Wombat Rampant

Joanne Jacobs links to a USA Today story about a West Virginia study examining whether Dance Dance Revolution can be a useful tool in getting kids to shed weight and improve their health. Check the comments to Jacobs' post; a couple of respondents talk about how they used DDR to change their lives. (!) California schools were already putting the game to work in PE classes, back in 2002 in an attempt to get sedentary kids to exercise.

Makes sense to me. Unlike a lot of other exercise programs, playing DDR gives you immediate positive feedback, and kids respond to the challenge of beating the game and unlocking the extra songs. Considering how expensive diabetes medications are (to say nothing of insulin shots) plunking down a couple of Benjamins for a Game Cube/PS2 and pad seems like a pretty reasonable investment for an insurance or healthcare company.

I had completely forgotten about last night's meeting of the Registration Department until phoenixalpha called to ask me to inform drunkenphlower that she would be late. That being the case, I scuttled plans to catch the early 597 and took the 17 up Nicollet to 15th instead and then hiked the four blocks over to drunkenphlower's apartment. She'd laid on an excellent dinner of fajitas and fresh fruit, which were enjoyed along with a discussion of this year's efforts and some advanced planning for 2006. danae will be in charge of Registration next year, and will be adding more staff (piman and cthuljew were mentioned) in addition to doing some fixes for things that didn't work so well this year.

The meeting broke up about 8:30, about half an hour after phoenixalpha and Scott showed up, and we hit the bricks back to Nicollet at about 9:30. This caused us to miss the 9:45 535, which meant that by the time we climbed off the next one it was 10:45. No more BE Line for us; we had to leg it to the St. Luke's Park & Ride for the Kia and then ride home. It was probably the most sustained walking I'd done since Detour, and somehow I managed to pace myself so that I wasn't winded. We all got home around 11:30, and by the time I was done checking e-mail it was past midnight...so I'm short on sleep going into tonight's class, for which I have managed to get absolutely no work done this past week despite having Wednesday night off. I might manage to squeeze out some stuff this afternoon, but I'm not too optimistic about that; work has been starting to pick up and my brain feels like it's full of mud anyway. Bleah.

I had forgotten that tonight was the night we'd be getting our rough drafts looked at. Fortunately I had blitzed through most of it this afternoon and was able to print it out at the school's computer lab...good God, Chaska must be swimming in money. Between the library, the next door lab, and the classroom we're in there were about two dozen fairly speedy Dell desktops networked with two Laserjets and a color printer. Anyway, Steve & Sondra seemed pleased with the rough draft, told me to get the format straight over the weekend and finish the lit review. I'll need to start that before I finish it, though it won't be too hard since I have most of the articles downloaded and will take a quick glance through the three books I have in the list.

The paper review didn't take long; I was in there at 5 and out again by 5:30 even with a little chatting about what I'm going to be doing this next semester...catching up on the classes I bombed out of last summer, mostly. That damn reading class, for example.

Desktop may have had the course. The touchpad works okay now that I've plugged it into the serial port (former home of the old Palm III's HotSync Cable) but for some reason P-Machine can't see the thumb drive on the other side of the USB hub. I don't want to spend any of my upcoming student loan money on a new desktop...maybe I can have Best Buy troubleshoot the old beast, fix the I/O port and sound card, and whip it back into shape for another couple of years. We'll see.

A few last things to take care of, and then I fall over.