nor so wide as a church door

Man, it feels like even longer than it's actually been since the last time I posted. I don't even have a good excuse, really, except that I'm even lazier than I thought I was. :P

The job's going well, though it still hasn't picked up much; about a quarter of the time there's nothing for me to do, and another quarter of the time there's stuff I ought to and/or want to be doing, but I don't know how to do it, or whether I should. The remaining half is split between stuff I find really satisfying, like taking the godawful and practically unnavigable page for the athletic handbook and filling it with internal links, and the stuff I find incredibly tedious, like adding new students to the website database by hand because the place that does our data processing is ridiculously slow. (To be fair, it is August, so I assume they're getting a lot of new student processing requests right now. But still.) I've also started daydreaming about being able to make my own database and fill it with minor characters and details from the great HP AU. Seriously, you could do great and hilarious multimedia fannish/RP things for Harry Potter, with a fully functional school website. (Teacher pages! Grades and comments! Schedules! Quidditch games on the athletic calendar! ... I am totally losing my sense of perspective.)

Anyway. Fannishly, I finally got off my butt - and the weather was good enough for long enough - for me to get mostly caught up on Burn Notice, Covert Affairs, and The Closer. I'm not caught up a hundred percent on Rizzoli & Isles, but I'm working on it. Now I just need to catch up on Warehouse 13, and I'll be all set. ( A little nattering, mild spoilers. ) Mostly, though, I really do not have any deep thoughts.

Which is possibly because the part of my brain responsible for deep thoughts is too busy buzzing around Arabic. Now that I have actualfax money, and - at least for the moment - no regular bills except gas to spend it on, I splurged a bit on a Rosetta Stone. I'm pretty sure it's Modern Standard Arabic; there are times when some of the speakers are a little difficult to understand, and I think it's partly because of dialectical differences that aren't being covered in the program in general. Anyway, it is, of course, fascinating. I'm only on the fourth lesson, so I haven't gotten a lot further than, you know, "The girls have bikes. The girls do not have bikes. There are three yellow bikes." And the phonetics are tripping me up a little, which I was expecting; I can't always hear the difference between emphatic and non-emphatic stops, or between the velar fricatives and the pharyngeal fricatives. And I definitely can't produce them very well. :P But I'm sure practice will help, at least, even if I'm too old to really get good at it.

Mostly, it's just a ridiculous amount of fun to do. There's nothing I like better than learning languages, and with a computer program, I don't have to do skits or dialogues or worksheets or any of the other stuff that I don't like about regular intro language classes. But I haven't gotten far enough to say for certain whether it works, either. ^^ (If it does, though, I ... may have already composed a prioritized and weighted list of the languages I want to get next. :D)

I'll conclude my wall of text by saying that I have never listened to so much NPR in my life as I have commuting to and from work - which is part of the reason I'm experimenting with taking my pretentious post titles from the Writer's Almanac poem of the day, instead of songs. I could seriously listen to Garrison Keillor talk all day.

This whole survey thing really exploded, huh?

I've caught up on a lot of the posts about it between classes and such, and have found it hilarious and infuriating by turns. The "slash is like dudes liking transsexuals" comment was bewildering; the responses to it warmed the cockles of my heart. I think that what throws me the most is the staggering number of hugely broad assumptions they are working from already - they are treating things like givens when they are not actually givens, and that anybody who is supposedly some kind of qualified researcher would not know better than that blows my mind.

I have seen it mentioned that the people behind the survey have implied that, because they were not intending any minors to be involved, they did not need IRB approval. (Although I did not actually follow any specific link to a comment containing that implication, so I have no first-hand knowledge.) If that is the case, then I would like to weep for all the time I wasted filling out paperwork just to get an expedited review of my thesis project by UVM's IRB when no minors were going to be involved.

I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking when I first saw the banners for the survey going around; I've seen that kind of thing before for people's smaller statistics projects and such, and I guess I never really realized that this was at least trying to be an actual official research project. That being the case, the problematic survey items take on a whole new meaning. We spent ages in Measurement of Communication Processes learning about just how careful you have to be about everything when you're making a good survey, including the wording of the items and the various options for the response setup. We had to run our project surveys on a pilot sample and test the validity of the items and chuck the really awful ones and rephrase the only mildly terrible ones and argue for, like, a day and a half about whether we had really picked the right response setup. And that was just for a class project, not for something we were planning on turning into an actual research tool.

Other people have talked quite a bit about the myriad other problems, so: linkspam roundup. I would be so lost by these blowups if it weren't for these roundups.

... And now I have to go to Human Cultures. Sooner or later I will put up a riveting account of my Tuesday, though.

ETA: Obviously I should have checked my e-mail before I left, or I would have noticed I had a comment (on LJ, I mean) before this posted, but somehow my last post about the survey actually ended up in the linkspam. It's like I have some kind of actual presence on the internet or something. o.O

ETA 2: Also, something so basic I forgot to even mention it: every statistics class I have ever taken has hammered home the point that convenience samples are almost totally worthless. Obviously this is a situation where you are aiming to get a particular population, and so a convenience sample, as long as it's taken from that target population, is perhaps slightly less useless than usual, but.

I've been sort of overdosing Harry Potter lately - first going to HBP, and then my mother got OotP on her Netflix because she couldn't remember anything about it, and we watched that, and then also I just got up the nerve to share the few chapters of the HP AU that I've actually written with M (she liked it! Although she's definitely the sort to say that, even if they were deeply terrible - though she would probably add a little concrit to the compliments, if she really didn't like it). So it's possible that I shouldn't be surprised that I had an ( HP-verse dream the other day. ) I very distinctly remember thinking at this juncture that I was a dreadful Mary Sue, because here I was, an original character (and a self-insert at that!), and I was beating Voldemort about the head with a jacket, and I wasn't dead. (And, of course, in a larger sense, I was fighting Voldemort, which was something Harry, or maybe some of the professors, ought to be doing.)

It was very odd, but rather a fun dream. I must add it to the list. That makes three flying dreams (one with wings, two where it was my superpower), a pirate dream (I was Elizabeth the Red, scourge of the high seas - mostly I remember the part where that was my name, and the part where I boarded a ship by swinging on a bit of rigging), and three fandom dreams (one SG-1, one J2, and this one).

I also must add to my wildlife count for the summer, with two more moles in Mary's garden, a wild turkey crossing the road on the way home, and a deer in the field across from my house, nomming very happily on some grass, and regarding my car with a very blasé kind of air as I passed it.

My thesis research is slowly but surely progressing; I have now completed three interviews, although one is probably not long enough to provide a good speech sample, and have two more scheduled for next week.

My mother is currently updating me daily on the tale of my birth, as my birthday approaches. My due date was three days ago, but my birthday's not until the third of August; I was very late indeed. (If I had been five minutes earlier, my birthday would be the second of August, but no; I felt it was best to wait until 12:04 AM of August third.) She loves to tell us these things, she does the same thing to my sister when March rolls around. I have done a little hinting around as to things I would like, and it looks like the first season of Burn Notice on DVD has a very good chance of happening. \o/!

Syntax is slowly leaching away my will to live. I appreciate the quirky beauty, the intricacy and arbitrariness, the flexibility, of English grammar, really. But I've taken, like, five classes on it. I was kind of hoping that this course would be a little more comparative - a little more about other languages, languages that are very different from English, languages with tenses and moods and particles and other things that don't exist in English. ... Sigh.

Thank god for conlanging, I guess. :D

Today was nerdy fun pretty much from start to finish. I got up early to feed the pets - two dogs, two cats - as promised, only to find that my mother was already awake, and had pretty much done everything. Turns out the loose dog and the more active of the cats had been waking her up intermittently for an hour or two.

So I ended up lounging around for a while reading back issues of ... Asimov's, I think it was, a little sci-fi short story magazine; there were a few disturbing stories, a few stories I'm not sure I totally understood, and a few stories I liked, which is pretty par for the course, as far as me and short stories go.

And then I got up and mixed up some sugar water for the hummingbird feeders, before putting them out. My mom put out some seedlings on the porch to get some sun before she left for work; I checked on them, and ended up putting a skirt - yes, when I say that, I actually mean a piece of clothing, this is not some kind of fancy horticultural terminology - over them, because they weren't quite used to full sun and they got a little wilty.

And then I proofread a hundred pages of text for Project Gutenberg. :D Aside from the obvious lure of proofreading in general - I got to fix typos! And formatting! It was like heaven! - the pieces of text themselves were actually really interesting. I did a few pages from a book about a young girl trying to become a dancer; another, a very sharp, dryly funny one, about cross-examination strategies in the courtroom; an old children's book about the life of Jesus, including a lavish description of the beauty of "Magdalen" and her "courtezan" lifestyle that made me think of Inara; and another one that seemed to be pretty much a collection of discussions and reviews of equipment for helping gamblers cheat at cards. And when I say reviews, I mean that some of the pages boiled down to "A+++++++++ WOULD CHEAT WITH AGAIN". That one was pretty awesome.

There was also some fail, natch - there was another relatively old children's book about some soldiers attached to an operation to lay railroad through the Rockies, and the part I proofread was the part where they get chased by those horrible savage murderous Indians, who are bloodthirstily persistent in their attempts to take the scalps of innocent white men. ... Yeah. I think it may have struck an especially unpleasant note with me because of MammothFail.

And then, after I decided that I should probably not do more than 100 pages a day, my recording thingy, the one I order because I'm going to need it for my thesis research, arrived! \o/ Whole new avenues of distraction were opened! I don't have much of a voice to speak of, but I do like to sing, so I took the opportunity and recorded some (rather terrible) renditions of songs that I know but do not actually have - ones I learned in chorus, stuff like that. Oh, and the Mingulay Boat Song; I learned that one in elementary school, and became very used to hearing it in soft, sweet, 4th-grade girls' voices, before discovering that most of the professional recordings of it are sung by big growly men. This is a very scarring situation to be in, so obviously I needed a nice high-pitched version to keep me sane.

All told, today was kind of awesome. Shiny.

Note: the dance is not nerdy because the source of the yay is nerdy, or anything like that; it's nerdy just because I'm doing it. :D

My Scottish Gaelic paper is DONE OMG. \o/ It's not a great paper - it may not even be all that good of a paper - but it's FINISHED. And, frankly, I did well enough in the rest of the class that I can afford to take a minor hit on the paper grade, if it comes down to that. (Sidenote: I am so crazy used to Google Docs that I keep stopping to hit Ctrl+S every few sentences - which Chrome interprets as me trying to save the Dreamwidth journal-update page to my computer, natch. I am such a winner.)

My goal for the rest of today mostly involves more Age of Mythology, although I was also hoping to finish up the first round of word generation for my latest conlang, and maybe get started on glossing some words - enough to translate the Babel passage, at the very least. If I do manage to get the Babel passage done today, possibly I will post it here, just for future reference. I LOVE being able to tag things, I cannot even express how much, except possibly by going ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ a few dozen times. There are times when I kind of wish my computer were just sort of a sea of documents that I could tag appropriately.

Also: this is the CUTEST THING EVER.

My usual strategy with research papers is to absorb all the necessary media first - read all the books and articles I've dug up, often more than once - and then let it percolate for a while. (I've discovered that if I put something on the back burner on the stove of my brain and leave it there for a while, when I come back to it, it will be much better; my mind will have put things together and made connections while I wasn't looking.) Then, I just flat-out write, and save adding citations and footnotes until after the paper's written.

I finished my paper on Saramaccan yesterday afternoon, which meant this morning was footnote/citation time! \o/ And, as noted, it was actually kind of fun. Despite what you might think if you looked at my desk, I do like being organized, especially with text; it pleases me to enforce consistency on things. That's probably part of why I like editing the formatting of things so much - making sure that every instance of a particular formatting choice is the same makes me so happy.

... That was probably the last whisper of a chance of being normal that I ever had flying out the window, right there.

Anyway. The footnotes are all done, everything's cited, the bibliography's formatted. Now I just have to review a couple things for Literature, and then I will totally be ready for the last round of Tuesday-Thursday classes this semester. Today, and gym class tomorrow morning, and then I'm FREE. (Not that there aren't classes I liked - Pidgins and Creoles! Linguistic Anthropology! ♥ ♥ ♥! - but, still. VACATION.)

Also, it had better rain today, or I'm gonna melt. *flop* QUIT PLAYING WITH MY HEART, OUTDOORS.