Places to study (with side rant on municipal segregation)

Between research for professors and research for fellow Fellows, neither of which have set hours or an office to go to, this summer I've had to make my own routine, including choosing and alternating places to work. The work isn't too different from class projects, so I think of it as study time.
One of my first finds was just downhill from the Duderstadt library, which is a good place to study during the year, but too lifeless in the summer.

I'd never seen them turn on the fountains before!

An old standard from during the year is the Traverwood Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library. It's rather impressively lavish. When I think about how expensive it must have been to preserve and use tree trunks from the site as load-bearing elements, inlay the wood patterns on the floor, dig the underground parking, install and program the automatic window shades, and design the automated book checkout system, I stop being skeptical that Ann Arbor actually is the richest city in Michigan.

My favorite tables, although these are usually full in summer. Image copyright AADL, CC BY-NC.

So long as I set aside the moral implications of a library system having that much money to spend, in complete isolation from so many municipal needs just East of here, the Traverwood Branch is a great place to study. In May and June, I went there for a large part of the day, most days of the week. And I went for some nice walks over lunch.

The view from a mini-forest ("Nature Area", to the parks dept.) over the golf course, 1/4 mi from library

There's always the desk in my study, which has shuffled a little to the right from where it was last Fall. It's okay for lazily checking off the simple tasks. When it's not too windy, the picnic table outside our back door is a great way to get going on a big project.

And when I'm feeling wacky or need a new perspective, I continue my tradition from freshman year: find a sculpture and sit on top of it.

Sculpture by Clement Meadmore, on my route to campus.

The Tao of Case Study Research

In my summer job as a research assistant, I've been doing the initial stages of some case study research that will be completed this fall.[1] I've had more leeway to shape the research and structure my own tasks than I was expecting, and I've learned a lot.

One of the things I picked on my own was the foundational reference book for conducting case studies (Yin 2003).[2] In May, I devoured the book and mapped what I knew about the project into Yin's framework. In doing so, I thought I was discovering great new truths from outside the planning/transportation mainstream. Last week, when describing the next step of choosing questions for the case study interviews, my boss made an offhand comment about how he tells his doctoral students to "embrace the Tao of Yin" -- that is, use the constraints of case study research to your advantage. So...my challenges are not original, but at least they're not trivial either.

Figure 1. Aftermath of a research brief

As I reflect on what I've done in the first three months -- the foundation for the interview questions I started brainstorming on Friday -- I'm starting to see what my boss means. You need a delicate touch to define a research question that will work well with case studies. You need to be clear about what you know, have a set schedule for developing your framework, and clearly record your propositions and units of analysis and candidate cases. But you also have to have finesse: unless you already know the answers to the questions you're asking, you'll have surprises that will make you want to expand or refocus most every part of your research. And you need to subtly redirect the questions you want to ask to fit the kind of "how" questions that case studies are best at answering, and to fit the knowledge and experiences that your subjects actually have. And that's all before you've "started" your case study -- before you've finalized your list of interviewees or the questions to ask them.

For me, this kind of balancing act between competing constraints means building up a master plan (study protocol) one section at a time, and always keeping the whole outline in view. If I had an office, everything from the grant proposal and research question down to the criteria for case selection would be posted on the wall. If my fellow researchers were as geeky as I am, there would be an authoritative wiki. For now, I'm making do with a binder and frequent reference to the key Research Briefs.

I'm starting to understand how the pieces fit together, and how to do good case study research.

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[1] I won't describe unpublished research here, but suffice it to say our unit of analysis (what we're studying) is decisions, including approvals and rejections, regarding transportation and land use projects in the U.S. And once we select about 10 cases, our units of observation (how we're studying the decisions) are background documents plus interviews with decisionmakers and other key players.

[2] Okay, okay, so my posts probably shouldn't have APA-style references. Forgive me this one? Yin, R. K. (2003). Case study research: design and methods. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Catching up on last semester

Two semesters down!

I'm done with my first year! And I decided to add another year to my time at Michigan, so I'm still two years away from graduating. :-/ The third year will allow me to get a second master's degree, so I'll graduate with both a Master in Urban Planning (specializing in land use and transportation) and a M.S. in Natural Resources and Environment (with focus on Behavior, Education, and Communication).

The end of my semester was packed, from a trip to Chicago for the American Planning Association National Conference to all the papers and tests. From there, a quick trip to the East Coast followed by a nasty cold kept me busy. I'm only now catching up to things I've been meaning to do for the summer -- including two research projects, one I'll be paid for!

More on the summer research shortly. In the meantime, I'm catching up on some notes I've been planning to post here for a while.

Train trip to Chicago! April 13.

a.k.a., what I would have tweeted if I were a Twitter person. 

• I welcome the track upgrades that they're planning for the Michigan-Chicago line, but there's no way they'll even blow the whistle fast enough to cross that many railroad crossings at faster than 30mph.
• Train travel = time travel. Look out the window and it's back to the industrial age.
• Wish I could have hopped the tracks to the train starting out on the South Shore Line. Pretty sure I would have saved half an hour. 
• Wow, I'm actually in Chicago! ...oh great, it's snowing.
• I'm two blocks away. Let's play "spot the planner."

The conference, April 13-15

a.k.a., there are a lot of planners out there!

• Everyone and their sister is talking about sustainability. You have to ask a few more questions to find out what they're really after.
• Everyone and their brother is talking about complete streets, and it's not only (not usually?) the transportation folks taking the lead.
• For most suburban communities, density is still a bad word. For some, esp. in the South, even walkability is a bad word, where one planner had much better success with "people-friendly.
• Community acceptance of the term "climate change" varies. Many presenters seem to think that they no longer need to censor that word -- that the constituencies now accept that weather is changing and that we both need to mitigate further change and adapt to what's already on its way. Following this train of thought, where "climate change" still triggers outrage and protest, for example from the anti-Agenda 21 crowd, it's a fading trend. If true, this is a major good sign.
• I don't get much out of most workshops. That's "conference sessions" in APA lingo: "workshops" are what you pay extra for. A good workshop I'll learn from and I'll have a great conversation with a panelist. I had two of those so, on the first day. The next few days were, comparatively, a letdown.

Things professors say

So I'm pretty well settled into my second semester. I've gone through a few rounds of recalibrating my expectations of how challenging or easy this semester is going to be, and I think I've settled at "moderate." I'm making more time for cooking and socializing, with good results. I think my two themes for this semester will be "time management" and "summer." Time management because so many courses + commitments even if some of them are relatively lightweight; "summer" because it will take some effort to arrange something rewarding to do.

Courses and quotes:

• UP 504 Quantitative Planning Methods II (statistics with free/open source software), with Prof. Bieri. When describing higher-order matrices: "0 means you're definitively lacking in the third dimension." Also, if you plucked a value out of thin air, you used your "moist digit indicator."
• UP 505 Fundamentals of Planning Practice, with Prof. Etienne. In grading my memo where I'd used the word "I:" "You're great but irrelevant. Don't mention yourself unless you have to." So yeah...strong opinions, which I'm taking with equal parts wry amusement and earnest self-improvement.
• UP 520 Urban Land Use Planning (field trips!), with planner Jeff Kahan. Fastest talker and fastest walker I've seen in a while, and a lot of fun.
• UP 572 Transportation and Land Use Planning, with Prof. Levine. Favorite phrases include "transportation's original sins" [such as forgetting that people usually care more about the places they can get to, not the distance that they travel] and "Alice in Wonderland" [EPA's smog-fighting logic].
• NRE (Natural Resources and Environment) 677 Reasonable Person Model. No quotes, but if there were one, it might be "go take a hike. Seriously, time outdoors has been shown to increase directed attention!"

Less quotably, the Graham Institute awarded me and thirty-nine other professional master's students across the University a Dow Sustainability Fellowship. So for the next couple months I'll be forming a group and choosing a project for us to work on. More on that, and plans for summer, as they materialize.

Finally, some answers!

Back in September I paired questions with this semester's courses. Now that I'm within a multiple-choice exam of being DONE with the semester, I figured I owed you some answers.

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Urban Planning (UP) 540, Planning Theory. "Why do we plan? How do we think it should work? Has it ever worked?"

"Why do we plan?" Depends how and when you look at it. Planning heads off nuisance claims (see: Legal) and externalities (see: Econ); it's a structure for rational technocracy to rise above messy democracy or a form of collective action to express public desires (see: comprehensive planning and its discontents); or it dulls the excesses of capitalism just enough to ensure it will survive (see: Foglesong, with a bit of Marx). I see planning as a way to build support for forward-looking governmental action. It's an imperfect tool but one of the more powerful ones available on the local level.

"Has it ever worked?" Both 19th-century pollution, disease, and overcrowding and mid-20th-century abandonment and violence were huge problems for cities without a clear solution. Along with broader societal and technological forces, planning helped mitigate these problems and more. At the same time, every major planning intervention has brought a wave of criticism in reaction. I prefer to think of reactions to early public housing, transportation projects, and suburbanization in general as refinements, solving major problems first and at least most of the time doing more good than harm. That is, planning _has_ worked, but in doing so it's never failed to give itself large opportunities for refinement.

"How do we think it should work?" Well, how much of current U.S. politics and legal structures can we change in our hypothetical? In any case, there are many conflicting theories of how to improve public involvement and the scope of planning efforts. I may not have a good answer to this question for a few more semesters.

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UP 513, Legal Aspects of the Planning Process. "What assumptions underlie land ownership and policy? What are the levers we can push?"

"What assumptions underlie land ownership and policy?" It's true that there are varying philosophies of land ownership, the relationship between nature and human activity, and between the individual and the state. For example, "it's my land -- you can't tell me what to do with it!" doesn't really stand up to the theory of government that prevents your neighbor from building an incinerator. Prof. Norton spiced the lectures with a few good recommendations on how to calmly hear and clearly counter such challenges to planning. Moral and legal philosophy aren't what decide the important court cases, however.

"What are the levers we can push?" Levers? Zoning is more of a dysfunctional Rube Goldberg contraption. Because of an overdeveloped Anglo-Saxon sense of land ownership, our litigious society, and fear of experimenting with any regulatory scheme beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed constitutional use of the police power rather than a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, states and cities have made only small variations since the Village of Euclid, Ohio's zoning scheme was originally upheld in 1926. This means municipalities must divide their area into districts that are each treated uniformly, and must create plans, often after the fact, to justify why they make sense. There's a huge amount of duplication and contradiction in most zoning codes, not to mention how quickly they can become out of date. The court officially frowns on "individualized assessment" that might determine whether a particular new development was beneficial overall, while special permits, "voluntary" developer donations, and variances granted by the Zoning Board of Appeals in practice bend the law all the time.

Most states have only enabled local governments to zone, meaning there are potentially over 36,000 governmental units that each are trying to advance their own interests. I live in Washtenaw County, Michigan, which is composed of 20 townships, 5 cities, and 3 villages, which have boundaries that interlace in interesting ways. Each of these municipalities has the power to create its own planning board and effectively zone out certain kinds of activities beyond its borders. But they can't effectively work together to manage growth that happens across boundaries, and even so each place has a strong incentive to look out for its own interests.

So zoning is awkward, self-contradictory, difficult to maintain, and hyperlocal. It's also exclusionary by design, and has discriminatory effects that the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't struck down except in the most egregious cases. However, it's what we've got in this country. Some areas, like Ann Arbor, appear to have the resources to translate forward-thinking goals into master plans and zoning codes, and to adapt public involvement requirements into moderately productive interactions. I'd love to see the state enabling laws change at least to have more of a regional focus, but for the meantime I'll need to just keep all these limitations in mind when working with local planning and land use.

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UP 510, Public Economics for Urban Planning. "When do economic theories inform us, and when are their assumptions bunk? And why wasn't my last Econ teacher half this fun?"

"When do economic theories inform us, and when are their assumptions bunk?" Sadly, the course quickly veered into teaching the the IS/LM model and enough microeconomics to understand taxation and intergovernmental grants, and dropped the critical perspective present at the beginning of the course. Occasional winks prevented the theories with the most egregiously regressive implications from being completely unbearable.

"And why wasn't my last Econ teacher half this fun?" I still don't know, but here are some notable quotables:

• "Milwaukee surprised me: It's a city!"
• "It's complex...but it isn't actually all that complicated."
• "It's a good thing you're learning Stata because I won't be using it."
• "It's a sort of w w w dot thing."
• "We shall develop a conversationality about this..."
• "...to determine what type of pain infliction machine we want."
• "If you're ever going to get a tattoo, you should get:
  β̂ = (X'X)^-1X'Y"

Believe me, they were all very funny at the time.

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UP 406, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Maps. Computers. Databases. 'Nuf said.

Okay, so ArcGIS violates like every software design principle ever. I am still quite motivated to check out qGIS/GRASS and other free software alternatives, even if I didn't get a chance to during the semester. That said, I am as confident as one can be in using the basic functions of software that loves to fail silently.

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Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE) 662, Seminar in Resource Policy and Administration, more specifically Localization: Adaptations for the Coming Downshift. "How will we build reliance and justice in the absence of cheap energy or continued growth?"

This was the first course I was done with. It's been almost two weeks. I loved the thoughts, the people, and the framework, but I never felt like I had enough depth to fully evaluate or trust the arguments that would have made the class really hang together. I've put many of the books that the reader excerpted from, on my reading list. Interestingly, it's the premise of the course that sticks with me the most, even if some conclusions don't.

The premise has three parts. (1) A societal downshift is inevitable, as we pass peak energy and as we make defensive expenditures to prepare for and recover from climate change. (2) Larger-scale governments, such as the U.S. Federal government, will be overwhelmed by the economic and energy shifts, and will have less ability to make policy that shapes local reactions. As a result, local communities are a more realistic point of leverage. (3) We cannot avoid the downshift, but we can prepare for it, and through our ideas and experiments, provide accessible models for communities to take advantage of when the downshift becomes more obvious.

I find points 1 and 3 consistently compelling. I've been going back and forth as to the second point; I expect it has some truth but I think our federal government should still have an active role even if recent trends of intensifying transportation and globalization revert to some degree.

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With luck, I'll have another two semesters to chew on this one. On that note, I should go write my application to the School of Natural Resources and the Environment!

mid-semester reflections: I like this place

Fellow students and various other people I've met have been asking me how I'm liking U-M, and how it's compared to my pre-move expectations. The answer is that I'm liking it: it continues to surprise me and to surpass my expectations, if at times overwhelm me. The department's professors are high-quality, the breadth of the program is stunning, the peers are friendly and smart, and classes are giving me a lot to chew on. I'm liking it so much, actually, I'm even considering staying here an extra year (!)

That said, I still miss Boston, and I'm still adapting to not having a job to go to: I miss coworkers, users, and fixing things. Right now, if I replace my own hard drive? Dangerous operation that might leave me unable to pass a class. Where's the fun in that?

Two professors, and their energy and dedication, brought me to this program. I've been pleasantly surprised this fall by how engaged other professors have been. The symposium on sustainability and social justice brought this home: from what so many of them shared there, the faculty is paying attention, cares passionately, and admits personal conflict and uncertainty openly. That's worth a lot.

It's time to line up what classes we're taking for next semester: what courses will we rescue from the broad catalog into our narrow schedule? It doesn't make it any easier that almost without exception, every professor in our department has something unique to offer, and is good at sharing it. I know I'm staying away from real estate, and not getting too close to urban design or architecture, so that's a start. I want the time to talk through the problems that each of our professors is working on, and to get to know them and their styles, without the restriction of a course schedule. Tomorrow there's a course fair, where everyone who's teaching an elective says a little about it; hopefully that'll be a start.

I'm working on assembling a peer group of the wacky, the transportation geeky, and the askers of annoying questions. I'm well on my way. Other fellow students are friendly and helpful, even if I haven't made time to study together and socialize as much as I would have liked. In any case, we seem to be smart, studious, and fun, even if some of these whippersnappers have weird ideas of "fun". (I mean, doesn't a tailgate get boring after a couple hours?)

Classes are good if sometimes frustrating. Four of my classes have 35-60 students in them, so conversation is stilted and superficial. There's a lot to learn from the material, it's well chosen, and some classes have optional discussion sections. But it takes a lot of effort to get into the readings and to skim them purposefully, there's only so much to get from a lecture, and I'm strapped for time outside of class, so my attention wanders more than I'd like. Frustrating. Still, I have the building blocks of some good study habits and technologies, I'm working on putting them together in a stable arrangement, and regardless I'm absorbing a lot of good information.

Classes are playing off each other in interesting ways. I can explore this a little in papers for each class (well, primarily it's Theory's assignments that have enough latitude), but I'd love an opportunity to put the concepts and approaches together, and use them to critique each other. Perhaps a future post topic? I'll keep it under 1000 words, promise :-)

Overall, I'm happy to be here, a little giddy about future semesters' possibilities, and daunted by the challenge of fitting everything I want to learn here into 3 remaining semesters. In fact, I'm applying to the School of Natural Resources and Environment to add a second master's degree -- giving me two more semesters! It would be a Master of Science in Natural Resources and the Environment, with a specialization in Behavior, Education, and Communication, starting in earnest next Fall. I really like what I've seen of SNRE so far this fall (through the one seminar). My challenge right now is to focus on writing the application now, and weighing all the options as to whether to accept their offer if and when it comes. (Some considerations include their class sizes, how much funding I get next semester and for next year through their offer, and the retirement of one of the professors that made the BEC specialization so attractive.)

I'll keep you posted!

inhumane treatment, I tells ya

My legal issues class has us working for the law firm of DEWEY CHEATEM & HOWE. The current client is a Mr. Charles Norris. We have to say whether Chuck can open an "Arsenal Karate" school on his land. AND MY ANSWERS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CONTAIN WISECRACKS. Aw, man.

I'm alive!

Since I last posted, I went to Milwaukee, hit what I thought was a groove for the semester, started thinking about funding for next semester and plans for next summer, and was rudely awakened by the repeated arrival of time-intensive assignments. So, a slightly scattered update:

It was great to see Milwaukee.  It's an industrial city with enough diversity of industries that some are still functioning, plus financial and other business anchors.  So after using Detroit as our point of reference, it had vitality and life. As our chaperone later put it: "Milwaukee surprised me. It's a city!"

• I went into the Art Museum.  I didn't pay to see exhibits: it was late, and I forgot to check for a student price. But the building spoke to me; its attempt to evoke a nautical theme worked, and I felt at home in a beautiful, meaningful space.  One of those rare situations where the abstract language and aims of architecture make sense to me.
  
• There's a Wisconsin state requirement that anything built on lake fill (presumably meaning Great Lakes) must be public. Privately operated museums like the above are fine. This is a wonderful policy, even if it causes some trouble to park authorities: Usually, a parks department will raise some of its funds through concession rentals.  However, private restaurants that might financially save the county park system are unlikely to pass legal muster.
  
• Scott Walker used to be County Executive of the County of Milwaukee. This is part of the reason why Milwaukee County Transit System routes have been cut to the bone.
  
• A tour of the MCTS maintenance facility was a visual feast. These mechanics are masters of their trade.  Someday I'll download the photos; I have one of a bus painting bay that looks like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Beforehand there was a brief presentation, which was momentarily interrupted by a Groupwise notification: I had forgotten how much I hate that product suite. In any case, MCTS is operated by an independent for-profit entity, Milwaukee Transit Services. To hear MTS tell it, this arrangement was not intended as privatization in the current meaning of the word, but as a mechanism for shielding the operations of the transit system from county politics.
  
• The story of the Milwaukee streetcar, including its funding, jurisdiction, initial planned size, and even impact on underground utilities, will have to wait for another day.
  
• Oh—and it was fabulous to be walking down the street with some classmates, spot an information booth handing out transit maps, and instead of being ostracized for slowing down the group, I STARTED A STAMPEDE for everyone to get their own. :-)

The week after Milwaukee, I happened upon a better way to organize my tasks. That is, for the first time in a while, I stopped trying to find a piece of software, and evaluate, and test, and adapt. Instead, I took out a sheet of paper to represent all reading and assignments due for the week. And it worked surprisingly well! By Thursday, I was feeling on top of things, and by Friday I was looking at possible research jobs and fellowships for next semester and starting to think about summer plans to pursue.  I took that as a sign things were under control.

As writing assignments started piling up last week, I remembered why I both love and hate writing: weaving concepts together is fun, but I don't like leaving out the fascinating tidbits that aren't central to my argument. I can precisely shape a sentence to my liking, but structuring paragraphs and full essays into neat packages doesn't come naturally. And I can play and connect thoughts well, but that doesn't help one bit if I don't quite know what I want to say—or worse, if I know what I want to say, but can't locate a necessary citation.

An attempt to bang out a full draft of the legal Memo that's due this Thursday pushed back last week's schedule more than I would have liked. And finishing this morning's Theory paper took more dramatic efforts than it merited.  However, as of this evening, I felt I could relax, just a little bit. I'll call that success.

Until next time --

Things are settling into place. Courses, notebooks, a fragment of routine...

It was a packed first week of classes. Three days of excitement, overwhelm, frustration, and...satisfaction.

My course schedule got less sure as I went from the late-spring course registration missive, to orientation week, to the middle of last week.  The saddest part was when I realized that NRE 560, Behavior and the Environment, was a logistical impossibility: it's on Main Campus, sandwiched in between North Campus courses with 10 minutes transportation time.  That's a 45-minute walk, 20 minutes expected bus, or 11 minutes full tilt (full sweat!) on the bike in good weather.  Not so much.

When I heard UMich had a "shopping period" for courses, I felt right at home.  Everyone shops for classes during the first 1-2 weeks of a Brown semester; it goes right along with the lack of distribution requirements. Two problems here, however. One had to do with "Michigan time," which an orientation packet defined as "the tradition of starting classes 10 minutes late."  Perhaps so, but not universally observed: two classes I tried to shop had started right on time, a few minutes before I got there.  The other had to do with online posting of syllabus and assigned reading: only those who pre-register have access, and many courses had readings due for the first class. Overall, I give UMich's implementation of shopping for courses a B-.

Happily, as of Thursday afternoon, everything had fallen into place. My course schedule for the semester:

• Urban Planning (UP) 540, Planning Theory. "Why do we plan? How do we think it should work? Has it ever worked?"
• UP 513, Legal Aspects of the Planning Process. "What assumptions underlie land ownership and policy? What are the levers we can push?"
• UP 510, Public Economics for Urban Planning. "When do economic theories inform us, and when are their assumptions bunk? And why wasn't my last Econ teacher half this fun?"   
• UP 406, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Maps. Computers. Databases. 'Nuf said.
• Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE) 662, Seminar in Resource Policy and Administration, more specifically Localization: Adaptations for the Coming Downshift. "How will we build reliance and justice in the absence of cheap energy or continued growth?"

So, 5 courses. I know a fair bit of Econ and GIS already, so that helps. Part of the reason for taking the NRE course is to determine how much I want to focus my studies in that department/on those issues. The course has the most readings; it's also my favorite, the one I consider most meaningful.  Legal Aspects is a close second on both counts.

This weekend was dedicated to figuring out how much reading had been assigned, how far behind I was, what notes went in what notebook, and how much note-taking to keep using the laptop for. Result: I'm now caught up on readings (to last Thursday, plus most readings through this Tuesday); I will only take in-class notes on the laptop for the GIS course; otherwise the laptop is an expensive tablet (displaying all the readings that come as PDFs, and allowing me to mark up their margins).

Late this week is the Expanded Horizons field trip to Milwaukee for first-years. A general tour, three specific tours I chose out of the 12 (!) the second-years put together, a service project, and some time on a rented bicycle.  Also, 15 hours of time on a bus to do all my reading!

More in a week+, after I'm back...

Ready for classes! mostly.

Classes start tomorrow morning. After last week, I'm thoroughly oriented (and have absorbed more platitudes than I need in a lifetime), and I've finished my summer reading. The study is unpacked, my task list is organized, and my class shopping schedule is set. I will be stopping by at least 7 courses this week, to be narrowed to 4-5 shortly.

My study, all set for studying.

Before bed: two chapters of reading for tomorrow morning's class. Over breakfast: skimming a PDF or two.

Allons-y!

Geeking out (digital technology edition)

So we get here, and what's the first thing we do? File trouble tickets.  I gotta say, UM Housing maintenance needs a better ticketing system.  Their email confirming your case number doesn't include the area, subject or description of the problem. No email when tickets are closed.  No way to see your open tickets.  So for now, I'm focussing on writing a ticket I'd like to see: describe symptoms, not a diagnosis; provide steps to reproduce whenever possible; ... what have I become?

After expecting to place out of the intro to GIS (Geographic Information Systems), I was told I still need to take UP 406.  This could be a good excuse to learn multiple mapping systems and solid ways to document and script my work.  (For example, TIG: I'll be learning a fair bit of Python.  Rejoice or despair as you will.)  Unfortunately, by the time I worked this all out, UP 406 was quite full.  I'll know within a week or so if I can sqqeeze in.

There are three-prong outlets _everywhere_! *happy dance* The lights don't even flicker when the laser printer spins up.

We're in Northwood, a University-owned housing development.  This year they migrated from phone/DSL to cable for everything ("triple-play").  Our landline comes out of the back of the cable modem.  I am happy to report that voice-over-cableTV technology works, with the exception that the bedroom extension is now disconnected from anything.

I'm less happy with the signal strength of the HDTV channels though.  Both TiVo and the TV intermittently report "searching for signal", and the TiVo frequently records artifacts/jaggies.  Anyone have an idea on how to isolate this type of problem?  I checked all the connections I could find downstairs (the splitter for our apartment and for the apartment downstairs) and they looked secure...

There are 25 wireless networks within earshot.  We're all getting our bandwidth from ITS.  There's got to be a better way.  (I've been meaning to see how they're allocated across channels in the hopes of avoiding once-a-week signal dropout, but that's probably a lost cause.)

Still working out how/how much to use laptops for note-taking in class.  I took a MacBook Air with me from work "as is" because it was overheating and discharging its battery quickly.  I had hoped it wouldn't take much more than compressed air and software fixes to set it right, but no such luck...it's started refusing to charge sometimes. (Resetting SMC hasn't helped.)  In any case, I figure I'll probably end up with digital notes for most classes, and paper notebooks for the more graphically-oriented ones.