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Over the June 21 weekend wifey and I took the ferry from Portland ME up to Nova Scotia. Our friends were getting married at a bed and breakfast up there, and it was really fun! I’ve always wanted to go to Nova Scotia, perhaps because of Stan Rogers. It’s very pretty, and the wedding was beautiful (congrats, Jen and Terry!). Here are photographs:
The whole world of Google stuff is becoming head-spinningly useful. I never knew I had so many different kinds of nails until Google started handing out all these different kinds of hammers.
In this post, I’m going to test one of the new features of Google Docs: forms. I expect that I may use this feature a lot in the future, for both fun and work interests. The forms are integrated with spreadsheets. There are a bunch of different ways to graph the results, and the number of different analyses and graphics plugins is growing exponentially thanks to Google’s 3rd-party plugin interface. In my spreadsheet, I made a graph of annotated locations on a map:
and you can add additional data to the source spreadsheet by filling out the following form (please fill it out!):
How cool is that? Think of all the applications, online class participation in teaching, surveys, collecting scientific data (fancy citizen science?), etc. And, you can graph the results for participants in a million different ways. You can control who has access to the poll if you want (mine is open to anyone), and hopefully they’ll add an anti-spam filter in the future.
Here are the results of the Beer/Cheese question summarized in a pie chart:
In case you’ve been wondering whether or not mandolins are fun, I’ve taken
the initiative, put in the time, and I got some real answers. Yes, they are.
Wifey and I were walking back from The Commons in Ithaca a few months ago when we passed
Ithaca Guitar
Works
and found this pretty awesome
mandolin (pictured left) for quite cheap (at least, I feel like I could play faster on
this
one than on some of the fancy ones that cost twice as much; so, as far as
“plays real fast” goes as a judge of quality, t’ain’t shabby). So fun! Wifey sees
it as a good investment too, because before now I’ve been playing diddly-diddly music
from
The Session on the banjo (4-string), and the same tunes
on
the mandolin sound, well, let’s say decidedly less plunky.
The look of this blog has changed a little, to get
more in tune with the 21st century. No, I haven’t stopped using
the ancient, obscure, perl-powered, database-free CMS
blosxom. The
change is that I now have the coolest blosxom flavor
ever! (imho.) The layout is entirely CSS controlled, with
no tables (aside from a single cell to keep the header
elements in a freely scalable box). Everything else is
floating around in a div tag! It was surprising how easy
and fast it was, considering I know nothing about web
design. The new code is less than a quarter as
long as the old code, because I just went through and
deleted all those dozens of nested table tags. Woo hoo!
Let me know if it causes any errors on your screen, especially if you’re using an outdated, unpopular web browser that I don’t have access to, like Internet Explorer.
While we were out for the wedding of mrcomfypants and froggy-dear, we also got to see Victoria, BC (took a boat from Seattle!). Here are the photos from that adventure. All the pretty garden photos are from the Butchart Gardens, where Wifey was inspired to take lots and lots of pictures.
- My brother mrcomfypants and froggy-dear got married! Beautiful wedding in Gasworks Park in Seattle!
- Due to the above event, we got to spend lots of quality family time which was really great. And we saw many neat things, including a really big waterfall, the town of Ellensburg, the museum-to-be at central washington university, and Victoria BC (via a turbulent boat ride).
- I got some textbooks in the mail so I can figure out what book I want to use for Analytical Chemistry. I’m pretty sold on Daniel C. Harris’s Exploring Chemical Analysis. It totally covers everything, but keeps it short and clear, and applied. He introduces techniques within the context of asking questions (environmental questions, biological questions, etc) which jives with my intent to include a lot of inquiry and student-centered learning in the classroom.
- In the past three weeks, I think I made four posters. Poster time. Thankfully, I only presented one of them. I’m looking forward to a summer free of poster printing. :)
- Wifey just went to the cinema to see Sex in the City: The Movie. I hate to admit I’m a little jealous.
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