entropic_ankh's Xanga

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 02:32:17 GMT

a few notes on the tv shows ive been watching lately.

americas next top model.
This is the most immature group of girls ive ever seen in the second half of the season, for any cycle of the show that ive watched. their interactions on the set and off the set are so very middle school, from the way they collectively treat heather to the way they had trouble delivering lines in the covergirl commercial. i think this cycle has been a lot less demanding, and hasnt been forcing them to develop a varied portfolio. almost every shoot involves looking "fierce" instead of a range of looks, and it feels like there have been fewer runway challenges than there were in the past. i dont know that i feel any of the top 5 could be americas next top model.

project runway
was it just me, or were the previews for the second episode from a completely different show than the one they actually aired? none of the drama in the preview ads appeared in the actual show. other than that, there has not been enough time in the season to really develop a lot of opinions. the only designer i cant imagine getting aufed soon is chris march, because hes like the narrator or the greek chorus to the episodes that have aired so far. he gives us the gossipy back channel we really want to hear about.
a lot of people have opinions about christian, but i just watched the part where he said he would totally leave before carmen because the design was his and he owned up to it. that was awesome.
sarah jessica parker. was really annoying when she was talking to the designers and while they were pitching their pieces. it sounded like she was trying so hard not to step on anyones toes or disappoint anyone. i began to wonder if she was going to stand up for her own opinions at some point if it meant telling someone their design sucked. but when it came time for the runway, she said exactly what she meant but without sounding like a two faced bitch who is nice to your face but slams you when shes with the judges. i was impressed.

tim gunn's guide to style
wow. i wasnt too impressed with the first few episodes, but this latest ep with gina the retired cop was the happiest, most positive thing ive seen on tv in a long time. veronica and tim really started harmonizing off each others personalities, and gina was just so optimistic and irrepressible it was almost a joyous experience to watch her so gleefully made over. it was just straight up HILARIOUS when she talked to tim about her bras for god knows how long. i dont usually save guide to style on my dvr after i watch it, but i had to save this one to watch as a pick me up after a long day at school.

gossip girl.
only five more episodes! no more after january until the writers strike is over! im not even sure what it is i love about gossip girl, i just know that i do. i remember reading the first book and thinking it was so sickeningly depressing, but i guess i got over that somewhere along the line.

super mario galaxy
not a show, but has been taking up a significant amount of my time this thanksgiving break. im pretty engrossed in it, and you should prolly ask me about it later on once i finally get some distance from what im doing. all i know now is that im a little bit obsessive and i get way more invested in it than a sane person should.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:50:49 GMT

what a day

the highlight of my day was giving my chemistry lecture today. we're really running out of time to cover this chapter, but i still decided to give one last shot at explaining how avogadro thought of diatomic molecules to explain the experimental results of gay-lussac. i wasn't expecting to cover much more than that today, so i didnt have any further lecture prepared for the next section, on the discovery of the electron. however, we got through diatomic molecules, relative atomic masses, and even all the way through the electron stuff in one class period. and it felt soooooo good. i love talking about chemistry and physics so much more than biology. it just makes me so very happy.

today we also had a health seminar thingy about breast health and breast cancer. and when the doctor was telling us about how we can maintain our best health to avoid increasing our risk for breast cancer, she went through all the normal things of not smoking and not drinking too much. then she went right through good nutrition and eating organic to avoid pesticides and onward to don't drink out of nalgene bottles because they leach bad chemicals into your water.

i started feeling a little defensive about my constant companion in nalgene form, and wondering what i would say to people if they brought up that i shouldnt be drinking water out of it. prolly something about saving the planet from disposable plastic bottles.

then people started sending emails with links to organizations supporting the disuse of nalgene bottles. and then i started hearing people talking about the best places to find stainless steel water bottles to replace their nalgenes. and im thinking, hey, my nalgene is kinda new and it was a gift! im not ready to throw it out NOR am i convinced its bad for me.

so i did a quick literature search, looking for the most recent articles or studies on the topic. i found this article (linked here as a pdf) from Practical Gastroenterology, May 2007. I feel like this article lays out the issue pretty well in terms of what different studies have found and what the potential risks are. so if everyone else gets caught up in 'plastic bottles give you breast cancer', i feel fine continuing to use my own nalgene bottle.

Monday, November 05, 2007

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:42:38 GMT

i guess i really did need to sleep all day saturday, because I had plenty of energy today and yesterday, unlike most days last week.

saturday i woke up late, then fell asleep reading shortly after noon. I was so groggy when I woke up part way through the nd football game that I had to make another pot of coffee. after the game we went out to dinner, and i fell asleep again not long after that. the ratio of time spent on couches to time spent not on couches was greater than one, and thats not good.

sunday on the other hand, was incredibly productive. lesson planning, grocery shopping, cleaning, car maintainance. got it all done yesterday.

today our school started the accreditation process, and i had one visitor observing my 10th grade chemistry class. it was a long day, with a full length faculty meeting followed by a grade level meeting, but i still had energy when i got home to work out on the total gym! though its so dark so early now, i wonder how long this energy will last.

time for dinner.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:26:00 GMT

I have come to a very sad realization.

it happened this morning, while reading a post in one of my favorite movie blogs, kung fu monkey. He wrote about the writers strike in hollywood, being a movie writer himself (among other things). why strike? he asked, "because the cake is a lie." I recognized this as a reference to the video game Portal, from another blog I read about gender, sex, and video games called Heroine Sheik.

when kung fu monkey wrote that he only expected nine of his readers to get the reference, i started feeling like im in a very lonely place. Those people who would get it are people who play lots and lots of video games, and would have already played Portal which only just came out for PC and XBox in october, and hasnt yet been released for PS3. I, on the other hand, do not play video games.

I am a video game geek who does not play video games.

sure, im a casual gamer. i play brain age2 and animal crossing on the nintendo DS. I play trauma center and guitar hero on wii. but nothing in my level of game play should allow me to get references about cake and lies. instead its my obsessive level of blog reading, finding blogs with a high geek quotient about language, gender, politics, and just generally funny stuff.

::sigh::

Friday, November 02, 2007

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 01:39:39 GMT

How convenient. I was soooo sleepy all afternoon, and fell asleep wtih the cat on the couch before dinner. still groggy after dinner, i dragged myself to the computer to do some grading. well, now that im done with that, i'm wide awake of course. and its bedtime. oh well.

last week i got an email from one of my professors at penn, asking if he could use an essay of mine as an example of an A paper for one of his assignments. That just about made my week, if not my whole month.

wedding planning is going. . . well. going well in that now its actually going. kelly's visit was just about the best thing that could have happened in terms of wedding planning, talking with her made it so much less scary. especially since it was coming from someone i know "gets" me.

now its finally bedtime. i miss my blog. do you miss me too?

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:23:02 GMT

new playlists! first i arranged all of my music by date of release, then i made playlists of those albums that i remember listening to most in a given year.

pre-2000
the virgin suicides, ani (upupupupupup), bad brains, dioband, joan baez, iron butterfly, the bennies, the doors, the smashing pumpkins

2001
ani (dilate), bjork (homogenic), peter paul and mary, the medieaval baebes, tori amos

2002
ani (not a pretty girl), ben folds, pete seeger, nick drake, radiohead (i might be wrong), shipwreck, the weavers

2003
howie b, bjork (post), ani (little plastic castle), parliament, radiohead (ok computer), simon & garfunkel

2004
ani (so much shouting, so much laughter), ben folds five, chicago, christopher o'riley, madison greene, radiohead (hail to the thief), a perfect circle, AFI

2005-2006
apocalyptica, ben folds five, joni mitchell, radiohead (amnesiac), sufjan stevens, the shins, wes montgomery

2007 so far
low, devendra banhart, the new pornographers, his name is alive, dead can dance, radiohead (kid a)

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 22:51:40 GMT

a few new things in my life.

wednesday i started attending an activity period at school. another teacher runs a guitar jam session during 3rd period on wednesdays. we only played a few chord progressions so far but i can tell its going to be a lot of fun.

this morning on my way to work two large SUVs tried to go through the railroad underpass at the same time. they both lost their side view mirrors. nice little adrenaline rush to see that happen right in front of me and wonder if im going to have to dodge flying mirrors.

petite sizes at gap.com rock.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 12:36:31 GMT

yesterday was parents visiting day at school, so we only had class until 12:30. with about 16 extra people in each class however, it was maybe more exhausting than a regular school day. as i was leaving, one of my coworkers told me to use my free afternoon to do something for me, like going to get a manicure. instead, i went shopping. and had a very productive afternoon indeed.

this was my first trip alone to the kop mall. you see, driving in the vicinity of the mall scares me but im learning the geography of it now. the other drivers are still crazy, but im doing better. since it was my first trip alone, you can gather that i dont go shopping much, so i had a lot of stuff in mind to check out. here are my four best purchases.

gap classic boot cut jeans : i desperately needed a new pair of jeans, and tried on many before i put these on and rejoiced.
bare escentuals starter kit at sephora: i had scoffed at this for a long time. my mom uses it but her skin type is so different from mine that i didnt think it would work on my face. but i got so sick of all the other so called "light texture" foundations like clinique's almost makeup forming a yucky film with my naturally oily skin and still doing nothing to cover my acne scars. so i went to sephora and asked for a makeover/demo. i knew it would be a test of wearing it for the rest of the night and then evaluating the state of my skin the next morning. touchable skin with no sticky film? check. covering acne scars after hours of wear? check. no acne irritation the next morning? check, plus some reduction in acne this morning. i couldnt stop myself from ordering it online this morning.
nintendo wii game trauma center: second opinion: this came on a recommendation from alyssa, the anatomy TA at duke tip this summer. sooooo much fun.
old navy mens low rise boot cut jeans: i needed a pair of rough and tumble jeans for hiking and camping, but all the women's jeans have such a high percentage of spandex in them they hardly count as denim any more. so i picked up these in the smallest size i could find and suprisingly enough, they fit better than most of the womens jeans i tried on.

i also recently acquired a new desktop computer, so last.fm scrobbling is back in my facebook profile. check it out to see what ive been listening to.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:27:54 GMT

ive thought about blogging from time to time lately. but a lot of things have been stopping me. first, i think about my day, my week, my month and im completely overwhelmed by everything thats happened and all the changes as i adjust to my new job. second, i have so many reflections about teaching, but its hard to write about teaching without saying too much about my students. besides, who really wants to read a whole blog of my personal reflections on my teaching practice? which makes me wonder if i should revive one of my other suspended blogs for teachery stuff, and keep this one for personal things? and by the time i got through all of these questions, i realize that no, instead of blogging i really need to finish lesson planning for TOMORROW. ive had so much to do on the weekends that i dont get a lot of weekly planning done ahead of time. i get a vague outline of what i want to cover, but not the actual activities i want to use. thats what i do every night between 8 and 10. i generally stay at school until 4:30 or 5. this morning i got to school at 7:45 because i want to join concert choir. and rehearsal? twice a week at 7:45 AM. i love singing, but when its dark out its gonna get a lot harder.

plus im sick. and i have a new computer which im really happy about, but i know its just going to keep me from getting all my lesson planning done for next week. i feel overworked, but i love my job sooo much.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:03:21 GMT

once again i have wasted another couple hours trying to find a way to get all my calendar data in one place and take it with me.

in grad school, my important calendar data came to me in the form of class syllabi, so i just shuffled around some coursework due dates, compiled them in a thin little calendar notebook and called it a planner. now, my data comes to me as a large unwieldy faculty calendar hosted by web event, but password protected. then i have some data in google calendar, which i started using becuase i liked the feature of how it would identify event in your gmail and offer to add them to your gcal. soon after, i formed two goals: A) to have all data in one place and B) to be able to take that data with me on a portable device.

believe it or not, i could not find a way to import a csv file into gcal for the longest time. i found all the stuff for create new calendar and add existing calendars from googles shared calendars, but not the import file button i was looking for. in my frustration, i started looking at other calendar services.

first, mozilla sunbird. loooove the copy/paste drag and drop functions in the calendar itself. second, i can set it to automatically check my gcal and add updates to the sunbird calendar. boo: never really found a way to check the protected school calendar as a remote calendar, though i didnt try too hard because i couldnt find a way to sync with my zen vision mp3 calendar, my preferred portable device.

next i tried another web calendar, 30 boxes. i absolutely loved how it would ask me exactly which items i wanted to import when i uploaded csv files from google and the school calendar, because there are often events on the faculty calendar im not really interested in, like 12th grade college counseling. with so many geeky ways to integrate 30b with other apps and such, i was optimistic about finding a way to sync with zen, but failed there too.
finally, with a little research i found out where to import csv files to google calendar, so i actually solved the data in one place problem there, but i was dismayed to see all the 12th grade counseling items cluttering up my view. now i was only left with the portable device problem.

i did a bit more digging on the web and found one person who claimed to have synced ical with the zen, but he seems to have accomplished that on a mac by means of libmtp, which as far as i can tell allows non windows users to use mtp devices like the zen. since i use windows anyway, this seems more like it would break windows than solve my problem.

perhaps now i should mention that my zen vision does have the capability to automatically sync with microsoft outlook. i despise outlook, and im now forced to use it for email at work. i dont use it at home, or any other microsoft office product because i use open office. what i want to do is find a way to tell my zen which csv file to read from without having to load everything in to outlook along the way.

im keeping that as my final option, and luckily since i work for a school i would be able to get a copy of microsoft office for free. i would really prefer not to do that if at all possible, but the only other option seems to be switching to another mobile device that would let me connect to gcal on the web, like a phone or wireless capable pda.

anyone have any suggestions?