Academic Lit

I just Googled up the process of using the Windows 7 magnifier function to invert screen colors. It's so much nicer reading PDFs in white on black!

Speaking of reading PDFs, I may use my first paycheck to buy a tablet for reading and annotating PDFs. Can anyone who does a lot of that recommend an OS that has a really good app for doing so? Ideally, I'd like a table that will interface with an external keyboard too.

The end of Orientation

It's a shame my phone ran out of power as I was riding around Syracuse with Endomondo tracking my trip. I'd love to see exactly where I was. Still, I'm pleased I got back home without incident. I was biking randomly around downtown, relying on my phone to get me home if I got lost. However, I didn't have the cord with me to connect my portable battery pack to the phone.

I was lost briefly, but I explored systematically until I found a street name I recognized and soon found I was not far from the old train station that serves as the local office of Time Warner. I can get home easily from there. During my trip, I saw the MoST (Museum of Science and Technology), the Landmark Theatre, the shot clock monument (the basketball shot clock was invented in Syracuse) and other downtown sights. I headed home, but diverted down Lodi to bike around the periphery of Rose Hill Cemetery. I headed homeward down Lodi just as a drizzle started. Looking out the window, I see that drizzle has settled in to stay for a while.

The last day of orientation was good. I was embarassed by the video of my presentation from yesterday. I was the only person who was consulting notes while presenting. It's because I've never really taught before; my public speaking experience has been restricted to presenting papers or a poster. I need to trust myself to know what I'm going to say and not keep referring to notes. I think over the course of the next year, I'm going to talk to other TAs in geography about doing some mutual coaching and see if they're interested. I want to get better at this. That said, I really do like the idea of teaching; it's exciting! I just don't feel very confident about doing it yet.

I got to talk with a few other members of the geography cohort today, both during the day and at the reception in the later afternoon when all the sessions were done. One of them has very similar interests to mine in terms of social justice and the city. I also seem to have scored points with a few with my "This Machine Kills Sprawl" bike placards. "You know you're an urbanist when you have that on your bike," said one of them. I'm really looking forward to getting to know all the geography people better during department orientation next week.

For now, though, I get a break. And with no more meals provided by SU for the next few days, I think I'm going to make one of my errands tomorrow a trip to the grocery store. I'm going to plan out a visit to school to pick up my ID card, to Melo Velo (a local bike shop and cafe where the bike advocacy group meets) to get a trouser clip, to the nearest thrift store for fun, and to Wegman's, a nice-ish grocery store where I expect I can find the cereal and yogurt that I want. I'm looking forward to continuing to learn the lay of the land.

Reading Journal Articles on Policy-making

I don't have to come into class with a complete understanding of the readings I've done, right? That's what the professor is there to help me (and other students) attain. I need to chill out. I keep feeling that, as a grad student, I should just 'get' all this stuff. Despite it being in fields I've never really read or taken courses in....

I also miss having Danae's sexy brain close at hand. She and I rarely fail to have interesting conversations about our respective academic lit.

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Also, I love the ajective "Schattschneiderian."

Readings on Policy

My computer has been randomly disconnecting from the internet. And just now, I realized that the clock on the computer was four hours slow. Surprise! It's eleven o' clock, not seven. No wonder I'm tired. And here I thought I still had time to finish reading, play some games, and talk to Miriam online....

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"When it comes to politics, noted Schattschneider more
than fifty years ago, “an amazingly large number of people
do not seem to know very much about what is going on.”

Oh, how true that is!

I'm really looking forward to reading E. E. Schattschneider's "The Semisovereign People." I ordered it today for my poli-sci class. It contains another phrase, one that I'd heard before but didn't know the origin of:

"The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent."