Out of my hat

The (anonymized) caption to a photo in the student paper here, depicting a young woman taking part in a recent blood drive:

DONER: A $SCHOOL_NAME student gives blood.

Leaving aside the fact that it’s a banal and self-evident caption which adds nothing to the story or the photo, that’s sort of an unfortunte spelling error in the first word. I mean, I’m as big a fan of don’t even know ‘er jokes as the next guy, but still…

Via Orcinus: Various federal legislations are being introduced to change the definitions of U.S. citizenship; currently anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically an American citizen (as are some others, such as Yr. Corresp.), including those children born to immigrants, legal or otherwise. There are those who think this encourages illegal immigrants to come to America and remain on the fringes of society… as opposed to, say, current corporate labour practices.

Via Clevermonkey: the state in which I reside is considering making motherhood outside of marriage illegal, with stiff fines applied to women who bear children out of wedlock or through “assisted” (e.g. surrogate) means. Apparently this will protect children, especially those whose parents will now bear an even higher financial burden.

I want to go home.

I wonder how long it’s going to take before I stop getting nervous about my bank balance near the end of every month. It has, in fact, significant digits plural on the good side of the decimal point, and should really get used to that fact.

The conference this weekend was good, although less of a getting-stuff-done sort of affair than I might have liked. OTOH, I do really like what it was, which was a lot of hanging out and seeing people whom I don’t get to see often enough anymore. And I got my hands on a couple of papers that I’ve been promised for about six months now, which is also a pleasing thing. (And yet, on another level it’s not because that was my last good excuse for not finishing writing one of my own papers. I guess there’s still “the proofs keep falling apart”, but that’s a bad excuse in other ways.)

Oh, and my world is filled with shiny new computer equipment. The laptop (still nameless for now) is being a little wonky, which might necessitate a service call in the near future. The mostly free iPod is going to make 75-mph-CD-management a thing of the past. And the acquisition of the large capacity portable hard drive means (once I’ve made sure that the transfer went OK) that the old, smaller-but-still-large capacity portable hard drive is somewhat in limbo. I know several people have expressed interest in the device, and I think most of them read this space; if you’d like to make an offer, drop me a line and we’ll talk.

Last night my laptop’s power adapter stopped working. Or at least, it stopped working well: if I hold it at the right angle and really keep it jammed in there physically it works fine, but this isn’t exactly ideal. Since the laptop in question has a battery life not long enough to illuminate any significant fraction of a mayfly’s existence, I believe the time has come for replacement.

I placed the order earlier today for all kinds of computer goodness. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get at least some of it before I drive down to confer in TN at the end of the week.

In other news, I’ve already got a rough idea of my schedule for next semester. (And it’s only September! I tell ya, tenure-track’s the way to go.) It’s pretty great, in that it satisfies the basic requirements of my current habitual existence:

1. No classes before 11 a.m. (In fact, no classes until noon.)
2. No classes on Friday, since that’s all too often a driving day for me.

And the classes themselves have all kinds of fun stuff in them, including the opportunity to bring terror into the hearts of our graduate students. W00t!

Heavy metal music was born for cellos, and quite possibly vice-versa.

Anyone who says otherwise is a filthy, filthy liar. Or just wrong.

Sorry I’ve not been writing here much lately. Between the beginning of term and recent national (US) events, I haven’t been able to come up with anything that doesn’t sound tawdry or banal. But I’m still here.

Swiped from Clevermonkey:

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

• For the first time ever, all three of the final exams I’m giving are on the same day: 1-3, 4-6, and 8:30-10:30 on December 15th. I even get a bit of a dinner break in there.
• I realise that it’s very old-school of me to complain about writing style in e-mail (“Full sentences, with clauses and everything? Proper punctuation? That’s, like, so 19th-century epistolary, dude.”), but I’m going to do it anyway. My first contact with a student this semester was an e-mail that consisted of one line, with no capitalisation at all and no punctuation except the question mark at the end. At the very least, is it unreasonable to expect people to introduce themselves when sending a message to someone they’ve never met?
• I’ve been distracting myself from course planning this afternoon by scheming and plotting. One of the objects of my scheming is a pair of diploma frames, that I might finally remove my degree-paper-things from the poster tube in which they’ve languished for lo these many years. I fail to see why it should be worth $200+ to me to put one of these into a frame, doctorate or not.
• Another plot concerns trip planning; it turns out that the Rochester/Toronto ferry has anticipated my desires and moved to thwart them far in advance of my own plans. At last, a worthy opponent…

Back in the States, back at work. Back in black. Back in the saddle again?

Not much to report, really. I’ve been spending my days throwing out a lot of papers (between the usual detritus that litters my office, and my discoery that I only have to keep old final exams something like six months, rather than the three years that I’d imagined… well, there’s paper aplenty to be discarded) and putting the finishing touches on my job-review dossier. At some point I should finish up the course prep that’s my main reason for being back here so early. (Well, that and the fact that my contract requires it. You know how that goes.)

On the Shiny New Laptop front, rumours are circulating concerning a new line of Powerbooks, apparently to be announced mere days before the end of the special back-to-school offer. This could be good, from either the “kewl newest thing” or the “discounted Apple hardware” perspectives. Stay tuned. And if anyone cares to suggest a name (I’ve had “Heloïse” in my head, but that’s not necessarily a name with good symbolism behind it) then feel free.

OK, enough typing for now; I need to locate the mysteriously missing envelope of evaluations from one of my classes last fall. More later.

Just in case anyone was worried, it turns out that the result I was complaining about yesterday is, in fact, true. And there’s a much nicer proof I’ve found, along completely different lines than the original, yucky one. So that’s all right.