The World at Your Feet

Check out this time-lapse video from the ISS. I think it might be the coolest thing I have ever seen.

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I Hardly Knew Ye

Sadly, just before noon today, my girlfriend's last remaining grandparent passed away. I didn't know Betty all that well, but she was always kind and friendly to me. She had a brush with death by pneumonia a few months ago, and while she surprised the hospital staff that time, it clearly did some damage. She just wasn't the same afterwards.

Last spring, my GF, her sister and brother-in-law, and Grandma Betty went to the finest BBQ joint in Buffalo. That's how I choose to remember Betty: smiling, laughing, full of joie de vivre.

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I Have the Power

I bought my current laptop back in 2006 or 2007. It was rather cheap, because life onboard ship is hard on electronics, so I didn't want to spend a lot of money on an item that was at daily risk of destruction.

It is still going strong, except the battery is dead. Even idling, the battery dies in less than 15 minutes. Sleep mode can be sustained for only an hour. I have to plug it in whenever I want to use it. It's still useful in some circumstances, as it is much more portable than my desktop machine; but it's utility in the academic setting is limited by the need to keep it plugged in at all times.

Thus I had to decide between getting a new battery and getting a whole new laptop. For $500-$700 I could get a low-end "ultrabook" which would be much lighter and yet still more powerful, with the benefit of half a decade of Moore's Law. But the old one's resale value is very very low, and it hurts my soul to throw it away. It's not like I need more processing power anyway, as I use it for office tasks and watching videos, not playing games or anything else processor-intensive.

Shopping for a new battery, I discovered I could buy an off-brand replacement battery for about $70, an official HP replacement for $90… or an official high-power battery (with twice the life) for $95.

Having received the new battery today, I am guessing the reason the high-power one is cheaper is that it was repatriated from a market where it was overstocked. The battery was made in China, but the packaging was all in Portuguese. The Brazilian market's loss is my gain.

I'm looking forward to seeing how long the laptop can run now. It will be lovely to do presentations without needing to stretch an extension cord to the nearest outlet.

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Music Over Time

We live in a time where we can review "live" works of art that happened in the past. It's kind of strange, really, what can be done with that ability.

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From the Academic Trenches

My adviser is perhaps ten years older than I am. She tells me that in a recent undergraduate lecture, she talked about riddle songs for a little while, and used a recording of the most famous one as an example. Most of the students in the class found it utterly hilarious, which confused her: the riddles are clever, but not in a very laugh-out-loud kind of way.

It was left to the TA to remind her of a particular scene in the movie Animal House. The professor swears she has seen the movie, it had just slipped her mind…

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Birthday plus Championship of American-Style Rugby

My girlfriend's birthday falls unfortunately close to America's most important secular holiday, Super Bowl Sunday. I am told that, in the past, this was annoying to her, because not everyone wants to go to a Superbowl party and a birthday party the same week.

So the parties have been combined. The plan was to have the Puppy Bowl on the upstairs TV and the Super Bowl on the downstairs TV, but the flaw in that was that people were more interested in socializing than anything else, and breaking the party in half did not advance that goal. There were about a dozen people, which is enough that both groups could have maintained minimum social mass, but it didn't happen. Perhaps next year we shall drag the upstairs TV down to the living room, and have both shows in the same field of view. The Puppy Bowl audio track isn't really all that important anyway.

There was the obligatory mountain of food, which is to say we still have multiple pounds of chips left over. Luckily chips take a while to go bad.

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Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.

In the Corps, the part of my job that consisted of actual work on things was about 30% unscheduled repairs and 70% scheduled maintenance. Dealing with all that scheduled maintenance required careful checklists of when things were due.

Thus, when I was applying to multiple MA programs, I created a long and complex checklist on a spreadsheet. It had every school I was applying to and what materials each school needed and when they needed them. I would check off each subtask and note when I had completed it. ("Statement of purpose to Drew: Due 1 Mar. Sent 14 Feb.")

Last semester was a stressful one, so I just reused the document. Most things were the same, in fact– they all still needed GREs, three letters of reference, etc. The only major change was a longer writing sample, but I already know what I was going to use: the paper I'd produced in my most recent research seminar.

However, I made an inexcusable mistake. The kind of mistake that, had this been in fact a maintenance checklist, could have resulted in serious consequences.

I failed to update the deadlines.

You see, MA programs tend to have admission deadlines of either March 1st or March 15th. PhD programs, however, have deadlines of either Dec 1st or Dec 15th. One reason is that some marginal candidates are not accepted into PhD programs but are offered MA slots. Another reason is that the two programs have very different funding implications for the university.

So, to summarize, I had chosen to work on my PhD admission once the new year started. Here it is, and I discover I am too late. I will be applying now for admission into the classes that start in September 2013.

I do have several different options.

1. I can take my MA and get a real job, skipping on a PhD that hardly offers a guarantee of success anyway. (I'm not sufficiently arrogant to simply assume that I'm a shoo-in for admission.)
   
2. I can work for a year, then restart school in September 2013.
3. PhD students are required to do one more semester of classwork beyond MAs. I could take that semester as a non-admitted student, and spend the next semester working on the language skills I will need for the PhD. Basically, I would be investing a year of time in the hopes of getting admitted. The downside of this is that the classwork semester is only useful if I continue my studies at UB. If I join a program elsewhere, graduate schools are not very big on transfer credits. The language skills, however, would always be useful.
   

"Adapt and overcome." I've got to remember that mantra. "Adapt and overcome."

UDPATE: I have scheduled meetings with two professors to talk about paths going forward. And before I discovered my problem, I heard good things from two other professors about my proposed project. Having interesting work will make one attractive to admission committees.

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A Third Party I Can Support

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For All I Know They Ended Up In Hornell

My sister's house is on the top of a hill. This makes sledding very impressive.

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Email and Wash My Hands of It

Whew, just submitted the last paper of the semester, a full half-hour before the deadline. Tomorrow I pack, bake cookies and mail them to Afghanistan, wrap presents, take my girlfriend out to dinner, then drive to the ancestral homeland to see my sisters and their families. Busy busy busy.

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