Neist

Awww. Before you know it you'll love it. Hopefully.

Welcome back! As per cheddar biscuits, I bet those meals would have been made better if you ate them with cheddar bay biscuits. Mmmm.

The Poisoner's Handbook is in my pile. In fact, a couple of people were discussing said book at graduation yesterday. I've experienced the apprehension from others in regards to books by journalists as well, and generally I don't understand them. For example, Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and the director of the science journalism program at MIT. Am I one to question her credentials? I don't think so. I've found that individuals like her are more the rule than the exception. I've just finished a tiny book titled Young Einstein: And the story of E=mc2, and when I had initially found it, I thought it had to be some cash grab. But the book is reworking of a dissertation, re-sculpted for a popular audience. I'd love to study the cultural impact of popular-targeted books, but I'm not sure how well-received such a focus would be in a lot of history programs. I'll have to start researching programs so I can make a better-informed decision after I complete my masters in a few years. I wouldn't want to go into an English program, and if I can't find a history program that's an ideal fit, I might look into American studies or information studies programs. I could actually go straight through a PhD in the program I'm attending in the fall, but I'm not sure how poorly the academic incest issue would affect my career prospects. This program is quite ideal, and I doubt there's many other programs that could match this program's fit. Things to think about.

You know, you make a good point. I do know that RVs can be far more expensive than one would guess. Airstreams, which admittedly are very expensive, can be 40k for a small 1-person trailer. I've seen people on those tiny house shows build their own tiny house for 5-10k. Thanks! They are from Red Lobster, though there's recipes to make your own. I'm convinced they are the sole reason for rising obesity. You should try them when you come over! They are horrible for one's health, but super tasty.

I might have to try The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've never read it. So many books, so little time! Hm. Besides for the classics? I really loved The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Ghost Map, and Ghost Hunters. I also love pretty much everything by Richard Rhodes. The great thing about history of science-esque books is that there's an entire discipline dedicated to explaining science: science writers. A lot of well-written, for-popular-audiences are actually quite historically accurate. I'm always finding interesting books, and upon finding them I tend to immediately look up the authors (to make sure it isn't some shill cash grab). The vast majority of authors I find are quite educated, vetted, and well-regarded. I think history of science, technology, and medicine is pretty lucky in that regard.

Welp. I graduated formally today. Yay. Afterwards, I went to Red Lobster for the sole purpose of gorging myself on cheddar bay biscuits. I lead a simple life.

My boss' husband got off a philosophy waitlist for a funded position one week before classes started. It definitely happens, but who knows how often.

It's okay. I fully expect most people on these boards to vanish in a few months, never to be seen again. But it sounds like everything is coming along for you. I'm glad!

I pace aimlessly outside, regardless of the weather. The only space I'd miss is for the sake of my books. Even if culled the collection, I don't think I could reduce it down to much less than a small bookshelf. So many of my books aren't available as eBooks or audio books. I grew up in a very, very tiny bedroom in which I spent nearly all of my at-home hours (which was nearly all of them when I wasn't at school). To me, a small space is a comforting space. It's a nest or hub in which I can operate out of. But everyone is different. It makes perfect sense! I'd be wary of the resale value of a tiny house, as they are usually built quite specifically to the tastes of its future owners. Who knows if anyone would want to live in a tiny house that I had built.

To my understanding, you can avoid a lot of the laws the smaller the house is (which wouldn't be a huge issue for me). It gets more tricky the bigger a house is. At least when I did my research a few years back, they aren't technically houses, they are RVs (as far as registering them goes). As such, one of the biggest problems is that they didn't qualify for mortgages. This is all musings as I don't live alone, but if I were to do it, I'd probably live in an apartment for a while, take out an initial chunk of unnecessary loans my first semester or two, then pay them back at an accelerated rate with my vastly increased income after the house was built. The wild card is where to park one. You'd need to find somewhere that was affordable and convenient.

I'm probably an outlier, given that I'm continuing within the same department I attended as an undergrad, but if i were single and moving, I'd have had a tiny house built, loaded, and moved in stead. Might be cheaper than paying for rent over the course of a PhD. Some people manage to have them built for under 10k.

Aww. The faculty member I graded for this semester sent the chair of the department I'm attending (and me) a glowing letter of appreciation in regards to my effort in his class. That was awfully nice of him.

Yup! I mean, I'll be okay. I can take out an extra thousand a year in student loans if I have to. I don't want to, but I have the option. I feel worse for people that I know who are in less favorable situations than I am.

Okay, so Oklahoma just is in a bit of a tight spot financially, and in response to this tightness, they've just passed legislation to remove the state EITC. I'm probably in a minority here, but I'm poor, married, with a child. It's absurd, absolutely absurd that politicians think it's okay cut financial incentives from the poor. Did you know the federal EITC sometimes makes up 20% of my yearly income? If the federal one instantly vanished, I would no longer be able feed my family, and it's not even a question of me spending frivolously. I have no car payment, no credit card payments, and I live very frugally. Subsistence living 2016, represent. Rant, rant, rant.

Yup, I use the web-based tools. I usually have to import my documents back into Word because documents made via Docs often produce errors (e.g., footnotes, margins, paragraph breaks, etc.). However, outside of that one caveat, all of my document storage and production is produced on the web tools. I don't even use Adobe Reader on my computers anymore. My default application is Chrome. The less programs I have on my computer the better. It'll run smoother.

The Google Drive app does that? Some Google nerd I am. I avoid the problem entirely and simply work exclusively on Drive.

I'd even be leery of exclusively using external HDDs, unless you used them in a RAID, for redundancy's sake. You might check to see if there's any programs out there that will periodically upload backups to cloud storage. I know there's services that provide this at a cost, but surely someone has developed something that will daily update the contents of a folder, right? That almost has to exist.

They'll pop up, eventually. They seemed to have appeared in batches for me. It probably took three days for the entire process to complete with approximately 4000-5000 emails. Keep hope!

You don't export it, really. I didn't think it would work this way when I set it up, but when you add an email to "Check mail from other accounts (using POP3):" in your Gmail settings, it imported all of my Outlook email in. Our university uses an exchange server (now the Outlook Web App). It was a bit annoying, as I now have to sort through the 4000 or so emails that got pulled over, but it worked. You might try it! I've pretty much moved everything to the cloud. I'm nearing my space limit, but I'm considering buying a cheapo Chromebook in order to upgrade storage capacity (a lot of Chromebooks offer a few years of decent storage). It's a pretty good deal, I think. And my email are similar to yours. I have 10 years of employment emails that will need to be trashed. I doubt I'm going to need to go back and check any minutiae of the day-to-day goings on once I leave. Or at least I hope I won't need to. Also, sorry to hear about your friend.

You can, actually, if you use Gmail. If you setup Gmail to receive your university email inside of Gmail, it'll import the entirety of your emails in. Or at least it did for me. Thousands and thousands of them. Took days for the process to complete.

Anyone a little overwhelmed with getting their digital life organized before graduate school? I've spent the last several hours organizing my email and cloud storage. Ugh. This is going to be rough.

I haven't checked in for a while. Finals time has kept me pretty busy grading, so I've been neglecting my reading. Since checking in last I've completed Drinking Water: A History by Salzman, and I've begun Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Pääbo. I found the former to be less interesting than the latter.

People actually do this? This seems insane. I'm glad that the department I'm attending in the fall is the size of a flea. The classes are small enough that I shouldn't run into this.

I'm a random visitee to the biology boards, but someone in the Fall 2016 application cycle applied to over 20 programs. I think it's not inadvisable to apply to as many programs as is feasible, but applying to programs takes a lot more work than it seems. But hey, if someone wants to put in the work, more power to them.

Congrats! And howdy! Sounds like a great opportunity. As per Grad Cafe, it's already died down considerably, but I'm sure some of us will stick around. You should drop by again sometime. I'd add you on social media, but I'm too lazy to use them. I should fix that.