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I’m having quite an exciting time right now. I have been focusing on what I have determined to be my personal weaknesses and have seen some great progress thus far. I’m meeting a lot of new people from different reaches and things are just plain exciting. There are new people in the gym I am talking to, exchanging ideas with, and overall making my daily trek more personal/funtastic (did you see that? I made up a new word. Awesome.). One of the things that has been particularly exciting is my school psychology cohort. Its really fun to converse about similar interests (something that I never really felt in my undergrad- it just felt like everyone was forced into a class). We are slowly becoming super tight knit, and its really really exciting. We seem to express the same concerns and aspirations. Just great.

I’m also really excited about settling into the peer reviewed life. Currently I’m working on an oral presentation on childhood anxiety, and its actually kind of fun reading these journal articles (in comparison to my work with entomology). There’s a lot of applicability in the discussion, that I found hard pressed to work with in sciences (mostly because they were beyond the scope of my day to day life). I’m really liking our weekly journal reviews. The solid hour of dissecting a paper is rather fun. Do enjoy. Much.

Right now I’m reading a paper on psychopharmacological training, and the debate on licensing psychologists to prescribe medication. Fascinating read (just 10% of school psychologists feel comfortable seeking prescription privileges) and a great set of beats to go along with it (Ratatat and Metric’s freshmen effort, Grow Up and Blow Away).

I am particularly excited about the Asus UL30. An extraordinarily cheap laptop by ultraportable standards, it uses a CULV processor (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage Processor), a chip more powerful than the Intel Atom in most netbooks, but easy enough on power consumption to give an astonishing 12 hrs of battery life (tested shows around 9 hrs and 55 minutes, still amazing). Considering this is on a decently sized 13.3 inch LED LCD, theres a lot to say about bringing work to school with this bad boy. I particularly like its size, the brushed aluminum lid, and a thinness matched only by the Macbook Air (with a substantial price difference, in the field of a thousand dollars). I would love a full metal body, but the battery life (untouchable for the Macbook Air), the relatively useful screen size, and fantastic price just make it an easy sell to me. Considering that my HP laptop has the crappiest keyboard ever, this could be very useful. Very.