With a mere four hours of fiddling, I've gotten my copy of SPSS 16 to run on my new Mac! I now have an additional incentive to finish relearning how to do everything using R, so I can get SPSS 16 off my new Mac as quickly as possible.

Yesterday I got home from work, and I was feeling pretty down. I flopped down in bed and euziere sat next to me. We chatted a little bit, and just sat for a little bit, and she occasionally reached down to poke at me or nibble on my arm. Then she explained object-oriented programming to me ( Read more... )

• Holding a free session at a professional conference to teach people to use your favorite free stats software: Excellent
• Having to pull everyone out of bed an hour early because they scheduled you for a pre-breakfast timeslot: Unfortunate, but not your fault.
  
• Spending the first 15 minutes of a one-hour talk on the history of the software: Okay, now ( Read more... )

I got up late and made it in for the end of the talk on doing research at social netowrking sites and bug search engines. The first thing I heard was the guy from Yahoo saying that you really need to know how to sift through tons of badly organized, incommensurately-formatted data, and to write code that can cope with your users having done things ( Read more... )

Oh my gosh! For the first hour, this workshop on doing scientific illustrations in Illustrator was seeming kind of worthless. The speaker's teaching a lot of valuable things that a layperson could only learn through awful, tedious experimentation with Adobe's bizarre-ass interface, but it turns out they're all the same things that I've already ( Read more... )

Yesterday I went to games night at nfnitperplexity's place. Y'all should come out next time! He gave us tuna stroganoff and kittens ( Read more... )

My MacBook's been running slow and overheating lately. I opened it up to see if there was a ton of dust impeding the fan, or if I could reseat the wireless card and get rid of some of my network problems. Nothing. But, due to Apple's ridiculous construction standards, the fact that my computer actually turned on afterward felt like a real triumph! ( Read more... )

Disaster was narrowly averted today when, after much searching and problem-solving, I decided I didn't need to jailbreak my iphone after all. I just wanted to know if it was syncing text files that I composed on the phone, and if I could edit them on the computer. Apparently at one point this was impossible! But I discovered that it indeed does ( Read more... )

I was just subjected to some embarrassment when Dr. R. mentioned today's data meeting to me in passing, and I had no idea what he was talking about (meaning that the embarrassment was actually a stroke of luck, compared to missing the meeting). I looked in my email to see how I could have missed the announcement. His most recent email was a huge, ( Read more... )

I finally gave in and got myself an iPhone. Since my old palm phone was stolen at the gym, I'd been using my blackberry pearl, which kept me constantly full to the brim with bile and disdain. (there's a broken parallelism there. I wonder which bodily humor is the appropriate metaphor for disdain.) It was slow and clumsy in all the wrong ways, and ( Read more... )