Tales from the Steppes

2005-05-24

10:05 a.m.
Step outside -- take a look at the stars. Catch a glimpse of the way things are -- Making contact..

Work has been really boring, as I am not doing jackshit. Every morning I wander over to my supervisor's office and ask if there are any plans I can review. He apologizes for not giving me any work but then says he is too busy to actually spend time with me. So I spend my days researching noise barriers and reading the subdivision regulations and relevant sections of the county code. I have reviewed a few plans but not nearly enough to keep me busy or for me to learn the whole process. But I try to stay busy and have not been working on my own research in my feeble attempt to be a good little employee. I think that may change starting today. Few things I hate more than feeling like my time is being wasted when I am running short on time and sleep.

I went out and worked until late last night but it was at least as frustrating as it was productive. I am working on a section of my theoretical construct that deals with the reasons why children use some spaces over others. WARNING!!! MORE BORING INFORMATION THAN NORMAL IS FOLLOWING. I came up with a list of exogenous and endogenous reasons to explain space usage that mostly seem to be common sense to me. For example, the exogenous reasons include things like proximity, connections, barriers, population distribution, social issues, cultural norms, and parental attitudes and restrictions. The endogenous factors are related to the space itself - what affordances and behavioral settings it provides. I have plenty of documentation on the endogenous factors but I went through the entire stack of literature I had with me and could not come up with much on the exogenous side. So tonight, I am going through all of my books and all 50 meellion journal articles in a vague hope that someone has written something on this topic and I didn't just make it up. I am pretty certain I could show that these are the determining factors but that would be a different thesis. I guess I could make it part of my hypothesis to explain the behavior I am attempting to document but that would definitely make my work even larger. Ugh.

Ok, enough of that. While I find human interaction with the environment to be fascinating, I am definitely in the minority on this one.

Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I look to see how people are finding this blog - the referring pages. One of the things that makes me laugh the most is how when someone will be researching a strange phrase, my blog entry will show up on some page of the search results, and the person will actually click on the link. To me, this is totally dumbfounding. If I was reasearching information, a personal blog would be just about the last place I would look for actual information and not merely an opinion. My favorite is the people that are looking up "Genie in a String Bikini." So far, I have had an incredible amount of traffic because I mentioned that I saw part of that movie. Perhaps these searchers think I will have stills from the movie or a "plot" synopsis. Too funny. Of course by mentioning it again, I am sure I just caused this site to be moved up higher in the search results. And that makes me laugh even harder.