Calendar

Muffin Man is a great Facebook status writer. I've decided to take some of his status updates and try to turn them into a comedy routine. Here is a bit based on his update...

Well, it’s 2012, the year of a major political battle for the U.S. presidency, the year of the warmest January in recorded history, and the last year of existence as we know it, according to some. The Mayan calendar ends in December 2012. Since their civilization ended about a thousand years ago, I’d say their calendar did pretty well. I don’t see how we should get so worked up about the end of a calendar made so long ago, I mean, I buy a calendar every year, sometimes with motivational pictures of kittens, other times dramatic scenes from the Harry Potter movies, and all of those calendars end in December. That’s just what calendars do, they end in December. I don’t open my new calendar each January, flip through it, and then exclaim, ‘Happy New Year! See y’all at the apocalypse next December!’ What it comes down to is we have more faith in an extinct ancient civilization to keep the time accurately than we do in Hallmark…

Oreo cookies and graduate statistics

75% of me really doesn't like stats homework, the other 25% hates it. I started out with the 13 pages worth of questions in good spirits. I was answering questions with ease as I was remembering the French-accented Dr. Deltoid (yes, a nickname), my undergrad research methods professor, and all that I learned in his class. I remembered distributions and measurement scales; independent and dependent variables, even what between group and within group mean. It was almost a joy, until I hit the part where I was given data and needed to organize it and create charts and tables. You see, in my undergrad classes (stats and research methods) we were required to purchase a program called SPSS. I purchased that program and complained quite frequently about how slow it was. Well, it turns out that the program is a million and a half times faster than I am at creating histograms and frequency polygons in Excel, manually. Can you believe Excel doesn't have built in functions to automatically create histograms from a grouped frequency chart? I know!

Well, needless to say, but here I am saying it anyway, because this was the point of writing (negating the usefulness of ever saying 'needless to say' in any seriousness), I wish I had SPSS. I don't know if I still have the CD for the program or not. It could be in a box in my parents' attic, or possibly in a box about 10 feet from me right now, I don't remember, it could also be in a trash dump out in Idaho somewhere after I gleefully tossed it out when I left school. One of these days, perhaps tomorrow, I'll check the box here at the apartment to see if it is still in my possession, otherwise I'm seriously contemplating a 3 hour round trip to scour the attic for it. The alternative is to drop $60 for a new one year licensed copy. Come to think of it, that probably is the best option, I'll spend close to the same amount on gas driving to my parents' house. Even if I find that I do have the CD, I might not be able to run it because it is probably a limited use license and it has been a few years since I bought it. Well, such is life.

I'm glad to be finished with this assignment, and until I have SPSS, or until I look at what next week's assignment entails, I am going to be dreading week two of this class. At least I have some Oreo cookies to keep me energized.