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
09/29/10 (1858)
In order to spread happiness and increase loyalty of alumni, NMT has decided to terminate all alumni accounts.
Certainly, NMT will recieve fat donations as a result of their actions.
You can find Karl's Cheap Web Cam Page in exile here.
The lights are out, and no one is home.
09/20/10 (0514)
Defend THIS:
You would think that the night before ones Ph.D. defense would be a sleepless affair, fraught with some combination of panic, worry, and nausea. In my case, the sleep situation was anticlimactic. I'm almost surprised at this looking back, at the same time, I also made a semi-conscious decision not to get myself worked up about things. Thus, fortune found me in bed before midnight (a rare event these days), and I slept like a log.
I may have lost the ability to loose sleep over stressful situations years ago... familiarity takes the sting out of all kinds of events that would put another persons adrenal glands into overdrive. Also, after 5 years of work on something, and particularly one year of intensive analysis and writing, there is little to be done a few hours before the final test. The dissertation is in the committees hands, your presentation is pretty damn polished and practiced (although I know most people, including me, can't resist fiddling with slides up until the bitter end). It is, frankly, not a situation that that you summarily prepare for by reading a Cliff's notes and cramming every equation you've seen in the past 3 weeks. It is so much larger in scope, something a bit deeper that you've better got a grip on by now. Or else, you wouldn't be here. Right?
Right.
The next morning was similarly pedestrian. Alarm at 0600. Shower. Shave. Coffee. NHPR. Raisin Brain. Laptop. Backpack. Suite. Bus?
The girly pointed out that overusing normality was a bit ridiculous. So I drove.
Boat, it was.
I hid in a unknown, windowless lab until 0930, and ran through my presentation a few more times. By showtime at 1000, I had already given my talk two full times that day.
Dissertation defenses here are in two parts: the the public presentation, and the private discussion with five members of your committee. The public presentation is actually not much different than the talks I had been giving since forever. Me, the room, a deck of powerpoint slides, and 45 minutes of nervous yammering. Then there was the private session. It was like all the other times my committee and I had spent time locked in the same room: long and intense. In the private session, each member of my committee flipped through copies of my dissertation that were dog-eared with sticky notes, asking questions and commenting. "Until you're done or we're done," one said. "Bring water, this should be 5 hours," another said.
For once, I got to use the spare slide in my powerpoint deck, which is good, because I am not a very neat writer, especially not on chalkboards, and doubly so under duress.
After a few hours, I left the room for the committee to deliberate, and milled with The Girly and my father. My adviser came to shake my hand. There was champagne in the lab. Nice.
And then, of course, there are the revisions to the dissertations itself...
Those are the most fun.
Piled higher and Deeper: Corrections
At the defense, committee members will recommend corrections and (possibly and hopefully not) additional work. When these are completed, they will sign and then the thesis can be submitted for binding, and is then submitted to the graduate school. Then you formally get the degree. Everyone calls you "doctor" after your defense, though.
For those of you who have been tuned in/turned on/dropped will know that my writing skills are not what I tout on my curriculum vitae. Huge amounts of red ink have been hemorrhaged.
Every time I print out a copy to proof read, a forest screams.
I am the type of person who really needs in on paper to see errors. Hence why I pump typos at you at 60 wpm. The used desktop laser printer I saved from the salvage heap 4 years ago has been a true gift. Through 8 classes, through seminar, proposal defense, and now the dissertation, it has consumed a single $70 cartridge, and jammed only when I foolishly attempted to manually duplex. Wise investment for grad school: laser printer (with duplexer if you can find it).
It ultimately took 5 weeks to get everything lined up and corrected to the point where it could be printed.
End of the the line.
The TCC is canceling all alumni accounts for reasons that are somewhere between obvious and stupid. As a result, this page will be moving to a new server. Where? I do not yet know. You may have to google me to find it.
I will try to post something here before it goes down.
Drat?
Drat.
07/20/10 (2000)
I just found out that one of my favorite hobbies is coining neoligisms.
07/20/10 (1403)
The joy I felt when i finally found some coherent instructions on how to put page numbers in portrait format on a landscape page was somewhere around euphoric. I might have even been elated.
Yet another hour of my life annihilated by minutia.
07/14/10 (2007)
I can use aspell, if I have to.
Old News
Look! I'm finally learning enough HTML to make a decent web page!
This page is made from 100% recycled electrons
