The statue got me high.

I’ve forgotten how much I really, truly love They Might Be Giants. It’s been so long since they’ve come up on the ipod on shuffle (it’s 30GB of music, after all) that I’ve sort of lost track of them. I should double check and see if they have any new albums recently. Or tracks.

I’ve been using iGoogle some over the last couple of days to try it out and see if I like it. So far I do, especially in terms of feeds. Of which I have like 80, so it’s actually been pretty good at tracking everything, delivering me my weather, having a handy dictionary when I know I’m not spelling something right at all, and so on. I think I’ll stay with it for a little while longer.

I also emailed back the prof. I was applying for an assistantship with to provide writing samples. Cross your fingers for me because I really need this. Or the tuition scholarship to come through. If you’re curious, the website for the journal I’d be helping him edit is here: Design Research Quarterly. It’s pretty interesting and accessible.

Quick link listing before I have to go to class:

• Chris Napolitano on George Bush, the State of Porn, and Why Playboy is Still Hot - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
• WorkPlace: In Iraq, Whistleblowers Fired, Harrassed and Detained Without Charge
• ABC News: Are We Teaching Kids to Fear Men
• Sleepy? Cut out late-night Internet and TV - Yahoo! News
• Playboy U. Hopes to Score With Students - Chronicle.com

Typical.

In truly typical fashion, my printer ran out of ink this morning and I bought the wrong type of ink cartridge tonight on my way home from work. Which means going back and spending another $30 on the right kind of cartridge. Way to save money, there.

I ditched the piercing research idea over the week. I still really want to do it at some point; it might be better as a quantitative project though. There’s going to be human subjects issues regardless of how it’s modeled, but I think it might be easier to get that sort of thing past an IRB if I was distributing paper surveys to tattoo parlor customers. It seems less invasive and sensitive that way. I just have to consign it to one of those “Maybe when I’m tenured!” lists. Along with social experiments such as coming to class and pretending to be a student on the first day just to watch reactions and see how long it takes before they start to split. Of course, yes, five minute rule, but no one actually leaves after five minutes of no-show.

Instead I think I’ve settled into something that will fit comfortably both in qualitative research and in my criminology class. I hope. It’d be my luck it gets bounced and I need to scramble for something else. The idea will still work perfectly for crim (one of the crim paper options is an intensive literature review). It’s qual I have to worry about on three fronts even. First the project has to be approved at the prof. level, then the IRB level, then I have to get permission for the interviews. Possibly from more than one person, as I want to look at college sports participation. I’m not sure if I’d need consent forms from coaches/administration in addition to the players themselves.

I’ve got a whole giant post-it note of ideas, including:

• female genital piercing
• phone harassment at call centers
• women in their second career
• hospitality and women traveling alone; safety issues? differences in guest treatment?
• women bloggers: girl gamers and social comms
• gender tracking of petty offenses
• sexual harassment in female dominated workplaces; possibly looking specifically at the reaction to and feelings about harassment seminars
• job negativity/dissatisfaction and workplace culture
• reflexive authority and abuse within a teaching environment (build on Zimbardo and the assumption of authority)
• regional responsiveness to sales via the phone; how accents change perception of competence, knowledgeability, persuasiveness, and overall impression

I have another equally full post-it with notes about the project I do want to do.

I finished my reading for Qual, finished my paper (Jesus, the first week of grad school and I have a nine page paper written for my Monday class by Wednesday. This scares the crap out of me.) for qual, made it through two chapters for quant, working on the problems for chapter two in quant (I have chapters three and five to finish).

This leaves around five or six articles to read for crim, designing a methodology for my qual project, filling out the IRB forms, editing the paper, playing around with NVIVO to start learning it and –

I’m sure there’s more.

Grad school is nuts.

I’ve read a couple of articles over the last week I wanted to talk about. But I never found time before now and I just don’t have the energy. I’m so eager for the weekend. Even if it’s a working weekend, it’s a weekend that doesn’t involve going anywhere. So instead I’ll just link them all up for your perusal:

• The working wounded: Most women don’t have a choice to stay at home with kids; this is an essay on the Mommy Wars and the latent assumptions within the discussion
• Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls; a study of sexualizing girls and young women in “advertising, merchandising, and media” and its impact on self-image — this is something I’d love to do a study on someday
• The 17th century women’s guide to looking good; amusing!
• Rise in births, abortion in Philippines feared with phase-out of US birth control program; aid pulled, out comes baby?
• How cops can measure gunshot residue on your hands; new developments in testing for residue in Brazil
• Federal court slaps data theft victims; they let our data get stolen and we have no recompense. Crap, I just opened an Old National account when I moved here
• “Cosmic train wreck” may derail theories of dark matter; intergalactic collision = theory collision
• New fossil ape may shatter human evolution theory; speaking of theory collision
• Rise of the Silver Surfers: The Over-50 Social Media Opportunity; retire and start blogging!
• NBC pumps up for ‘Gladiators’ redo; the return of American Gladiators. Seriously, what? Just? What?
• Morning-after pill popular but under pressure; happy anniversary emergency contraceptives!
• A BA in ladylike submission!; apparently Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has a new course. In homemaking.

And in other news, Bioshock is my reason for living at the moment. I hope to make some time to actually play this weekend.

So, now, I go to bed. Yay bed.

Cat on my head.

Domain successfully reclaimed. Databases almost successfully retooled and updated. Some data lost, recreated the pages and link listings. Mourning the loss of all comments. Wonder how long it will be before someone reads this page again. Fond of speaking without pronouns.

All pretentiousness aside, I’ve somehow managed to survive my almost first week of work + graduate school. This makes me happy; it would make me happier if I weren’t still sick. Yes, the head cold is still here and on top of that I managed to bite my tongue somehow last night while I was sleeping.

There’s apparently hurricane Dean boiling and brewing right now. We talked some about this last night at work and it didn’t really hit me until this morning. You see, I just started working for Hyatt. (Queue another post sometime later about the insane corporate culture they have.) I’m in training to be a reservation agent, which means I’ll be talking to those people fleeing from the gulf. Already people are packing up and leaving New Orleans for fear it hits them and the levees break again.

You can talk all you want, and I know I spent a lot of time being pissed off in my econ class because of the horribly racist and classist connotations of the professor’s take on the situation, about Katrina and just how bad the government response was and what should have been done to help move people out and why some couldn’t, etc. And it really hit me that I’m going to be working in hospitality during hurricane season. I’m going to be assisting this people, or at least be trying to, find them a place, any place to go that they can take themselves, their things, their families, their pets that’s safe. That’s really a pretty awesome responsibility.

In other news, I think I have about three different ideas for research papers right now and at least one doesn’t seem to have much in the way of literature out there about it, at least when I did some preliminary searching on the topic yesterday, so it’s a possible thesis topic. The other big one probably has been done but I haven’t actually tried a lit search yet. I plan on doing some Monday afternoon. This weekend is strictly for relaxation and catching up on stuff I need to do.

Uwe Boll’s Five Steps To Being A Wanker

Uwe Boll FTW!

So, celebrity deathmatch: Uwe Boll vs. Anne Rice; who wins?

And now I go in for my second day of work with a nasty head cold.