciting to add in my first new post in two weeks or so. Life has pretty much been about school, work, and more of both for the past few weeks. We did make it to the fair on Wednesday and to the Jewish Festival in Greensboro with my mom on Sunday. And we successfully avoided the North Carolina Identity Politics Gathering, after accidentally wandering a little too close to the South Carolina version in Columbia the week before.

This weekend, though, I have no schoolwork due, three consecutive days off work, and plans to go someplace relatively far away. Therefore, I will not be answeting the phone or checking email after Thursday night, lest these plans somehow be ruined, as so many others have recently. OK, maybe I won’t go that far, but I really do need to get away for a couple of days.

For your perusal: new photos in the Carolinas photo gallery, including shots of Columbia, Durham, Lexington, Burlington, and Kannapolis.