Author: Dan

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Walking to class

Wow, 3 days and 3 posts to my blog. I haven’t been this consistent in a while.

Anyway today left the wheel chair in the trunk and I walked to class. And really the wheelchair is no faster than walking with crutches. The only advantages the chair has are that when I get tired I can stop and rest very easily and I can be pushed by someone else if needed. But with the crutches I can take more direct routes than looking for the wheelchair accessible doors, etc.

I finally decided that the wheelchair is a convenience, not a necessity 95% of the time. Sure I get worn out using the crutches. But I got worn out using the chair too. My left knee is very unhappy with me from all the walking, but that’s nothing new. So from now on I with be walking a lot more and wheeling a lot less. Hopefully it will just get easier from here.

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Really a student now

Well, I’m really a student now. Spent 6 hours today talking homework for Qualitative Methods I. Qual I is basically statistics and regression analysis. Which isn’t that hard, I’m reasonably good with SPSS. Except for this homework we had to show our work. So while we didn’t have to do everything by hand, I used Excel, we couldn’t just plug the data into SPSS and interpret the results.

I haven’t had to actually show my work in a stats class since an undergrad class in Elementary Statistics in 1999. So I was a but rusty, ok extremely rusty. 🙂 Thankfully Stephanie is good with numbers and she helped get things figured out. Thanks Hobbit, my brain hasn’t had to work that hard in a while.

I went to a SLIST Ph.D student meeting last Friday. There were about two dozen students there. Most of the Ph.D students are more focused on educational technology, there are about six or so information science doctoral students. This Friday I have a meeting with the other doctoral students that are funded by the same grant I’m on. I’m well on my way to getting back in the academic swing on things.

In other news I’ve had a new computer for a few weeks now. it’s a Dell Dimension 9100. the specs of mine are a little different then the system in the review, but it’s a very nice system and I’m happy to have a computer that works like it’s supposed to.

On the baby front Stephanie has a doctors appointment tomorrow to see how things and going with Peanut. More about that tomorrow.

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What’s new

Well I’m now in Week 2 of classes. I just have class on Monday and Tuesday afternoons 4 to 6:30 so it’s not too bad. Driving is going ok, just wish gas wasn’t so expensive. Parking is a pain on Tuesday afternoons so last week Stephanie drove me to class and then shops. Thanks, Hobbit!:-) The parking lot for the building I have to go to is super crowded and it’s a long haul to my class. Maybe the parking lot will be less crowded today.

Stephanie had an ultrasound last Friday, everything looks good. Details and pictures are on her blog.

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Gearing up for classes

Well today was spent gearing up for the start of classes Monday. I did a bit of graduate research assistant orientation and got keys to one of my two shared offices. Yeah, apparently I have two offices. After that I talked to Doug about independent study stuff for a while and then he, Stephanie and I went out to eat lunch at a pizza place near campus. Then Stephanie and I went and got my student ID, signed me up for health insurance, and got me a parking permit.

Then I us drove is home. I didn’t scare Stephanie too badly and I wasn’t a nervous wreck when we got home so that was good. Now I just need to drive to campus and then I should be able to repeat the process by myself. Hopefully anyway, my sense of direction is usually pretty bad. 🙂

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Great quote from NASA

The space shuttle has problems, everybody on the planet knows this. So NASA is going back to a more traditional rocket with the payload on top design for future manned missions.

The New York Times has an article on the new design. The best quote from the article is from the new administrator of NASA, Michael D. Griffin;

“As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don’t care what they shed,” he said. “They can have dandruff all day long.”

But funny quotes aside let’s hope this new plan gets the U.S. back into the space exploration business.

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Macs, and Tigers and Hard Drives …oh my!

Well in my post last Monday it was going to do losts of computer related things. Here’s an update on that. I burned some DVD’s finally and the iMove project is now living on the Mac’s external hard drive. The Mac has been formatted and OS X Tiger has been installed. Windows file and printer sharing works perfectly, just remember to put the Mac and your Windows machine in the same workgroup. It will save you a lot of trouble.

Stephanie now has her own external hard drive, so now all our desktop computers can be backed up.

In other news, we have a fancy lawnmower now, a Black and Decker Cordless Rechargeable Mulching Mower with Bag. Haven’t taken it out of the box yet, it’s extremely hot here and hasn’t rained in weeks away.

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