• ANOVA test/homework fairness questions (DONE)
• Import and link Calc 2 roster data (DONE)
  • Clean data so that it doesn’t have a bunch of RedIDs for which I have nothing other than an indicator of their Spring 13 enrollment status (DONE – More annoying than I’d thought)
  • Recalculate persistence
• How do various sub-populations compare in various outcomes across the four treatments? This is a big question that uses a lot of two-way between-groups ANOVA.
  • Sub-populations: people who’ve never had calculus before; gender; race/ethnicity; quartiles on CCR; quartiles on ACT/SAT…
    • Made a variable for the kind of calculus people have had before.
  • Outcomes: beliefs items; final grade; score on final exam; CCI score; CCI normalized gain; persistence…
• Link focus group protocol items to post-term survey items (DONE-ish. No analyses conducted yet but I know which FG items correspond to which survey items.)
• Learn R and the IRT packages for R; conduct IRT analysis of CCI items

I’m sure I’ll think of more things but this is a good list for right now.

As the door slowly closed and the light from the hall grew gradually dimmer, I made some noises like “Uh – I – were you – um -” and he rushed back in and was like “Oh I’m so sorry, I forgot about you!”

#unforgettable #thatswhatIam #itsbeenagooddaytoday

• I have tickets to a Gold Cup double-header in Utah on July 13 (USA vs. Cuba and Belize vs. Costa Rica)
• I’m planning my summer trip to Utah around this match and fully intend to plan it in such a way that I can go to an RSL game on either 7/3 or 7/20
• The USMNT is (rumored to be) playing a friendly against Guatemala at Qualcomm on July 5 and if tickets ever go on sale I’d probably buy tickets to that (and alter my Utah plans accordingly)
• Xolos and Club América are playing at Petco Park on July 6 and I’m totally thinking about buying tickets (Castillo! Corona! López Ojeda!)
• A bunch of us are going to watch the local semi-pro team play up in Black Mountain/PQ next Saturday
• I missed the Champions League final on Saturday so I avoided sports websites until I could find a replay online
• And then today I spent a bunch of time talking about it with my soccer friend at school
• Also today I spent like an hour watching RSL play against some minor-league team in the US Open Cup which is a domestic competition that nobody really cares about that much but it was soccer anyway
• I’ve been frequenting a sports bar/restaurant in PB specifically because they subscribed to the MLS TV packages, even though I think their food is overpriced
• The World Cup is coming up next year in Brazil and I’ll basically be graduated and my friend was telling me how he’s going to take out some student loan money so he and his family can go down and watch a match or two and this sounds like a kind of awesome idea

I regret nothing.

I’ve only had it for three years but I feel like this car and I have gone through a lot together and I kind of like it. This is why I’m perfectly willing (although not particularly excited, in all honesty) to potentially be spending a bunch of money on things that are relatively invisible. Nothing that happens is likely to dramatically improve the performance of my car (A/C notwithstanding), but I’m pretty okay with that.

Here’s to the next 100,000.

Maybe they are like the ember

that hurts when held tight

but when released kindles flame that the heart leaps to see.

Maybe they are like the grain of sand

that is covered by smooth hard layers

slowly, one by one, year by year

until the pearl is found, shining and lustrous

hiding the sharp edges deep inside.

Maybe they are like small stones

light but dense

when multiplied heavy as the world.

Maybe they are like the shoe

that rubs and chafes and galls

and makes callous what once felt the soft grass.

This is true: they are holding the breath

and stopping the tongue

and damning the self

that by nature must flow, must be free.

There’s a couple of ways to sort of reset a sleep schedule. One way is to stay up as long as feasible, like until 6 or 7 am, and then sleep for maybe 3 hours and get up at 9 or 10. Then, because you didn’t get enough sleep the “night” before, you’ll be tired enough to go to bed at a normal time, and then you’ll wake up at a normalish time as well. I’ve employed this method with some success. The trick is to find something moderately interesting to do during the hours between 3 and 6, which are normally pretty terrible times to be awake. One time I did this by watching several games of Australian rules football, which is kind of bemusing at the best of times, but even more so when you’re really tired. It was entertaining enough to keep me awake, but confusing enough to keep me from being all excited, so that when 6am rolled around, I felt plenty sleepy. The problem with this method is that you tend to be a little discombobulated the next day; if you’re going to do it, I would recommend doing this on like a Friday night when you aren’t doing anything in particular on Saturday.

The slightly saner way to reset your sleep schedule is to just go to bed early one night, preferably after a good amount of physical exertion. For instance, I got back from playing ultimate about 90 minutes ago, and I’m feeling plenty tired to go to sleep nowish. (The problem tonight is that I have to wake up early to take a friend to the airport, so we’ll see if I actually manage to fix my sleep schedule.) The more general problem with this method is that

especially when one is conscious of trying to fall asleep and reset one’s sleep schedule. But anyway, that’s the method I’m choosing tonight – wish me luck!

I have some other thoughts about pizza that are not related to my conversation with my friend. One of these is that whenever I eat pizza, or indeed any dish that is topped with melted cheese, my moustache smells like melted cheese until I have a chance to wash it with soap. I don’t know why this is. My moustache is not really long enough to dangle in my food (you’re welcome for that mental image), but I didn’t ever notice this effect before I had facial hair. I wonder why the smell of melted cheese clings to hair (and particularly facial hair) when it doesn’t cling to skin (e.g., on my fingers, or my lips).

I have a great recipe for sourdough pizza dough that I haven’t made for far too long. I intend to make more pizza dough in the near future, because I have a great deal of arugula in my garden that is going to need to be eaten, hopefully in creative and delicious ways. I’m thinking that arugula, pears, balsamic vinegar, and sautéed onions would be good friends on top of a pizza, with just a little olive oil and a little cheese underneath. Maybe sprinkle some feta on top, or maybe add a little prosciutto.

For instance, my roommate might be buying a house. It’s apparently a great deal. He’s trying not to be all stoked about it but I can tell he is.

There is another Skywalker for instance (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) but I don’t feel about talking about it right now. :)

This time there are five voices: me, a guy sitting on the left, and three girls who are all sitting to the right. This makes my job much more annoying, because it turns out I’m really bad at telling women’s voices apart. I resorted to making a sticky note with timestamps where I know each person is speaking, so that I can jump back and compare. (Also note my rad pseudonyms; I got the idea of using superheroes or cartoon characters from my advisor, who does this when he does focus groups.)

There are a few things I can do to make this process marginally less painful. First of all, I use a media player called VLC to play the audio files. VLC has a lot of really nice features. First of all, there’s a slider in the playback window with which you can control the playback speed (without changing pitch!). I’m a fast enough typist that I can keep up with speech at 50 to 60 percent of normal speed, depending on how fast the subject talks, so if I crank the playback speed down around this level, I don’t have to keep skipping back to type everything. So what I do is, I close my eyes (so I don’t see typos and feel compelled to fix them immediately), kind of zone out, and type like a madman.

But on the topic of skipping back, VLC has another nice feature that lets you skip back five seconds by holding down the “skip back” media key. (EDIT: This length is even customizable; see here for directions!) Most other programs I’ve played with make you use some sort of crazy key combo (Option-Command-Shift-B or something stupid), which means that the media player window has to have focus to begin with, which, when you’re transcribing, it usually doesn’t, because your text editor is the thing that has focus. VLC will listen for media keys even if it doesn’t have focus, which is beautiful.

However, this feature sometimes backfires on me. See, if you don’t hold down the key for long enough, VLC interprets it as “go back to the beginning of the file.” Nothing is more frustrating than accidentally skipping back to the beginning of the file, because a) you lose your place, and if you haven’t recently put in a timestamp, you’ve got some guessing to do, and b) at the beginning of this file there is an annoyingly loud (even after I attenuated it a little in Audacity) noise from me putting the recorder down on the table. So basically what happens is, I’ll be in this sort of intense transcribing zone, and I push the media key not quite long enough, and suddenly CLUNKWHACKGHRACHKHGKGH, which makes me rip my headphones off my ears and spew profanity and go get a cookie.

So – now you know what I’m doing when I’m working on my dissertation for the next little while.