...like it's 1999...

I was quite surprised when my sister offered to take the kids for New Year's Eve.
Well, she didn't exactly offer. I kind of backed her into a corner about taking the kids. But, she failed to object loudly enough to get out of it, so that's pretty much the same thing, right? But, I'm far more interested in getting free babysitting credits than any material goods. After all, the only things I want in life right now are peace, quiet, and sleep.

So, in other words, I'm slowly turning into my own father. On some level, I knew this would happen, but I was just hoping it wouldn't happen for a little longer, say, in my 50's. (He's about to turn 76.) But before that happens, we're going to be kid-free and loose on the City of Albany on New Year's Eve, starting with dinner at Jack's. It'll be the first time we've been kid-free on New Year's since 1999. (Not counting about 3 weeks of gestation, which resulted in a very nice Porterhouse Steak and Lobster Tail dinner being puked up shortly before we realized that we were expecting my daughter. But my daughter was smaller than a pea by then, so that doesn't count.)


Basically, kid-free on New Year's Eve, 2006. I have absolutely no plan to drive, since even the faintest whiff of alcohol anywhere on my person will probably cost me a night in Albany County lockup, or so I tell myself. OTOH, I'm not terribly optimistic about the cab situation, which leads to the usual dilemna: do I drive there and abandon the car downtown overnight? Not a chance.

But it's a good time to reflect. About this time in 1999, I had just changed jobs, had conceived my first child (though we wouldn't be sure for another week or so), and I was steadily working on my transit itinerary planner, which I'd first put on the web (without much data) about three months later.

About this time, my father-in-law would become diagnosed with cancer, and pass away six months later.

The world was expected to come crashing down all around us as the Y2K bug struck. Sadly, I had just left the job where I'd been critical of the Y2K consultants and other panic-mongers, to join another Y2K panic project. I never did have the chance to say "told you so", thereby losing the chance to throw away what little maturity I'd picked up after my first four years working in Manhattan. Oh well.

Never in a MILLION years would have expected to be back in Albany, seven years later, sitting across from a Christmas tree, two kid stockings, and Thomas the Tank Engine tracks and engines scattered all around the floor. (The boy needs to start picking up after himself.) Or to be a PhD student, teach five college courses in two years, and be sitting up the day before New Year's Eve, planning out two other courses for next semester instead of out celebrating something or other.

Suddenly, I'm realizing that my kids will be at my sister's house on the first day of the New Year, 2007, and not at home with us. Now I'm having second thoughts about my so-called party night on the town. I'm a parent now.

But maybe one New Year's Eve out after seven years won't be all that bad.

Third Christmas

I've realized it's our third Christmas back in Albany.
I've also realized that the tabletop Santa statue we got in the Christmas Tree Shop looks a lot like Gandolf from the Lord of the Rings. Santa the White?

I'm taking a break from more grading. I've resigned myself to accumulating two more Incompletes that I'll (really) try to knock off over Winter Break. While planning out two (or three) new classes and working part time. Really. It'll happen.

I really hate grading. It's one thing to put comments on something, but putting a number on things really bugs me. I can tell the difference between an A project and a B, but what's the difference between an 86 and an 88? It's just arbitrary precision that you calibrate by comparing all the students against one another, which you're really not supposed to do anyway. And at the end of the day, you just give out a letter grade.

This from someone who builds quantitative models all the time. But, they all rely on rankings and relative choices. Grades just seem a little different, since it's about absolutes in terms of achieving learning objectives, not relative accomplishments within the classroom process. Or is that just based on the colleges I've gone to?

I'm done with teaching my fifth class now, and grading for a third class. I'll be grading during Christmas day at this rate... :)

What's left

Grading, grading, grading, independent study (late), directed reading paper, independent study (not late). Resolve general comp exam issues, get waiver for secondary comp exam. Do 10 loads of laundry. Feed cat. Put something on Christmas tree now sitting in living room. Return stack of books to library.

Starting tomorrow.
I'm going to bed.

Computers are making us all stupid

I'd elaborate, but I can't think of anything to say.

Just like driving in Jersey

It's the end of the semester, and I know exactly what I need to do, and how I'm going to do it.
Except for the concrete barrier between me and where I know I need to go.
It's another case of writer's block. Or burnout, though the precise difference is irrelevant right now. But rather than choke, I'm going to just mechanically throw together some kind of paper and fix it later if there's still time. Which there never is.
But by the end of the week, it'll all be over and I'll be heading for another resupply mission to New Jersey. I can hardly wait.

2007: the year of cable

Since moving back to Albany, I never quite got around to having Cable TV installed. We've been going off the antenna for almost 2 1/2 years. We get PBS, the major networks, FOX23, the CW, and some other station that used to be UPN: "My TV 4".

I think that's going to change over break.

Somewhere between the Gilmore Girls, Scrubs reruns, and just nameless crap on other channels, I've finally broken down amd decided to get cable.

Just as soon as I turn in my papers at the end of the semester.

Monday Night Lab

It's another Monday Night of going through the motions.

I have lab hours. In 12+ weeks, I have not had a single student show up, even for appointments. I'd rather be doing pretty much anything else. Anything that doesn't involve waiting. That's my picture of Hell: the Department of Motor vehicles, before NY made it 500 times better. (Yes, it REALLY is 500 times better than it used to be. It made Soviet bread lines look like Magic Mountain.) Pushing a boulder up a hill to have it roll down again, for eterntity, is at least doing something. Being tormented in hellfire with pitchforks, at least you have something to dodge before the inevitable. But just sitting around and waiting? Forget it. Meditation? Good luck with that.

Maybe it's just that level of impatience, combined with dependence on public transportation in the NYC Metro area for nearly a decade has made me so ticked off about waiting for the bus/train/ferry/whatever that I had to build an information system to, yes, minimize my waiting time.

Well, writing this has occupied me for about 5 minutes. Now I have another 15 minutes to wait before I can leave...

All about the visualizations...

So this is the decade of Tufte visualizations to make some sense of the data that floods our lives? The famous one he talks about, about Napoleon's march to Russia, uses an old map that overlays the expedition route with a visualization of the casualties of a million man army numbering 10,000 on return to Paris.

Somehow I'm visualizing a similar graph, but my version tracks a college undergrad's weekend march through Downtown, and the width of the line would be blood alcohol content. It might work. It's Friday. The semester is almost over, though my workload is far from done. That visualization probably says more about my current state of mind than the hypothetical undergrad I'm picking on...

Though right now, I think that not only does XML in general rock, so do Microformats.