Colgate is a strange place when you're a senior. I've already attended two events sponsored by Career Services, with the specific purpose of getting ready for my job and/or grad school search. There is also a distinct lack of people who are a year ahead of me. There is no food at French & Italian house. The libary is called Case Library @ James C. Colgate (and they're not kidding -- they stuffed the entire library into the Pub and the Hall of Presidents). I'm working on a thesis. It's weird (much like the flow of this paragraph, yes).

In spite of all the weirdness, I can report that one thing is completely the way it is supposed to be. Taylor Lake has returned to Colgate (evidence attached). Bridget apparently thought it was gone

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Today I spent a good portion of the day getting my semester started. I ordered books from Amazon, and I sold one on the book exchange (would have been two if only I could find the second one...). In total I saved around $90 for a total of $300ish instead of $400ish.

More importantly, though, I spent most of the day organizing my room some more. I even took out the trash and shopped for groceries...

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Today:

• 8 hours of travelling (6:50 - 15:00)
• moving stuff (3 car loads)
• welcome dinner

Tomorrow: Wake up at 8:30 G'night

 

Dutch children get to call a lot of people Aunt and Uncle (this information may be outdated, but it was definitely true back in the 80s ). Typically this title is reserved for close neighbors and sometimes parents of primary school friends.

Today Tante Lenie brought along a new neighbor: her grandson Lars Jan.

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Yesterday I spent about 12 hours adding some features to PHPSurveyor, an open source web survey package. This is part of a research project of a friend of mine who, unfortunately, got stuck with some survey code that was... erm... inadequate.

The Plot Thickens...

The original plan was to extend the existing code, which seemed reasonable enough. Some moments investigating later, it started to seem less plausible. Finally I had someone else look at the code. I don't remember the exact response, but it had something to do with a 10' pole, so that settled that. *Insert movie clip of someone dragging a folder icon into a trash can*

Most commercial web survey packages are fairly pricey. They start at around $80-$150 for the standard ones, but those didn't have the features we needed. The packages that did were upwards of $5000. (Incidentally, I hear the 'original code' hadn't been much cheaper than that...) There were some packages with academic licenses, but they typically had strange requirements, such as 'citing' the software in any derived academic papers.

Short version: we decided to grab PHPSurveyor and slap on the extra feature we needed (i.e. that would be my job).

The Features

PHPSurveyor lacked an important feature. We had some scenario questions, where we wanted to have the participant rate three scenarios at a time, for a total of 8-12. These would be different for different participants, allowing us to cover a large number of permutations without having each participant answer > 100 questions

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