Claire - I guess it's a part of our nature. We all occasionally have to fight the urge to get moody, to get on our "pity potty", to just feel like griping. This morning it was Claire's turn. Unlike Abby, Claire can hold onto it for a long time unless there is a major distraction to turn her around. I suspect it was because she didn't get enough sleep. She tried staying overnight at some friends' house just down the street. Not unlike me, she found it difficult to sleep at a strange place, so by nine o' clock she was driven back home. Tonight Abby is going to sleep over at her friends house. So far so good... no phone calls.
Pool - Today was a gorgeous day: sunny, dry, and 80°. Michelle took all the kids and met up with another neighborhood mom (and her kids) at the newly re-opened Milford pool. She says Daniel was a real fish, but Michael didn't want anything to do with it.
Safari - When I look at the amount of technical books I buy each year, the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf monthly subscription starts to not look too bad. Just last month I purchased two (real) books that Safari had available in electronic format. The purchase price of the real books would have paid for several months worth of online subscription. Considering how fast these books gets obsolete and often replaced by a second, third, etc. edition, I'm giving it some serious thought.
del.icio.us - I'd mentioned a few days ago the service called del.icio.us, a "social bookmarking" service where you can keep your bookmarks online so that you always have them available. You can share them with others, edit them, categorize them, search them, and see what others are bookmarking. A few days ago I finally broke down and registered an sbilik account with them (sorry 'S'uzy). I still plan on maintaining the links sidebar below. I intend to use the service for things I want to bookmark for myself. Nonetheless, it's a pretty cool service and I wanted to put in a plug for it (again).
Layout - I'm a bit worried about seeing how things look tomorrow in Internet Explorer. I did a major overhaul of almost every generated page to re-structure how the "headlines" are done with the little author thumbnail. Rather than using what HTML calls a table, I did it all with some Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) trickery. The problem is that Internet Explorer is notoriously buggy in that area. In the redesign the only tables on the pages are the calendars, but those should be tables. Using tables to make alignment or columns of your page layout is such as hack anyway... Tom gave me an early confirmation that things seem OK.
Hey Scott-
I am here at the ISU library....wasting time b/c some system is down and I need to search PSYCHInfo for articles but cannot- Isn't it so convenient when you have a day off to actually get to the library and the library search doesnt work!! I HATE COMPUTERS!! Sorry, I'm better now- I've been having trouble with computers left and right- My computer, as well as the ones at Chestnut all have colds- and this sure isn't making homework easier- I got a new computer program today, though- (well, DAD got a new computer program) its call SPSS - for Statistics Package for the Social Sciences- Its not cheap! Its on all the comp's at school but I work late, often past closing time at the library so now I can just put it on my own computer and do my work at home- also, i'm hoping to install it on Dad's comp so i can work on it when I visit River Grove- plus, I'll be analyzing my own data during the year for thesis so it will be nice to not always visit campus to access it- well, i'm going to check the server again- I'll try to give you a call on wednesday!
When you say that your computers have colds, do you mean that they are infected with computer viruses? Or is it that the hardware is failing?
Not that we don't have the occasional mess up, but our computer systems here at home have been pretty stable. It's either the boys getting into things that they shouldn't (read "Timzilla"), me tinkering with things too much (well beyond the average user), or some really flakey kid program (some of those cheap edutainment CD-ROMs really are worthless!) But in the past 3+ years I've not had to deal with viruses, annoying window popups, spyware, adware, etc. It makes computers so much more sane!
Congrats on the SPSS purchase. I hope it helps with your research. Best of luck with this last year of gradual school. ;-) Don't miss Seth too much knowing that he's in Chicago while you are still in Bloomington. Before you know it, it'll be behind you. When I look back on it, it seemed like my time in grad school went by in a flash, but I know it didn't seem like it when I was going through it.
For a grad school diversion check out the grad school comics at:
http://www.phdcomics.com/
Posted by: Scott at June 26, 2004 09:02 AM