« May 2005 | Main | July 2005 »
June 22, 2005
Running the experiment
It is now 8:54 pm and I sit here in an office with two undergraduates performing my lab exercise (and possibly my experiment, if they signed the consent forms), and the two undergraduates helping me trying to double check all of our solutions.
It has been a long day, and will continue to be a long week, and possibly weekend. I guess it is a good thing Becca wimped out and decided not to come. Due to a massive computer failure this afternoon, instead of being able to train all of my undergraduates at once I instead must train half of them individually. This adds an hour to each of the 10 teams. 10 extra hours. Sigh. Of course this is made worse since we had already passed around the sign up sheet with 2 hour time blocks.
Sigh. Other than that the exp is going fairly well considering it was written by a Tiawanese girl who spoke no english and had never used access before. For those of you who cannot read between the lines, this is not a compliment to her inginuity or inate programming skills.
Posted by kfeigh at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2005
Happy Tuesday
I am currently sitting two doors down from my old office having just finished setting up the room for my latest experiemnt. As with the last one this one is zapping all of my time, despite having 2 undergraduate helpers.
We officially began yesterday when I gave the class (for whom this experiment is actually a class assignment) a lecture on airline operations. I think it went well and they professor of the class was very happy with it. I guess that is all that counts. I actually had two students come up after class and say that they liked the talk (not bad considering the guy in the front row fell asleep.) So because this is a class assignment, [dripping with sarcasm] all I have to do is convince the students to allow me to analyze the data from their runs.
In reality I am actually also the TA for this lab exercise, so I have to do everything. Tomorrow the class has a lab period during which my UGs and I will go down and train the students in how to do the exercise. This will involve a short lecture and then two practice problems in the computer lab.
Right now I am surrounded by mountains of paper just waiting to be filled in by unsuspecting students ;) I still have a 'to-do' list a mile long. Among the things on it include buying video tapes (who buys video tapes any more), print things out, make copies etc!
Posted by kfeigh at 04:06 PM | Comments (1)
June 16, 2005
I'm back
Well it's been a whirlwind 5 days. As I see it this is my Saturday. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday I was working on the revision to my Journal paper. Those days went by something like this get up, go into work, work in paper until about 2-3, drive to Amy's, play with Elliot while Amy reads new paper, go for a walk to discuss revisions, repeat.
Then on Tuesday I have to work to get a revision in to the IRB for the experiemnt we want to begin running next week.
Then yesterday we had another deadline for a conference paper and presentations. So I worked all day on this.
I am so dead. Of course if I had gone home everynight and just crashed I would probably not be so tired. Instead last weekend we had two social engagments. Friday night we met up with Ir's friend Jeanne and watched Star Wars III, then Saturday one of Brian's college friends came up with his wife and we went to see Madagascar (smile and wave boys, smile and wave). Then last night I went to our first grad women's dinner group meeting. We had a blast, but I didn't fall into bed until after 11.
So now you are caught up.
Posted by kfeigh at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2005
Grad Student or 24hr Copy Editor?
Even though I know that I am a grad student, every now and again I feel like my life has taken on the shape of some other random profession. Today I feel distinctly like a newspaper editor for some bizar 24hr news channel. I know I have deadlines looming but I cannot do much except continue to wordsmith the stuff I have until the reporters send me more stuff for me to enter/edit. Amy just walked in and dumped revisions to 1/2 of my 'final' draft on my desk. I had hoped to file send this paper off early this afternoon, but that doesn't look like it is going to happen. Sigh. Nothing like working right up to a deadline.
Of course if this was the only deadline today I'd be happy, but of course it is not. So happy corrections to me!
Posted by kfeigh at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
Journal Paper
So randomly, the day be for Amy left on Vacation and 3 days before I was scheduled to leave Italy I get an email from the editor of the paper I submitted my mauscript to. "Can you have the revised version to me by the 1st of June?" How do you say 'no way in hell' politely? I managed to buy us some time (until the 13th, next Monday).
So I am diligently working on the paper as we speak (yeah me). Unfortunately Elliot (my Boss's son) has choosen this week to fall ill and otherwise act up. Sigh. So you can guess how much help I'm getting in this endeavour.
I'll keep you posed.
Posted by kfeigh at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2005
Deep thoughts
Normally I do not engage in deep thought in this journal. Long rants yes, deep thought no. So this may be a bit of a change for my readers, but I'm looking for feedback (feel free to email if it is too long for the comments).
Is mandatory health insurance fair?
Not is it legal, but is it moraly justified in some way. GT is about to face the question of whether to impose mandatory health insurance on its graduate students and someone asked if it was right of us to do this.
So is mandatory health insurance fair?
What if it means lower premiums for everyone and better coverage?
What if there is an opt out program for people who already have other coverage?
What if there are multiple levels of coverage, and only the bottom level is mandatory?
Posted by kfeigh at 04:08 PM | Comments (5)
June 06, 2005
Italy Pictures
Not much time to talk now. The rest of the photos are up, however I've still not completed all of the captions.
Posted by kfeigh at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)
June 03, 2005
Cortona & Siena
As you can see by the photos I really liked Cortona. If only it was a little more on the level. I reminded me a lot of Peruvian Flat. Cortona Flat was very similar. The town had lots of cutsy shops and old house fronts with beautiful flowers. Of course you had to make like a billy goat to see them, and so mom and I contented ourselves with just the morning in Cortona. We intended to then take the 12:50 bus down to the train station and head towards Siena. Unfortunately that bus did not run that day (I never did figure out why) so we ended up taking the next bus -- the school bus. Who knew that italians had school on a Saturday.
We ended up getting to Siena a little later than planned, but no real problem. We took a taxi from the train station (wich was only 7 euros for the two of us and our bags). They dropped us off directly at our hotel. Great -- things are looking up. That is until I handed them our reservation and they could not find it. The poor man who was there was beside himself. He clearly was not the brains of the operation. He seemed very happy to do what he was told, so when we didn't fit the mold, he got very scared. Then his daughter came in and after much fuss, figured out that for some reason the service I had used to book my reservation had not generated the automated email to them, so while I was in the system, they had not known I was there. To make a long story short we ended up being upgraded and had a lovely room just behind the Il Campo (the big town "square" in Siena). We enjoyed a lovely afternoon and evening in Siena. We couldn't get into the Duomo as it had closed up early for some reason, but we got to see the Baptistery which gave a good idea of what the Duomo contained. We did the traditional stroll up and down the main streets enjoying our gelato. Mom was amazed at all the people just out randomly walking and talking amongst each other in the evening (after the hordes of tourists had departed)
We had another great dinner and then had dessert at a cafe on the Il Campo. The next day we were off bright and early to Florence.
I'm having trouble loading my photos. For some reason it says I need a program, and when I tried to download it I found out that it doesn't have any nice bundled install feature. Sarah help. How do you load lots of photos at once?
Posted by kfeigh at 10:26 AM | Comments (3315)
June 02, 2005
More on Italy
I've posted about 1/3 of the photos from the trip on my gallery, for those of you who are bored or interested. We flew from Atlanta to Madrid and from Madrid to Rome. This meant that instead of arriving in Rome in the morning we didn't get in until around 4:30. Luckily this didn't really matter much to us as Heather has sent us a driver to pick us up. It was significantly cheaper than a taxi and not all that much more than the train-bus rides to Heather's house.
When we arrived Heather & Henry had not yet returned from work, and we had a very interesting altercation with their new porter, who did not like the look of us at all. Not to worry though we only had to wait about 10 minutes until they showed up. They have an absolutely amazing apartment just north of the Borghese park. It was fully stocked with American goodies thanks to the wonders of the embassy commisary.
We spent 3 days in Rome. The first day we did the Vatican. Museum in the morning (while it rained) and St. Peter's in the afternoon. As you can see we even decided to climb to the top of the cupola (dome). The next day we did the Caesar Shuffel seeing the Palatine hill, the forum, the Coloseum, and the Pantheon. It was at lunch that we discovered that we were in the middle of culture week in which all of the museums and cultural sights were free to the public. So that afternoon we went over to the National Archeological Museum (next to the train station) to look at the mosaics and frescos. The final day in Rome we visited the Borghese gallery. We had planned to take an afternoon train to Cortona, but due to a public transit strike from 8:30-4:30 we didn't get out of the city until later that evening.
We arrived in Cortona about 7:30pm, just in time to check into to the hostel and go to dinner. The guy running the hostel was kind of shady and was definitely holding down two jobs. So after climbing a rather steep hill to get to the hostel we had to wait about 20 minutes for him to show up. To add to the counts against him he told us the wrong time for breakfast and lied to us that the TI would hold our bags. Luckily the TI ladies took pity on us and let us store the bags with them anyway (after calling and yelling at the guy). More to come tomorrow.
Posted by kfeigh at 09:16 AM | Comments (1)
June 01, 2005
Back from Abroad
Yes, I'm back. Still not on the correct timezone, but physically here. I must say that it is far easier to travel in an airplane for 10 hours when you have nice big fancy seats and video games. Yes business class is the way to go -- especially if you have to go with Del*ta. I'm still sorting through all of the photos that I took and will endeavour to get some of them posted soon.
Just so you don't think that our whole trip was unexciting, below is a short description I wrote to Heather of the day we left Italy. Please note that while I've been back in the country for a little over 30 hours my luggage has not.
Yeah the lost bag is really only a fitting end to the day. First we got to the airport in what must have been record time. At 7:04 we got into an incredibly long line, which was OK because we had plenty of time. By the time we made it to the front of the line it was 7:46. We then waited as the woman checked us in. Then she asked me for my paper ticket --- bad sign. I'd converted all of my paper tickets to electronic tickets in Atlanta. Well this prompted a 20 minute ordeal which ended in me not having a boarding pass for my Barcelona to Atlanta flight. She said it was clear that I'd had an electronic ticket but for some reason the boarding pass kept printing out saying that I needed a paper ticket with the boarding pass.
So we then had to run over to the Delta ticket window (cut in line) and proceed to have the Delta lady call the Alitalia lady and yell at her. We then ran back to the Alitalia window pickedup my random boarding pass and ran for the plane (which was an hour delayed due to late pilots...)
Now mind you that the Alitalia lady booked our bags all the way through to Atlanta. She put no fewer than 3 little barcodey things on each possible surface.
In Barcelona when we went to board, we were told that our Alitalia boarding passes were "wrong" and had to go stand in line again to get "real" boarding passes.
10 hours later, and no bags.
Sigh. Better this direction than the other direction though :) Not sure who will be in charge of taking them through customs.
Posted by kfeigh at 09:07 AM | Comments (3)