Blog

We drove past campus today and saw undergrads dutifully trundling their belongings out to sidewalks and cars, along with a few half-hearted, exhausted lawn parties sputtering along and a ton of “For Rent”...

Maybe we didn’t give it enough of a chance, but I was kind of underwhelmed by the Ann Arbor Book Festival today. (It fills a portion of North University for a couple of days every year around this time.) There...

I’m really, really going to have to take (and see through) 502 next winter. Damn. Having said that, I know (especially now that the term’s essentially over) that there’s no way on God’s green...

Can’t recall the last time I slept for 10 hours straight, but that’s what I did last night. It felt great.

I was on the bus this afternoon and passed through Party House Row on South State. One of the roofs had about fifteen subscriber newspapers, still in their wrappers, scattered all over it. I wonder what that was all...

Sometimes I wonder where the hell I’m living. It seems that the Michigan House has just passed a bill that, if it gets approved by the Senate, will permit doctors and other health care providers to refuse to treat...

Done, done, done ….. up till hours I’m ashamed to divulge finishing it, but it’s done ….. don’t know how coherent the product is, but it’s done. Hallelujah. Now, the CS 810 paper...

The beagle is once again in his customary final exam support role, next to me down here in the basement as the wind from the approaching thunderstorm howls outside. Superstitious though it may seem, I know I’ll...

Well, ugh. That’s my reaction after completing the first three assignments for the first of four undergrad courses the University of Michigan is forcing me to take before I will be permitted to join that exclusive...

Between converting this site to Textpattern—since LunarPages is no longer interested in helping resurrect MovableType (if they ever were)—and starting my 12 hours of undergrad courses in preparation for grad...

Blender and VH1 have teamed up to list the 50 worst songs of all time. I would agree that Starship’s “We Built This City” is a plenty bad song, but the worst? The worst? Have these people never heard...

How long will it be before all the ash trees in southeastern Michigan die out? I heard a figure on the radio just now of 6 million ash decimated by the emerald ash borer and almost did a double take. Unbelievable.

A howling wind tore through the boulevards of the southeastern Michigan town, stirring up dust motes, leaves, beetles, and memories of regret, pathos, and anomie.

This year’s Lyttle Lytton Prizes (a spinoff from the better-known Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, sponsored every year by San Jose State University) have been announced. The winner: This is the story of your...

Tornado weather, says Hillary ….. great! The one that passed through the day we arrived last August was enough for me, but I suppose that’s wishful thinking. (On another subject, Hillary has a great post...

Let’s see. Prediction from the National Weather Service: possibility of thunderstorms 20%; temperature will rise to 76 by noon then fall to 67; and the winds will be between 25-30 mph, with gusts as high as 49 mph...

This weather is almost astonishing in its California-ness. Blue skies, sunlight for most of the daylight hours, temperatures in the high 70s, and lots of dry wind. I suppose, on second thought, it’s more like a...

The dog was back to his old tricks today, though he seemed to be somewhat more drowsy than usual (which is to say, he spent somewhat more than his usual 22.5 hours a day asleep). He ran without much apparent impairment...

The nightmare that is the last few weeks of school is almost over ….. yet it seems right now as though it will never be over. April 29 seems very far away.

We no longer have cable, so we’re already unwittingly doing it, but if you have cable and are of a mind to do this, it’s something to consider. [Link courtesy LibraryJuice.]

   [First pic: We’re going somewhere? Now? YAHOO!!! Second pic: Ummmm, this is a really long hike, dude. Third pic: ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!] Today, we demanded too much of the geriatric and overweight in...

The archival permalinks are now working. I missed a step in the Textpattern setup regarding ‘clean URIs’ that I didn’t see the other day. So, we should be back running. No word yet on if or when...

« Here’s how the Boy Emperor supports our troops ». Dr. Strangerummy made the announcement: ‘The Pentagon formally announced Thursday that it had stopped the planned return from Iraq of some...

    Proof that Ann Arbor is not always a ‘sunless horror, devoid of joy and hope,’ was provided by a gigantic orange ball in the sky the last couple of days; beagles were especially grateful...

Weekend Magazine, The Michigan Daily’s, well, weekend magazine, put out its Best of Ann Arbor issue today and a very well-deserved Best Blog award was given to Rob over at Goodspeed Update. We weren’t even...

Technology is a wonderful thing … until it crashes and burns spectacularly. We’ve had our own problems (obviously) with technology here around the manse this week; the crash of our Movable Type CMS punted us...

Until I straighten out the fight between Movable Type and Textpattern over my single SQL database, older comments you may have made on posts will not be available, but they are not lost. However, the commenting system...

Today really felt like the first day of spring. Classes were sitting out holding their sessions in circles on the grass, there was some massive groovy “Goodness Day” event going on in the Diag, and every...

Well, Textpattern is installed and working … I hope. Comments are back and we’re Movable Type/CGI/Perl-free and mostly PHP (but still XHTML Strict compliant). There are some slight differences that...

« This is incredibly disturbing and sad’ »: ‘Out here on the farthest reaches of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, they are calling it “The Silent War,” the one where...

After pitching a fit with LunarPages, who finally apologized and agreed to restore the entire Movable Type installation, I spent an hour or so this morning trying to make the backup work. It doesn’t. MT is, to a...

The content management system I use to control all facets of AirBeagle.com was obliterated by my hosting provider, LunarPages, today, without notice or warning and with extreme prejudice. I only found out about it in a...

Walking down Liberty tonight after a movie at the Michigan, we saw the planet Venus rising low in the sky to the west. It would be difficult to think of a more beautiful sight.

A guy from Lansing talking about the two halves of Michigan on a radio call-in show this morning: “We don’t worry about the UP, and they don’t worry about us trolls in the south.”

A random question (inspired by a recent srah post): Does anybody know of any good places to buy tea (as in loose-leaf or bags in stores, store sections, etc, versus cafes that sell tea by the cup) in the Ann Arbor area...

It was sunny late this morning when I got up (had my first long sleep in almost a week). But the cloud cover rapidly rolled in and the National Weather Service is predicting a 20% chance of showers. April in Michigan.

I’ve talked to a few of the second-year students in the past couple of days. The adjectives I’d use to describe them and the looks on their faces: relieved, relaxed, and, in some cases, resigned. One of them...

It would seem that I’m going to have to start using a peak flow meter on a regular basis, at least until the pollen season is over. It’s a very simple device, actually; the best analogy I can come up with is...

Apparently we’ve made it to another milestone: a listing in Google Directory. (We’re under Reference -> Libraries -> Library and Information Science -> Personal Weblogs, if you’re...

… there was a huge Good Friday concert in the Diag today complete with a big wooden cross on the steps of Hatcher and an electric Christian rock band that sounded like a washed-out version of Live circa Throwing...

There’s a long column in yesterday’s Chronicle on Higher Education advising Ph.Ds on how to make the transition to librarianship, “because the library profession consistently offers a deeply satisfying...

It’s always amusing to watch hypocrisy in action — as when certain conservative library blogs that normally get into conniption fits about any e-mail or posts on any other library-related site (including...

I lay in a hot tub for a half hour tonight and felt as though it were the first time I had had a chance to breathe and relax in days. I had to think for a couple of minutes to recall what day it actually was. I have...

Morrissey may not be making great music anymore, but he’s still good with a one-liner (this one’s from tomorrow’s Guardian):

Q: What do you feel when you look in the mirror?

A: Extreme reluctance.

Census stories fascinate me. This one, from today’s Associated Press wire, shows that San Francisco County lost more residents in 2002-2003 than any other California county (Steve and I left the month after the...

My presentation was serviceable; it was supposed to clock in at 5 minutes and the professor signaled when I was going over the clock (which I don’t think she did with others who seemed to go over 5 minutes). I...

I went to Ambrosia this morning to sit and do some last-minute prepping for my final 643 presentation. A grad seminar (apparently in Mideast politics, because every other word was “Islam” or...

It’s nice to know that there are good people in the world. I was in a rush this afternoon, picking up a slice of pizza on my way to work, and I knocked my tray onto the floor in the Union with my awkwardly...

Well, time to break out the inhaler. Asthma has returned.
By the way, thanks, Steven and Bentley, for the Sudafed advice. I bought some today and it helped a lot.

It’s good to know that some people have nothing better to do with their time than write letters to their local newspapers (in this case, the Aberdeen American News in South Dakota) and ask whether any local...