Not To Be Trusted With Knives

And one final round-up for the year end. My nerd stats!

Analysis of above stats:

• I talked less, but more people listened!

Other nerdery highlights of ‘09 include:

• Started self-hosting my blog.
• Completed my first (and probably only) 24 hour Blogathon.

Books read this year⁷, in no particular order:

• The Subtle Knife by Phillip Pullman
• The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman ⁸.
• Blink by by Malcolm Gladwell
• Tipping Point by by Malcolm Gladwell
• What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
• Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy
• Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• One Minute Millionaire by Mark V. Hansen and Richard G. Allen
• Work Less, Make More by Jennifer White⁹
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tollee
• 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks¹⁰
• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• The Shangri-La Diet by Seth Roberts
• Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
• The Toyota Way to Healthcare Excellence by John Black with David Miller¹¹
• What Projects Should We Manage? by Bill Bates
• Utilization-Focused Evaluation (3rd edition) by Michael Quinn Patton¹².
• God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
• 50 Success Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon
• Rich Women: A Book on Investing for Women by Kim Kiyosaki
• The Now Habit by Neil Fiore

Happy New Year everyone!

1. at the time of writing this blog posting and including the tweet that will result from me blogging this [↩]
2. not sure why this value is not equal to the number of visits to my blog divided by 365 days. Probably some some of rounding error [↩]
3. ibid [↩]
4. at the time of writing this blog posting [↩]
5. thanks to the Hockey Hotties posting [↩]
6. thanks to the Blogathon! [↩]
7. undoubtedly there were more that I’m forgetting. This list is based on ones that (a) I can actually remember without prompting, (b) appeared on my blog and so I saw them when I went through my blog to write my year in review summary, and (c) I still have out of the library, so I saw them when I checked what books I have out of the library. [↩]
8. which I’m *almost* done [↩]
9. just starting this one [↩]
10. didn’t finish before it was due back at the library. But it was really good – need to get it out again to finish it! [↩]
11. partway through [↩]
12. partyway through. This is like the bible of evaluation [↩]

Well, so much for the whole blogging-every-day-in-December thing!  But I assure you, I had various good reasons for forgetting.  You may choose one or more of the following excuses:

• it’s too cold outside
• my shiny Christmas tree distracted me
• cute baby distracted me
• cute baby trying to knock over my Christmas tree distracted me
• cat was too cuddly
• boyfriend was too cuddly
• I was wrapping Christmas presents
• I was plotting ways to break into my coworkers office to leave her Secret Santa present¹

1. I am currently 0 for 3 attempts. At this rate, she’ll be lucky if she has her presents by Easter! [↩]

At the end of NaBloPoMo, the NaBloPoMo people sent an email saying “Way to go and/or not, depending on if you actually did blog everyday in November”¹ and “hey, why don’t you try blogging everyday for yet *another* month?”²  Apparently, the theme for December³ is “mitzvah” – which means, basically, doing good deeds.  In the words of the NaBloPoMo, this means that the challenge for December is:

to give something, to someone, every day of the month, and then blog about it. The goal is to act with kindness, obviously — I don’t want to be responsible for people giving each other black eyes. Your gifts can be as large as volunteering or donating to charity, or as small as a kind word to someone who needs it.

And when I saw that, I was all “like it wasn’t hard enough to just blog every freaking day, now you want me to do good freaking things too?”  No thanks!

But then Chris commented on my posting that she was going to do it and so I should join her and she was in the freaking hospital and managed to do all but two days in November and how could I not do December with her?⁴  Because in addition to being a glutton for punishment, I’m also a sucker for peer pressure.

Anyway, in her posting today, Chris said that she’s not going to go out of her way to do things that are kind and generous, but rather just be her using kind and generous self and give “mitzvah” updates in her postings if/when they happen.  So I’m following her lead⁵!

Which brings me to my small act of kindness for today: I gave Laurel, a colleague of mine who hates driving, a ride to a meeting today.  I hesitate to even call this an “act of kindness” ‘cuz it was really no skin off my back – I was already going to that meeting anyway, so it was nothing at all to pick her up along the way – plus, it meant I got to drive in the HOV lane with my 100% full Smart car.  But I mention it because it then allows me to tell this story about my GPS.

We were driving out to the meeting, which was in Pitts Meadows at a location that I’d not been to before, so I decided to set the GPS to guide us.  I’d explained to Laurel that the GPS was new and so I don’t fully trust it as it occasionally tells me to do odd things, so I still had a trusty hard copy of a map, just to be sure.  So we are driving along Hwy 1 in the HOV lane, still a few kilometers away from our exit when the GPS says, “In 400m – take a – sharp right.”  This is in the MIDDLE OF THE HIGHWAY.  We are in the HOV Lane.  As in THE FAR LEFT LANE!

That GPS is lucky that I generally don’t do what I’m told to.

1. this may or may not be an exact quotation [↩]
2. ibid [↩]
3. apparently there are themes [↩]
4. the latter part of that sentence was all me, and not what Chris said in her comment.  She wasn’t trying to guilt trip me – that’s all my own doing! [↩]
5. i.e., I may be kind to you this month. Or I may just blog about nylons [↩]

30 days, 30 outstanding blog postings!  OK, 27 outstanding blog postings and 3 blog postings that I totally phoned in – but done nonetheless.

And in honour of this momentous occasion, I grant myself this lovely “Participant” badge.  Because nothing says “great job” like “eh, she showed up.”

..but there was a cat on my computer!

Oh Thursday, you are a long, long day for me.  In addition to my usual 1.5 hrs of commuting and 8 hours at my regular job, Thursdays this semester involve 3 hrs of night class¹.  Meaning I race home from work, grab a quick bite to eat, make sure I have everything I need for class, and then head off to campus for the evening.  And I’m not home ’til about 10:30 p.m., which is my ideal – albeit rarely realized – bedtime.   So that is my long-winded excuse why today’s blog posting is a link to a different blog.  It’s a little blog project that my friend and colleague, Dr. Dave and I have been working on.  It’s called The Black Hole, where the “black hole” in question is the postdoc (and academic life, really).  We talked about such things as science funding (or lack thereof)/policy/training/communication, and scientists in nonacademic jobs.  Or, as Dave put it in his inaugural posting, we talk about “what’s wrong with the scientific enterprise.“  It’s not meant to be a bitch-fest, but rather a place to generate discussion about issues that we and our colleagues have faced – and hopefully some discussions on how to make the situation better. We’ve just started up, but there are a few postings up with more coming down the pipe.  So if you are a scientist – or even if you are not – I encourage you to check it out!

1. an aside: some of my students told me tonight in class that they’d found my blog.  So, if you are reading, students – hello! [↩]

I’ve been rather slack with the blog-every-day thing.  And so I’ve signed up for National Blog Posting Month – or NaBloPoMo for those in the know – to see if I’m still capable of pumping out 30 days of quality content. You know, quality like lists of hot hockey players, pictures of what I’m wearing on a random day, and being a guinea pig in scientific studies involving porn watching.  If I do run out of quality topics such as these, I can always follow this person’s lead and turn it into NaBloShoeMo.

My friend, Resident Historian and Chief Political Correspondent, Sarah is doing NaBloPoMo too (in fact, it was her posting today that prompted me to join), so you should go check out her postings this month too!

A friend of mine and I are putting together a little science-related blog¹ and I have a question² for one of the blog postings I’m going to write over there.

Where do you get your science information from?

Doesn’t matter what kind of science – be it health, environmental, astrophysics, agriculture, geology, whatever – I’m curious as to where people get their scientific facts from.

Do any non-scientists ever read scientific journals (or do any scientists read journals from outside their field of training)? Popular magazines? Scientific American? Health care professionals? The media? Government agencies (like Health Canada or Stats Canada or Environment Canada or the BC Centre for Disease Control)? Random forwarded emails telling you that [fill in name of common food or drug] causes [fill in name of disease]?

Let me know in the comments section!

1. because, you know, I clearly don’t spend enough time blogging as it is [↩]
2. a little unscientific survey, if you will [↩]

So, whenever I have to write for long periods of time, I always make sure to put on nail polish. Usually in some crazy colour.  Turquoise. Bright shiny red. Metallic purple.  Because, believe it or not, I actually find it entertaining to look down when I’m typing and see colourful nails.  Wow, when I type it out like that, it sounds really, really pathetic.  But when you are typing up, say, a thesis, it helps.  Keep in mind, I was usually writing late, late into the night for weeks and months on end.

So, anyway, for today’s Blogathon, I decided to go with silver:

You can also see in the photo (a) I also painted my toenails silver (because you gotta match, right?) and (b) I now have a sticky note covering up my computer’s clock, because it hasn’t stopped being a bitch.

Don’t forget to donate!

Read about the charity that I’m supporting, Options for Sexual Health!

So I just saw a tweet from @Blogathon.org saying that if you post a pic of the place you are blogging before 1 p.m. on their Flickr, you will have a chance to win a $5 sponsorship for your charity from them. And seeing as I haven’t got a single donation pledge since the start of blogging today (mad props to everyone who pledged their donations before the ‘thon started though!), I figure I should give this one a shot!  So here I am:

It’s a beautiful day here in Vancouver and so I’m blogging on Tod’s balcony, enjoying my non-stop Diet Pepsi and the hummus I made last night knowing that I’d be snackity¹ today.

¹“Snackity” is another word for “BETH HUNGRY!”

Don’t forget to donate!

Read about the charity that I’m supporting, Options for Sexual Health!