I attended a SAS Enterprise Guide workshop.

I was invited and today attended a workshop on using SAS Enterprise Guide. We worked on computers in the Sprott School of business Lab E this morning. I found out about a meeting of the Ottawa Area SAS Users Society that is happening tomorrow morning. To attend this tomorrow I will go back to normal days with early mornings and early nights.

Rationalising this week's studies.

Although my pre-grad school math studies are going well and I also worrry about doing enough of these, I am going to back off on these studies for the week. I will only really study SAS today and perhaps on Monday as I have a SAS workshop on Monday morning at school. SAS is one of the statistical softwares we use at our math and stats school.

For legal studies I will focus on my mid-term this week but this mid-term is fairly open. I have done enough studies up till now so only have maybe one required reading or two to still read. As far as suggested readings I have been doing these regularly so am ok with these but these are where I will study more from this week. I need to read a bit more about war crimes, the Winnipeg general strike, and may be continue reading some of the more general books about our times in a legal-political sense.

I will also leave some study time for reading medicine, self help, computers and other fun stuff like Internet research and doing blogs. Mostly this week I have half day assignments and I have all of Thursday off and Thursday is another pay day this week. I will not have had my Friday night friends over for about three weeks after this week.

I updated my new blog just now.

I have a new blog using iBlog on my macintosh computer. It is being used to tell my story of graduate school in statistics.

I attended a lecture last night in criminal law process and politics

This is my last undergrad course needed for my BA. It took nine credits as a second degree. One credit was of course my first year introduction to legal studies. Then there were three second year courses worth a credit a piece and I did these over four years. They were introductions to criminal law, public law and private law. I took the criminal law second year course first in 2001-2002 after I had begun working as a security guard. This was also when I gradatued with my first degree my statistics B.Math but this was only a three year general B.Math not an honours degree. Then for third year and fourth year courses in legal studies these were only half credits, so I needed eight of them plus the fourth year honours paper which was one credit. For third year half credits I only needed three optional courses and one research methods course. I am just now this term completing my last optional third year course in criminal law process and politics. In the winter 2003 term I took my first third year course which was called law in the information society. I focus much on my studies on this area of the internet or computers and the law. After this course in summer 2003 I took my second second year course in private law and wrote about a case at our Supreme court about the right to refuse medications. Recently the person involved in this case has been forced to take medication again so his victory at the Supreme court is really only a theoretical or temporary victory. My next third year half credit course was consumer law in fall 2003. I started studying fourth year courses after having done two second year courses and the one third year course and my first fourth year course was criminal law reform also in fall 2003. This was when I first had my IBM laptop. I then took a business law fourth year course about issues in ecommerce and this was my worst course where I scored my lowest grade in the BA a C in winter 2004. I also took the research methods course that term. For my third fourth year half credit I studied in the criminal law and criminology summer school which has been a tradition at our school since at least the early 1980's and I had wanted to take part in this summer school for years and finally did in summer 2004. I did very well with this course scoring A. This is when I started to have regular 24 hours days awake. I have the same professor from that course this term. I then last school year took my last half credit in fourth year and this was my drug law course. The professor of this course feels I have talent for graduate school and has offered to be a referee for this MA application which I have been preparing in the past week or two. Also last year I completed my honours paper which counted for one credit at the fourth year level. The paper was on the topic of computer hackers. This past summer I completed the last second year course in public law. I only need now to complete this third year course and I am done in about 5 weeks. This will be my first outstanding degree with my graduation average being a B+ in legal studies and a good B over all. The university regard this as graduation with high honours.

I took time while studying for this BA to also study a philosophy course in the history of ethics. Two sociology courses one in criminology and one in the sociology of science and technology. I also studied last year a course in numerical analysis and also a course in data mining.

Next week, I have my mid-term in the third year criminal law course and should get an A on the mid-term or at least a B+. Then on December 10th, Human Rights day I have my final exam. I will have to wait until March to find out if I have formally graduated and then will attend graduation in June along with spring graduates.

In the winter I will not be in a program but will be considered a special student and can really study whatever I want provided that there is space for me in the course. I am thinking of studying experimental design and have started to read about combinatorics for this course. I am also considering statistical computing. I also am considering bioethics as a course. In legal studies I am considering state security and dissent, feminist legal issues, and risk and the legal process. I would like to find a space in the medical issues in criminal law course as this course covers topics like the insanity defence but this course is full right now. Again I will cut this list down to one or two course by the time the winter term begins.

Legal topics studied this week, so far.

So far this week, I completed reading an article about privacy by Valerie Steves from our criminal law and political process course readings book. I also read two cases concerning aboriginal Canadians and the colour of right defence to charges resulting from protests. Basically aboriginals are allowed to trespass given that aboriginals have not sold their land to us Europeans. The belief that Canada, or parts of it not covered by treaties, are/is still aboriginal land and the complexity of land not being owned, because land ownership is a concept alien to aboriginal legal systems, is affirmed in these court cases I read. This continues the coverage of defences from my introduction to criminal law course, and also continues the coverage of aboriginals and the law from my introduction to private law course.

I spent about five minutes or less so far this week looking at the Rule of Law history book I am borrowing. I borrowed only one book tonight after reading

Schwartz-Morgan, Nicole. Loose Cannons In Cyberspace: Society and Psychological Change in Last, David & Horn, Bernd. eds. Choice of Force: Special Operations for Canada (Kingston, Ont.: The School of Policy Studies, Queens University, 2005).

This article depends on and describes the concept of genetic change by the concept of propensity genes. Her point is that the Information Age is changing the way we behave and that this change is not individual or cultural and thus is permanent. She is worried about this in more than just our dependence on technology, but also in regards the behaviour of the special forces and its leadership as these people change because of cyberspace.

The booked I borrowed is an analysis of the British Army Special Air Service and its presentation in popular culture. I will cite it at a later date, if I read more of it. Also this week I got more into reading about feminism and femininity involved in Latin American revolutions and also labour movements.

I have labs again last night.

There were fewer students this week in the labs. I gave labs in determining probability using a probability density function and also using a cumulative density function. I showed students how to calculate these proabilities using Minitab software and also using the formulas for the various distributions in particular I showed them the binomial and poisson distributions, two discrete distributions.

I got my transcripts requests mailed out.

I attended McMaster university in 1977-1978 and also in 1980-1981. In between I took a couple of courses but didn't complete them at Mac. I also attended some night school courses at Algonquin college from 1995-1999 studying managing volunteers. To apply to graduate school I needed to get my transcripts from both of these schools and have them mailed to Carleton. I filled out the forms for both schools twice, once for the M.A. and once for the M.Sc. I just mailed them at noon today.

My next step is to visit my M.A. referees this week and I also need to pay for the M.Sc. application on line this week then just complete the forms which are almost done now. I might also need to check with or change my referees for the M.Sc.

Today I will go to campus to hardware services to borrow a set of SAS install disks for my broken laptop which has a WinXP install that is still fresh.

The college life: faculty partners and family charity book sale today.

This is typical of college life today. I woke up at 2 PM yesterday. I stayed up and wrote things and read things and am up still this morning. I will now stay up for about a 24 hour day. I will stay up to attend a charity booksale of faculty and library books. This all seems like typical college life.

I gave the statistics mid-term, as part of my teaching assistant duties, last night or helped proctor it might be a better way of saying this. It went well and the boss offered to be a referee in my statistics graduate school application and gave me some advise on how to find referees.

In other school news today I am trying out iBlog on my Macintosh and am hosting the blog on my student web space. This blog will be a record of my statistics graduate school experience. Yes I do too much web publishing and it costs too much.

I gave a mid-term tonight.

I proctored a mid-term tonight in statistics as part of my teachng assistant duties. It went well no major peek experiences and all experiences were positive. I got to know my students better.

Started a basic book on Information technology as a review of IT.

I started to read a review of the principles of how computers work. This was written for lawyers. This book is

Handa, Sunny. Fundamentals of Information Technology (Markham, Ont.: LexisNexis Canada, 2004).

This book starts with a review of physics of electronics and I am going to read more of it later.

Completed reading David Shenk's 1997 Data Smog book tonight.

I completed reading David Shenk's Data Smog tonight and returned it to the library. I also returned a few other books I was not reading. I borrowed books on computational materials science, grad school algebra, and a few on law and information technology. I will read for a few hour tonight. I will read our course pack for LAWS3306 and did attend the lecture this week earlier this evening.

Missed some work today.

I was supposed to do building inspections today as part of my health and safety committee work but did not have enough sleep or wake time. I prioritised my main work and my social night tonight. I will be on a good sleep schedule for the rest of the week. Tomorrow there is steward training at noon. There is also a workshop on IP and copyright at school tomorrow that I want to attend. I note here that a book project I am involved in is starting to earn royalties which will pay for another edition. Then in the evening tomorrow I have my weekly lecture to attend. Then Friday I am working in the late afternoon early evening at our statistics student's mid-term. Then this weekend I will mark it.

Just heading off to my teaching assistant work with everything ready for tonight's labs.

I am just powering up my iPod with PDA guys podcasts to learn about gadgets. I am taking my legal studies books for school to read on break and also I hope to finish reading Data Smog today. I will be early to work I hope and drop by the union office.

Continuing marking early in the morning/late at night.

It only took me half an hour to mark one Q just one more Q to go now. The problem is dealing with some social facts but in fact if one were studying this area of sociology one would not be so certain that the numbers for this statistical problem would actually be accurate. In fact, these numbers might never actually be available but in our imperfect world these numbers are always available for policy but in true science these numbers would be doubtful and more uncertain than they seem to be presented in this statistics textbook. I will meantion this to the students later today. The problem claims to measure the number of unknown cases but by definition these are still unknown in number and will always remain unknown.

I am up late working on my teaching assistant work.

I need to mark two more Q's on the assignments and then spend about 2.5 hours preparing for the assignments. I need to sleep by about 3 AM or 5 AM and wake up at 2 PM for a less than 24 hour day and a good ten hours sleep. I am working later today at 5:30 PM until 10 PM.

Marking statistics assignments today and reading Jihad v McWorld

I am reading a little this morning about interdependence and resource economics in Jihad v McWorld. I am also going to do some marking. I am managing the household budget and buying some cat food today. I am also doing some green party volunteering at school today.

Article in today's paper about youth and adult transitions.

I did everything I usually do today, although my today is from 4 PM to about 6 PM later today. I will volunteer today starting in about 1 hour. I have also worked for about an hour marking statistics assignments. I am more than half way done with this work which is due back on Tuesday. I need to volunteer on Monday too with my PA system so should get this marking done today if possible. This is part of my teaching assistant duties.

I have read some of my own studies earlier today. This includes studies in law, informatics, and also social research. I also helped a fellow academic with some statistical problems and although I took the role of statistical consultant in this work I believe it was not all that successful. There is a book review of a pop statistics book in today's Sunday newspaper by journalist Jason Chow who is in Toronto. The book is Rosenthal, Jefferey S. Struck By Lightning: The Curious World of Possibilities (Toronto: HarperColins, 2005). I was struck by the term Markov Chains again and Monte Carlo another term I seem to have some understanding of, and these combined are Rosenthal's specialty.

I listened to some podcasts, which are in this case just spoken radio like entertainment. But the difference is that they are digital and thus can seemingly be saved for later use or reference. I have also listened to two or three albums of music. I have two reasons to listen to more music. One I need to put more relaxation into my schedule because even reading is work for me. And two I am taking up my music career a bit more including giving a free lesson today at about midnight, in blues playing and also major and minor scales on the guitar. In my studies today and in the podcast I was learning about PDA's as well and I mention this here because the applications I installed and tested on my Palm PDA today were artistic tools. One is called Fretboard and is very useful and not bad as an interface for what it does. It is able to show the fretboard positioning for chords, scales, and notes for a variety of fretted instruments and this is really its power is that it has many fretted instruments I have never played on nor have played with players of these instruments. Another music tool for the palm PDA was the software Tuning Fork which played throught the speaker on the palm perfect A notes at 440. I tried it to play 880 which it did but then the palm froze and needed to be soft reset.

The other PDA art tool was Q draw perhaps more in line with my school training in arts and I used it to draw a floor plan of our apartment. I was quicker and did a better drawing, than I have with other softwares like Illustrator and Photoshop. The reason perhaps is because doing this on the palm was more like holding a sketch pad with a pen instead of a mouse. Yet the various drawing tools are similar to other computer drawing programs where there are tools such as shapes and fill and of course text my all time favorite tool as I was trained to techincal drawing and map making. These types of drawings are incomplete without text labels.

I read the paper with interest today which is unusual for a Sunday paper. The cover of one section had a photo of a sister union member. The article "On Hold: Coming of Age in Ottawa is a Road to Nowhere For Many Worried Twentysomethings" by Pauline Tam Ottawa Citizen, October 16, 2005 C3-C6. It is about concepts like emerging adulthood and arrested adulthood. There are some pretty simplistic value statements defining adulthood and relating the values of work, but the economic arguments I thought might be missing that explain the situation, like lower wage trends in the past thirty years, were included in the article. I have experienced what this article is about both in my work and my school life. It also includes the family as a topic in this article and the plea for government and business policy for part timers and this hits one of my road blocks square on the head. This pieces analysis and my reading of it remind me to see the parallel developments approach to analysing problems. The social can not be divorced from the economic and, in fact, the best perspectives are interdiciplinary perspectives. This article also had some critiques of teaching and I seem to be taking on the resonsibility for my teaching and hoping to improve it.

Speaking of teaching I need to prepare some statistics labs for Monday. I also have about three data mining conference reports out from the library from Friday night. I should take some time now and read some of these articles before going out to volunteer.

Reading about child poverty research, evidence and privacy, and other legal studies books.

I read some more of Data Smog this week. I read the first chapter of a book about child poverty research. I read the first chapter in an old law reform commission report about electronic surveilance. I read the introduction to a book on Ulrich Beck and his risk concept. This is for preparation to a possible legal studies course this winter on risk. I read the first chapter about youth in Robert Kennedy's To Seek a Better World. This last book is for my legal studies course tis term in criminal law.

I am slowly slogging through Neil Nehring's Popular Music, Gender, and Postmoderism: Anger Is an Energy (Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage, 1997). In music I also started to read this book this week: Firth, Simon. World Music, Politics and Social Change (Manchester, UK: Manchester University, 1989). Both of these books are critical of the elitism of music studies in universities. I also started to study mixing and effects in the book White, Paul. Basic Effects & Processors (London: SMT;Sanctuary, 2003).

Taught some labs and borrowed some books.

I taught some labs in statistics tonight. I was mostly quiet in the labs only helping the students rather than solving problems. We interacted fairly well. I have some marking to do now. I also talked with our TA union business agent and some other TA's during the course of the evening. I also talked with a student who also has a disability. I borrowred books on revolutionary women fighters and feminisms in guerilla warfare, special forces operations in the Canadian forces, exploring child poverty, and finally a handbook for university courses in forensics.

I did a little studies today to prepare for my teaching work on Tuesday. I am working tomorrow.

I read the course textbook for statistics for about half an hour this weekend. I need to spend about another three hours on Monday studying this textbook for the labs on Tuesday. I am also writing an M.Sc. thesis proposal today. I have a rough draft but haven't read it yet I just wrote one page and printed it but still need to read it once through.

But at the moment I am going to try to nap for about four or five hours because I have to go to work early Sunday morning. I managed to help deliver the newspapers this morning and also did a volunteer on call shift today. I am also reading some legal studies and other books.

Attended lecture last night on war crimes.

We had a lecture on war crimes last night. It was shocking to watch the footage from Nazis Germany and the death camps. I left in a strange mood. I hung around school for about two hours before the lecture. I had everything read that was required. I borrowed some more books about terrorism. I am borrowing about 40 books now. I had to take back the book on basic gender studies. I am coming to understand that law school will be too expensive to study. I may investigate grants and other funding help but I am thinking the MA in legal studies will be more fun intellectually and better for me.

Continuing to read critics of the information age.

I am reading Shenk, David. Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). and Rose, Ellen. User Error: Resisting the Computer Culture (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003). Both of these books are critical looks at the Information age. These are borrowed books. Another critic I was reading in August was Stoll, Clifford. High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (New York: Double Day, 1999). I own this book or it was my mom's.

I found three referees for my law school application today.

I spent about an hour surfing the law school application web site last night/this morning. I printed the manual for the application. I emailed some four lawyers and two community leaders looking for referees. Today I have two lawyers who are my past teachers and also a community leader to act as referees. So this is on its way to being ready to go. I will check the application again tonight and read the manual for this year's applications.

May be meeting with a professor of criminal law this week to discuss MA supervison.

My drug law professor has agreed to meet with me and discuss supervising my MA in legal studies. She really made me work hard last fall to write a very good paper on drug addiction treatment and the law. This paper is one of my best in terms of having a very academic diction. She may be able to supervise some studies on criminal law and mental health. I should try to study the criminal law and health issues course next term but need to find a space in this course. I guess with that reminder I am off now to surf the school's registration system to check on class openings. I will proof read this and then surf on over to the University web site.

I read three chapters of a book and turned on the movie Y2K.

I borrowed this book today at an employee's suggestion

Shenk, David. Data Smog : Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco, Calif. : Harper Edge, 1997).

I read three chapters this evening. Then I turned on the movie Y2K and watched it to the second commericals.

One of my old friends has to keep a blog for a school course.

His blog is here http://waltonp.blogspot.com. It is for some teaching course he is studying. I comment on his first post. Here is what I wrote:

Peter said...

Phil as an old friend I had never read you before. High school and elementary were verbal between the youth. Only love notes between girls and boys nothing between male friends. True we read books but we never read each other. Of course, it is easy for anyone to proof read and I did that. Is it Keating or Keating's? Much of my Internet use is proof reading my own public self.

I am not surprised to see spam here. Art blogs on blogspot get spam. My dry school blog does not. My school blog which is inspired by the school but not required is here http://notebook.webpagex.org. This is just a blogspot site where some computer techs donated my cute web address.

I have now joined you in your public writing. I have been writing in public on the Internet as world wide web for ten years. I think this really is welcome to the Internet for you.

I like books about computers.

I am enjoying reading cyber sociology. I really like books. Today I have read about drug offences in Britian, the Greek, Solon and his legal constitution, information overload, and the rule of law. I emailed two professors about finding a supervisor for my legal studies MA. I also read a paper directly for my own course that we were assigned to read this week. I borrowed books by famous academics in Internet studies, books on law, a book on women work and technology, and a book on crime and numbers. I am borrowing about 35 books at the moment.

Surfing school web pages and installing school pdf's on my palm.

I am just about to surf school web pages which means read web pages. Our criminal law course has a web CT web page and I can look at extra readings on this web page. I have also read a little this morning. I installed a few course outlines, school union documents and my mixer manual as pdf's on my palm pilot.

I defeated the shopping cash flow bug today.

I managed to buy a bus pass, smokes, and groceries and only spend 5$ on something unplanned. I am heavily behind on bills this month but have spent 930 dollars at the music store in the past two months. I am such an independent musician ;) Said with sarcasim towards individualistic neo-liberal personal accumulation schemes. Am I really smarter or more creative owning music technology? I think with all the music technology I just bought I did not buy one item with a integrated circuit chip in it.

Oh well our rent will be paid and our debit was serviced and I even bought stock. Our house has some food and some drink. We will buy our major amount of groceries tomorrow. But most probably our phone will be disconnected and our power turned off.