The bullets are addressed to different people and organizations, and I doubt very much that some of them would recognize these were addressed to them even if they received an actual memo. (It’s been that kind of week.)
Be it known that:
Category Archives: Personal
This seems backwards to me.
My tenure dossier is due in 24 days.
My application for a sabbatical leave is due in 3 days.
Is it really possible to wrap your head around the possibility of a sabbatical, let alone map out the projects you might complete during such a leave, before the tenure dossier is wrapped up?
(Maybe they’re just messing with me.)
Monday brainteaser.
This is our third teaching day of the semester (which started last Thursday), so of course, WebCT’s servers decided that it would be a good time to freak out. (The official description:
… experiencing network latency within our VA2 data center that may be affecting your Blackboard environment. This may result in increased latency and/or packet loss when trying to access your hosted Blackboard system.
But you can’t tell me that this doesn’t amount to the servers freaking out, especially as they are still “working with our Infrastructure team to determine the cause and to work towards a resolution.”)
So here’s the brainteaser:
On the perils of choosing a T-shirt on a Friday that includes a committee meeting.
One of the best things about Fridays on my campus is that hardly anyone is around. Not only does this make parking less of a headache, and interruption mid-task less probable, but it means that there’s even less pressure to dress in a manner that asserts, “I am a responsible adult!”
I mean, I am a responsible adult, but must I prove it by wearing a suit?
Why a Luddite like myself likes teaching an online course.
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a Luddite who composes her posts on wax tablets before uploading them.* So it may seem curious that nearly every semester I teach at least one section of my Philosophy of Science course online.
What would possess me to do such a thing? The ability to make active student learning inescapable.
What are we *really* like? (Thoughts on meeting people you know from online in real life.)
In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers’ assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers’ real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae.
Maybe philosophy’s to blame, but I think there’s a deep and interesting question here.
Piecing together what happened in New York last weekend.
Actually, my memories of the semi-spontaneous confluence of ScienceBlogs sciblings in the vicinity of the Seed mothership this past weekend are quite vivid, and I’ll put up a proper post on that later today.
But in the event that I hadn’t remembered things so clearly, and had to piece it all together from what came home on my digital camera, my reflections on the last few day might be distorted.
I might end up with something like this:
How big a risk is my laser printer?
On the basis of this article about emissions from laser printers, our department administrator came by this week to take my HP 1200 series LaserJet away.
I said I wanted to keep it.
Passing thoughts about conference presentations.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was sucked out of the blogosphere for much of last week by the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) 2007 Summer Symposium .
I did not live-blog the conference. I did use overheads. Why, other than being a tremendous Luddite, would I use overheads?
Answering my email in a post.
Two items in particular.
From Julie:
post something!
I’m starting to worry!
From Super Sally:
no blog since we left causes a mother to worry
Hope you are just busy.