RBOC: Planning and Griping Edition

Busy trying to clear things off my desk. Feels like the workload for my year (or maybe just the term) has been front-loaded.

But progress has been made. The following items are in the planning stages and need feedback:

• I'm planning the meal for the closing banquet of the conference we're helping with. Honestly, who left the guy from Texas in charge of a menu for a group that's guaranteed to have lots of vegetarians? Even worse, our caterer has just stopped giving prices with their catering guide so I'm going into this blind and well-aware that I'm going to have to negotiate. Anyway, how does this sound for a vegetarian menu:

1. ravioli porcini morel (the main course)
   
2. fresh mesclun salad
3. baked sweet potatoes
4. baby squash
5. angel food cake with seasonal berries

• I think I've got a widget/gadget/whatever the hell Blogger is calling it this week to help deal with the job search status questions (incidentally, there didn't seem to be a great counter for Blogger, but there was a spiffy one for WordPress). My question is what things would you like to see me track? I was thinking about the overall cost; the number of jobs found, applied for, contacted by, and various types of interviewed for; and maybe the number of requests for particular types of documents. Anything else?
• On a different note, one of my soon-to-be-graduating seniors said, in response to a discussion about Interlibrary loans, "Wait...so the library will give us a loan?" They were quite disappointed when a fellow student said "Yeah. Of books and magazine articles."
  
• My Mac is still softwareless. It's a $2600 web browser at the moment (oh, and it plays "Spore" - see the example at the right of one of my creations). I tried to request the software I'd need for it, and am now locked in a battle with IT over whether I should have to buy copies of software that the University has upgraded to and that I'm required to use in teaching for this computer.
  

And on that note, good night.

Six String Greats (a story and a complaint)...

When I was in sixth grade, I started taking guitar lessons. For six weeks, my guitar teacher - a woman from the church my mother went to - had me playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." This being the heyday of Mtv, this was not the way I wanted to spend my Wednesday nights. One evening, just in from lessons, I was more than a little distressed. It was at that moment when my sister came out of her room, asked if she could see my guitar, and 30 minutes later re-emerged and played one of my favorite songs.

I don't remember what the song was. In some versions of the story, it was The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go." In others, it was "Photograph" by Def Leppard. The song doesn't matter. What does is that it was on that night, that I gave up on learning to play a musical instrument.

I tell you this because tonight I gave in and bought "Guitar Hero III," and I must say that while there's an interesting set of songs in it, it seems a tactical error to have mixed the guitar underneath the fake vocals. I'm just saying. And, honestly, "Talk Dirty To Me" by Poison? That wasn't even good guitar rock when it came out.

Still, now I'll at least have an excuse for why I can't do any grading for the next several weeks.