7 Quick Takes: Robots, Photos and Budgets

I was too late to get last week’s post in, Jen already had the linky list closed when I finished. Feel free to scroll down and read it as well, it’s some pretty big stuff.

—1— I’m finding it hard to find 7 things…
It’s been starting to feel like spring is definitely coming. It’s been staying lighter later, there have been no more bitterly cold days and temperatures have gotten as high as 9 degrees Celsius! We’re still getting snow but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I can’t wait! I have pulled a few of my ‘spring’ clothes out of the drawers this past week and today baby is dressed in a spring green froggy outfit Clocks go back tomorrow night too.

—2— Last night DH and I had an important discussion/budgeting session. This past month money was quite tight, and while there are probably a number of factors, the biggest one is that we lost the money I was bringing in as a TA because as of January my contract ended. They never told me this and it wasn’t till the middle of the month that I found out why I was no longer being sent things to mark. We didn’t have a lot of extra with this job, but we were definitely in the black.

I’d been thinking about getting rid of cable and my cell phone contract is up in May. The cable people are coming Tuesday and we may cancel my phone early. We’re also going to pare down DH’s contract to the bare essentials. These two cuts along with trying to keep groceries down should fix the problem. Oh and I’m turning my pc off at night also, to see how it affects the power bill.

—3— Another thing I’ve been mulling over for a few weeks is that I’d like to get just a part time job where I can either work from home or at least have only a small amount of hours. To bring in even a little money I have to find a job that pays better than say McDonalds. I have had little success with the work from home sites I have found online because they are really competitive and most of the people are over qualified giving me no chance. I have thought about working a restaurant (a proper one not fast food) but it still falls into the same trap as McDs (have to work too many hours to get the money I want). But, last night I had an idea, though I don’t know if it’s going to work out or not. I used to work at the CS Helpdesk, it was my co-op workplace and when I wasn’t on co-op I was working a shift on the weekend instead and earning the same amount as my original goal for McDs when I stated, while doing only 6 hrs of work a week. In addition it’s not that busy on the weekends so it really isn’t even that much work. After my last co-op term ended, the summer we were married, I think the weekends were already filled but for whatever reason I haven’t even tried to go back. I’m going to ask the head guy first chance I get if I can get one of the weekend slots and also if can bring the baby with me. I wouldn’t dream of doing that during the week full time, but on the weekend I can’t see it being a problem.

—4— On Saturday WiTS (Women in Technology Society, of which I have been a part of almost since the beginning) is putting on an event for 60 girls age 9-13. It’s all about promoting technology and computer science, in the hope that they will want to pursue careers in it someday. We’re putting on 3 workshops for them: Computer Building, Ceebot (a simple programming computer game) and Lego Robots (Lego Mindstorms: Robots you can build and program). I’m really excited and even though it hasn’t happened yet I can wait to be able to repeat the event in the future!

—5— As a result of 4 I have been playing with lego robots all week. I built the basic model following the instructions and by adding a light sensor and using program someone else developed I have been able to make the robot follow a lack line. It’s really neat.

—6— I haven’t talked much about school before either. I’m taking one class a term until I finish (2 or 3 more after this term) because I don’t want to be away from baby too long. I’m also kinda busy so too much homework would not be good either. This term I am taking Software Engineering (SE), the easiest of the 3 Computer Science (CS) courses I have left to take. I hadn’t really done any CS in about 2 years because when I took (and passed!) Algorithms (the toughest CS course) I was in my first trimester, and except for the marks I earned myself on the final, my group had to pretty much carry me, as my brain couldn’t process much of the assignment material (thank the Lord that we had the option to do all our assignments in groups).
Anyway we have to do a project as part of the SE course (despite the name software engineering the course is basically project management for large computing projects.) We are in groups of about 5. So far besides writing this and that for the documents we have to hand in I have been attending the meetings and drawn pretty pictures in pain. They are not really pictures but diagrams, (they are just black and white). But we are all working really well together and everyone is doing their share, so it’s going really well.

—7— Ah Hah! Found my 7th thing. On Monday we took the baby to visit his Aunt. Their house has nice lighting and I just love the simple soft clean feel of it as well.

As usual, I was snapping away most of the time. Well I finally remembered the DSIS setting on the camera to reduce motion blur. I’ve now decided to use that as default for all baby photos when possible, and so far it’s been helping a lot, as seen here: