robglazebrook.com

I’ll have you know that my presentation(s) today went fine, ~despite~ a noticeable dearth of wishers well. Dana, in fact, was the only person to wish me good luck. For shame!

I had a really good time presenting, despite the fact I certainly Did Not Wish to Wake this morning. I got done preparing my presentation at around 3am. I went to bed, tossing and turning, until at least 3:30 (the last time I remember seeing). I was awake again before 6am. In other words, I did all of my presenting on less than three hours sleep. Really, I suppose the coffee deserves most of the credit for pulling it off.

Despite the fact that I was awake by six, I still managed to fall behind this morning. I fell into my normal morning routine, which of late involves a lot of sipping of the coffee and nibbling of the fruit and reading of the email. At one point, I startled, glanced at the clock, and realized I had twenty minutes to shower, shave, brush my teeth, and dress in presentable presentation duds in order to catch my bus.

I was ~early~ to the bus stop by two minutes. I really don’t know how. I think I may have sent a new personal (personal) hygiene speed record.

Anyway, the presentation went well. I presented the same information in three sessions, so I had to vary it a little bit each time to keep myself interested, but it was a good time. Dr. Niday didn’t intimidate me much, which I’m blaming on the lack of sleep. After the sessions, during lunch, I was also part of a graduate student panel discussion why we’re at ISU and what admissions persons could do to attract more bright young stars like ourselves. I had one of the ladies present snap a picture of us on that panel, so we’ll see how that turned out later.

Now all I have to look forward to is work until 5pm, class until 6:30pm, and then racquetball at 8pm. I’m gonna be one tired little fella by the time this evening rolls around.

I’m already a tired little fella. Uht-oh…

You all have too much time on your hands.

I have a bigScary presentation tomorrow at something called an Admissions Workshop. Basically, a bunch of people from various departments involved with graduate admissions are going to sit and listen to me et al. discuss graduate student orientation and various other topics. My job is simply to report the results of a survey the Grad College conducted a few months back, but I’m still slightly nervous because I’m the only graduate student presenting, and also one of the people who presents immediately after me is Dr. Niday, the English department’s Director of First-Year Composition and thus my exBoss. To make things more fun, I haven’t had time to work on my presentation until this afternoon. Luck wishes appreciated.

Fun with Music

I had gotten bored with my previous playlist on my iPod nano, and totally redid all of my songs last night. So far today, my iPod has made me snort aloud twice.

<NotForGirlfriendsOrGrammas>
So I was walking across campus from Ross to Pearson around 1pm today, and I ended up behind this blonde girl in high heels wearing rather tight jeans. I happened to notice she had a really, really nice behind. And then I noticed it again. Again. After a few glances, I resignedly reminded myself that I have a girlfriend now, and I should not be checking out the Tushies of Others. “Just ignore it,” I told myself. So I started staring at my feet. Roughly two seconds later, Jonathan Coulton’s remix of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” started blaring in my ears. I like big butts and I cannot lie…

I was trying so hard to suppress my laughter I nearly passed out. :)
</NotForGirlfriendsOrGrammas>

About two hours later, my boss sent me to the Provost’s office to borrow their digital projector. The Provost’s office is probably one of the prettiest offices on campus, what with the high ceilings and rich carpets and marble columns. Very high class place. Just as I opened the door to the office, Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” started playing. I couldn’t get my headphones out of my ears fast enough, and managed to announce my presence with a loud snort.

I don’t even know why I put that last one on my iPod in the first place. Obviously I was not thinking clearly.

Expulsion in 5… 4…

The projector is in a big black bag. It isn’t all that heavy, but it sure is big and imposing looking. On my way out of the Provost’s office, I set the bag down at the base of a column in the middle of Beardshear Hall so I could put my headphones back on. After I set it down, I had an extremely powerful urge to leave the bag laying there and take off running to see if it would freak anyone out. I bet I could have shut down Beardshear for the rest of the day. :)

Networking for Dummy

I attended a workshop over lunch today called “Resumés 101.” Basically, a bunch of people from various colleges and companies came and talked about what they look for in a resume and so forth. The workshop was specifically for teachers of business and technical writing, but I figured I could attend anyways. Right before it started, they requested we go around the room introducing ourselves and listing the classes we taught. When it came to me, I figured honesty was the best policy. “My name is Rob Glazebrook. I’m not currently teaching any classes, but I am planning to apply to a few of your companies in the near future.” I got a laugh anyways.

I ~also~ got to meet one of the creative directors of Innova, a design company here in town that I would love to work for. The only weird thing about working at Innova would be that it is literally two doors down from my apartment; I’m a little worried that if I started working there, I’d never again have a strong reason to leave Main Street. Regardless, I let her know I’d be applying in the near future. Let’s hope I made a good first impression.

Tuck is no longer Tuck. Tuck is now Smaug. Smaug is now eyeing his reflection in the mirror suspiciously. I think he distrusts the other cat’s motives. Or perhaps he just wants to make a friend who spends more time playing on the floor and less time saying “No!” and pulling him off of counters and out of garbage cans.

Smaug is Smaug for three reasons: first, because Smaug is the name of the dragon in The Hobbit, and kitty yonder seems noble yet crafty, just like a good dragon should. Secondly, Smaug sounds an awful lot like smog, and he is very smoggy-smoky colored, so yay double entendre. Thirdmost, it’s the name that has stuck. Tuck stuck not, or at least not enough to be a daily name. When Smaug was Tuck, I usually just called him kitty-kitty. Now that he has been tranSMAUGrified, I generally call him Smauggidy Smaug-Smaug Smagoo. This, as you can easily see, is an Improvement.

Today has been a very hard day. It started out with my usual battle with the coffee maker, and this time, Mr. Bunn kicked mine. Despite the fact that I had onne (one and only one (yay geekish grammar)) coffee filter in the machine, said filter decided not to filter so much as to contain. Coffee grounds and reallyHot water went most everywhere. Smaug was seriously impressed with my new game, but I was not so much so. I spent tenplus minutes cleaning up the resultant mess, then made a second pot, which brewed much more smoothly. Unfortunately, I forgot to drink it.

Today’s Score:

Coffee: 2.
Rob: 0.

As I mentioned in the comments of a post past, I’ve done a bit of editing to the source code of my site. Internet Explorer doesn’t like my columns. Never really has. Since I didn’t really care for IE, either, I didn’t let it bother me for a while. Unfortunately, I’ve recently been feeling empathetic and have decided I need to make my site IE-friendly again. I played with the CSS for around half an hour this evening, but didn’t get anywhere. If you visited while I was tinkering, you probably saw some pretty weird things. As it is, the site’s design has changed ever so slightly: the blue lines that faded to nothing along the right side of the page are now a consistent, yet very faint, collection of blue lines along the length of the page. The reason for this is really technical, but suffice it to say it should make my job easier when I’m trying to make IE pretend to be a real browser. :)

G’night, all.

This exchange earlier in the week sorta threw me for a loop:

What this means is, not only are two of my colleagues reading my mom’s blog, but they read it more frequently than I. Only bad things can come from this. Also, that wasn’t funny, mom. *g*

I had my first meeting with my POS committee on Friday. There were three professors present, whose job it is to make sure my planned creative component will merit a degree. One of them thought I wasn’t tackling a big enough project, one of them thought I was taking on too big a project, and the third inundated me with additional ideas and technical terms. In short, it went exactly as I had expected. Now all I have to do is do the damn thing.

As I’ve reckoned it, I need to be reading around one book and one article a week for my creative component (in addition to my other class-related reading). As of last night, most all of my books are on the way, so I’ve got maybe a week’s time before I feel I need to start reading. In about two weeks, I also need to start writing around ten pages a week. Ten pages a week doesn’t sound like all that much, I realize, but the real tough part comes in making sure that the ten pages I’m writing fit with the last ten pages I wrote as well as the next ten pages I’m going to write. Also, I need to sorta design and develop the website I’m doing my creative component on in the meantime. Sometime in November, while this semester was still a distant dream (nightmare?), I planned out my weekly work schedule, guaranteeing I had sufficient time to do my homework and work on my creative component. Of course, this was before I had a girlfriend. *g*

Speaking of her, things are still going fantastically, for those interested. We try to see each other every day, even if it isn’t for long and we don’t accomplish much more than cuddling on the couch a bit before we’re both too tired from studying to stay awake, Other times we spend huge chunks of time together and thoroughly neglect our homework (not to mention, I hate to admit, sometimes our friends). That will have to change in the near future, I guess. Pout pout.

Well, this has been a fun break in the homework, but I must get back to it, because our evening is full with dinner and a movie with oldFriend Natasha, who is briefly back in town from Minnesota. Tomorrow will hopefully involve more homework, a bit of shopping, and laundry, as I’m behind on reading, low on perishables, and wearing uncomfortable underwear.

*sigh* I just started to put together my creative component reading list on Amazon, and already the total is nearly $200. If I had $200, do you think I’d be in ~college~ right now? ;) To that end, if anyone would like to help me out, I’ve made a “thesis reading” wishlist available here. It could be, like, a late Chanukah present or something. It’s late for Chanukah, right? I’ll probably start buying them as I need them at the end of the week, which should please Mr. CreditCardCompany to no end.

Alright, enough of the begging. It’s too early in the morning for that. Actually, I suppose it’s getting rather late in the morning, but I didn’t get much sleep last night and I’ve only remembered to drink one cup of coffee so far, so it feels early.

I miss my three-day weekend already. It was a lot of fun. I got to see a band I like, spend copious amounts of time with Dana, and even see my family. Whew. I’m getting sleepy just thinking about it. Or perhaps I really should go get that second cup of coffee.

I had a fantastic idea (I even had this verified) for a new website last night, but I’m not going to tell any of you about it, because it’s really good and you’d probably just steal it. Don’t steal my idea!

The above paragraph illustrates one of the minor changes I made to the website yesterday: I now possess the ability to highlight things. I don’t know how often it’ll come in handy, but it’s a nice visual effect. I think so, anyways. I also finally got sIFR Flash headlines installed. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, suffice it to say I now have the power to render my headlines in whatever typeface I want. If you didn’t really notice a change, that’s because I chose typefaces pretty close to what I had originally. Go Creativity, I guess. *g* If you don’t see headings at all anymore, let me know, because that means I need to do some finagling yet.