April 2007 Archives

I've uploaded a two minute trailer for Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan onto a new website I've dedicated for Bethel publicity: http://www.disability.jp/bethel

Please enjoy!

One piece of important information that you should have before entering into salary negotiations is the AAUP national salary survey. This gives average figures for assistant / associate / and full professors at schools across the country. Even community colleges are counted.

Note that the figures for schools with large business schools, law schools, or engineering schools are usually inflated as faculty in those divisions tend to make more than those in the humanities or social sciences.

Also, you need to ask whether your school is paying you on a nine-month salary or a twelve-month. AAUP adjusts all of their data to 9-month salaries, so if the school is offering you US$120,000 for a 12 month salary (let me know where!), AAUP will count it as "only" getting US$90,000.

AAUP survey: http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/

ArsTechnica has a fantastic overview of the current crop of high-end pigment-based inkjet photo printers: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~3/109372463/inkjets.ars

My Epson 1280 is still soldiering on, but when I end up replacing it, I think I'll get a Canon. I'm sick of Epson's policy of suing every single third-party ink manufacturer and Canon's ink tanks are larger and more efficient.

Roland has released a minor firmware update for its Edirol R-09 digital audio recorder: http://www.rolandus.com/ (click on "Downloads)

The new features are:


  • Repair Files (fixes corrupted files)
  • Max recording size (allows you to limit the max file size of a recording)
  • Peak hold (peak audio level is held for a short while to make it easier to detect peak audio levels)
  • Rec/Peak LED energy saving (turn off these LEDs to save batteries)

See my other notes on the Edirol.

iFixitIBook.jpgI recently had to change out the hard drive on my partner's iBook G4. It's a tremendously difficult procedure with (what seemed like) over a hundred screws that need to get removed in the proper order. iFixit has a great guide series for disassembling and reassembling your Macs and iPods, including a very useful screw reminder sheet that I used to cellotape all the screws to in the order that I removed them: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/

I put the old drive in a portable USB enclosure and used SuperDuper! to clone the old drive to the new one. Everything worked spankingly and my partner now has a 100 gb drive to put her huge iPhoto database on! And an external 60 gb USB drive for backups.

You'll need an assortment of teeny Phillips screwdrivers (including a Torx, although I used a hex driver) and a "spudger" or a little lever tool that helps you crack the iBook case. iFixit will sell you one, I used one that I had from my camera repair toolkit. A small set of tweezers was also great for picking up small parts. My screwdrivers are magnetized, which also helps with the small screws.

p.s. I wish Apple made the iBook easier to maintain! You shouldn't have to take out 100+ screws just to change out the hard drive!

J.C. sends me a link to a fascinating website, the 100 year old photo blog: http://www.shorpy.com

Zoom-h2.jpgSamson now has a detailed page for their new Zoom H2 flash recorder: http://www.samsontech.com

It truly looks like a winner all around: SD card slot (4 gigabyte compatible), 3 capsule mics, date/time stamp function, works as a USB mic when connected to your computer, easy to use, small, light, cheap.

It even records 5.1 surround sound in 4 channels in real time! Perfect for recording wild sound. I can't wait to get my hands on one for this summer.

Blog: Going paperless

| | Comments (1)

This is something I've been meaning to blog about for a while, but I'm going paperless in my office. I've been scanning down my large library of photocopied journal articles and reducing them to PDFs which I store on my RAID network area server. It's a slow process, but I'd like to be done by the end of the semester which is when we're moving office spaces (again).

scansnapeddy.jpg
My current workflow is:


  1. Scan using a Fujitsu ScapSnap
  2. OCR using Adobe Acrobat
  3. Index using Spotlight
  4. Rinse, repeat.

Adobe Acrobat 7.0 for the Mac is buggy and has problems with some of the PDFs that ScanSnap generates, so I'm looking forward to seeing if Acrobat 8 solves them. I haven't been able to find other good OCR solutions for batch processing PDFs so if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

MS Mouse 8000.jpgI bought the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 the other day. I'm quite fond of Microsoft input devices, I have their USB keyboard / mouse combination at work and at home. I bought the Presenter 8000 because I'm giving a lot of talks and I thought a little presenter mouse would be good. The 8000 operates normally as a 4 button scroll-tilt mouse, but then it also has presenter buttons on the underside.

It's a bluetooth mouse so I thought I would be able to just use my internal bluetooth drivers on my Mac PowerBook G4. Unfortunately while most of Microsoft's mice are totally Mac-compliant, the 8000 doesn't properly register itself as a Bluetooth mouse and you need to hack it somewhat to get the Mac to recognize it. I found the solution on Mac Rumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=249841&page=2 in a posting by viper0440 (scroll midway down).

One of my friends (B.B.) has a favorite saying that I particularly like: Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice.

A reporter from Kyodo News has been interviewing me the past several months about Bethel, looks like a translation of the original story made the English section of the Kyodo website:

http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstStory/index.php?storyid=307467

I hate how they have to post my age!

Karen

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