Oops!

Well... I got that last paper all finished up, but not without some major accidents along the way. I think that I have finally learned the lesson that going nearly 48 hours without sleep messes with the senses. Right in the middle of the night before handing in the paper, I made a few clumsy keystrokes and ended up trashing pretty much all of the notes I have taken this semester. I don't know what happened, but no matter what data recovery software I run, I get nothing but corrupted files and, well, useless crap. Seems that the files just disappeared. This is especially problematic since those were all the notes that I need to study for my finals over the next 2 weeks. Suffice it to say, I am a little mad about the whole thing. It really put a bummer on the rest of the project.

Fortunately, in one of my more lucid moments, I backed up a bunch of the material, meaning that I am only set back about two weeks. Lukily, I have been a super nice nerd this semester and shared my anal note taking talents with about half of the school, making it possible for me to reconstruct a large part of the semester from email attachments that my wonderful GMail account saved for me.

So things are sucky, but not as bad as they could be.

First Post

Well, I really shouldn't be posting.
I'm working on a 30+ page research design for a social research methods class, but I just can't take it anymore. I have all of the information in my head, but it just doesn't want to get down on paper.

The ethical issues surrounding the use of video in ethnography are also killing me. My prof isn't an anthropologist, so he gave me pretty general guidelines on how to work around some of my challenges, but they just aren't helping when I am filling out the forms for the Research Ethics Board.

I've gotten to the place where I am just going to give up on half of the cool research methods that I want to use so that I can get this paper done. Video, internet, and photography make the ethics review process just to much of a pain in the butt.