I had a blast working at this year's CIT Instructional Technology Showcase today. This is the third showcase since I started working for CIT and I think it was definitely the best so far. Everyone was encouraged to take photos and video and tag them with dukecitshowcase2008. We also handed out flip video cameras during the conference, so you can really get a sense of what it was like to talk with people throughout the day.
I was planning to spend the majority of this post whining about the quality of the lens on my new Treo 700p cell phone. Unfortunately, I am going to have to find something else to write about. I just transferred the photos to my laptop and even the ones that I thought were just horribly dark don't look nearly as bad after running them through Picasa's "I'm Feeling Lucky" filter. I had even been wondering if I needed to carry around my old Treo 650, just to use the camera, which I absolutely did not want to do. I don't think that will be necessary.
Over all, I am very pleased with the new phone. Since it's on Verizon's network, I get a better signal at home and can actually use it at the office. That is marvelous. I have missed so many calls because people assumed that I had some way of finding out that I had a message. It's also just nice to be able to make calls wherever I am, particularly in an emergency. I usually couldn't even get a signal outside in the parking lot most of the time.
Thanks to Verizon's EV-DO broadbandesque network, I can use my the browser on the phone much more easily. It is extremely fast and makes everything much more practical. It's particularly impressive when using the Google Maps client on the phone. Recently, the mobile version of Google Reader has been my favorite app. I've been using TreoTwit in order to avoid per message SMS charges.
Thursday was CIT's 7th Annual Instructional Technology Showcase and it was definitely a success. I worked at the registration desk early in the morning. I got to attend Malcolm Brown's keynote, the lunch and the poster-session. Lunch was catered by the Refectory and I must say that their hummus wraps are great. All of the door prizes that I gathered from our sponsors now have happy homes. I also got to see RN and KD, which was cool.
We had worried about Dr. Brown's arrival, because his original plane had engine trouble, as was depicted in a dramatic collaborative 2D reenactment by HC and SM, drawn on the glass in between their cubes.
After the Showcase, we had out traditional drinking party. This year we went to Satisfaction's and I tried their selection of virgin daiquiris. First, I had a lime one, which was very sour and good and was served in a wine glass. Various other people recommended their strawberry daiquiris, so I tried a virgin strawberry one. That was served an overflowing 16 oz. cup! By that time I'd also eaten several onion rings, cheese sticks, chips, wings and one jalapeno popper, so that was a little much.
Yesterday, at lunch time, a bunch of us went to the Duke Farmer's Market. We ate leftover Showcase wraps while listening to HC play Old Time music with his buddies. The weather was perfect for it. LA and I bought things for our mothers' birthdays.
Today, my mom and I went to the Flying Fish for lunch and we stopped by Callaway Jewelry afterwards. I visited FIFO in the afternoon and followed him around, taking pictures with the Treo 700p. We celebrated her birthday at ACME Food & Beverage Co., of course. What we should have also been celebrating is the fact that today is the first anniversary of the appearance of my doofus woodpecker who has been slamming his head into my windows for the past year. He was at it bright and early this morning. It's so nice to be loved.
The power has been out at my house and for much of this area all day long and there's no sign that it will come back on any time soon. It's been extremely windy here and there are trees down all over the place. I'm really appreciating my generator right now. After having endured literal weeks without power after hurricane Fran and the ice storm a few years back, I don't think I'll be taking it for granted for a while.
At lunchtime CIT had a fun brown bag celebration where we played games the whole time. HC, SE, SM and I played SET, which was challenging and fun. You can play on-line, but it's probably more fun playing in person. The same company also makes Quiddler, which I'd played before and didn't like as much. I was, however, in the mood to play hearts at the time. Before I joined CIT, they used to have game lunches about once a month, so I was happy to finally participate in one.
After work, I went to an ACM talk given by Ted Hung. He was a computer science major, who graduated just two years after I did. It was great to see him again and learn about what life is like as a game programmer. Going to an ACM meeting again was fun. It was definitely a mixture of nostalgia combined with the pleasure of not having to preside over the meetings anymore.
I'm conducting an experiment. Can and will teeny ants get out of my new Black & Decker hand vacuum? It's shaped quite differently, so it's possible that they can't. They easily got out of my previous one, but spiders were too lazy. I had a bag of birdseed in the garage that was full of ants and they seem to have decided to visit my less than immaculate kitchen floor. I guess I haven't been swiffering often enough. Given the fact that I can't remember the last time I swiffered might also be some indication as well.
It feels as if I've been neglecting my blog, but I guess it really hasn't been that long since I posted. I spent much of the end of last week and the weekend working with SE and SM on an internal CIT April Fool's newsletter. That was just a tremendous amount of fun and I have even more of an appreciation for GoogleDocs, because it handled three people's working on the same document beautifully. I also had to work on DFMA minutes and other secretarial duties, which were not nearly as enjoyable.
Speaking of beautiful things. The spring flowers around here have been stunning. Even more daffodils have bloomed in my yard, thanks again to a regular reader and our neighbor/landscaper. Other flowers bloomed about a week early, so there was much more of an overlap of the redbuds, dogwoods and wisteria. My commute, primarily on Highway 70, has just been bursting with light purple and white. Since we've had a decent amount of rain, just about every dogwood is gorgeous and full of blooms. Unfortunately, a cold front is coming through tonight and, if the weather people are correct, I'm going to have to appreciate brown blossoms instead. I hope they're wrong. Many of the trees have their leaves out, too, and I'm afraid they're going to get zapped.
Recently, I've had lots of good dinners and lunches with parents and friends: DS, AE, NP and JH (serendipitous). In the evenings, I've been busy working on collecting gift certificates to use as CIT Showcase door prizes. so I've been going out to eat even more than usual. Since I want to finish this post and still get some sleep tonight, I'm not going to go into detail this time.
What else? I met two lovely cats last night. I really miss being around cats. I was photographed by the paparazzi yesterday. I went to the Duke Computer Science picnic on Saturday and had a good time.
We have a lot of pollen here and it's everywhere. We breathe it, live it and photograph it. Fortunately, I'm not terribly allergic to most of it, so I think it can be pretty.
Well, it looks as if I may have solved my ant problem.
Today I went to my weekly meeting at the American Tobacco Campus, but I came back to West Campus for lunch. AE wanted to show her friend, DS (many name collisions on these intials lately- I leave distinguishing them as a hopeless exercise for the reader) around Duke. As I mentioned previously, there isn't a lot on campus that is open this week, so we met at Twinnie's. We then carried our stuff back up the hill and ate on the library patio. The weather was perfect.
My parents and I ate at Thai Cafe tonight. It's the time of year when I need to convince restaurants that donating gift certificates to be used as door prizes for the CIT Showcase is good advertising. It is!
When I got home, my Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard was waiting for me. That was very exciting. So far, I am extremely pleased with it. It's lightweight and compact. I downloaded the Treo 650 driver and then I was ready to go. Configuring the secure connection was a little tricky, because I was finally watching the second half of West Side Story and not paying attention to the instructions closely enough. It's a little tricky anyway, because you have to keep putting the keyboard in discovery mode while configuring the passkeys. It is very cool, though. I like the idea of having something that should also work with whatever tablet or phone I get in the future, too, since it uses bluetooth.
I know some of you have been wondering about my woodpecker friend. Well, he's been banging on my great room windows more or less every day since I last mentioned him. This weekend he started to branch out. He started banging his beak on my bedroom windows. It's not the best way to wake up, but it could be worse. Of course, I think the best way to wake up is to be licked in the face by a large dog, but I'm guessing that many of my dear readers would not agree with me. The woodpecker even followed me and started tapping on the little window above my sink in my bathroom. I don't know why it took him his long to determine that my house has more than one side.
I have now converted my mom into being a flickr user. I spent a large portion of yesterday afternoon playing functional tech support. Hopefully, I had a 100% customer satisfaction rating for the day. Of course my deciding to upgrade her account to pro for an early Christmas present might have helped with that a bit. Some of her photos are really rather wonderful.
I went to the California Pizza Kitchen with DS last night. I'd never been there before and I was impressed. I had a pear and gorgonzola pizza, which was excellent. I ate the leftovers for lunch today and they were great, too. We saw the Borat movie afterwards. Is nice. It was very funny, but not quite as funny as I had expected.
The excitement for today was the CIT Multimedia Monday session on PRS "clickers", which were originated for Physics classes. They basically are electronic devices that allow users to anonymously enter in multiple choice, numeric or very short answers to questions. I actually used them when I took a Physics course ten years ago, but they mostly use RF now instead of infrared. Like most of our MM sessions, it was fun and interesting. At the end we did a survey and found that most CIT employees prefer dark chocolate.
My parents and I went to the Flying Fish again and ate virtually the same thing (fried oysters) as last time. It was just as good.
