Brian Bilbrey ⁽⁷⁵⁹⁾

Brian Bilbrey August 17, 2011

Culture Shock

Left over from yesterday: A bit of link-love for MIT's OpenCourseware. 'Cause they're totally worth it. I was told that using my Xoom to watch MIT Chemistry courses while working out on the elliptical was a bit ... nerdy. SRSLY? Oh, yeah, and bonus link for people wondering how homeopathy works: http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/. I promise that's no Rick-roll. * * * So, Culture shock. How, you ask? More specifically (since the topic even needs disambiguation at Wikipedia), I'm talking about The Culture - the pre-Sublimation galaxy-spanning "civilization" spawned from the mind of Iain M. Banks. I've read eight books from the Culture…

Brian Bilbrey August 16, 2011

Another use for the Xoom

It turns out that the Xoom fits right nicely in the book-holder slot on the elliptical machine. But I really can't read while I'm exercising ... and I've never gotten the knack of listening to audio books. But hey! There's a lot of video lectures out of MIT and elsewhere. That's one of my biggest problems with exercise - I get bored. This has possibilities! No, there's no woman with improbably blue contacts and a glass of some liquid fiber product lurking just outside of the frame. Multi-tasking has its advantages, though.

Brian Bilbrey August 14, 2011

Passages

Thursday: Oh, right, you heard from me on Thursday, at least to show you the yummy chili. Friday: Work, then I wrote that 600 word paper that came out to 840 or so words, and turned it in. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that the instructions didn't just say must be 600 words, but also included the "must not be over 800 words" category. Really? The prose that described the topic to be addressed was 534 words. Why can't I use as many words as I want? F#@(*U&. So I pulled the paper back, then edited down to 783 words, by…

Brian Bilbrey August 10, 2011

Down to the wire

Summer session is wrapping up for me pretty quickly. Final assignments for both classes are due this weekend, so I'm taking a day off work to work on school. I've got to do a PowerPoint (blargh!), and normalize a data set, as well as write a 600 word paper. In a perfect, undistracted world, I could accomplish all that today. I hold out hope... The Fall session starts for me in mid-September, with a course on Gerontology, which fulfills one of the remaining general education requirements. I finally got around to buying the book today, and the list price aged…