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.

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.

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.

Happy Monday

Well, let’s see. I drove by myself for the first time yesterday. It felt strange since I haven’t been my myself in a car for a long time. I just drove around the neighborhood. There wasn’t much traffic, although I did have to deal with stop signs and a traffic signal. It was pretty sloppy actually, my turns were to wide and my braking wasn’t that quick. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I haven’t found just the right seat position yet. I think I was a little too far away from the wheel.

In other news, I fixed a problem with my computer not starting Windows XP half the time. Turns out I just needed to update my video card drivers. Now if I could just make my computer shutdown and restart correctly I’d be happy.

I decided to update my iMac to OS X Tiger. As part of that I’m doing two things. One is finally burning an iMovie project that has been on the iMac for two years to DVD. But I have to wait for the blank DVD-R discs that I ordered to get here. Maybe they’ll show up tomorrow.

The second thing is I’m formatting the drive so I can do a clean install of Tiger. But I have 14 GB of 2770 songs on there that I don’t want to lose. So I ordered a 160GB OWC Mercury Elite external hard drive. That will give me plenty of room to back up the iMac hard drive (it’s only 60 GB) and room to store the next iMovie project that I forget about burning to DVD. 🙂 So this will be a busy week for the iMac.

I had a hard drive that I was going to use to back up the iMac already, but in the process on reformatting it for the Mac OS filesystem it died. It was an old drive that I had put in an enclosure, I hadn’t used the drive in almost 2 years anyway, so it’s no great loss. I’ve ordered a new hard drive for the enclosure so Stephanie can have a backup drive.

Well I’ll stop now, this post is getting a bit long. 🙂

Licenses and cards and stuff

Well Stephanie will be getting a new social security card in the mail soon. What they really wanted was the marriage license number which isn’t on the certificate itself, it’s on the receipt. Thanks for the tip Silvia. 🙂

Next week we’ll tackle new driver’s licenses and car license tags. Thankfully here in Missouri you can get them both at the same place.

If it’s not one thing

This has been a weird week so far. Yesterday we didn’t have any water. We didn’t think much of it at first, after all there is a lot of construction in our neighborhood and maybe somebody messed something up. So Stephanie calls the City of Columbia, who we thought we were paying for water. After we spent a lot of time on the speaker phone… turns out our house isn’t in the city water service area. We pay the city for sewer but not water, weird.

Anyway we found out who does provide our water and called them. Turns out the construction company that built the house was paying for our water until yesterday. Not that we knew this, we thought we had set up water service through the city. Anyway we got our water turned back on around 4:30 yesterday after a quick trip to the right office.

Today Stephanie was going to get a new social security card. However the social security office here in Columbia didn’t like our marriage certificate. They said it wasn’t official proof of a name change. So I emailed the Knox County Clerk and explained the problem. They said to find out what we need for an official document and they’ll send it. So we’ll see what happens I guess.

Misc. news from Missouri

Well we are now moved in to the house in Columbia, more or less. We’re slowly getting things unpacked, we’ll have more help with that this weekend when Stephanie’s parents get here,

We also now have a kitten named Mizzou. Keegan and Gracie seem to have fun playing with her.

And now for something completely different…. Farm Animal Friends…. be afraid. 🙂 Don’t worry it’s pretty funny.

Back in Columbia

Due to a shipping mixup, Stephanie and I moved all our stuff to Columbia a little sooner than we expected. Last Thursday I ordered two very nice Dell UltraSharp 1905FP 19 inch LCD monitors so I could give Stephanie my current monitors, a Dell UltraSharp 1900FP 19 inch LCD and a Viewsonic VE700 17 inch LCD.

Anyway the shipping estimate was 3+ weeks so I thought no problem, I’ll get them sent to Columbia, since we planned to move around July 8th. The next day I find out that my monitors have already shipped and are on their way to Columbia way ahead of the July 15th shipping estimate I got the day before.

So we need to get to Columbia and get there fast. We decided to go ahead and move all our stuff so we can be there when the monitors arrive. So we call everybody we know and start packing the house Friday night. By Sunday at noon all our stuff is packed in a 17 foot U-Haul truck and we are on the road. Roughly 10 hours later we pull into the house in Columbia.

Yesterday was spent unpacking the truck. Stephanie did 99.95 percent of the work, all I did was open and close doors. When you’re either using crutches or a wheelchair, moving large, heavy objects is pretty much not possible. But at least I did something. The unpacking was going to continue today, but Stephanie was worn out. So we hired some unloading help and they should be here later. The moral of this story is if a job looks too big for one person to handle, it probably is.

Tomorrow we will hop on a Greyhound bus for a ride back to Tennessee. After a few days there we’ll pack up the dogs in my car and head back to Columbia.

Well let’s see…

Since I last posted, I’ve gotten married, been on a honeymoon to Mexico and Belize, and made it back to Knoxville. Since coming back to Knoxville I have finished driving training finally, so I can actually drive my car now. Not that I’m all that crazy about driving again, it’s just one of those things you have to do.

Other than that Stephanie and I have been opening wedding presents (thanks everybody) and preparing to make the final move to Columbia. Looks like that will happen sometime around July 8. I’m ready to move, but it is a bit overwhelming to be starting all over. Matt, who has just left Knoxville and SIS for Memphis has some thoughts on moving as well.

Thanks Matt and everybody else who helped the wedding go smoothly and thanks in advance to everybody who will be helping us move soon.

In other news, I updated Stephanie’s blog and gave it a fresh coat of paint. Next I’ll try working on this blog a bit.