Working from home

I decided to stay home and work today. For one thing, the heavy-duty data entry and analysis are done, and I'm a little tired of it right now, too tired to start playing around with diversity indexes, which I can do next week.

Also, the other thing I need to do - look through the preserved invertebrates - I need to reload the drivers for the microscope camera first. (The program was apparently lost in the Great File Migration from my old computer. Interestingly enough, the file containing the photographs is still there. (I had copied it several other places just to be safe). The complication with this is that SOMEBODY (cough, me), stored the CD badly and it got a bit warped. So, Britton and Brown's "New Flora of the Northeastern US" to the rescue again - this time, to weight down the disk and hopefully flatten it back to usability. (It looked good when I checked yesterday, but I prefer to wait to work with it when I know the computer dudes are on campus, in case the whole thing goes kerflooey. I think of that early episode of Mythbusters where they tried damaging CD-ROM (or maybe it was the drive) beyond functionality to see if they could make the CD burst into shards of flying plastic.)

But I'm also working at home because at the moment, I'm a bit leery of being up on campus all by myself (which is what I probably would be, at least, until noon). My building is fairly remote on campus (our Dean told us of how she had to correct a student giving a tour who said, "We have a biology department, but they're not on campus.") Normally, that isolation is nice, it means we don't get a lot of people coming around and bothering us too much.

But of late, there have been a couple of pretty brazen armed robberies in town - and while one was of one of those check-cashing places (which are kind of like convenience stores in terms of being a magnet for crime...even back in college the people I knew jocularly referred to the "Stop N Go" near campus as the "Stop N Rob" because they were hit so often), the most recent one was an apartment complex not very far from my building. So yeah. Since I have no pressing need to be up there today, I don't think I will be. Just in case.

(Some people speculate that this is a sign of the times, that more nasty robberies in town is a marker of a down economy, but I don't know. I know a lot of people who are struggling, up to and including people who lost a job and can't find another - and they aren't turning to crime. I think it's a little bit simplistic - and maybe a little unfair to the people who are trying to muddle through on the right side of the law - to "excuse" the higher crime rate as a sign of the bad economy.)

I've got new labs to write and think about, and I can just as easily do that at home. I'm working an a replacement for the dispersal lab I did (which was long and frustrating and usually didn't work that well), so I'm glad that our interviewee, when we were talking about ecology, suggested how his university did a dispersal lab - I can modify the idea to work for us. (And regardless of whether he takes the job or not - and I hope he does - I'm giving him credit for the idea).

And, as I Tweeted, I used an Oxford comma and I liked it. (I refuse to give up on the Oxford comma, regardless of what some say.)