personal
drorzel | March 4, 2014In October 1988, I trashed my parents' basement in order to get into college.
OK, the causal connection is a little indirect, but it's there. I was applying to college that fall, and needed to write an essay to go with my application. I've always been able to write stuff with very little effort, so I banged out something that I thought was adequate, and showed it to my guidance counselor, who said "No way." My parents backed her up on this, and I had to go write another one.
The problem was that while what I had written was reasonably polished, it was also glib and superficial-- because I'm…
drorzel | March 1, 2014Kate has been cutting The Pip's hair a little bit at a time, and this morning he demanded a trim. This is a somewhat fraught process, as he's two, and thus tends not to hold still very well. While Kate was trying to get him arranged, SteelyKid came bouncing into the bathroom to "watch," which is a sure route to disaster.
"C'mon, SteelyKid," I said. Let's go see what's in the bedroom, so The Pip doesn't get distracted."
"Distracted?"
"Well, Mommy's cutting his hair, so it's important that he not move. And if you're in there, he might want to move around to look at you."
"Oh, yeah. And he likes…
drorzel | February 28, 2014I got book edits this week, gave an exam on Thursday, and pre-registration for our spring term classes is just beginning, so I have a parade of students begging to get into this course or that one to deal with. So I have no more time for detailed blogging, but will do a bit of tab-clearing to end the week.
This piece about bimodal exams resonated well with my experiences in intro classes. I see a lot of the same thing, though with less statistical power, given that our maximum class size is 18. But in general, the "well-prepared students are bored, poorly-prepared students hopelessly lost"…
drorzel | February 9, 2014SteelyKid's gotten a bunch of press here recently, so it's time to give her brother his due. So here's a cute picture of The Pip from this afternoon (as the "featured image"-- if you read via RSS, you'll have to click through). He's wearing a "superhero cape" made from a fuzzy blanket, because SteelyKid was bouncing around in a cape made from an entire twin bed sheet.
Of course, the effect here is maybe less superheroic than monastic, especially with his hands folded like that. This could be a photo of Brother Pip of the Order of Little Green Frogs.
And yet another possibility would be that…
drorzel | February 7, 2014SteelyKid's class at her after-school day care has been learning about space for the last month or two (the program is very flexible-- the teachers ask the kids what they want to learn about, and then they spend however long on that topic the kids like), so we've been getting a lot of tidbits about astronomy related to us during car trips and dinner conversation. Last night, there was an open house at the Union College Observatory, so I picked her up a little early, and took her to campus to look through the big telescope (20-inch Cassegrain, for those who care about such things). This served…
drorzel | February 6, 2014A couple of days ago, John Scalzi posted a writing advice open thread, asking people to share the best advice they'd gotten on the craft of writing. There's a lot of good stuff in there, much of it fairly specific to fiction writing-- stuff about plotting, the use of synonyms for "said," how to keep track of who's speaking, etc. As someone who's very much an outsider to that side of the writing business, it's interesting to read, but not that directly useful (I do have long stretches of dialogue in the How-to-Teach books, and occasionally needed to worry about the "said" thing there, but that…
drorzel | February 5, 2014Both SteelyKid's kindergarten and the snow-day day-care program that the kids go to were closed today, which kind of threw a wrench in things. But it's also kind of fun, as I got to spend some time playing outside with SteelyKid on her play set in the snow. The "featured image" above is a cell-phone snap from this, and I got three short video clips of her going down the slide.
Of course, it's kind of stupid for these to be three separate YouTube clips, but when I went to stick them together using Windows Movie Maker (which is what I've used for this sort of thing in the past), it turns out…
drorzel | February 1, 2014SteelyKid is one of the biggest fans of Union's women's basketball games. Not necessarily the team, just going to the games-- she rampages all around the lobby, and as the crowd is generally pretty sparse, everybody is cool with that. The Pip has started coming along this year, and the two of them chase each other all over the place.
This past week, the team scored a big upset over William Smith, the second half of which the kids spent climbing up and down the stands. This is a shot from floor level with my phone, after I got sick of following them up and down, and figured that any major…
drorzel | February 1, 2014Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.
As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…
drorzel | January 30, 2014Since somebody asks nearly every time I mention my TED@NYC appearance back in October, I can now confirm that I will not be speaking at TED this year. Which I found out the same way as everybody else: when the full speaker list for this year's TED was released today. If you're curious about the outcome of the "talent search" I was part of, the only name I recognized from that event was Zak Ebrahim, who was awesome in New York.
Having said what I won't be doing, let me mention a couple of things I will be doing later this year:
-- Kate and I are going to Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction…
drorzel | January 18, 2014Kate is off at Arisia this weekend, so I took the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's. Where we've had good fun sledding and playing with a variety of toys. I'll be driving home Sunday afternoon, and my parents will be bringing the kids back on Monday, which is the MLK holiday in the US, so a day off for people who aren't college faculty.
In honor of all this, I give you the unique musical stylings of SteelyKid and The Pip, performing their hit song "Oh My Gosh" live in Grandma and Grandpa's basement:
Hope your weekend was a tenth as much fun as theirs.
drorzel | January 17, 2014About five minutes into my class Wednesday, my cell phone rang. I silenced it right away, but recognized the number as the kids' day care. And I knew right away what it was: The Pip has had a bit of a cough for a while, and wasn't all that happy that morning. Sure enough, when I got back to my office there was a series of emails waiting for me between Kate and the director of the JCC pre-school program, about how The Pip was just feverish enough to need to be sent home.
Wednesday was a particularly inauspicious day for this, as Kate had a court argument in Rochester on Thursday, and I have a…
drorzel | January 16, 2014"Daddy, you know what? I bet you didn't know, but my school bus can fly."
"Really? I didn't know that."
"Yeah, there's a button up at the front with a picture of a flying bus, and if you press the button, the bus flies."
"That's amazing."
"Yeah, and guess what? The other day, the bus driver called me, and said '[SteelyKid] come up here, and press the button,' and I pressed the button, and the wings came out, and we went flying."
"Wow. Where did you fly to?"
"Um, to school. And then to the JCC."
"You didn't go anywhere else interesting in between, ith the flying bus?"
"Well, we flew to Grandma…
drorzel | January 11, 2014Friday night was a home game for Union's basketball teams, so I picked SteelyKid and the Pip up a little earlier than usual, and took them to the women's game (which starts right around the time day care ends and ends right around their usual bedtime). You might wonder what it's like taking the pair of them to a sporting event. Well, wonder no more:
It's pretty much that, for an hour and a half. There was also a stretch were they were throwing dice behind the elevator (the thing they run around in the video) like a couple of junior degenerates.
Now you know. And knowing is half the battle…
drorzel | January 5, 2014Kate and I will be going to the Worldcon in London this August. This will be my first trip to the UK for anything other than changing planes, so we're going to take a few days on either end to do touristy stuff. The pre-con plan is to stay based in London, maybe taking a day trip or two from there.
Post-con, we were thinking of going a little farther afield, maybe Dublin. For a variety of reasons, I've spent a whole bunch of time thinking and writing about Newgrange, and thus it might be nice to, you know, see it in person. and Ireland is another place I've never been but would like to see (I…
drorzel | January 3, 2014I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there's anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo!
To break it in, I got the kids to help out by re-creating a classic slow-mo physics trick: the slinky drop:
Note that when SteelyKid lets it go, the bottom doesn't really move until after the entire length of the spring has relaxed. You can clearly see this in the still frame that's the "featured image" at the top of the post.
And since The Pip has…
drorzel | January 1, 2014I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn't done yet.
The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages (space-and-a-half) and 96,807 words. I don't remember the word count from the original contract, but this is more than that. Which is pretty typical of my writing, really.
Because I wrote it down as part of the final checks, here's the approximate table of…
drorzel | December 25, 2013Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, happy Wednesday if you don't. That's about all there is to say, isn't it?
Warm holiday wishes from Chateau Steelypips.
drorzel | December 6, 2013I'm giving my talk about blogs as a tool for science outreach again on Monday, and need an updated version of the cute-kid picture screenshot I use in that. So here's a composite of the two kid pictures I posted a week or two ago, because it should all fit on screen, even on my laptop.
I probably should do something more directly productive, but I drove down to NYC yesterday to do an interview and meet up with some folks from the TED@NYC event back in October, and got stuck there because the attendants at the lot where I parked my car didn't warn me that they would lock the place up before I…
drorzel | November 30, 2013"Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!"
"It's not a dog, honey, it's an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"OK, fine, you can play with the robot dog."
We came down to my parents' for Thanksgiving this year, because both Kate and I are really busy with work at the moment, and didn't need the additional stress of planning and hosting a big dinner. On Friday morning, my dad went up into the attic and dug out the bags containing the vast collection of Star Wars toys my sister and I…