Bounded in a Nutshell

So far my biggest accomplishment this weekend has been to buy a bookshelf. The principal utility of said bookshelf is that it's just tall enough that I can easily put things on top of it, and it's right by the door and hence convenient for things like my keys, my wallet, the daily mail, etc. Plus it's a bookshelf, which means I have more room for books; I bought a shelf when I first moved here, and found that my currently collection of books filled it up. So I naturally kept buying books. Finally, a remedy for the situation has arrived.

Constrast this, now, with what I'm (still!) hoping the biggest accomplishment of the weekend is going to be: cleaning my apartment with a large fraction of the thouroughness I usually associate with moving days. This part of the plan's not going quite as well, partly because I have almost no patience with cleaning and no instinct for same, and partly because I made a library run yesterday and picked up multiple sequels of multiple books I was reading while at the parents' house the other week. I have, therefore, no end of distractions available to me.

Other than that, summer session is in full swing. Week two of throwing high math at students and waiting to see if they catch it starts tomorrow: on this week's menu we've got multiply-quanitifed statements and an introduction to mathematical proof. I'll also have a visitor in town for much of the week, furthering the goal of getting research done, and a long weekend thereafter.

Every now and then I remember that I have to figure out how JPEG compression works well enough to bedazzle a small class of high-school-teacher types with it in about three weeks time, but then I push that thought away again.

I'd hoped that I'd be able to take some of my vacation to maybe assemble the syllabus for my summer course, and maybe finished typing up one of the two or three papers that want finishing. My bad planning put paid to the first plan when I managed to leave the textbook in the Midwest, and so far the second hasn't happened yet.

Vaguely paying attention to recent news: the coverage of last night's vote in Parliament has been pretty awful. The general consensus in the press is that the Conservatives won a vote requesting the PM to dissolve Parliament, and have every right to be outraged that he hasn't done so already. What actually happened, of course, is that the Conservatives won a vote to direct a committee to recommend the dissolution of Parliament to the PM, and -- since I don't know that the committee has had a chance to meet and discuss this direction yet -- the PM's fully within his rights to maintain the government for the moment. And the American governmental reaction -- that Canada might be about to collapse into instability and chaos -- is a little silly.

My office is a place I go to in order not to do work.

Seriously. I work in coffeeshops. I work (after a manner of speaking) when I'm driving long distances. Hell, I get more work done waiting for car repairs than I seem to do on a typical day at the office.

A clarification is perhaps in order: my work as an academic can generally be divided into three sorts: teaching, research, service. That last tends to happen in meetings with other people, which don't happen in my office because there's not the room for them. Teaching as such happens in classrooms; attendant on that is grading (which happens anyplace but my office or apt., I sometimes feel) and having students visit to attempt de-confusion (which does, admittedly, happen in my office). And research itself isn't any more common in my office than anywhere else it seems to me.

So what do I do here? Well, I type. I suppose that's something, though it's not precisely what I get paid for. And there seems to be a lot of general mindwandering happening. And blogreading. And other newverbing, I'm sure.

Or maybe it's just been a bad couple of weeks from the productivity standpoint; I don't know.

Just a few quick things, since I feel like I haven't been posting enough.

• I've been reading through an extensive -- some might say exhaustive -- review of Mac OS 10.4 (AKA Tiger). He goes into a lot of technical details, some of which I follow; this is clearly a man who Knows His Shit. I haven't finished reading through it all yet, so I don't know whether the total impression is positive or negative; it's that sort of piece.
• Classes are over, exams are upon us. I'm expecting tomorrow's office hours to be quite busy with last-minute crammers who sat through the complete review of relevant material on Thursday last without absorbing any of it, and who then proceeded to not pick up their notes and texts until Monday at about noon. Or maybe I'm being unfair.
• Kitsilano in Vancouver. Lincoln Park West in Chicago. The Annex in Toronto. I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what it is these neighbourhoods have in common, because I feel that whatever commonalities are represented define my ideal urban environment.
• British Columbia is contemplating changing their electoral system from the first-past-the-post (plurality) system (that's currently used provincially and federally all across Canada) to STV on multi-member districts. It's not perfect, of course -- but then Kenneth Arrow's taught us that no voting system is perfect. And this one's a damn sight better than the current system IMO. I was chatting about this with an old friend earlier this evening, and he was telling me that the NDPs (avowed socialists, for the Americans out there) have been pretty lukewarm about the whole thing, despite being strong proponents of proportional representation in general; apparently this wasn't the flavour that they had in mind. This seems rather short-sighted to me: if an incremental improvement is available for the taking, why not go for it?