Webmaster Week

I happened to dedicate this entire week to setting up the Drupal Content Management System for my lab. We will use it store and distribute all of our custom code and field data, as well as to collaboratively write documents, record research steps, and an assortment of other things. Along the way, I had to set up Apache, PHP, MySQL, hMailServer, phpMyAdmin, and an assortment of other libraries and helper applications. Oh, and the best thing: everything was 100% free, as in beer.

The whole thing seem pretty solid, but it's probably held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and nylon string (so I'll refrain from linking to it here in order to dissuade hackers from discovering weaknesses). I'll work on smoothing out the kinks over the next few weeks as we begin to use it.

One Paper Accepted, Another Submitted

Today I got word that the paper Dr. Capriotti and I submitted would be accepted for publication, tentatively in May. This is my first publication, and I'm excited that it's happening so quickly! Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Hyndman and I sent out my first spectral analysis paper to Water Resources Research. It's a big paper (14-17 pages probably), and it has some great results! I'm looking forward to its (hopeful) acceptance so that I can write the next paper in that series. I'm hoping to shoot for a little wider audience that Water Resources Research with the next one.

This semester I'm doing both an research assistantship and teaching a single session of a class. It's the same one I taught last spring, it's a lab class teaching non-science majors about geosciences and science in general. It's a fun class to teach, and only having a single section is the way to go if I also have a lot of research to do (which I do right now).

One Day, Two Workshops

Today was spent entirely in workshops, that's how everyone wants to spend their Saturdays, right? This morning, my wife Cheryl and I led two sessions preparing the coaches of Michigan's Science Olympiad teams for our event: Compute This. While there I got a chance to talk to my seventh and eighth grade science teach, Mr. Moulder. It's a bit strange to talk to someone who was such an important figure in my life when I was young as if we were somehow equals. But, in talking to her I could see exactly why she was such an inspiration to my science education.

After the morning's workshop, I went to a media training workshop in the afternoon. It was hosted by MSU's Environmental Studies and Policy Program and was designed to help teach graduate students how to conduct a media interview without embarrassing ourselves. The PR firm that hosted the workshop sent an exceptionally well qualified partner to lead it, and she had reams and reams of wonderful examples. We conducted mock interviews, which were videotaped and then criticized afterwards. It sounds a little stressful, but the group was small and everyone was friendly, so it ended being a lot of fun.