How many grad students does it take to configure an office space?
Answer: Three. One to try and decide in what arrangement the desks should be, one to move said desks, and one to realize, after all possible combinations of desk arrangement have been attempted, that they’ve decided on keeping the desks in the order they were originally.
Yeah.
Related news: I’m moving to the Botany Annex, ‘cause the Social/Personality area needs more space. It’s okay, though, ‘cause in the Annex the windows actually open.
Woo.
Today’s song: Put Your Hands Up for Detroit (Radio Edit) by Fedde Le Grande
You can’t spell “analysis” without “anal”
R: $0.00
Tinn-R: $0.00
Stats classes that taught me how to use R: $900.00
Grad school: $2,700.00/semester
Packs of gum to chew when nervous: $30.00
Amount of money I could have earned working in the time I’ve spent on this one figure manipulation (BC minimum wage style): $400.00
Figuring it out finally and, for once, not getting bitched out by my anyone: Priceless
There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s banging your head against a brick wall until epiphany happens.
Today’s song: Palladio by Karl Jenkins
The First Floor of Koerner Library is the Scariest Place on the Planet
So for the first time today, I went down to the first floor of Koerner Library (the entrance is on the third floor and the majority of the books I ever check out are on the fourth and fifth floors). But thanks to the desire to read Dr. Zhivago, I had to go down instead of up this afternoon.
And this is all I have to say: that is the creepiest motherfucking floor of any library I’ve ever been in.
Libraries are usually, to me, quite comforting things—they inspire one to write, they inspire one to read. They’re fun to get lost in and wander around until you find the obscure little corners full of shelves of authors’ works that sit largely unread by the general public (the structural equation modeling section, anyone?). In short, they’re motivating, quiet, wonderful things that serve to quench intellectual wanderlust.
The first floor of Koerner was none of these. I just wanted to sprint to Pasternak’s little corner, snatch up my book, and get the hell out. There was no one down there, however, save maybe two people. So ignoring the not-so-subtle drone of the building air intake wall (which you shall see), I took a short little video of the place.
The creepy vibe on the video doesn’t even reach 10% of the level it is in real life. Seriously. It was scary as hell down there. That humming you hear when I’m close to the vent is much louder in real life, too, and permeates throughout the whole floor at a level my camera mic can apparently not pick up. Check it out:
Oh yeah, and those wheel things on the sides of the shelves swing the shelves outward so people can get to the journals inside. The second time I’m zooming in on the vid is where a wheel is turning, but you can’t see it, unfortunately.
Gah.
Today’s song: Show Me Love by Robyn
Eine Kleine Nachtfieber
God, today was a shit storm. FUCK YOU, test anxiety, and your ability to turn my near-automatic calculus abilities into “what’s a multiplication sign? I’ve never seen that before.” I can do that stuff in my sleep (quite literally), and you know it. I don’t know why you only do this with math tests. It was like a direct repeat of my final for Math 160.
Seriously. Fuck you.
Ugh.
The ONLY GOOD THING that happened today was going to see Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” First opera experience. Won’t be the last.
Today’s song: Cooler Than Me by Mike Posner
Social interaction? WHAT
Yay, first actual social interaction since finals (Boston doesn’t count; I was sitting in the corner doing calculus the whole time).
And Michael and I reconciled our differences (we had a bit of an argument regarding who invented calculus. It was pretty great). We didn’t agree on the fact that LEIBNIZ was first, but we did have a nice little conversation extolling R and bootstrapping, so we decided that counts.
Yay.
And this is pretty great; it gets more impressive as the video goes on. The tweezers part is my favorite.
Today’s song: Love Struck by V Factory
I am deriving so much pleasure from calculus that I may need to integrate it into my daily life
HOT DAMN I love calculus.
And no, it’s not just because the great and glorious Leibniz invented it, either. It’s very methodical and I actually know what the hell I’m doing (for most of it). I think I hated it so much the first time around because it was at 8:30 in the freaking morning AND because it was all business-oriented. And because I didn’t really care back then. I dig the tediousness of it all—it’s less tedious than eigenvalues (thank god) but still fun. It feels weird to be doing a metric crap ton of math homework again.
Oh, and THERE’S A FREAKING ICE CREAM TRUCK OVER HERE, TOO! Totally not an imaginary one, either…I saw it go down 43rd street blasting out a lullaby.
I’m not insane. Bad ass.
Today’s song: Glycerine by Bush
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
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…
Eigenblogger 