The tendency to use unnecessary scare quotes appears to have infected the rest of my group! Why is “iPod Nano” scare quoted?!? Eeeeeck!!!
Category: university of michigan
When one is submitting one’s part to be integrated into one’s group report, one should refrain from using scare quotes for things that should not be scare quoted.
I really hope that by the end of this semester I will learn how to spell visualization*.
*For the record, I copied and pasted these instances of visualization from the instance that Word spell-checked and corrected for me.
I gave a workshop this afternoon about building a portfolio with Dreamweaver and now I’m looking at the evaluations. They’re all good (only five people showed up) but I’m curious about who wrote what. I don’t care about the actual ratings per say . . . I just found some of their comments interesting. I’ve been staring at the sign-in sheet and I think I’ve figured out who said what. I don’t really know why I’m so curious about attributing the comments to each person but I think it is because several of the students are my friends so I really want to make sure that whatever I talked about today fulfilled their needs.
And can I just say that talking for three hours* nonstop is really tiring? I think I’ve gained way more respect for my profs who can lecture for that long and still keep me engaged in the material.
*Actually, I only lectured for two and a half hours because it went faster than I expected.
For my infoviz class, my group is working on a fitness application that uses pedometers to track the number of steps a person takes in a day. The average American walks about 5,000 steps a day and most walking programs recommend walking 10,000 steps a day. My group and I have had our nifty pedometers (thanks to the UM Department of Family Medicine) for about a week now. Most school days, I walk around 7,000 – 8,000 steps a day. Over the weekend, my step counts were dismal (a little over 4,000 steps) due to the fact that I’m just at home working on homework. This morning, I walked over to the IMSB and worked out for a half hour on the elliptical trainer.
17,381 is the number of steps I’ve taken today. According to my pedometer, that’s about 7 miles.
“After three months, I finally have my IRB approval.”
gulp.
It BETTER not take that long.
Or I just won’t graduate anytime soon.
I think I dreamt about blogs and my thesis last night. I don’t remember much of the dream. I just know that it wasn’t a nightmare or a good dream, either. It just felt tedious.
I don’t want to dream about my thesis or blogs.
When I was younger, I used to have a very vivid memory of my dreams. For some reason, over the past few years, I just can’t recall hardly any of my dreams. I wake up in the morning knowing that I had dreamt about something but I just can’t remember what it was or how it happened.
I hate Excel – you know that sketchy place on South U. that provides cheap coursepacks by having students make the copies themselves and thus exploiting a loophole in copyright law. It stinks. It’s hot. It’s messy and dirty. The lines are always way too long. Their copy machines are super old and slow and the copies always come out misaligned and fudgy. This afternoon, I spent at least an hour getting my 300+ page infoviz coursepack – that included having to stop seven times to clear paper jams and then having to move to a different machine because the one I was at kept jamming (not that the second machine didn’t jam either). When I was making my copies today, I kept thinking that this place looks like a scene straight out of a bad John Grisham novel. It’s like we were all there trying to secretly make copies of confidential documents or something. That plotline kept me amused and silenced that voice in my head that kept saying, “Why am I here?!? Why can’t this coursepack be in a PDF on CTools? Why am I spending a perfectly nice, sunny Friday afternoon holed up in a hot, stinky room?!?”
I wish all of my coursepacks were at Dollar Bill. Sure, they’re more expensive but at least they’re quick and professional and I don’t have to make the copies myself.
And they also use the software that I worked on this summer! :)