Too much travel.

Mostly so I can keep it straight myself, here’s a list of places I’m going to be through August:

June 30-July 7: Washington, DC
July 30-August 4: Boston, MA (with a trip on the 31st to MIT)
August 29-31: Seattle, WA

And I think I’m missing one in there somewhere.

It is the end of the semester. I have one of my seminar papers done, and am in good standing with finishing the other. Unfortunately, I sort of have to hold off on it, as it’s a quantitative paper, and we’re not learning the techniques I’m using until the last week of class. I can pick it up fast, but statistics and (quantitative) research methods are really something I have to be taught, I can’t just learn it by reading about them.

What else?

My gender and sport class is still torture. Earlier this month we actually made the instructor cry. So, instead of paying any attention at all, I’ve been writing bits and pieces in class. Maybe I’ll get around to typing it all up.

So, that’s really all I’ve got; except for the fact I’m on campus and really just… have no motivation to get work done. Not a whole lot of work to get done.

I just spent a half hour playing fetch with my cat…

…and it was terribly relaxing. Everyone should have a pet to play with.

Let’s see, what to update since the last time I wrote?

1. I got an assistantship! Yay!

It’s the one I wrote about earlier, working under the editor of Design Research Quarterly. The articles are pretty interesting, so even if the writing is dreadful in the pure form and it takes me five hours and three Aleve to edit one article, it’ll be worth it. The experience I get in the editing/publishing end will come in handy later on if I ever hope to have a position in the publication side of research (and the idea of me being a knowledge gatekeeper of that sort is both hilarious and intriguing). I also think it’ll make me an even stronger writer, also very necessary to surviving grad school.

And yes, because I’m materially minded, a partial tuition waiver. It’s only a 25% position, so they only waive 9 hours. I’m taking 11. I pay 2 hours worth and fees. The fees are what really suck. Still, it gives me about $2500 back out of the $4200 for the semester plus a (tiny) stipend. That’s nothing to sneeze at for something that’s in theory only 10 hours of work a week.

2. I’ve been sort of running stats study groups for our quantitative methods class. It’s more fun than I thought it would be because I find that I actually still remember and understand this stuff from way back in 2004 when I took undergrad stats. Also very helpful when you take into account that Sherkat tends to jump steps like crazy and assume we can keep up. So far I have been but I definitely have to remember to ask him to slow down and explain things when we get to the higher end stats formulas that I haven’t really dealt with or used. Regardless, the groups help me cement my knowledge, figure out alternate ways of explaining what’s going on, and it’s a great sort of ‘intro’ to teaching. Most of the tutoring I’ve done up to this point has been one-on-one, so the group environment is nice.

Is it weird I like statistics? I remember being the girl in high school who cringed through her math courses. I survived them and did well because I studied judiciously not because I was “good” at math.

3. I’ve been cooking a lot more since I moved down here. Some of it is out of necessity. I’m hungrier because I’m running around like crazy. But I also need the leftovers. I can’t eat out as much as I used to be able to; I really miss those nice big paychecks from CMR. Alas.

4. I have some thoughts on bootstrapping in discussions of prejudice that I kind of want to talk about at some point. When I’m not in the middle of sauteeing pierogis.

5. Also have thoughts on the use of the tyrant figure and anti-establishment coding vs. establishment frameworks in video games, also to be talked about later. See reason above.

Good lord.

I think I’m done. Okay, so, it’s only a preliminary proposal, really, but I’ve got the HSC forms filled out. I’m sure I screwed it up somewhere but at least it’s done. I have all my qual reading done. I even have most of my stats/quant stuff done (including the problems). The crim stuff is going to be interesting because I’m not getting the bible until Monday.

It was about $55 worth of printing for the readings. Two binders of readings for the semester. That hurts.

I toyed with the idea of dropping a class and taking two hours of readings in the department on sports and delinquency. Then I talked to work and bargained my hours down some. 32 is still considered full time so I get full time benefits. The paycheck… Well, I’ll have to figure that out when I get to it. Even at 40 hours I wouldn’t be making enough to cover all my bills. (This is the part where I cross my fingers and pray for the tuition scholarship to come through.) But I think I should be okay, at least until Nov.-Dec. financially. The real worry is balancing 32 hours of work and 11 hours of grad school courses. I’ll have to cross my fingers on that too. And send out a couple of emails about my final decisions on the matter.

Which I’ll do now before I forget.

There. Done. I love Semagic drafting.

Let’s see, what else?

I’ve been getting a lot of sales calls since I moved here last month. Just today I’ve had five since around 10am. I finally figured out why they keep calling though; my old number is on the national DNCL, not this one. Time to add myself again!

I have mixed feelings about the National Do No Call List. On one hand, I love not getting phone solicitation. On the other, I’ve done that job and the more people sign up to things like the DNCL the faster people like me go out of business. And the DNCL has some glaring blind spots that will get you every time:

• Charitable organizations (which is why the FOP — Fraternal Order of Police — can call me about once a month to solicit donations)
• Organizations you’ve already done business with (so if you stay at night at, say, a Hampton Inn once three years ago, they can call you)

So the DNCL sort of misses a lot of the egregious offenders of phone solicitation.

I also found time this week to finish Bioshock. I went with the “good” ending and made it out of the game with 950 achievement points. Not bad for a first play through. When I have more time I want to do it a second time, try a different plasmid build and maybe even pay more attention to the philosophy of the game. It’s obviously based on objectivism (”Atlas” and if Andrew Ryan isn’t supposed to be Ayn Rand I’ll eat my shoes) and I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of direct quotes from Atlas, Shrugged but it’s been a while since I’ve read the book.

See, this is what I love about video games (Roger Ebert notwithstanding): they can be as socio-politically/intellectually deep as you want them to be. Bioshock is either a philosophical ramble through an ailing dystopia filled with egoists and scientists so devoted to pure research they lost their sense of humanity altogether or it’s a really fucking cool setting for a survival horror FPS game.

Someone linked me this video of Miss Teen South Carolina flubbing her geography on a question about how to improve geographical education in the US. I cringe for a variety of reasons.

Word of the day: exegesis

I have a lot more to talk about but, frankly, after working on this stuff for quant for about 8 hours today… I want to get off the computer and do something fun.

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.

To do, in the future

Sometime this weekend, when I have time completely free and have caught up on sleep, remind me to write that essay I’ve been thinking about on the shifting and occasionally classist definition of “fandom.” Because I really don’t have enough to do in the next couple of weeks. And now I’m off to my 8 hour departmental orientation and then 5 hours of work directly after! Yay!