My plan to put up twice-weekly posts on this thing hasn’t been going great. In fact, it hasn’t really been going at all. Oh well, once a week still isn’t bad.
Work is going pretty well. We had a big meeting on Monday with all the bosses – academic and industrial. I had to give a 20 minute presentation. It went fine, if uneventfully. My heart isn’t fully into my research right now, which is OK. It’s a job. I still feel like I’m doing well and working hard, but it’s not like I’m spending my spare time thinking about my research like I’ve done in the past. Having a dispassionate approach can actually be beneficial when giving presentations. I’m not going to get very nervous, and I’m not going to take it personally if somebody criticizes my work (which nobody did at this talk).
One thing that can really bury a meeting, especially a large informal, round-table type meeting, which this largely was, is the I’m-Funny-Too phenomenon. This is something I heard Patton Oswald and Adam Carolla discussing recently in the context of working with a large network. Basically, it’s when funny ideas get ruined because too many people have input, and things start being changed not because they need changing, but because everybody wants to put their stamp on it to prove “I’m funny too”.
I’ve seen this type of thing derail meetings before. Nobody is trying to be funny, but discussions go on endlessly, because everybody wants to show “I’m [appropriate adjective] too”. The worst is when a long discussion is just about to wrap up, and then somebody chimes in with something mostly irrelevant and instead of just saying “that’s not really relevant” or “let’s discuss it another time” or just nodding (my favorite move), everybody tries to address it in earnest. Thankfully, we actually didn’t have much of that at this meeting. Most of the comments were on topic and insightful. Other than my presentation I didn’t say much, if anything.
I do have one big gripe with the meeting, however. Lunch was provided (which is good), but it arrived a half-hour before the meeting began. In the email from the organizer, it was stated that we could arrive anytime after 12:30, but that it was perfectly acceptable to get there right at 1:00 and eat while others are talking. This was made explicit in the email.
With this in mind, I show up at 12:54 (I know this exactly because I looked at the clock upon entering) figuring that I’d have time to gather some food (I’m ridiculously hungry) and get situated before 1. But when I enter, I see that the organizer has already started the meeting! Not only that, but its super crowded, so I have to kind of climb over people and disrupt things to get a seat, and all the food is in the center of the table, and I’m on the very end.
So, I had to sit there for an hour and a half until the coffee break, super hungry and super annoyed. The thing is, I could have come much early and eaten and avoided being the guy who showed up “late”. I was just sitting in my office. Why would you make specific mention that it’s OK to arrive right at 1:00 in the email, and then start the meeting at 12:50? All the organizer had to do is say the meeting starts at 1:00 get there around 12:30 to get lunch beforehand. I would have been there at 12:30. Even if the organizer had said nothing I probably would have showed up earlier. The explicit mention really threw me for a loop. Anyway, it was irritating.
Speaking of irritating things, one (very) minor thing happened today that annoyed me. I was typing something with a lot of mathematical symbols, so I was using this scripting language called LaTeX. It’s very popular in the math world. Basically, you type a bunch of commands into a word processor, hit a button, and then a pdf document pops up with what you typed translated to math symbols.
It was very near the end of the day, and I realized the document I needed to create was quite similar to one a grad student had already created, so instead of typing out all the commands from scratch, which can be time consuming, I figured I would just use his code as a template and make the appropriate changes. So, I go to his office and we have a conversation approximately as follows.
Me: Hey, can you email me that (I point to an open window on his computer screen). I need the actual LaTeX code document, not the pdf.
Him: Ah… yes… I make many changes (his English isn’t great)… I show you (he starts showing me stuff on his computer)… But it’s not finished.
Me: That’s OK. I just need the LaTeX code. I’m writing something similar and I don’t want to start from scratch. If you could just give me what you have up to this point, that would be great.
Him: Eh… ah… eh… I… am not … eh… done.
Me: I know, just send me that (I point again to the code). Right there. Exactly. I don’t care if it’s done. I just need it as a template. I’m not even going to read it. It doesn’t matter what shape it’s in.
Him: Ah… I see... I will email to you later.
Me: When?
Him: Eh... I will be done on tomorrow.
Me: OK, thanks (giving up).
What the hell? I literally just needed him to hit save and email me a file that was open on his screen. It would have taken 30 seconds. I don’t know if it was a language barrier thing or if he didn’t want me to see his work in an unfinished state or what, but I didn’t get what I wanted.
It put me in that work no-man’s-land where I had about 45 minutes until my bus arrived, and I could either spend the entire time doing something and get it done today, or I could wait until tomorrow (Monday in this case) and do it in about 20 minutes then. I opted for the latter and started working on something else – the Friday New York Times crossword puzzle.
I’ve been solving and making quite a few puzzles lately. I bought a Gold Membership to the Cruciverb website because it gives you access to their database which basically details every entry in every crossword in every major publication over the last 15 years. For instance, you can think, “I wonder if anybody has ever used INDIANAJONES in a puzzle”, type it in, and sure enough it’s been used twice – in 2005 in a New York Times puzzle, and 2000 in an LA Times puzzle. Also, you can use question marks, so you can type in ROU?, and it gives you back ROUE (133 times), ROUT (114 times), and ROUX (18 times).* It’s pretty sweet.
So, last thing I wanted to mention. We won our ultimate Frisbee game this week. We got some new guy, who’s quite good, on our team somehow, and he was probably the difference between winning handily and getting crushed. These games are just for fun, but it’s more fun when you win, so yay us.
*That the seldom-used word roue (a lecherous man) appears more times than the very familiar word rout, is a classic example of crosswordese. The letter combination in roue, with the three consecutive vowels is more valuable (to constructors, not to solvers, who usually find crosswordese boring) than that of rout. Roux (a sauce thickener) is not very common, and the x makes it klutzy for constructors, which is why it appears so much less frequently than the other two.
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