Emily took her first nap in a real bed today, since she has realized that she can easily scale the gate of her crib. She’s a real little girl now. Cathy is reading to her on the bed now, she’s in her jammies and has her pooh bear and blankie, and seems very much into just hangin out on her new bed.

Probably one of the more useful things I learned today had to do with using my TI-85. The TI-85 is a graphing calculator I had to buy in 1994 for Calculus 1. It wasn’t the latest and greatest even then as you can tell by the raised lettering molded into the plastic case that reads 1991 in tiny, almost invisible letters, now almost completely obliterated by scratches and knicks. But it is still a standard tool in a lot of schools (once you get something into the schools, you milk it!) Besides, there’s a lot of support on the net and great freeware utilities and add-ons for data gathering and such. The screen isn’t that great, and it uses an old Z80 processor which has been around since the late 1980’s at least, but I finally learned how to do something on it that I have been completely unable to figure out which makes it a lot more useful: I was so frustrated in Structural lab on Tuesday (Prof Davis) when I was taking data points and then couldn’t simply plot them on my calculator. It seemed ridiculous that I had a graphing calculator and yet couldn’t easily graph stuff!

As it turned out, you can use [2nd LIST] to edit and name a list. These lists are available in the [STAT] menu where you can [Edit] and choose one to take the place of the xlist (independant) variable and edit the ylist variable for the dependant variable. Once a table of values is ready, [EXIT] and choose [DRAW] where [SCAT] and [xyLINE] will plot it up for you. This is so cool, since there are many times when you want to do some data gathering on the fly and see results in a graph and using this its easy. I was at work some months ago and Neocles wanted to do that and asked me to bring the calculator, but I hadn’t a clue at that time!