Here, in the finest tradition of bloggers droning on endlessly on the content of their days, is what happened.
I went to bed at 1-am last night, for, near as I can tell, no good reason. I did some studying for a test I had today, and I got some reading done, and did some note taking and what not. My sleep schedule has been a bit wierd of late, so this isn’t a huge deal.
I woke up at 7:20-ish, but it was mid-sleep cycle so I was groggy and weird, which is never fun. Note to self, maybe earplugs can help prevent such oddities. If I can hit the sleep cycles just right, I can wake up without much pain. Feh.
I got out of bed and chugged a cup of tea at about 7:45, with the intention of leaving the house at 8:20 for an 8:40 breakfast.
At 8:05 I became seriously nauseated. It was clearly the fact that I chugged the tea (there was no dairy in the tea), but I couldn’t fathom eating breakfast. I knew that it would pass, and that it was probably a blood-sugar/hydration issue, but anyway. I trudged off to class/test at 8:47.
9:02, taking my illness as an excuse, I rode the elevator to my class on the 4th floor of the science building with two of my classmates. The test hadn’t started. I felt reasonably prepared. The professor offered to push the test back a while to let us cram, but given that the test was over neural-memory systems and what not, I thought this was a bad idea, as I was rehearsing what I knew about LTP.
I finished the test at 9:40, and I think I did pretty well. All I really need to do on this, and the next test, is get better than a 76 on this and the next test, and I should end up with something resembling an A- in the class. And I think I do that well. (It’s crazy. I do well enough on the papers and other parts of the grade which total to like 68% percent of the grade, that the fact that I consistently score in the 76 range on the tests, means that I’m in good shape). The professor had brownie-cookies in class which helped with the blood-sugar issue, and I had some water when I got to the class room which helped with hydration, and by the time I got into the test I was fine.
I had a instant message conversation with my father, which was vaguely surreal (Hi dad), while I waited for one of my TAe-es, or to talk the professor. Ultimately I met with the prof about my project for that class that’s going to avoid designing some sort of incredibly complex study to explore affilivive responses to identity and autobiogrpahical representations. It’s basically one of the things that I’m really interested in, with skin conductance tacked on for good measure, but I’m excited. If I can ever have enough of my brain cells free at one time to sketch it all out.
I had a meeting with another one of my TAe-es at 11. It was awkward and I took way too long to read the paper, but I think I was helpful enough
I ate lunch with a friend at 12. It was nice to finally eat and relax.
I met with the first TAe at 2. I hung out in the class room and surfed teh internets, from about 1 until the TAe got there. Durring this time I got caught up on the news reader, and began organizing some thoughts for the paper I’ve been writing today.
At 3 I was so exhausted that I went back to my room and promptly fell asleep. I had 1 cup of tea (well two, I guess if you count the cold one I had that morning) at this point, which is at least 2 less than I’m used to and, this time for completely different reasons, I once again doubted my ability to walk across campus.
I woke up at 5:20, pulled myself together, did a little bit of reading and then went to dinner at about 6, and had pasta and noodles, that were of passable quality, and then went back to my room and worked until the roommate came home 9. We talked and puttered about for about half an hour before going to the campus coffee house to do the nights work.
Here’s where I am now. I’m still working on the blasted paper, it’s coming along, and having reached the present. I think this post is finished.
Cheers!
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tagged: academia
I’ve been looking for….
Hi folks. I’m in the thick of the semester and the general craziness. It’s not bad–I kind of like it–but it is stressful.
Anyway, I just have a quick note and a question for you, gentle readers.
Does anyone know of a good open source XML-RPC weblog editor. I live and die by the one I currently use, but I’d like something with better support for LiveJournal and del.icio.us and what not. I just want something with a slightly faster development cycle. I’d also rather enjoy something that was a little more mac-y. By Mac-y I mean integrated and fast, I guess.
As some of you know I’m a big fan of NetNewsWire. This is an RSS/Atom feed reader that is incredibly wonderful and very useful. I heard the other day, that NNW leads the RSS reader market share by a large margin. This is impressive because NNW is a Mac-only application. Having said that, there are a couple of things that I constantly yearn for. First of all, I’d like it to download images refrenced in feeds for the last X number of entries, for better offline performance. I’d also, like a better ability to password authenticate for feeds.
So I came across a new feed reading application which addresses the second problem, and is generally a cooler looking application. And the new application is open-source, which I’ve become a big fan of. The other thing about NNW is that it has an incredibly slow development cycle. I’d like it to be a little faster to add features like delicious posting (which it has, but it could do better in this respect), or exporting of marked entries, or similar things. Or, here’s something. You can’t subscribe to an RSS feed from NNWs built in browser! So the other reader, Vienna, handles all my concerns, but isn’t as fast (and I’d have to run a perl scrip to import all my data from NNW, and I’m so not that hard cor) Otherwise I’m so there…. If I were going to start using a feed reader for the first time today, I would probably choose Vienna. If you aren’t as attached, I’d totally check it out.
Cheers,
ty
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tagged: technology
I was reading BoingBoing just now, (I’m not a big BoingBoing reader, not having the attention span for that genre of commercial blog) but anyway I saw something that Cory posted about an interview he did with Mur Lafferty. Mur is one of the chief geek podcasters (GeekFuActionGrip), and I’ve caught wind of her work from time to time, so being the distractible fellow that I am, I clicked through to the website for her podcast “I Should Be Writing” and was quickly assaulted with news that it was, once again NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is and event wherein participants attempt to write a complete novel during the month of november. It’s a national thing. A writing speed/endurance test to end them all. It’s now a much more organized thing than It was four years ago when I was actually writing a book, and I remember thinking at that time, why bust your ass to write a crappy novel in november: clearly the way to make it work was to write steadily and continuously. For the past two years, when I realize that its NaNoMo, I get a sinking feeling. I wish I had the time to write like that in November. I wish I had a story sketched out.
NaNoWriMo (and the preparation I’d have to do) has gone on my list of “things to do if I don’t get into real graduate program.” I’ve been making a list of all the cool things that I could do if I weren’t in academia for a while, as part of my “lets be rational and not put all of my eggs in one basket” plan of getting into graduate school. I will go to graduate school, and I will do research. If I get time off now, I’ll also write another book.
So much of the way I remember my life, hinges on the book I wrote. There’s a bit of a confound in that I was writing that as I came out, but nevertheless. One part of the story that I think I tend to ignore/forget from time to time, is that I started another book after I finished the first, that sort of fell flat, because of the craziness that was my junior and senior year of high school (which strangely–or not–marks the beginning of my academic journey).
I began working on an outline for another book this summer, and it really didn’t go anywhere. I’ve been carrying that notebook around for a few weeks (it has some notes on books I’m reading too, but never mind,) and I don’t think that project is intriguing enough to justify the effort. So another one bites the dust.
I’ve noticed, as I’m sure long time (ha!) readers of the site should (you’d better!) notice, that my writing here has improved. I sort of want to know what my fiction might sound like if I were able to get off my ass and write it.
sigh
Well, There you have it, another TealArt entry… Funny how that happens. I hope you all are well.
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tagged: TealArt