February 28, 2005
Birthday haiku
Greeting everyone
with her special charm and wit,
laughter fills the room.
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Posted by rigd0003 at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2005
World Jump Day
This from J-Walk blog.
There's a movement out there to organize a World Jump Day. Their rallying cry is,
"Join us in the attempt to drive planet Earth into a new orbit!"
From the site:
Scientific research has proven that this change of planetary positioning would very likely stop global warming, extend daytime hours and create a more homogeneous climate.
This reminds me of a mathematics professor, Dr. Alexander Abian, who was at Iowa State when I was attending undergrad there in the early 1990s. He proposed blowing up part of the moon in order to stabilize weather here on Earth. When I Googled "ISU professor blow up moon", the first two hits were:
Hey, if that ain't prestige, I don't know what is.
Posted by rigd0003 at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2005
With the start of the cycling season, a long drought is over
The Outdoor Life Network (OLN) has published their 2005 cycling race coverage schedule. The first will be the Paris-Nice race on Sunday, March 6. I wonder if OLN is only covering it because Lance Armstrong is slated to attend? No matter, I'm just happy to get a chance to see it.
Some of my friends may find this hard to believe, but I've become a bit of a sports fan of late. It all began when I started dating my now-husband. He and his family are huge Yankees fans. I found that once I started to get into it - knowing the players, etc. - that I really enjoyed watching the games. Then I started following the Cubs, a team I always had a fondness for. Then it was cricket - a great sport, once I learned how it was played. (If you ever want to challenge your brain, try learning a sport you didn't grow up with, have never seen played, is kind of similar to America's favorite pastime in some vague and not-too-helpful ways, and is steeped in British history and jargon.) Then it was cycling, which I now have a great passion for.
So now like all those sports fans I never understood before, I'm jones-ing to see a race, match, or game. This time of the year is a serious dead zone for me. (I still can't get into watching basketball or hockey, the latter being a moot point this season anyhow.) There's cricket going on, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, but my satellite company isn't offering any matches up in the near future.
So now I sit and wait for the cycling Spring Classics and baseball's Opening Day...
Posted by rigd0003 at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)
Yes, Virginia, you CAN get Cubbies tickets!
After a long and frustrating day yesterday, I was finally able to get some Cubs tickets. This was the first time I tried to get single game tickets from the Cubs web site. Home game tickets went on sale yesterday at 10 a.m.
After clicking on the appropriate link, you are taken to a "Virtual Waiting Room". Then you're told that people in the waiting room are being chosen at random. The waiting room page automatically refreshes every 30 seconds, at which point they re-assess whether it's your time to be chosen.
My chosen time didn't occur until 9:04 p.m. - a full 11 hours after I'd started this adventure. Granted, I was away from my computer for certain stretches, but still.
When I finally got touched by the Cubby gods, I had a heck of a time finding a game and a section that still had 4 tickets for sale. So I'm frantically clicking around their ticket site, because you are given a very short time frame to make your selection before they kick you back out to the waiting room. Not fun.
But I'm happy to announce that my family and I will be basking in Wrigley Field glory on Friday, July 1, watching them play the Washington Nationals (the Federals would have been a much better name!) from the Upper Deck. I'm sure to have forgotten all about this frustrating process by then.
Posted by rigd0003 at 07:26 PM | Comments (2)
Abyssinian bliss
At lot of people ask me what an Abyssinian cat looks like. Here are some recent pictures of our two.
Callie is of the ruddy variety. She's my personal stress-reduction trainer. Warning: This pose is very advanced and only recommended for professionals.
And Pippin is of the blue variety, seen here proof-reading my dissertation. Hey, at least he's not asleep yet.
Posted by rigd0003 at 04:57 PM | Comments (1)
Epi makes top 25 list
The job of Epidemiologist has been ranked by Fast Company as one of the top 25 jobs in 2005! This feels like Sally Field moment - "you like me, you really like me!"
One of the four categories they used to rank jobs was Room for Innovation. That really hits the nail on the head for me. Epidemiology is a different way of looking at things. It studies cause and effect, exposures and diseases. But the big challenge is separating the mere spurious associations from the truly causal associations, separating the chaff from the wheat. It's a lot of Sherlock Holmes-like deductive reasoning. And it's a relatively new field with all sorts of new methods and avenues opening up all the time.
On the other hand, the job of epidemiologist scored low on Salary Range Index because so much of the work is done at the local, state, and federal government agency level. Much of the funding is at the whim of representatives of the public for whom we serve. And when epidemiologists are doing their job well, there are fewer outbreaks, exposures, and illnesses. So when things are going well, there are fewer problems, and no problems mean no funding.
But money isn't everything. Just as long as I make enough to pay off these student loans before I reach retirement age!
Posted by rigd0003 at 12:21 PM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2005
At play...
I'm having fun learning the HTML ropes. Here's a picture of me at play in the snow. This is from a month ago when my husband and I finally got to take our snowshoes out of storage. Since that big snowstorm, the Twin Cities has had 50 degree weather (melting all but the most sheltered snow), temps in the single digits, and some more snow. And we're not even to March (weather) Madness yet!
Posted by rigd0003 at 03:11 PM | Comments (1)
February 24, 2005
Getting it RIGHT or getting it DONE?
Which is more important to a PhD student working on her thesis? Are they mutually exclusive? Is this the work on which I'll be judged for the rest of my life, or is having that piece of paper and those three letters after my name the bigger key to opening doors?
Such are the anxieties of life.
Posted by rigd0003 at 02:20 PM | Comments (1)
Signing on
So I've decided to dive in to the blogging pool. I'm not sure how I'll use this, but check back and find out!
Posted by rigd0003 at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)