Benefits

I choose the benefits package. I went with the cheap one ($22) a month but it has no deductible and hardly any co-pays. The disadvantage is that it is limited to one major hospital and 16 medical centers around the county. But a young healthy guy like me should be ok with that. I got the dental and vision plans too that were default. Now I just need to figure out the retirement plan and whether I'll stick with the Ohio State pension or do something else.

Purchasing

I spend about 3.5 hours ordering stuff today and have most of it taken care of. I have a headache though and the purchasing system with purchase orders here is so inefficient. I'm really appreciating the online PO system we recently got back in Davis. It made things so much easier. But this is still such a nightmare in general. Why don't universities have easier systems to buy stuff? It would save so much freaking time.

Computers and most of the electronic workbench stuff were ordered today. I need to figure out how to order from Newegg without a PO because the don't accept them and the price is more than I want to put on my personal card.

I should be able to finish the purchasing tomorrow.

Emailed matlab rep some questions and will hopefully get that wrapped up soon too.

Plone

I'm going to use Plone for a our lab website. At one point I remember telling myself that I wouldn't eve use Plone again, but after thinking it over, Plone is ideal for this use case. But I'm going to get over the learning curve this time and work through the Professional Plone Developement book to set my dev environment up correctly and also how to modify things more easily. I started on that today. First hiccup was installing a local Python 2.6.8 in Ubuntu 13.04 which has issues. I ended up sourcing the binarys from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~fkrull/+archive/deadsnakes to be able to install older versions of python on raring.