Archive for July, 2010
I’ve been slowly working on my MSc research proposal. Still far to early to post any of it online, but it’s starting to take shape. I’m using Papers to gather journal articles for reference as I’m working. Today, I added 33 articles to the stack, on top of the 63 I’ve already gathered. That’s not manageable. But Papers has some great tools to help cut through stuff quickly. I can sort the articles by the number of citations they have, which pushes “important” articles up to the top of the list. Then I can work through them all more effectively, without worrying about missing anything important.
Of course, Papers is also to blame for the tall stack of papers to read. It makes it almost too easy to find articles.
A giant list of 96 papers with 33 new additions becomes a filtered list of 31 papers to read first, sorted by “importance”. Now, if I had an iPad to read the papers without being tethered to a computer (or killing a forest of trees, and draining several unicorns of their blood for inkjet printer cartridges…)
fresh ground coffee beans, steeping in the french press, before pushing the plunger to strain the goodness. best. coffee. evar.
I was asked to turn in the iPhone last month. Due to the contract setup, it couldn’t be cancelled right away, so I was able to borrow it for an additional month. That month is up, so now I just finished nuking the iPhone again so I can turn it in. I’ve likely saved the University hundreds of thousands of dollars by advocating and using free and open source software for nearly a decade. But that $50/month will probably be what finally saves the University from budgetary destruction. Phew. Disaster averted.
I was planning on reverting to my iPod Touch until iPhone4 is available in Canada. But The Boy™ accidentally smashed the screen while we were fishing a couple of weeks ago. oops. Now I’m IOS-deviceless for awhile, until I can pick up my own phone sometime this month. I’m starting to twitch already.
a surprisingly strong system just blew through the city. tornado warnings. severe thunderstorm warnings. flooding. 2-inch-wide chunks of ice falling from the sky. It’ll be a fun ride home…
Update: The U of C rooftop greenhouse was pretty much destroyed by the storm. yikes!
Greenhouse photo by Tannis McCartney
the education tower, rising above the U of C campus.
I headed over to Education to chat about blogging with a group of PhD students as part of a summer course.
We dropped Aunt Helen off this morning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the airport so empty. spooky.
I don’t have any footage of unicorns to serve as a proper chaser for driving the depressing funk away after the last few posts. This will have to do. Not much more fun than bumper cars. Even more fun, now that The Boy™ is old enough to handle his own car…
bumper cars from D'Arcy Norman on Vimeo.
From a cheery article on Helium.com:
The bottom line: BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years.
The oil giant drilled down miles into a geologically unstable region and may have set the stage for the eventual premature release of a methane mega-bubble
Lots of scary tidbits in an article on a planetary extinction apocalypse event – although with questionable reliability – and then this:
Most disturbing of all: Methane levels in the water are now calculated as being almost one million times higher than normal.
If that’s true, holy fucking shit. Things could get really interesting. And by interesting, I mean scary as hell.
Another weird part of this whole thing, I heard about it from a tweet posted by Roger Ebert. WTF? This would make a pretty awesome and dark film…
I really hope the article is just the delusional ravings of a crackpot loony conspiracy theorist.
Evan rides the roller coaster all by himself, underneath the backdrop of downtown construction.
lunch on the patio at the Black Lung. definitely need to do that more often. maybe after the construction noise dies down a little…