Thursday, June 19, 2008

random bullets of teaching and stuff

* This is the first week of Summer Session II. I already know that the students in my class are smart, funny, and quite proficient. I hope it will be a painless, yet interesting and in some ways challenging, summer session for them all. A few of the students have already walked in graduation, so this really is their last class, yet they all have good get-the-work-done/learn-something attitudes about being here. At least so far. I've already achieved my goal of making each person laugh at me, and I'm 90% sure of all the names.

* Got the evaluation numbers from last semester's class—two thumbs up. I love me some statistical validation.

* I still haven't taken my new computer out of its box, but I did install Firefox 3 on this machine. I will write a post about it. It's very fast. You know something is speedier than its predecessor when an actual, live human can tell the difference (as opposed to using tools and working in microtime). This Firefox 3 Memory Usage post talks about a lot of the improvements, and I would just like to note that I am personally two degrees of separation from all this awesomeness. You see, my friend/fellow PhD student/soon-to-be office-mate, Donna, is the mother of the fine fellow, Jason Evans, who wrote the jemalloc memory allocator. That's cool.

* Um...how to segue to something not-technical?

* I've cooked a bunch of good food this week. The next One Local Summer post will be full of stuff and pictures. Hooray!

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