I found myself.

dskdfkdskflks

Okay. Long story short: Trying to do a social study on UStream and how its live streaming media and audience is being used by online artists, musicians, et al. I keep running into brick walls and scheduling and have to compile some decent data by, like, May 4th.

If you host a UStream or know someone who does who'd be willing to let me hit them up on AIM or gchat with questions or at least toss a survey at them by e-mail, please comment here. My focus is on artists since I've seen a LOT of art UStreams in recent months, but really, in my current state of fail I'm not picky.

All comments are screened so they won't be public to all and sundry. This study will never be published, the only people to see the results will be my prof and the rest of my IS728 class, and there will be no personally identifying information in the results.

Please, if you UStream or know anyone who does who might be interested, drop me a comment.

This message has been brought to you by my need to actually finish grad school (ONE MORE CLASS ONE MORE).

Sooo... I had to take half a day of work off this morning because I got up and there was no word from a group member about her section of the paper.

Finally heard from her at 9:30, scrabbled to compile everything.

Paper sucked, but printed it out anyway because it was done.

Handed it to Dr. Z at 12:15 today and went to work.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE the semester is over!


NOTE TO SELF: E-mail your prof for Electronic Commerce to see if he will tell you if he plans to assign a group paper and if it's open-topic. If so, find out about a handful of topics NOW so you don't spend half the semester arguing with people about it. Lesson learned.

Okay, so apparently the pollen count is at RECORD levels these past two days. And what did I do this afternoon?

...go mow my lawn.

GO ME AND MY SUPPORT OF THE ALLERGY MEDS BUSINESS. thank goodness for Benadryl.

Unfortunately, this is going to make the 24 Hours of Anime marathon at UMBC tomorrow night just that much harder.

In other news. Dr. Z liked our intermediate report so I'm trying to research that more. Trying. Even though I would rather be writing fic.

And that sums up like the last week.

*faceplant*

So while slogging through papers for my group research paper, I read the first item in a reference list that made me laugh out loud:

Ivan Marc Author. "Some related article I wrote." Some Fine Journal, 99(7): 1-100, January 1999.

This was in a published paper for an international conference. The very first item.

I don't know which would be funnier: if that ref got in there by accident and they totally missed it or if that was a genuine reference.

Heh.

On the one hand: If I got LUCKY,* I got a B. At best.

On the other hand: If I hadn't studied like crazy all week, I'd have pretty much failed the class already.

(We spend an entire lecture on knowledge inference, but that's nowhere on the exam and she gives an essay question on a search algorithm mentioned in one article that proved to be inefficient anyway? WTF?)

*If I got full credit for everything I didn't leave blank because I couldn't think of anything. And there was a LOT of BS.

Okay, so, I have officially FAILED at the PW playthrough. Aside from that first case, I honestly haven't had the time or been able to justify taking the time to pick up my DS at all, much less replay any of the cases these past two weeks. The public posts that you've seen the past 2 weeks? All the posts I've made here, period.

Work has been non-stop crazy, and school... well, I've been putting in more hours than I should in trying to get assignments done. The last homework should NOT have taken a total of 12 hours to get done (especially since half of that was spent trying to find a real-world case of search engine manipulation or something done to prevent it - everything's theoretical and none of the papers let you know if it's been done in practice).

I'm not complaining. Things haven't been bad, just... ridiculously busy. I need to reorganize my time management again because this semester's class is nowhere NEAR as structured as the last two and estimating how much time deliverables will take isn't as easy. Work is also weird, but I'll get into that later.

I have been using the "not dead" tag WAY TOO MUCH LATELY.

Deliverable 5 is turned in! Wheee!

Presentation next Monday. Which will be much less of a headache.

Semester officially ends in 5 days, 6 hours, and 14 minutes from now. *crosses fingers*

Sorry about the FX, but I had to find some way to convey the sheer thank-god-that-part's-done in plain text. This will not become a habit. Promise.