Merry Christmas!

my new camera!, originally uploaded by saburke.

Sorry for the lack of posts everyone... I've been a busy little elf these past few days! Apparently hubby was busily elfing some time ago to arrange the arrival of this beaute in my hands this morning. It's amazing, he's amazing for thinking of it! He even included black and white film for me to try it out. I can't wait to get roll one developed! I can tell I'm going to have a lot of fun with this camera!!!

I have to admit though, that I'm a little intimidated. I only started with this SLR thing a few months ago, and the beauty of the Rebel is sort of that you can know as little or as much as you want. Now I really have to learn. I'm excited, but a little nervous! :s

Merry Christmas to everyone, and Happy Holidays for others. We are having a wonderful holiday with everyone and hope you all are too!

absenteeism

sorry to have disappeared on everyone! i am home for the holidays ~ yay! ~ and enjoying spendng time with family... but sadly i've developed a nasty cold and really haven't done a whole lot of anything.

santa? i'd like some healthy for Christmas please?

Appologies for bloggy weirdness

I must have picked the worst possible time to upgrade to Blogger Beta!

I'd like to send a thanks to Styleygeek for hosting and including me the the Carnival of GRADual Progress... however all you new readers are getting to see every quirk in my new blog template as I try to fix it up! I'm not sure actually if Blogger Beta and Safari get along too well. I really like the new editing tool for templates, but it seems to keep freezing up on me, so probably some of you have seen a few duplicates of things, and things popping up in weird places.

I think I've got it looking more or less normal, so I'll be leaving it like this for now. I'm home sick for the day, so I'll probably swing back around the blogosphere again later, but for now I have paper corrections to work on!

iResearch

I wish there were an i-App like iTunes, iPhoto, etc for organizing research papers. Something that I could add keywords that would be linked into Spotlight, and one could sort by journal, topic, authors, and maybe give ratings (you know you've read papers that are 5-star, and some you wish you could remind yourself never to read again by giving, oh, maybe negative stars!), oh, and most importantly link directly to the pdf of the paper. I'm not particular fond of the i-everything naming scheme, but a program organized like Apple's iLife apps would be fantastic. My current system of folders works ok but breaks down when I have papers that fall in multiple catagories... and I have this burning desire to rate papers these days.

Does anyone know if one exists (that doesn't involve inputing all data manually)? If not, anyone wanna write one???

Blogger Beta!

So it seems I'm now one of the cool kids, and I get to play with Blogger Beta! Which means things like labels... mostly I've wanted to play with labels... and I'm not sure what else. Should entertain me for a bit anyway! Hopefully there will not be horrendous glitches...


EDIT: oh, apparently, I got Beta just days before Beta came out of Beta. Kinda like being the last picked for the baseball team in gym class...

term recap and public accountability

So, some of you may have noticed the "progress bars" in my side bar creep along very slowly. I tried this motivational technique when I saw it on Dr. Brazen Hussy's blog some time ago and I thought it would help motivate me along to get things done. I thought I would also recap how this method of public accountability worked out for me.

Well, I'd have to say I wasn't nearly as sucessful Dr. Hussy. The only thing I acutally got completed was one of two Christmas presents, which is nice, but doesn't really help with my work, and since I still have another to go, really feels only half finished. I completely lost track of my TA hours as they were flexible and things got done here and there. I'm pretty sure I got more than the 40hrs I last posted, but not the 100hrs I was supposed to do. I still plan to make those up (it was more of a planning position, so in principle I can do it whenever), but now I'm doing an experiment and I'm going home for Christmas on Saturday, so I may have to just double up the work next term. I'm still a bit dissapointed that I didn't do more for that though. The paper, though not complete, and will not be submitted before Christmas, I'm actually quite happy with. I've now sent everything but the introduction around to my co-authors, and I think it is a better paper than the one I had in my head before I started digging here and there, and though I'd like to be faster at writing I really feel it was worth taking the extra time.

So, I end this semester and will head into the next with mixed successes and a whole new list of things in the lab, and writing, to accomplish. Expect more progress bars... we'll see if they work better next time.

quote(s) of the day

Yesterday:

Hubby: "What?"

Me: "I didn't say anything. It's just the voices in your head... don't listen to them."

For some reason, he thought the fact that I added advice for a course of action regarding the voices in his head was incredibly funny. Why wouldn't you make this suggestion??


Also yesterday:

Hubby: "I made progress today by not going backwards"

Oh how true, how often this is true...


There was something this morning too... but I can't seem to recall.

pure vanity

pure vanity, originally uploaded by saburke.

I was feeling rather goofy on Sunday morning, so I set up a "photo-shoot" of sorts, with the subject being "Rebby" the amazing, super-vain Canon Rebel. The idea was to make it look as if "Rebby" was doing self-portraits with my iSight camera in PhotoBooth. It didn't turn out quite as creative as I envisioned, but it was fun anthropomorphizing my camera... seeing as how we name all of the electronics around our house!

The bunch of them can be found through the "camera self-portrait" tag on my Flickr account.

yum!

yum, originally uploaded by saburke.

My contribution to the group Christmas party: Gingerbread cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, decorated with chocolate shavings and candied ginger. Really, it turned out prettier than I could have hoped, and it seems that people enjoyed it, though no one got more than a sliver.

The cake recipe was one I had from the "Anne of Green Gables Treasury" and is really very easy... I'd almost say foolproof, but never underestimate the intellegence of fools. ;) The icing is a pretty basic buttercream with cocoa added. The candied ginger I bought at a store near us that is a puveyor of such goods and I have no idea how one actually goes about doing such things. I had so much fun doing this, despite a bit of stress since I hadn't made this particular combination before and used new cake pans. I was trying to make something similar to the cake I posted raved about some time ago.

One of these days I will stop taking pictures of my food... nah, I probably won't actually.

The party was great as usual, though we stayed too late and were stupidly tired yesterday. That's ok though as yesterday was still quite productive despite my intense desire for sleep. Actually, I'm still a little tired today. Ah well, Christmas comes but once a year!

terrible life choice

Further proof that I've taken the "stay in school" message a little too far... Bart Simpson makes fun of grad students. Watch, laugh, cry, sigh, roll your eyes...

(Thanks to Mel for sending this to me.)
(Fingers crossed on first attempt to embed video... if it doesn't work click here to go direct to youtube.)

reading

I've read three research papers this morning and am halfway through the fourth. My eyes are scratchy, my head hurts, and my officemates conversations drove me to search for places nearby I might be able to find noise-cancelling headphones (EDIT: I should note that they aren't actually that loud, and usually talk science... I'm just easily distracted). I have to finish this last one before a meeting at 2pm.

I think this describes how I feel:



Ok, back to it then.

pretty pretty dress

So I stumbled across this today... and it is sooo pretty... and I absolutely love it. So here's the question: Can I buy a dress online (there are no Anthropologie stores in Canada), meaning: no trying it on, for a wedding next summer that we haven't yet formally been invited to?

Sadly, I think not. *sniff, sniff*

anybody in there?

anybody in there?, originally uploaded by saburke.

It's just been that kind of a day where at this point my brain can't do much more than play with my iSight camera. That little eye peeking out at me from atop my screen is just too much to resist sometimes... I wonder... is she watching me??

Happy December!

Christmas sock, originally uploaded by saburke.

Being the first of December, we put up our small, fake Christmas tree on Friday. Now it feels like the holidays are getting close, and we are getting excited about going home. Miraculously we pretty much have our Christmas shopping done... honestly, I have no idea how that happened... but it should make for more relaxing times and increased holiday spirit rather than stressed, crowd-fighting shopping frenzies.

Of course, a tree - even a small, fake one - makes for a fun photographic subject, so I immediately pulled out the camera. This is one of my two favorite pictures I took... this one makes the blog though since I made the ornament myself. :) The Fortissima Socka (colourway discontinued?) yarn is from Germany, and is meant to become knee-socks for myself (a much grander undertaking), and the pattern is Kate Atherley's training sock from knitty.com made with a slightly longer leg and foot.