that's all.

these allegedly arrive today. we'll see.

Gave my first F.
Rode the Hillcrest shuttle for the first time.
Took advantage of a warranty on my car. Goooood move on the warranty.

I refuse to give a lab tour if I do not have a lab.

Being that it will be my birthday, I will probably go drink a caipirinha instead.

<3,
mag

my dish soap, that is. my lovely organic hippie colorless green-apple-flavored dish soap. (for you chomsky fans out there, that was totally accidental.)

i came back from vacation/conferencing a few weeks ago and a fruit fly, the result of undone dishes, had drowned in it. i was semi-grossed, but squirted him out and washed as usual. but man, the sink reeked--this awful, putrid, sulfurous reek. i figured it was something stuck in a pot, that then got stuck in the drain, and has continued to reek from there ever since.

but last night i was doing dishes and decided that the reek was coming from my dish soap. i made M verify this (much to her displeasure), and tonight i threw it away.

does anyone out there have ANY idea what happened? did the fly make it go rancid? is organic fruit-flavored liquid soap just a bad idea?

I just got my course reviews back from last quarter. I was a little scared to look, but they turned out pretty well, with a 93% overall approval rating for the course. I think that's good, though if it *is* good I'm a little worried about keeping up a high level of performance.

The TA's got a lot of props too. I was no help there, as I had no idea at the outset what to tell them to do, so whatever they did right they did themselves.

Also, someone wrote that it seemed unfair and mean to single out students who were text messaging in class. It's not appropriate classroom behavior, they thought, but I occasionally got unexpectedly rude and embarrassed them in front of the class.

They also thought they were getting better grades on average. Of course, maybe they did get those grades, as only about 2/3 of the class was there to do the evaluation, and I'm guessing it was the top 2/3.

The eyetracker is being crappy. I have a graph of it being crappy, which I would post here if I could. As always, it's hard to tell if it's the eyetracker itself being stupid, or the interface I'm using.

If we designed computers, why is it so flipping hard to understand what they do??!? And not just by me, by actual software engineers. I think at this point I deserve my merit badge in cowboy software design.

[as seen on web page of a prospective TA]

In addition to being cute, she also overregularizes ("blowed up"). I think I'm going to have to use this in a class.

I was surprised there weren't more.

Leonardo was left-handed and gay!! Woohoo!!

Random article on left-handedness.

I brush my teeth left-handed. Does that give me some credit?

Article: http://tinyurl.com/39rrb4

In case you haven't heard, Southern California is on fire. I knew it was smoky last night when I went to dinner. But then this morning, I went out to the bus, and there were chalk scrawlings everywhere that said "UCSD IS CLOSED 10/22/2007." It almost seemed like a joke. The other would-be passengers and I looked up as tiny particles wafted down from the sky. Then I got an emergency notification voice message on my phone from UCSD telling all nonessential personnel not to report to campus, just as the shuttle pulled up, and I went back inside.

I'd slept really poorly last night for a variety of reasons, so I conked out on the couch with my computer and a cat. Now I'm getting kind of worried, and annoyed at the same time. I have work to do, and it's much easier to do it in my office. There was a talk scheduled for tomorrow that I really wanted to see. I have to get some talks of my own ready. I'm about to leave for a conference. Are planes grounded?

What if something happens to my apartment while I'm gone? (More importantly, to the cats?)

Moreover, why doesn't it smell like smoke in here at all? Is this place completely sealed to the point that I have a limited supply of oxygen?

Still smells like smoke outside. Yikes.

Earlier this afternoon I attempted to wake myself up by going for a run. I'd done the same yesterday, but this time I took an unfamiliar route through froufy La Jolla neighborhoods and took my iPod for a test drive. The air was clear, the sun was bursting through the clouds, music was pounding in my ears, and the preternaturally green grass turned into Rose Canyon. Canyons are somehow much more vast and impressive and three-dimensional when you're on foot than when you're in a car.

It really struck me at that moment what a California thing I was doing--going running on a sunny Sunday, iPod in hand, amidst idyllic scenery.

I wish I could've recorded it all to play back--the sky, the grass, the fleeting elation. It even smelled good from all the eucalyptus leaves, and maybe some other stuff too. I think the dead leaves get potpourried in the sun because it's so dry here (though it rained yesterday, which was utterly foreign).

Had fun making lasagna last night. I'm looking forward to the leftovers.

My laptop keys have an annoyingly long refractory period or something. They keep missing my double consonants. Grr.

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=41765

Apparently my brief LJ rant about the "crockus" (the nonexistent brain part cited by a popular lecturer as one of the Differences Between Boys and Girls) has not gone unnoticed.

I am strangely elated.

"Detailed instructions for submission of proprietary or privileged information is available on the FastLane Website."

Apparently, it's completely acceptable these days to assume that the gender status quo is biologically prespecified (convenient, huh?). I've been reading a lot of stuff lately about this that makes me quite angry, but I won't cite it here because I presume it's calculated to stir up krrrrazy feminists like me. Feminists who want an egalitarian society and pretty much get along with men. Anyway, the most amazing instance of this is that someone actually made up a part of the brain that differs between men and women. Then, he made up a person who named the brain part.

I very much like what Mark Liberman had to say about this "neuro-indoctrinology" on Language Log, so I repeat it here:

In the first place, the ideas about what men and women are like haven't really changed much from the days when such theories were used to argue against women's suffrage or careers for women outside the home. The stories are now usually framed so as to make fun of males and praise women, but that's just a matter of how the advertising copy is written. These authors generally present a rather unpleasant picture of what boys and men are like: uncommunicative, out of touch with their emotions, distractable, obsessed with sex, aggressive and competitive. The idea seems to be that this is OK as retribution for all the years of negative stereotypes of girls and women -- and after all, similar ideas have been endorsed by many feminist writers. But the inverse picture of girls and women, though now framed in positively-evaluated terms, is pretty much the same the old negative stereotype of women as over-sensitive, over-emotional, manipulative gossips, who need to be protected from the rough-and-tumble world of men.

i think about this a lot.

My web page at UCSD is now online. Comments welcome. I'm a little worried that
-the font's too small,
-there's too much research detail (don't want people stealin' my ideas!),
-there's not enough research detail (want people to find it interesting),
-the beach picture is a little too much. But I'm not taking it out. It's not even San Diego, it's SC.

Enjoy..?

i registered online ONE MONTH AGO tomorrow. that's 31 days. they had "experienced unprecedented interest" and had run out of cards. great. fine. but if you're touting yourself as a Convenient Sustainable Alternative to car ownership, you kinda have to be convenient. (and stop sending me self-congratulatory e-newsletters for a service i can't even USE yet.)

just saying.

Yes, even in San Diego. All the weather websites are saying it's in the low-to-mid 90's. Still don't regret selling my AC, but today there was nowhere to escape. The office has no AC (and I think all the campus coffeeshops would've been closed--not good as hot weather makes me sleepy anyway), and then I went to Peet's and their air conditioner was broken. I tried to tough it out with ice water, and then they closed early because it was too hot to work. Can't blame'em.

Then I went to S*buck's, which was full, and finally to a burriterie, where I ran out of laptop batteries. So I bought some blood orange soda and a full-length door mirror I've been meaning to get (go go gadget Civic backseat!!), and came home. Where I put on my swimsuit, turned the shower on myself, and plugged in my laptop. I'm trying not to drip on it.

I guess this is what my parents did growing up in SC with no air conditioning. Of course, they didn't have laptops to short-circuit. No complaints, though, evaporation works.

Back to work, so I can slack tomorrow night when my first Netflix arrives. !!

PS--I know I look pasty-white, but I have another photo that proves I've gotten some sun exposure.
EDIT--it's not an indecent photo, it's just rather unflattering and not worthy of journalizing.