TEN MILLIONS!
This morning I had to sprint ten blocks* to the second bus I catch to get to campus because somehow, in the infinite wisdom that is my half-awake mindset, I managed to screw up the time my second alarm goes off while I was trying to get the first one to shut up. I wouldn’t have even bothered except I had to present for my Measurement class at 9:30 AM…not something you want to miss when the presentation is worth like 30% of your grade, and something I’m damn glad I remembered when I happened to glance at my clock and see a blurry “8:50 AM” displayed.
On the upside, I broke my old record of “this is the fastest I can get to school in panic mode.”
So after that insanity this morning, I then spent all afternoon spazzing over my Regression problem set (due tomorrow) as well as the write-up for my Measurement project (due tomorrow, too). Then I somehow stumbled across the fact that Brian Regan actually does do shows in Canada, and that he was performing tonight at 7:30. So I went to see him, which was super awesome. Worth every dollar, that man is freaking hilarious.
IN OTHER NEWS: classes are over, bitches! Now I just have to turn in these two things tomorrow, invigilate exams on the 21st and 22nd, take my Regression final on the 23rd, turn in the last Measurement homework on the 26th, and grade Infancy crap. Then first year = DONE.
Yeah, that’s all I got.
*Vancouver blocks are like twice the size of Moscow ones, for whatever the hell reason. It takes 15 minutes to walk from 41st to my house on 31st, and I walk pretty damn fast. Not a problem when I don’t have anywhere to be, but in the mornings I much prefer the 2 minute ride on the #7 to get to the UBC bus.
Today’s song: 栄光の架橋 by ゆず
CRAIGSLIST YOU ARE MY ONLY COMPANION MAKE HOT SWEET LOVE TO ME YOUR PIC GETS MINE – 22 F
Haha, sorry.
I think I accidentally took some sort of “anti-screw around” drug or something this morning, ‘cause I got a lot of crap done today.
In fact, now that I think about it, today was the least “bad” day I’ve had in a long, long time (up here, that is, I don’t count when I went back to the States for cats/friends/orgies). I actually got that stupid R code to converge this afternoon (so TAKE THAT!), subsequently made pretty graphs, worked on Measurement homework, emailed back the obnoxious Infancy students, and worked on my final project.
I’m also excited ‘cause I get to make a PowerPoint presentation.
I fucking love PowerPoint.
Today’s song: Up by The Saturdays
She Deafened Me with Pseudoscience!
I’m starting to loathe Saturday nights. And I was actually going to post yesterday’s blog, you know, yesterday, but MySpace was being dumb.
Either way, our little “group” went to Kharah’s last night and played a bunch of games (and made a lot of stupid jokes) and shared a bunch of cheese. Welcome to grad school.
Haha, and Michael and I got into an argument over who invented calculus, it was pretty freaking awesome. How come the only cute, pudgy blonde guy I’ve met up here is a proponent of Newton?
Guess you can’t win them all.
And I think I found my Script Frenzy plot.
AND I finished the drawing of Matt. Matt, do you mind if I post it to my DeviantArt page? That way you can actually see it, haha. I can leave your name off of it if you’d prefer.
AND AND this.
Today’s song: You Belong by Northern Kind
Screw this monotony, I need to do a factor analysis!
Ahhhhhh, much better.
It’s surprising how much happier doing a random FAs or CFAs makes me. I wonder what that says? Certainly that I’m on the right track in a sense…
So I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to apply for a job at the Census this summer. If I get it, I’m quitting UBC. Decision will be final.
I also DREAMT ABOUT CLIPPY LAST NIGHT WHAT THE HELL. I think it’s because I was going through ye olde blogs and found that one about him. It was a pretty awesome dream. Clippy’s Odyssey will be an upcoming short story, I promise.
Um…what else…
Oh yeah. No freaking clue what to do for Script Frenzy yet…might redo/expand Marionette, but that sucked more than anything I’ve ever written, so who knows.
Today’s song: Castaway by Chasen
A blog of several points
ONE
Zeno, bitches!
TWO
On the door of one of the area labs on the third floor of the psych building. Never saw it before because the door’s always been open and I’ve never paid attention.
THREE
Plastic bag fashion! Again, this is what results from studying stats all day. I just did the close-up of the top, ’cause the bottom kind of sucks and I got bored in the middle of it.
Today’s song: Ride On by Celtic Panpipes
In this blog: we all get excited about statistics
SPSS gets almost as wound up about factor analysis as I do:
Jeremy gets more excitable the closer we get to the midterm. “What happens if you run an analysis of x and x squared? You’ll get HUGE multicollinearity and the program will return a ton of red text! ‘Inflation factor of ONE BILLION! ABORT! ABORT! DO YOU WANT TO PROCEED?!?!’”
Yay.
Today’s song: Something Good ’09 (Radio Edit) by Utah Saints
Senor Blog says it’s time for another adventure!
Statistical computing: there are about sixteen of us in there. Guess who’s the only female and the only non-Asian?
Tell me that’s not intimidating.
Also, I have realized over the course of several MSN conversations how tied to specific memories the majority of the songs in my iTunes library are.
I say I could pick out a specific memory surrounding the date I added a song for about 90% of them.
This is very good when I’m feeling nostalgic, but pretty crappy when I want to focus on what I’m doing at the time when I’m listening to the song.
Peh.
There was something else I was going to say today, but I honestly can’t remember what it was.
Hm.
Today’s song: Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant
Mediocrity, Thy Name is Claudia
So YET AGAIN I’m having a dilemma about school. I really, really don’t have any idea what I do. If I stay, I’ll be miserable for approximately five years, but if I leave, I’ll regret quitting for the rest of my life. I can’t figure out which one would be worse as of right now.
Why am I having such a hard time with this? I think one of my biggest roadblocks in all of this has been my fear of what others will think. “She’s too stupid to get through grad school.” “All the other schools were right in rejecting her.” “She’s a quitter.” I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s something I worry about, especially if I want to get a job at the Census and/or get a Philosophy MA or PhD.
Anyway.
It got to the point tonight where the decision was so 50/50 that I realized the only way I was going to solve my dilemma was to utilize the old coin flip. I relied on an online coin flipper (because manual coin-flipping is biased slightly in several different ways—look it up, it’s interesting), with heads being “leave” and tails being “stay.”
This exercise proved three things to me. First, when the coin came up “tails” and I went on flipping it until it came up heads (three times, by the way), it proved that I really did have a preference.
Second, it proved that what I was actually looking for was an excuse—an excuse to get off this track I had so meticulously set for myself—and that I was so desperate for this excuse that I would count an online coin-flipper’s outcome as my ticket to freedom.
Third, it proved that I’m unlikely to do anything anytime soon about it, because that’s just the way I am. I like to finish what I start. If I don’t, I hate myself even more.
So here we sit.
And here I am.
I don’t even know what else to say.
Sorry, it’s been a bad day.
Today’s song: Glitter in the Air by P!nk
If an apple tree falls in the forest, does it still keep the doctor away?
So the thrill of the blogs working again came before we all went to dinner for Alyssa’s birthday.
Ben and I made more stats jokes than either of us care to admit.
We continued said stats jokes into a game of Apples to Apples (which I had never played before, but enjoyed very much). Dick Cheney was also referenced several times.
We also discussed Jeremy’s awesomeness, for he speaks to the variables he writes on the whiteboard. I’m not kidding. “Let’s call this one ‘Cself.’ Cself. Cself run. Run, self, run! Can you tell who didn’t get a lot of sleep last night?!”
Awesome.
Today’s song: Preface by The Shanghai Restoration Project & Di Johnston
In this blog: Tom Hanks is a badass
Seriously.
He supports same-sex marriage, he seems pretty damn modest for being as big of a star as he is, he supports NASA, and has a freaking asteroid named after him.
How cool is that?
Also, my poster got accepted for the APS (Association of Psychological Science) convention! I shall be going to Boston to talk about fit indices in May.
Anything to get out of this bog called Vancouver.
Today’s song: The Heartache Can Wait by Brandi Carlile
Claudia vs. The Unstapled Assignments: Round 2
Why don’t these people staple their homeworks?
Seriously, is it that hard to do?
Is a sighting of a stapler that rare up here? It’s not like they don’t sell them at, say FREAKING STAPLES. You can buy small ones that FIT IN YOUR DAMN PENCIL CASE!
Hell, I have one. It probably cost me at most $7. I can’t remember, since I bought it so long ago.
And l love how people think “folding the corner over” works. None of the 300 or so variations of “can I just fold the papers over?” have worked, especially when you have to shove your assignment into my mailbox, which may contain as many as 49 assignments already.
These SPSS assignments are about 20 points each. I think “staple your goddamn work” should be a 2-point demand on the next one.
Haha, they should devote an entire lab to it: “Today we’re not going to look at SPSS. Instead we’re going to look at this device: it’s a STAPLER. It HOLDS PIECES OF PAPER TOGETHER, which has been shown in empirical studies to help slow the progression of TA insanity. Practice with staplers may also improve your manual dexterity and help you look like less of an idiot by demonstrating that you understand the concept of binding things together with a small piece of metal.”
OH MY GOD.
Today’s song: Toe Jam by The BPA
If Godot falls in the forest and no one is around, do we have to wait even longer?
You know you’ve officially stopped caring when, in the margins of your notes, you draw out elaborate scenes involving helicopters and kites.
Today’s song: Clair de Lune by Stephen Malinowski
Today I learned a valuable lesson
Dear Psychology Student Counsil people:
If you want undergrads to pay attention to presentations on the research being done in the different areas of the department, please don’t schedule the quantitative person, whose presentation was on the sensitivity of fit indices used in structural equation modeling, on the same day as the clinical person, whose presentation was on sex.
Seriously.
Me: “I graph fit index values as a function of increasing latent variable numbers and increasing omitted error covariance!”
Undergrads: “…”
Morag: “I shove infared sensors up women’s vaginas!”
Undergrads: “HOLY SHIT TELL US MORE!”
Vaginas give you an unfair advantage. At least schedule me on the same day as the neuroscience people so I at least have a chance.
Today’s song: Le by DJ Settler Project
January is too far from the end of the semester
Ugh, school. Here’s my schedule this semester:
9:30 – 11:00 M/W: Bayesian Inference
3:00 – 4:30 M/W: Statistical Computing (half course, starts in March)
9:30 – 11:00 T/H: Measurement
11:00 – 1:15 T/H: Regression
Fun times.
Today’s song: Fuzzy Blue Lights by Owl City
*farting noises with mouth*
Yay, everyone else is on break but me…
And when I start classes everyone will still be on break…
And none of my band friends will be in Moscow when I get home…
And I have to proctor a 3-hour final starting at 7 tonight…
Apparently the Competence Train doesn’t stop in Vancouver
A YouTube video in which is represented every mistake in every Infancy paper I read this semester.
Dear Universe: Please Cut it Out
I swear to god.
So apparently—contrary to what I was told when I first got here—if I want to get a MS in statistics alongside my PhD in quant psych, I’ll have to essentially take double the stats classes. That’s right: the stats classes I take to fulfill my quant degree DON’T double count to fill a stats degree.
What the fuck. Really? Is that how we’re going to play it up here?
Oh, and add on to that the fact that I’ll have to pay double tuition. Yeah.
Thanks, universe! I’ve always wanted a big steaming pile of Karmic shit for Christmas!
Fuck this noise.
The 10 Undergraduate Commandments
- Thou shalt read the syllabus.
- Thou shalt write legibly.
- Thou shalt stay within the designated page limit.
- Thou shalt not contest every point missed on an exam.
- Thou shalt not blame thine TA for thine crappy test grades.
- Thou shalt consult thine textbook before asking stupid questions.
- Thou shalt not have to consult thine TA regarding what constitutes an “introduction” paragraph.
- Thou shalt use proper spelling, capitalization, and grammar in thine emails if thou wishes a prompt response.
- Thou shalt staple thine stupid homework pages.
- Thou shalt not assume thine TA has nothing better to do than to grade thine test.
STATS MARATHON
Holy crap, I’ve never taken a 5 hour final before.
What’s even better is the fact that it was a 5 hour stats final.
Wow.
Sorry, I can no longer think straight.
The Beauty of Non-Monotone Relationships
My graphs speak for themselves. They make me very happy. Also, they’re not supposed to be making weird patterns like they are, but it’s still cool.
Yes, this is my research.
Eigenblogger 