official according to state and school
Hi again,
Well, I am officially here according to the state and my school.
For the state: I have my plates and driver’s license.
For the school: I have my ID card/number, lots and lots of HR paperwork completed, an email address, and (just yesterday) a phone number!
My office at school is coming together. I have the “before” pics, but I am waiting to post them until I do the “after” pics.
Everyone is being super friendly and helpful. A lot of the students who are doing research for the summer and are around and being introduced to me remember me from my genetics lecture (in class). Thus far, only faculty remember my seminar, but if this school is anything like my last school, there are students who remember it who are too shy to say anything about it.
I have a really great room for my lab space, but it needs a big cleaning. It is a place where a handful of old computer monitors have been “stored.” Some extra chairs and a couple of classroom desks are also in there.
However, the admin is super about getting work orders in so that stuff gets removed ASAP. And a summer research student is going to help me clean up the lab space during incubations in his experiments. He is doing PCR, so he has a 4 hour block of time when he is free on a fairly regular basis.
I’m working with IT to get the right kind of tablet PC for my teaching. I cannot use an iPad, because I have to run powerpoint on it, and the iPad cannot run Microsoft products. The school has a discount with Dell (big surprise there), but the one that they had gotten for me to try out, and I tried yesterday, has an awful touchscreen for writing. These weird lines shoot off to the left when I write on a powerpoint presentation slide. Perhaps it is a setting issue, but if the reviews on the Dell website are to be believed, it is an inherent flaw in Dell’s choice of touch screen technology.
I used a Fujitsu at my last school. Evidently, they pioneered a lot of the touch screen technology for tablets.
Here is the short-ish video that I took of me using it while videotaping myself (one-handed). Not all that exciting, but since I taped it, I feel like I’ve got to do something with it.
I guess that is it for now. Thus far, I’m unaffected by the hurricane; it is just rainy here.