Weekly Report

1. This is the beginning of Week 6 of kitchen construction. There has been no progress for several days. There will be no more progress until next week. We are waiting for the countertops. They should be ready in roughly a week or so, I'm told. Once the countertops arrive, I'm told that construction will resume. I'm tempted to do something about cleaning up construction dust in the parts of the house furthest away from the kitchen.


2. The weather suddenly changed from stupid hot to stupid cold. On Thursday I was laughing at myself for buying a sweater on a day when it was well into the 90s. Today I wore the sweater and shivered anyway.


3. We are approaching the middle of the semester in statistics class. The rate of information transfer is approaching the speed of construction in my kitchen. The professor is stuck in a rut and is recycling many old slide decks about the same thing again and again.


4. The syllabus claims two midterms and a project. The first midterm has been scheduled for a point roughly two-thirds of the way through the semester. There is no mention of the project. How can someone teach the same course every single fall semester and still be unable to set a reasonable calendar?


5. Statistics fun fact: The professor's travel schedule during the second half of the semester may be completely complementary to mine. It is entirely possible that I may end up not seeing him for a month and a half. I don't worry about this much, as his teaching technique is to read the slides word-for-word while pointing at each word with the laser pointer. I really need to film this.


6. I spent statistics class writing recommendation letters. One great thing about being able to touch-type is that I can be looking intently at the projector screen while typing. Typing during class is less suspicious than a lot of mousing, right? I'm roughly halfway through the pile of letters that I need to write. Nearly 30 more to go!


7. Work has finally reached the point where deadlines and crises lurk around every corner. It now has much less potential to be boring.


8. The Topologist is in town for the week! He will be going back to Germany on Friday.


9. FoF has come to realize that more background is necessary before applying for first rate math graduate programs. As a symptom of a adjunctification of higher education, I have also been contacted for advice about graduate school by a student who is majoring in journalism. She was in one of my small seminar classes when she was a freshman. Most of the other classes that she's taken have either been so huge that the instructor doesn't know who anyone is and/or taught by part-timers, some of whom are no longer around and some of whom never went to graduate school.


10. One of the best things about working in computer science is the awesome parking. When I get to work early, I think that I park closer to my office than the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences parks to his office.