University of Minnesota

Hello!

I'm in snowy Minneapolis. I realized when I landed in the airport here that

1. I have never been to the MSP airport before! That's another one off my list.
2. I had never been to Minnesota before. Another thing to check off.

I'm not sure how many states that brings me to. I think I've been to more than half at this point. Well more than half. I might have even hit 2/3. I should make a list so I'll know where I can just avoid in the future.

Not much new on the job front. I have another tentative feeler from a school, but nothing firm. I kinda just want this whole thing to be taken care of. I'm not big on the whole "stress" thing. I know it's still a little early, but I really want to hear more and now.

So why am I in MN? To visit Tyler Lawson! Yup. He got an NSF which included support for collaborator visits, and this includes me for some insane reason. I figure that we will work like crazy people for a couple of days, then I will flit off to San Francisco where I will work like a crazy man for a few more days editing stuff for the Talbot conference proceedings for the tmf workshop. Just as exciting. All this will take up right up to the 23rd, then I arrive triumphant in Louisiana. I'll be there for a few days, and beyond that, I have no idea. Definitely Boston, but I have no plans yet.

I finally finished all my grading, etc. My friend Tai at UVA will drop my grades off for me tomorrow. Now I get to start collecting data for my courses to see how the computer assisted exams fared! It's a little scary. Even if it doesn't pan out, I'm not going to completely abandon the idea. It'll just give me an opportunity to refine the project and see exactly what worked and what didn't. I'm also really releaved that classes are done. Next semester I am teaching a graduate course on computations in algebraic topology. Not to toot my own horn, but this is something I'm really good at. It'll be fun to really play around with things and to get the grad students here up to speed with a lot of the tricks and techniques.

Not much else going on. I have learned some MySQL and PHP (all in the vain hope of making my computer project even better). I think I will use these to refine some of the online tools we used, maybe making them something that UVA can incorporate into their online package. Speaking of that, I had a hilarious run in with their "new" technology. UVA has spent a lot of time and energy rolling out this "Collab" project. It's built on Sakai and it is supposed to be fantastic. Well, it's not all that much better than the previous "Toolkit". In fact, it seems like they put some lipstick and a nice dress on that pig. This one is just "open source" and "scalable". Well, I finally figured out how to add a tool to my collab site to allow me to submit student grades online (and since collab is plugged right into the university systems, this should be easy). No no! The collab "tool" was actually a link to Toolkit's old tool, and after I finished (it was a laborious, multistep process), I had to print everything out and then submit the hard copies. Insane! Yay paperless workplace.

A Day at the Beach

Tim and I decided to finally take a mini-vacation and take the ferry down to P-town for the day. I've been a few times in the past, and each time was fun. I was really looking forward to going with him and hanging out on the beach there for a bit.

We took the 9 am ferry, which landed us in the heart of P-town at about 10:30. We rented bikes from, they claimed, the oldest rental place there, and then we biked across Route 6 to the Cape Cod National Seashore. For those of you who haven't been, it's a really wonderful place. There are bike trails that run all through the sand dunes, and it's very peaceful. It's sort of the polar opposite of the more urban part of P-town. We ended up riding pretty much all of the trails, including the little spur heading out to the airport.

After our somewhat lengthy bike ride, we stopped for lunch at a little place called the Post Office cafe. It was cute with pretty tasty food. Tim had a salad and I had a corned beef sandwich. Our waiter was a little brusk, but we were having such a good time that it didn't matter. We walked a little bit around the town proper, then we hopped back on our bikes and spent the rest of the day on the beach. We ended up have such a great time there that we were late returning the bikes! I hope they found where we left them.

We had a quick dinner at a place some people on the beach had recommended to me, and then we boarded the 8:30 ferry back to Boston. All told, it was a very fun day. I think we both really enjoyed getting away from our lives here in Boston for a bit and just relaxing. We're thinking of heading back next weekend, we had such a good time!