Even in Kyoto

I'm trying to get the hang of this rss feed-creation business. So, today I made sytharin's webcomic into a feed, sampsoncomic.

Let's see how that goes.

This was partly inspired by reading today's xkcd_rss, heh heh heh.

I need to re-write and reevaluate my "projects" list sometime soon. I keep having thoughts about going back through the 10 years of LJ posts, to tag things I've been lazy about, and see if there's anything I want to make of the 10 years of blog.

But there are a couple of other compelling projects to work on:

-Rip the rest of my CD collection
-Catalogue my analog recipes
-Hand-quilt

...and others that I am forgetting. Move house, for instance.

I'm supposed to be going up to Nebraska sometime soon, but my collaborator has been really quiet lately. Once I have a better sense of that trip, hopefully I will be able to lay out my near-term plans more clearly. It's hard to have so much of life be up in the air, with no end in sight.

This morning I came across this site, a blog where each entry is a scanned-in picture of a handwritten statement.

I write occasionally about the tension between my digital journal and my paper journal. The above blog's journal-keeping method seems like an interesting compromise. More of the writer's personality shows because we can see quirks in handwriting and illustrations along with the actual entries. But on the other hand, virtually all of my lj content is public (I have a big mouth), while my paper journal is 99.9 per cent private (to the best of my knowledge; the most perfidious betrayal of my trust would be opening it). On one of the lj communities, someone commented that in reality, electronic journals are much more secure than paper ones, and yet they remain in my mind so much less personal.

Here's a lesson I learned yesterday, as articulated by kihle: Don't ask a question if you aren't prepared to hear all of the possible answers. That's what makes a question like, "Do I look fat in this?" so terrible. Just don't even ask it and you'll save yourself and the person answering the question a lot of grief. If you really need to ask, at least be ready to hear something that you might not want to hear, and don't take the answer personally.

I guess that's why it's a good thing that many of the conversations that I have with other people are held entirely in my own head. Right now, it's a bit noisy in there.

I'm a nut.

'Nuff said.

Yesterday was a strange day--I spent most of it helping my minions get their projects together. I *did* come up with a bit of a genius idea in the process, though--I created a worksheet for statistical analysis purposes. These students haven't done much research before, so they have to learn what's involved in analyzing data. Part of the process is developing a set of questions that you would like to answer with the data, and the worksheets helped the students organize the whole data analysis process. So that was rewarding.

I also proctored an exam, during which I had to accompany a student out of the room so she could throw up (she'd been sick all morning, she told me). That was a potent reminder of how unhealthy college can be. I felt really bad that she felt compelled to come to the exam when she was so obviously sick. I guess that's just another problem with mass-manufactured education.

I was pretty tired by the end of the day, so I almost skipped out on climbing. So of course I ended up having a pretty good climbing night.

Blah. Time to go to school.