Welcome to Karl's Cheap Web Cam Page
This is a page to encapsulate my web cam and a growing list of interesting things that are in some way linked to me.
There may be a live webcam available, click here to see it.
Click here for information about the camera, and why it may not be updating.
News
11/10/09 (1911)
Magic Show:
Ooblec:
Quail Man:
Rock Wall:
Trees:
Users/karl/Desktop/Scale/DSC_8340_mod.JPG">
Dog:
The Girly:
Tomatoes in November:
Things:
11/07/09 (1052)
The leaves are almost all gone now. I can stare up and to the right over the corner of my computer display and and count all the houses all the way to Central Avenue. I can crane my head further over my shoulder and see the clock on the church two blocks away through frozen kelp forest of bare branches. I conceptualize the houses on my street as being wildly different, because I'm used to seeing them up close with The Dog. Some are convered in trinkets and kitch, on has cracked plastic dishes of cat food in front, another has an ackward wad of pipes dangling of one corner. From a block away, however, I can see that they are three pastel triplets, powder blue, seagreen, and yellow, starched and crisped in the November sun.
We're sick again. Maybe again-again. If you feel bad long enough, you begin to wonder if maybe one illness supplanted another. I lay in bed and wished something slightly bad would happen to the Dog that would keep him occupied for a couple of hours. He paced back and forth, whined like a little girl, then rammed his wet nose into my mouth. I hoped some drunk hunter would have stumbled in and planted a beaver trap in the tub or delusional a lion tamer, would have decided to spend the night on the couch, then wake up, muzzle The Dog, make him sit on bar stools, jump through flames or hold a kitten in his mouth. Or at least take him on a walk so I could sleep. I was very happy asleep. The Dog clearly views sleep as some crazy accident that happens if you are not too careful.
I made 10 six ounce cups of coffee this morning. This is equivalent to 5 american cups, 7 european cups, or 15 cups if you bought your coffee maker at Wal-Mart.
I read that I show several signs that I am an axe murderer: I have a middle class background, i have trouble maintaining relationships, I am white, and I am male. I only need an axe and exhibit cruelty to animals.
Maybe that's why I'm always searched at airports? Because I'm an axe murderer?
The phone company went bankrupt. Then they billed me again. I called them again on monday and they transfered me to a manager who claims that it is all fixed. I seriously doubt it, especially since they now claim that they have to wait until the next billing cycle to be sure.
You would think that deleting an entry in their database would be easy.
11/04/09 (1416)
I have no problem keeping my plants watered. I think schlake is doing it wrong. Maybe he should give up his schedule. I have various vessels that hold water, and if one plant looks dry and I am holding a vessel, all the plants get watered. Except for the tall pointy thing. It only gets watered when i forget the last time I watered it.
Whenever I water it, The Dog tries to eat the soil.
Because the tall pointy thing is so pointy, I just grab his tail and pull him away. I think he gets the message because he tries to eat me instead.
The Dog periodically needs water too. If he acts weird there are several courses of action to try:
a)Let him outside to pee
b)Take him on a walk (possibly to poop because he doesn't like to poop in the yard).
c)Play fetch or tug of war
d)Feed him
e)Give him water
f)Pet him
g)Shoot him with the squirt gun
h)Lock him in The Dog box.
i)Neuter him
j)Yell at him
I don't hesitate to note that (i) is remarkably affective but costly to do on a regular basis.
I received an email this morning notifying me that there is a flu outbreak on campus. This isn't exactly news to The Girly or meself, i spent the weekend and Monday trying not to die. Last night, for the second time in a month convened our cough-and-sneeze duet.
I have 7 pairs of large men's briefs (white). Large is what the label says, but this means that they are extremely comfortable to wear outside of my pants.
Writing thesies really really really really sucks.
10/27/09 (0815)
Shake!
10/26/09 (0913)
As a grad student, you can look forward to spending any free time you have working. I think I may have shot this weekend in that manner.
My brother noted that his blog is sorted year-month-day. I think his chronological accounting system is nearly ISO 8601 compliant. So is mine, for that matter, though posts are recorded in MST.
ISO 8601 is a great idea. Great, that is, until you get the monkeys involved.
We held a big group meeting in 2007, one of the major issues was how we were going to store data from our measurements. This is a big task, given how many of them there are, how many of them only support 8 characters in their filenames, and how much data some of them produce. One of the things I pushed for in that meeting is that we switch from colloquial to ISO 8601 dates in UTC.
In the meeting, everyone agreed that this was a wonderful idea.
Fast data acquisition systems were set to store the data as the ISO 8601 date. It sorts well and is easy to parse. We have years of data consistently stored this way. It's been a win.
We've run into trouble with slower systems that rely on human input for filenames.
People can't remember what they're supposed to do.
So we have a mishmash, and arguments. Since I was the only one who took notes at the meeting, everyone thinks I'm making it up.
Maybe I should have just pushed for a Julian calander. Sheesh.
Tempus porco nihil est
I can only see The Dogs butt.
It's sticking out from under the desk. I hear mouthy tennis ball chewing noises emanating from the dusty confines.
There was a long sequence of in and out and whining and chastising this morning.
The dog woke me promptly at sunrise. This is pretty much the routine, I haven't used an alarm clock since my brother and Packrat were here. I put the dog out (it's warm and damp) made coffee, heard the dog bark, brought him in, and fed him. Went back to bed (where The Girl still is). Dog starts whining. I let him out again. Barking. I let him in.
I give up on sleeping.
I take a roost in the office to do morning work, plus coffee. The dog comes in behind me.
*whine*
And he sits.
In his doggy brain, sitting is starting to take the equivalent of "Pretty please with a cherry on top?" There's something he really wants, I'm missing it.
He's been out. He's got water. He's got food. I've pet him to bits. What am I missing?
I let him out again. I note he keeps tangling his lead on the junk pile the landlords stooges left. I lift the lead over the jetsam and nudge my mutt-er-whiner to the yard. He mills about and squats.
Oh.
In case you didn't know, I'm trying to find out what I should do after I'm done here. I have a bit of a deadline I'm working towards. Slowly, more slowly than I'd like, but it's coming.
About tenure track life:
I was sitting in a meeting last week. One of the nontenured profs was there. She was talking about how she wanted to do some fairly trivial world travel, but didn't have the time to do it due to her research and teaching.
My stomach turned a knot.
I have no idea why someone would be tenure track faculty. No pay. Insane teaching loads, unworkable battles for grants, and no free time. In addition, no one in my field has really won the tenure track race. My former adviser has gotten tenure, but funding for research has been elusive, at best. My current adviser isn't tenure track, having left a tenure track position to pursue research. Now research funding is tight and the short term future is grim. A friend, who is a former department chair and tenured is leaving, again, because of no funding, in addition to the normal bureaucratic nightmare that is a University. Another friend appears to be leaving science altogether. Now I'm watching current assistant profs come in. One has written countless modest proposals that have gone unfunded. From my point of view, as start up money and time dwindle, the proposals seem evermore extravagant. I presume this is to appear to be more aggressive and high impact. Another new professor got a start up package that, frankly, sounds like pocket change. I couldn't buy ONE of the instruments I use regularly. I couldn't rent one. I might be able to make one, but then there would be no money for science.
Long story short is I don't know anyone who is winning by playing the same old game.
To boot, these people never seem to stop working. True, the work can be quite gripping and fascinating, but it tends to own you in a way because so many other people are working like that at different times that you have to work when you'd rather be doing something more fulfilling just so you can keep up. I'm not sure if it bothers me more that some people respond to work related email at 0200 or if i was the one who started the exchange at 0130.
Actually, I do know why people want tenure. Tenure sort of promises a paycheck to those who have it. You want job security, tenure isn't a bad way to try to get it. It's hard to fire a tenured prof.
Also, if you enjoy the pace of academe, it might be the place for you. Things take forever to do because peoples jobs are never at risk. The ivory tower is the only place on the planet where I can imagine real, productive work being blocked by the campus aesthetics committee. I take that back. I don't have to imagine it, because it happened to me.
All and all, i don't think being a prof is the life for me.
I do like the idea of working and being paid a 9 month salary. I would love to have summers off.
I think I could handle teaching, but not teaching and research.
If you're on the seacoast, you should go outside, because the leaves are just past the peak of freshness, and the world radiates light like nothing else.
Old News
Look! I'm finally learning enough HTML to make a decent web page!
This page is made from 100% recycled electrons
