Taking a break from school-work to update you on the Dougish going ons...
BLOT: (14 Sep 2010 - 02:13:00 PM)
Taking a break from school-work to update you on the Dougish going ons...
There aren't many Dougish going ons, right now. Now that the weather has cooled off, especially at night, Sarah and I have tried working tennis back into our schedule as best we can. This translates, roughly, into Friday nights through Sunday nights, schedules otherwise not-conflicting. We got two matches in this weekend, the first lasted over an hour and the second just slightly under one. I managed to win both, but it was pretty shaky at the start of the first one. Took me about half an hour for my body to really wake up and remember the game in question. I am still notably more rusty than the last time we seriously played (this past Spring, if not last Fall), but my body seems to be remembering the "tricks" at a rapid pace. Will be down in Gadsden this Friday night, and will probably be too tired to play on Saturday, so chances are this weekend will be shot.
I talked about taking a break in the "subject line", above. That's a little unfair. I have not really accomplished all that much today. I really need to get some things done tonight, and most likely will wrap up both of my presentations due this week and maybe, but just maybe, will get a chance to work with on a paper due this weekend. This leaves a somewhat sizable (8-12) page paper due on Thursday, but most of that will be "responsive" writing. What do you think about the article's research? What do you think about the article's bias? Double spaced, too. I think I can do that in about three to four hours, even I am not running at full speed, and likely less.
The reason just about nothing got done today is because of the readings I did last night. I read through dozens of articles with titles like "The functionality of familiarization of ebooks in actual classroom settings" and then, despite the attempt to be all scientifically minded, most of the article would be based off maybe a couple of interviews, a small handful of responses to a short survey, and then a literature review of previous studies. I found articles that would be nothing but literature reviews, and then later articles that were practically identical except for the inclusion of the intermediate article. Truth by consensus. Maybe half of the articles concluded with, roughly, "these are things that future researches can look into," because so few of them had real conclusions and most just considered themselves testing the water with their toes.
I know that the survey is considered the height of science for many humanities, and in the library and information sciences, it looks like vague hand-wavings towards the literature is the standard methodology. Since the topic I want to study (our ability to recall information from digital versus print sources) is best served by hard data, it is practically new. There are some other papers out there, but so many of them fail to actually prove what they claim they are proving. It is almost disheartening.
Enough with school work blubbery. Sarah and I had a good time this weekend. Last weekend was spent recouping. The weekend before that was spent working. The one before that was spent schooling. This one, though, was spent just relaxing and doing things. We got the tennis games in Saturday night and Sunday night. On Friday night, we went out to Edo with Sarah's parents. They have, on several occasions, helped us with Sarah's car. Not monetarily, but her dad is a mechanic and so they have done things like drive out to Huntsville to figure out why some piece won't work. It was just a way to repay that, taking them out to Edo and having a nice meal. It was frustrated by the fact that they were an hour late, so we ended up getting to Edo with less than hour until they close, but it ended up being nice. They tried out chopsticks. Got some tempura. I got eel and vegetable sushis, and some seaweed salad. Some green tea ice cream. Some sake (of course, alcohol makes any family gathering better). We came home and talked some more with them, and about 10:30 that night Sarah and I made a quick dash to Books-a-Million and picked up a small handful of things. She got volumes 2 and 3 of the oversized
Saturday, we did stuff but I only remember shopping and tennis. I got a copy of the new
And, then on Sunday, we did the standard grocery shopping trip. Except instead of hitting up Kroger (like we normally do), our entire trip was to John's Big Brother (on Holmes near Jordan). Cost us a few dollars more, though some things were cheaper there, and it was so worth it. For those who don't know it, it is one of the few old school groceries you can find around here (though there are others, sure). It only has a few aisles and not a huge selection of things, but the trip is far more relaxed than going through a big-box grocer just so you can stand in line for 10 minutes. I think I'm going to try and alternate between that and Kroger for a bit.
That's pretty much it. Going to get something for lunch and then jump into some more work, maybe. Or just casual reading, possibly. Here are a couple of bits to entertain:
- Decatur's City Hall was shut down due to some unknown, hazardous material, yesterday. Turned out to be baby formula.
- According to this chart on the time expenditure by college students, the average college student sleeps over 8 hours a day. They must be including the word "nap" in there much in the same ways several freshmen girls I know used it.
TAGS: Me in 2010
BY WEEK: 2010, Week 37
BY MONTH: September 2010
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Written by Doug Bolden
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