e-aggressive

now, no one get your undies in a bunch, but i registered on (which is not the same as becoming a member of) e-harmony. the only reason i did it was because i got a hundred points on mypoints. to register, you fill out this un-buh-lievably long profile form. you think you're done when you click 'finish', but it turns out you're only 37% done. you have to be a member to do the other sixty-three percent. no thanks, didn't want to do it anyway, just wanted my hundred points. my answer to, 3 things you can't live without: giraffes, snowplows, cheese. in hindsight, the snowplows is true.

this was three days ago. i've been sent thirty-eight matches (apparently, i'm very matchable), each in a separate e-mail. in addition, e-harmony has sent me over a dozen photo 'nudges', become-a-member reminders, and welcome messages. i have a blackberry. please. stop. sending. me. e-mails.

today i fought back. i went to their website and made my profile inactive. i have to give them credit though, they really try to hook people up. relentlessly.

google scholar (tm)

a while back, my very intelligent and wildly intelligent cousin eric (sorry ladies, he's married) e-mailed me to say that he had discovered my level of fame reaches well beyond blogging as he had been searching for dissertations on proquest (a scholarly search engine) and had come across my master's thesis, which, technically, is published, making me, technically, a published author. last week, as a friend and i were working on our quantitative methods homework (and having a blast, by the way), i remembered this e-mail, and, as we were looking for something to do other than our homework, we booted up google scholar and searched for "penny black diffusion of innovation theory". the first result, my thesis. and you can purchase your very own copy! only 37USD for a .pdf, or 75USD for a hard copy. if you're really interested in reading it, i'll loan you my copy; it'll put you right to sleep.

oh, awkward moments

so i'm working at my desk, minding my own business this afternoon, when a voice begins to penetrate my concentration. it's a loud voice, irritated, argumentative, coming from the lobby of my building. now that i can hear the voice, it's the only thing i can hear, the only thing i can focus on. it goes on and on and on and on. finally, i can't stand it any longer. i get up and close the door between my program's offices and the lobby. i have to leave the door partially propped open however, because it locks from the other side and people need to be able to enter our offices. i see the man sitting in the lobby, talking on his cell phone. it's been at least ten minutes and he hasn't stopped talking. loudly.

ah, sweet bliss. the sounds of the loud, agitated man are muted and i can concentrate on work again. after awhile, i notice the voice has completely stopped, there is silence in the lobby. i get up, glance through the glass door i had closed, and see the previously occupied chair empty. triumphantly, i knock on a co-worker's door. "someone was not using his inside voice out there!" i say to my co-worker, whose office shares a wall with the lobby. we chat about the loud man and his inconsideration and such for a minute before i go back to work.

a few minutes later i need to use the restroom. i open the door, this time propping it fully open and as i rise to a standing position from setting the doorstop, i see the cell phone talker sitting in the chair in front of me. he's looking at me and i know he heard every word i said to my co-worker. i smile politely, walk across the thousand-mile lobby, use the restroom, and walk back across the endless stretch of tile, all the while knowing he's there, watching me, planning his next cell phone conversation, his next volume level, his next audience, all in retribution.

odds and ends

today i had the pleasure of attending an irb training with my supervisor who slept through the entire thing. whenever you do research, you have to submit your proposal to an 'irb' - something review board - which allegedly are in place to protect human subjects (participants in your research). the truth is, these irb's serve to protect the university from liability issues but they don't say that. the timing of this training was a little late as 1) i have already completed the on-line, much more comprehensive, irb training; and 2) i submitted an irb application 2 weeks ago. but, as a lowly grad student/project assistant, i had to attend per my supervisor - who, did i mention, slept throughout the training??

ziva's crawling and oh man, is she cute. of course, she won't crawl on command so if you put her down, wanting her to perform, she looks up at you as if you've betrayed her and tears fill her big blue eyes causing your heart to break and your arms to reach down and pick her up again. she may never learn to walk.

it was 0 degrees when i woke up this morning and 5 degrees when i got to work. and no, i don't get tired of reporting the weather to you all.

i'm starting a new study group. i sent out the invitation to everyone in my classes and got a pretty enthusiastic response. i had to find a meeting room large enough for us and we start meeting next monday. we'll see how it goes.

my laptop has a virus even though i have anti-virus software. i need to take it to the computer doctor on campus and see if he can do anything. i know antibiotics won't work because it's not bacterial but maybe they'll have something to knock it out.

someone stole my coffee mug at work.

and so, my friends, now you know why i haven't been posting a lot lately. while i've been crazy busy, nothing very exciting has been happening. school is intense and all-consuming and when i'm not at school, i'm working and when i'm not working or at school, i want to sleep. it's not yet 8:30 pm and all i can think about is crawling into bed and closing my eyes. of course, then i'll lie there for two hours thinking of everything i need to be doing (like bringing in the trash can from the street that i've left out there for 2 days, shoot!). so it's homework for a few hours before i get to fall into that beautiful bed upstairs. i'll leave the trash can for tomorrow.

joke of the week

tourists visiting a natural history museum were marveling at the dinosaur bones on display. one of them asked the guard, "can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?" the guard replied, "they are 65 million and eight years old." "that's an awfully exact number," said the tourist. "how do you know their age so precisely?" the guard answered, "well, the dinosaur bones were sixty five million years old when i started working here, and that was eight years ago." - contributed by my quantitative methods professor (suspender-wearer at right) in an attempt to illustrate the relative meaninglessness of too many digits after the decimal. he is a funny guy.

winter lesson #173

you can't leave soda in your car here.

compassionate friends here responded by saying, "well you know you can't put soda in the freezer, right?" yeeeees, but i don't think of my car as a fuh-reezer, thank you very much. a motor vehicle that gets me from point a to point b, yes. a food-storage appliance intended to reduce the reproduction rate of bacteria, no.

that said, let this be a lesson to us all.