Fast and dirty

Yesterday, I banged out a short proposal for an internal program they're calling the "Undergraduate Research Initiative." If successful, it'll bring in about $1,500 for one of my undergraduate research students. It's done (a full week ahead of the deadline, I note with some pride), and waiting for my student to drop by my office to sign it.

Then, last night and this morning, I zapped out an abstract for the Texas Academy of Science annual meeting, which UTPA is hosting next March. It's some of the work done by one of my Honours students, Anna, from last year, so it'll be good to give her a small presentation of her work. Hopefully, we'll be able to work it into a paper, but in the meantime, this isn't a bad start.

Also finished and printed off copies of the proposal by my most recent Honours student, Yajaira. Got that out of the way, and now we're good to go to pick up the tempo on her research project. Did a few little initial tests which look promising.

Oh yeah, President Bambi officially went through her investiture today. Community access cable will be thrilled. They'll be able to show those hours of people standing around in robes on cable for months. Me? I wasn't there, because I have real work to do. Like writing proposals, abstracts, and supervising students.

Another noteworthy event today, at least for a geek like myself, is that the new email program Thunderbird is now more or less ready (version 1.0 candidate release). After becoming a convert to Firefox a while back, I've been waiting for this for some time now. Lots of people have been using it steadily for a while, but call it a quirk: I still want to use software that is labeled "1.0" at least.