So I've been good all day. Even though my Shiny New Toy arrived at my aparment shortly before I left for work, I've been getting grading done and teaching classes and drawing pictures for my upcoming talk and all the stuff I'm supposed to be doing. And not once have I seriously considered skipping out to go and play ( Read more... )

So it's like Week 3 of the term, which still seems cah-razy to me since Labour Day was yesterday. You'd think that after six years in the American semester system I'd be used to this sort of thing by now, but apparently not ( Read more... )

I suppose that's a bit of an exaggeration, really. But certainly my days as a wild rover this summer have come to an end: I'm back in the Industrial Midwest, and classes start on Monday next, and I really, really need to finish cleaning up my office a little bit. For the moment, I'm splitting my time between throwing out lots of extraneous paper ( Read more... )

After nearly three weeks in Southern Ontario, I've flown down to San Diego for totaldomination's wedding. My initial impression: totaldomination is a filthy, filthy liar, in that everything he's told me about weather in this part of the world is being disproved this week. I've seen a number of folks who are clearly here for the Comic Book Convention, including one guy at a ( Read more... )

So it's about a week into my vacation, and yet for some reason I've been spending the last two and a half days burying myself in web programming: javascript, php, sql... Theoretically this is all going to end up with pocket money for me someday, though, and so I'm sticking with it. Even though I'm, you know, not very good at it and have to look ( Read more... )

So it turns out that while trimmje was watching Chicago at a theatre in Birmingham, I was in Chicago at a theatre festival. Specifically, I just got back from a weekend at the Chicago Improv Festival. It was a pretty good weekend for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Chicago's a great city (at least the "Park West" area where the ( Read more... )

This afternoon I got an e-mail from a student wanting to know if there was class tomorrow (yes) and whether I was going to show the class my card tricks. Apparently she's friends with a couple of former students of mine, and they've been asking on and off whether I've shown the class my card tricks ( Read more... )

It's always pleasant when you book a room at a cheap hotel fully expecting a rat-hole, and find that it's actually pretty pleasant. This is especially true when the hotel in question has unlisted amenities: for instance, (apparently) free internet access ( Read more... )

I was announcing to my class that there was going to be a quiz next Tuesday, and joked that if there was anything they didn't want on it, they should let me know so I could be sure to include it. Some laughs, some groans, about what I expected. I then made a further comment about how they could try and pull a Br'er Rabbit and the Briar Patch ( Read more... )

Much travelling about happening this month. I just got back from a trip into Ontario this past weekend; the centrepiece there was a graduate student conference in the social sciences, which isn't normally the sort of event where one might look for me. But it was kind of fun; I felt very scholarly sitting there listening to the talks and the ( Read more... )