Britt's Blog

Taking a motivational tip from JP I am going to use the threat of public shame to motivate me to plow through an onerous to-do list.

Here’s the grading I have accumulated:

• Astronomy: Observing Lab, 8/31 [15 min]
• Physics: Lab, Vector Manipulation, 9/11 [1h 15m]
• Astronomy: Indoor Lab, Celestial Sphere, 9/12 [30 min]
• Astronomy Problems, Unit 1-4, 9/14 [1 hour]
• Physics: Projectile Motion Lab, 9/19 [15 min]
• Astronomy: Spectrum Lab, 9/19 [15 min]
• Physics: Problems, Ch 3 & 4, 9/22 [1 hr]
• Physics: Lab, Atwood Machine, 9/25 [30 min]
• Astronomy: Observing Lab, Binary Stars, 9/26 [15 min]
• Astronomy: Problems, Spectra handout, 9/28 [30 min]
• Physics: Problems, Ch 4 & 5, 9/29 [About a million years]
• Astronomy: Article summaries, (various) [30 min]

I thought listing it all out would make it seem more managable.

I was wrong.

Any encouragement would be appreciated. Email me if you need my address so you can send chocolate, caffeinated beverages and/or cheap whiskey to dull the pain. :)

I’m not much of a Mail guru, but this is a little thingie I figured out how to do.

Here’s a picture of my Mail window. Yes, there are actually zero emails in my Inbox. I am a disciple of the Inbox Zero school.

What I’d like to draw your attention to are the folders at right. I try to keep my folders to a minium, and if there were tags in Mail.app, I would only have three folders: @ACTION, @HOLD, and Archive.

I immediately delete anything I don’t need and can’t imagine ever needing, naturally. Archive is where I throw almost everything else as soon as I possibly can. @HOLD is for mails I want to hang on to for a short time and don’t want to forget about: directions to that party on Friday, a notice that something shiny has been shipped from Amazon so I need to be watching for the package, &c.

@ACTION, though, is the important folder. It is the folder that holds emails that I need to take some action on. I want to be continually reminded that those emails are there, and I’d kind of like to know how many there are, too. And notice that in my screenshot, the little number tells you exactly that.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a way to get Mail to display the number of mails in a folder when the folder is closed. (If you know a way, do tell!)

What Mail will tell you is how many unread messages are present in a folder.

So, if I need to take action on an email, but can’t do it right away, I:
1) Hit Command-Shift-U to mark the mail unread
2) Hit Control-@ to move it to the @ACTION

#2 isn’t going to work on your Mail, so don’t try. I have Mail Act-On set up to move emails to the @ACTION folder when I hit Control-@. You can of course achieve exactly the same effect by dragging the mail to the folder, but then you have to take your hands off the keyboard, like some kind of a chump.

It would be ideal if you could set the mail as Unread using Act-On, and do this automagically when moving mail to the @ACTION folder, but that’s not currently possible. Apparently Act-On uses Rules, which is Mail’s filtering function, and the designers of Mail assumed that you’d only use Rules to filter incoming mail, and did not include the capability to use Rules to mark things read or unread.

So in general, if you want to display the number of emails in a closed folder, go into the folder, hit Command-a to select all, then hit Command-Shift-U to mark the mails unread. That’s my little Mail hack! Use it in good health.

Jason keeps complaining that I have no pictures of him in my blog, so here he is, showing off a sweater and pants I knitted for Michael, my sister Gretchen’s new baby.

Both peices are made from Lion brand Babysoft. The sweater is a raglan cardigan (click for free pattern). I determined the pattern of stripes by flipping a coin (or having Jason flip one for me) to decide to make each stripe 2 or 4 rows wide, and what color to switch to. As you can see it didn’t really come out looking very random, but that’s kinda how randomness goes, sometimes. The pants are from a crazy Dutch pattern magazine I found at the Friends of the Libary a while back, which has provided boucoup excellent baby patterns over the years: Scheepjeswol Journal 45, 0 to 5 years, subtitled “Fashion for the youngster.”

Just gotta find a box and they’re off to La Crosse!

Tres, originally uploaded by Flatfield.

We went to J’s sister’s wedding this weekend. It was a nice ceremony, held outdoors in a park, with a western theme.

I took a few pictures that came out really nicely.

Grandmas blowing bubbles, originally uploaded by Flatfield.

smallfrog, originally uploaded by Flatfield.

I find today’s Find of the Day at Found Magazine strangely disconcerting and depressing.

Ugh. Maybe I just need to go have lunch.

Here’s a Keynote slide I put together for tonight’s lecture.

I know I’m easily amused, but I think Harlow looks especially cheeky.

1) Keynote is nice. It doesn’t do some of the stuff I’m used to being able to do in Powerpoint (like, strangely, create a freehand or bezier line) but everything it does do looks just a shade…nicer. Also, the Inspector, which lets you quickly change the properties of text, object or a slide, is much better than the Powerpoint version. The Keynote Inspector has an incredibly useful feature that PPT lacks: adjusting the space between paragraphs, lines, or even characters with a simple slider, allowing one to subtly squeeze more text onto a slide without messing with font size. The PPT “inspector” thingie is also distracting as hell because it turns semi-transparent and freakin’ changes sizes when you’re not using it. Who thought that was a good idea!?

2) Aquamacs is working nicely. Expecially once I changed the Preferences so that it open files in the same window (the correct emacs behavior, thankyouverymuch) instead of a new freakin’ frame. (Note of clarification for the uninitiated: In emacs, a “window” is a subdivision of the emacs screen. In Xemacs, a “frame” is a new. . . uh . . . well, what the rest of the world would call a window.)

3) I lurve the Stop-It!, count-down timer Widget for the Dashboard. Despite its rude-sounding name, it actually makes a very mellow, new-agey, singing-bowls kind of sound when the time is up. I use it for tea and for timing 15-minute or half-hour periods while I work.

4) Mail.app needs tags. Mail.app needs tags YESTERDAY. Mail Tags is a freeware plugin that impliments tags, but it also has all kindsa bells and whistles, and really, all I want is some freakin’ TAGS. Get on the stick, Apple!

5) I’m test-driving Mail Act-On, which allows you to create key combos that will cause user-created mail filter rules to act on particular messages. The upshot is I can hit ctrl-a to move a message to my “Archive” folder instead of clicking and dragging, or hit ctrl-d to delete a mesage instead of mousing up to hit the Delete button. I may or may not come up with more cool stuff do do with it.

I think I might have left my camera cable in Ohio. That’s the last time I remember using it, anyway. But we were at CompUSA yesterday, because Jason had to send in his laptop for some repairs, and I found a nice retractable 5-pin-to-USB cable, by Belkin, for $12.99 or something. As you can see, it works pretty good. I haven’t hardly used my camera since we got out here, so I’m going to have to go around and take some pictures, both arty ones and just some picks of the apartment, and where I work, so you guys can get the full Britt-and-J-in-Beloit experience, visually, at least.

Blind enthusiasm will only get you so far.

I spent the first week and a half operating on adrenaline and caffeine. I ran from one emergency to another with my hair on fire, flying by the seat of my pants.

This is no way to live, and I Hit the Wall about Wednesday.

I was tired and unfocused, which lead to procrastination. This left me scrambling around at the last minute to prepare for class. This lead to stress. This left me feeling tired and unfocused…

Therefore:

I must be deliberate in how I spend my time.

I knew I was going to have to manage my time carefully to accomplish all I need to do, and yet I let myself fall into the trap that “I don’t have time to get organized.”

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I don’t have the time to not be organized.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have a system at all, but that I messed with my system. While working on my thesis, I started using the Unschedule, from Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit and it really helped me to focus, and sustain my focus, on productive work, while still taking enough time to unwind and stay sane (though near the end of my thesis writing, I was running on pretty small values of “enough”—possibly an important exercise in finding my own limits.)

As the semester started, I intended to just use my daily calendar as an Unschedule instead of printing out my full, 24-hour Unschedule form, but I found there was some kind of psychological barrier there! I don’t know if my daily planner just doesn’t provide enough room, or if it was bugging me that the planner only goes to 7 PM, so my evenings were falling off the end, or if it was wigging me out that it didn’t look like the Unschedule I was used to, but I just wasn’t using it.

I’ve printed out my Unschedule again, and I found myself immediately returning to some of the good habits I established over the summer, felt (a little) less frazzled, and started getting on top of things again.

So, yikes, here I am, psychologically dependent on a corny productivity tool.

Oh, well. It beats the alternative.

Planning for a two-hour class period is very different from planning a one-hour class period or a three-hour lab.
Or: I must be more deliberate about how I spend class time.

I am teaching two 2-hour periods of Astronomy and three 2-hour periods of Physics 101. Many Beloit instructors swear by the two-hour class period.

I find it foreign and strange.

Okay, actually, at the moment, I just hate it.

I’ve started actually making a wee schedule for each class, marked off in 15-minute increments. This is something I never really had to do for 1-hour classes, but I just have no instinctive grasp of what you can do in 2 hours. It just seems like a yawning void into which I throw ideas, only to come up short on time every single class. And even with the structure of the schedule to help me plan, I’m still having a hard time estimating how much time different activities will eat up. I’m sure I will learn this skill if I keep working at it, though.

I must stop trying to be Professor of the Year and just be a competent instructor first.
I am wasting far too much time trying to come up with teh bestast interactive peer-instuctive creative entertaining hands-on simulated in-class activity evar!!!!!1!!!!!!111

I don’t particularly like walking into class with two hours of chalk-and-talk or Powerpoint slides, but it beats the hell out of dashing into class at the last second, trailing crumpled handouts mangled by the copier, only to have trouble setting up my computer so that I discover that I can’t do the Very Clever Activity I had spent four hours planning instead of just writing a damn lecture.

Also, I’m currently spending an unsustainable amount of time prepping for class, and I’m going to burn myself to a crisp in a couple weeks if I don’t change the way I do things.

And, anyway, if I start just writing a lecture, I frequently get ideas for activities I can weave into the lecture, so it’s not like I’m totally changing my teaching philosophy—just trying to rein it in a little and keep myself realistic.

So, that’s the accumulated wisdom of two weeks. I’m sure I’ll look back on this in a year (or a month) ((or a week)) and laaaaafff. Anyway, J and I are off for the weekend to visit family and spend time away from the internets. I need this so bad I can taste it. :)

This is Physics Kitty:

They say that every good physics class should have a mascot to be dropped off of cliffs, shot out of cannons, rocketed into orbit, and generally abused.

So far, Physics Kitty has only been threatened by an advancing car, but I predict a perilous future.