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Caught up

The semester has gotten off to a busy, but relatively smooth start. My writing class is finding tardigrades and starting to write about them. Students in ODI are feeling their way forward. Most of the labs in the building are working now. I still have to get the intro labs sorted out (by Monday), but I'm starting to have time to sit back and stretch for a minute or two now and then. Life is pretty good.

I'm using the plant physiology lab, which has scopes and computers to teach writing this semester. We've also got the BCRC reserved when we meed more computers. In the first class meeting, students tried to find tardigrades -- I had set up little bowls where we floated some lichens, causing tardigrades to drop to the bottom and walk around. Only a few found any the first time. On Monday, I got them started at the course website. On Wednesday, we met in the lab and again and the goal was to get a tardigrade in a well-slide and look at it. A couple of groups managed to do this -- I did three or four so more people could see them. I'm seeing a lot of cool stuff: different species of tardigrades, moulted exoskeletons with tardigrade eggs, etc. I'm excited about where the class will be when we get to the end.

The new lab for Super-Deluxe is coming together. The instructor decided to get equipment and software that requires Windows, so we're exploring the best options for doing virtualization. Sigh... I'm going to try VirtualBox and vmware and try to see whether potential benefits from vmware offset the fact that its licensing will probably make it two or three times more difficult to support. I'm meeting with folks at Computer Science who've been running a multi-OS lab for a year or so.

I keep having stuff to do at night. On Tuesday night, it was Chamber event and last night, I met with the founder of Ridebuzz to talk about the technology. We had a good conversation at the Dirty Truth. There's good ideas there -- I think those kinds of approaches going to become more important over the next few years. But I think there's a lot that would need to be done before it could be a mainstream phenomenon.