Hoarding

A new toy arrived today and has joined the collection! The iMac and one of the MacBooks both belong to the univesity; I'm going to have to put some stickers on my MacBook to avoid the sort of mix-up that happens on sit-coms.

Much time has been spent on configuring things and on the transfer of files.

I find this WAY more interesting than recounting the assorted end-of-semester things that are happening at school. Today I xeroxed my finals (May 7 and May 8); I just need to make copies of the formula sheet. Checked out a movie from the library to play in the gen-ed class on Friday. (There is no point reviewing with these students 11 days before the final exam.) Sketched out a half-assed calculus lecture for Friday about areas in polar coordinates. Been meeting with tense and upset students about things that have been blown out of proportion. Yes, definitely seems like it's the right time to fuss with computers.

I did put in the effort to do a nice demo in calculus today. We were doing the center of mass problems, and I used Grapher to print out the graph representing the region that I was finding the centroid of. I xeroxed the graph onto cardstock, cut out the region, and showed the students that the region could balance on the tip of my pen.

Perhaps if the technology gods smile upon me, the university may see fit to replace the seven-year-old G4 tower in my office with a shiny new iMac. If not, at some point I'll have to buy my own iMac for home and move the university's hemisphere iMac into my office.