Today was a great day. I got a bunch of stuff done that's been hanging over my head. I still have two more things that need to do yesterday or last month, but I got two or three such things squared away. It's a great feeling when you can fix stuff. A couple months ago, we got two Toshiba projectors that have been, well, problematic. One was DOA. The other quit after about a month, and the replacement quit at about the same time. After we got them back, one was DOA. Sigh... I didn't send it back immediately (it's been hanging over my head for a couple of weeks), but today I got it out and figured out what was wrong. There's a little microswitch that acts as an interlock when the front grille is removed. It turns out that even when the front grille was in place, it didn't reliably engage the switch. So I used a little tape to extend the poky thing that activates the switch and, Voila! It works! The rest was a bunch of paper work. Done, done, done!
Charlie called me at work today. I was surprised to hear from him and a little apprehensive. Was something wrong? He said, "There something that just isn't working out for me... How do you connect to Muppyville again?" Feeling relief, I was happy to tell him the URL again -- it turned out he was spelling Muppyville with one "L". Later I noticed that he and a friend had successfully logged in. Luckily my home server isn't being blocked for unsavory content.
I felt good today. Everytime I eat, I imagine my body saying, "Augh! Where are the carbohydrates?" But today I felt just fine -- plenty of energy and not very hungry, except at mealtimes. I think I'm over the caffeine. And as long as I don't look at other food, I don't have any cravings. It's a start!
Having 
flash click installed is wonderful! Have I mentioned how much I love not having things move and flicker while I'm trying to look at stuff on the computer? I feel a bit sorry for the content providers that aren't able to claim my eyeballs for revenue generation. But it's their own fault for allowing such unpleasant advertising. If they had a simple still, I wouldn't mind. If they had something that played and then stopped, I might be able to tolerate it. But I can't stand the constant, flickering motion.
There are too many cool classes I would love to teach. A faculty member in Biology wants to co-develop a biometry course that we've been talking about for a couple of years that would be organized around "R". We've worked out a bunch of the basic kind of data analyses that biologists need to do -- and a bunch of just plain fascinating things you can do with data -- and could give students access to a free toolbox for powerful statistical analysis and figure generation. R makes great figures -- good clean postscript that you can easily open and tweak using something like Illustrator. Another cool course that would be fun to teach is a lab in bioinformatics that a faculty member in Micro wants to develop with me: having students manipulate data with perl, build mysql databases, stuff like that. Unfortunately, I'm already kinda at my limit for teaching. I'm already co-developing the Organisms: Diversity and Interactions on-line course with Buzz for next fall. In fact, it looks like I probably won't teach Information Technology in Biology Education next year since I'll be doing this new course. Sigh...
I love teaching, but I have to be careful to not let it get in the way of everything else I need to do.