Welcome

It is quite nice here very unusually warm for this time of year. I wore shorts today just a few days before Christmas. I can remember Christmases before when it was really cold but that was mainly in North Florida. Around here it is usually much colder now but no where near as cold as Indiana.

I spent some time with my friends from work on Thursday. They all seemed happy to see me so that was nice. I doubt I'll get to see everyone I want to since I need to help my grandmother move into her new apartment the day after Christmas and many people are probably already gone for the holidays.

I'll be back in Bloomington in a few days to celebrate New Years and to get some internship and scholarship applications filled out.

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas or had a Happy Hanukkah.

I made it, through one semester that is. Today my group turned in our final paper for our class. The paper deals with the CHI 2007 problem. The group is taking a little time off for the break but I know we will have to start working on a plan to move forward before we get back if we want to submit to CHI. We still have some testing to do on our concept and a poster to design but for the time being we are done.

This semester was rough especially the few months. I am hoping things won't get that bad again but who knows. Next semester I have two more classes from the HCI/d track plus either Applied Cognitive and Emotional Psychology or Stats for Information Science and Usability. The professor who teaches the stats class told me this is the last time he is teaching it so that is probably my first choice reluctantly due to my love of math. The class is taught through the School of Library Science and not Mathematics and apparently this guy is a really good professor so hopefully it won't be that bad.

The only problem with the stats class is that there are four students in it right now including me so there is a good chance it won't form. This is why I signed up for the Applied Cognitive and Emotional Psychology class which is taught through Telecommunications. I know this is kind of odd for both classes but Cog Sci doesn't teach anything at the grad level that is not for just the cog sci people and stats at the grad level in the math department would not be a good thing for me.

I am heading home this weekend and will be gone for a bit. I am happy to be going home to see some friends and be back in the warm weather although it hasn't been that bad here for Indiana in the winter. :)

This is an interesting thing I ran into this evening. I was using a link to Google words to a song and came up with a link to a site that said it had the lyrics. When I clicked on the page I got this from Google.

" Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!
You can learn more about harmful web content and how to protect your computer at StopBadware.org.

Suggestions:

* Return to the previous page and pick another result.
* Try another search to find what you're looking for.

Or you can continue to http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/lyrics/RAY_LAMONTAGNE.html at your own risk.

Advisory provided by Google"

See here for the actual page
http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/lyrics/RAY_LAMONTAGNE.html

The question is how did they end up on the malware list? How do get off of the list if you end up on it and don't belong there?

For example in my last job our papers sent out e-mail newsletters to people who had asked to get them. Often the papers would complain that users were not getting the newsletters. Sometimes it had to do with our newsletters ending up on the spam list of AOL, Yahoo or one of the other major e-mail providers. So then we had to jump through the hoops to get off of the list. This happened every month or so and then we would have to fight to get off the list again.

I wonder if this will happen with this new malware advisory. I guess we shall see.

As a side note they do ban you from messing with the url parameter and making it look like a clean site is a malware site. I am sure they saw people seeing this is an easy hack.

Right now it is 16 degrees outside and it feels like 2. Tomorrow's forecast high is 31 with a 22 feels like temperature. I have never lived anywhere that it gets this cold. It is really hard to deal with these temperatures. Needless to say I am cold.

Today I bought another hat that covers my ears and ties under my chin along with another scarf to match.

I has snowed, well as they say flurried a bit here but nothing has stuck to the ground.

On Friday we had really high winds and our first day of horribly cold weather. I am glad the semester is almost over so I don't have to walk in this much longer.

Hopefully this won't last too long. *crosses fingers*

I had said earlier this year that I thought UF would have a good season but I didn't think they would end up in the National Championship game. I'd love to go but the tickets are super expensive through scalpers. I am working all of my ticket connections and crossing my fingers for something around face. The bad thing is that the game is the first day of classes for this semester, I am sure it is the same for UF but I don't have class until Tuesday at maybe 11:15 depending on how things go.

Having Michigan on one side and Ohio on the other probably doesn't make me real popular as a Gator in Indiana but I don't care.

All in all GO GATORS!!