Surveys for Sunday 15 May 2011
Uid 11
Went to see a preview of "Win Win" with Paul Giamatti (directed by Thomas McCarthy, who also directed the excellent "The Station Agent" and "The Visitor")- a feel good and gentle film examining relationships, as all his films do.
After that came home and had lunch before going down to look at our newly allocated allotment on a prime site. We had intended to just spend half an hour or so there before I went home and chained myself to the big pile of marking that renews itself every few days. I ended up getting seduced by the lure of a big bonfire to clear lots of the weeds and other plant debris there. Ended up staying until 6.30 and felt shattered but happy. Came home and went for a pint and curry at our local pub before watching "Die Hard 4" (again!).
My wife was very happy that I had a day off marking - I'm looking at another two weeks at least, but with some interruptions for social activities planned to stop me staring at paper and screens all the time.
Last time that I will have this intensity of marking to contend with. Looking forward to being time-rich and cash-poor but with the roof over our heads paid for.
Uid 13
It was bad luck for my participation in the Share project--15 May was my first day completely off in weeks. So I did nothing related to work at all.
A week before Easter, my teaching assistant contacts me, distraught. Her brother had just died. She's dropping out of school for the rest of the term. I offer my condolences and hang up. That's the last I hear from her. Two weeks later, as the semester ends, I have all the grading to do that she didn't finish, plus the final exam to handle myself, plus my 40-person Senior Design to grade (all the final project documentation, project designs, personal reflections, etc.). I then had the most intense 10 day grading session I've had in my 18 years at the university. I finished on May 9, at 11 am (grades were due at noon). May 12-14, I had a three day meeting, working on the new Advanced Placement Exam.
So, when the 15th rolled around, I was ready for a day off. Went to church in the morning, then did the weekly grocery shopping. We then took the whole family to the Renaissance Festival. We (my whole family) used to go annually, so we have costumes. We had a fun time, watching juggling and hypnosis demonstrations. In the evening, we watched the latest Doctor Who episode. Great fun! But no work.
Uid 14
Writing this two days later, it's hard to remember some of the details. I'll do my best. In the morning, I remembered it was the 15th and that I should be keeping a log, but that slipped away for days afterward. Ironically, the next day I forgot it was the 16th too, so I suppose I'm on Summer mode.
Woke up around 7 to do the morning routine: get 16-month-old out of bed, set him on the toilet, sit uncomfortably on the floor, diaper him up. The two boys must have eaten something, but we did go to 9am church service, so it must not have been a grand breakfast. I am particularly irked at the music after having traveled with a research colleague who attends the same church, who himself is irked with the music, as he told me on the drive home. Now the things that bother him also bother me.
Donuts and coffee after the service. I run into a friend who I know socially and who works at a local IT company. Aside from some theological discussions, I mention to him that I have a meeting in the next two weeks with the upper management of his company and my university president, provost, and others to discuss how the company and the university can leverage each other. I have been stressing about this meeting (which was scheduled earlier in the year and then postponed) for two main reasons: my administration has made it patently clear that they do not understand technology or entrepreneurship (despite having a "ranked" entrepreneurship program, the bureaucracy kills all ideas), and the company has laid off almost all their engineers and now outsources everything to India. I joked with my friend that I was going to go in "guns blazing" and challenge the CEO, saying that if he wanted to work together he had to hire some of my students instead of some idiots in India, and my friend suggested I not bring that up.
His suggestion was an interesting one, though. He suggested that quality is the biggest problem in the company---quality control overall, a process and administrative problem. Of course, one cannot walk into a meeting of executives and say "you are the problem," but it sounds like that's the case. I've heard it from multiple sources. It's the old problem of trying to apply industrial metrics to knowledge work. I have to think of some disposition I can have for this meeting that can be potentially fruitful, and that's going to be challenging. This is especially true since one of my colleagues has been working with this company for ages, through a third party, and I have zero respect for the technical or managerial skill of this colleague...or for that matter, of most of the other people in my department. To cut to the chase, if there's going to be any help for them, it's pretty much going to have to come from me, and I'm just not sure if I care that much when there's other scholarship to do.
Got home and made experimental eggs, which turned out really good: a fritatta with orange peppers, onions, chorizo, cheddar cheese, and cumin.
Played some board games with my wife and older son while the younger one napped.
Played some computer games.
Read the paper.
Made Turkish coffee.
In the afternoon, I spent some time thinking about a poster I needed to design for the coming week, a research poster that also serves as pitch for a grant. I stared at it for a while and tried coming back to it several times, but mostly ended up processing email, checking Facebook, playing games, or otherwise no working on it. I have been working like mad through the intersession, and there's a break in sight after the coming week, and I'm just tired. This meeting later in the week is a regular one and it can be soulcrushing, especially knowing how much my wife thinks it's a waste of my time.
After dinner, I make some actual progress on the poster and send drafts to my three colleagues. Then, my wife and I watch Deadwood and turn in.
Uid 21
~8:30 am woke up, read e-mail and blogs for about an hour
9:20-9:40 am breakfast
9:40-10:10 went through tables of contents for the past 5 months
looking for papers to use for journal clubs in one of my classes.
10:10-10:20 deleted some old e-mail, responded to Doodle poll for
student advance to candidacy scheduling
10:20-10:55 cleaned out lots of old email messages
10:55-11:15 showered and got dressed
11:15-11:18 requested new account on RAST for annotating a genome
11:20-11:40 put laundry in washing machine and reheated leftovers for lunch
11:40-11:50 read teacher blogs
11:50-12:10 uploaded genome to RAST site for annotation, replied to a
comment on my blog.
12:10-12:20 filled out RAST forms about genome, but it seems to have
lost the coverage, number of contigs, and read length info I provided.
I hope that none of those matter. (There were only 2 contigs,
corresponding to the two chromosomes, coverage was about
24.5x, and read length averaged around 410.)
12:20-12:50 read teacher blogs
12:50-13:10 read and comment on various blogs
12:10-13:25 fold towels, transfer laundry to dryer, make tea
13:25-13:40 wrote a short blog post about Bob Samuels article at
http://renewal.org.uk/articles/how-universities-became-hedge-funds/
3:40-14:00 helped high-school robotics club check that programs could
be downloaded to Arduino Uno (as well as Duemilanove) and run
the motor shield. [Worked fine on my Mac, so problem was most likely on
the Windows machine the student was using at home.]
14:00-14:05 Looked up the documentation for installing the Arduino Uno
drivers on a Windows machine and e-mailed them.
14:05-14:10 Muffin break
14:10-14:45 wrote another blog post and scheduled it for tomorrow.
14:45-15:00 at with robotics club as they debugged a C++ program for
controlling the arm. (Bug was an unsiged instead of signed
char, which they found themselves.)
15:00-16:10 biked downtown, bought a can of tea leaves, drank
complimentary tea while reading two papers that will be
presented in journal club by students this coming week.
16:10-16:40 did grocery shopping on the way home.
16:40-16:55 read e-mail and responded to a post on an Arduino forum
16:55-17:05 folded and put away laundry
17:05-17:10 read blogs (mainly FemaleScienceProfessor)
17:10-17:40 chopped up branches to fit into greenwaste can
17:40-18:05 read blogs
18:05-18:40 cleared over-size messages from my spamfilter (one of
which was the call for my merit review next year---the deparment
manager had attached a wholly unnecessary scanned PDF file of my
biobibliography)
18:40-18:55 read 43 e-mail messages on the AP-bio mailing list.
18:55-19:00 read blog posts and high-school newsletter from son's school.
19:00-19:25 modified Makefiles and started protein-structure
predictions for a colleague
19:25-20:05 dinner with family
20:05-21:20 reading history of programming languages essays by Alan
Kay and Bjarne Stroustrup and writing a blog post about them.
21:20-22:05 watched Whose Line is it Anyway? (on YouTube) with family,
took pills, practiced a little self-defense with son (from his
PE class)
22:05-22:15 read e-mmail and checked progress of protein structure predictions.
22:15-22:35 did situps and leg lifts with son, and looked on web for
the origins of the use of lambda in lambda calculus (we found
the story he alluded to of it starting out as a caret over the
variable, which I had not heard before).
22:30-23:00 read e-mail and responded to Arduino forum post about
pulse-width modulation on the Arduino motor shield.
23:00 checked status of genome annotation job. It still hasn't
started at RAST.
23:00-23:05 Brushed teeth and prepared for bed.
Uid 22
Yet another sunday that didn't follow my plans.
I took my daughter early to the dojo so I could help her and her friend with their techniques. They soon have a graduation and need to improve a bit.
But unfortunately I also needed to write on a grant application so I brought with me some papers and the iPad hoping to get some work done.
So first 1.5 hour of helping the girls, then 1h being the instructor for a group of kids, then a quick drive home with daughter and directly back again, followed by the supervision of two younger instructors (which did their work very well), then pizza in the microwave at the dojo, followed by few hours of grant application, then it was time for my workout but it turned out that my leg hurt so I had to stop at once (I don't want to get some inflammation in my leg due to exercising when I should get the leg the chance to heal). Then waiting for my son to complete the workout (which means more grant application stuff), and finally back home again. This means that I left home at 10 and got home at 20:30. Then some more writing on the application.
Then to bed.
Uid 23
Marking, marking, marking. 430,000 words to give feedback on in 6 weeks, then more coming in!
Uid 24
May 15, 2011
Sunday. Went to 8:00 AM mass - out the door at 7:30. After we came home one of my wife's guitar ensemble friends came over to practice. Great for me - I graded exams to live music :-) Spent most of the day grading, helped my older daughter with some math homework, and picked up my younger from her friend's house. Overall, not a bad day at all.
Uid 26
Sunday...a good day. Slept in (a real treat) and then went to church with my daughter. Then we went out to lunch (delightful). Returned home and did some housework. Finally logged in to check emails around 4 pm. Online classes for summer term start tomorrow and I still don't have everything set up. Working on some of the learning modules and discussion groups. Spent most of the evening dividing classes into discussion groups and entering topics for them to discuss. Went to bed around 11 pm.
Uid 28
Marking; pub; dinner; bed.
Uid 31
I'm writing this after the fact since I forgot about the survey on Sunday!
On Sunday, I slept in a bit, until 8:30 or so. I had taken a red-eye back from a conference on Wednesday night in order to see my students' presentation, and only on Sunday did I really start to feel caught up on sleep.
I cooked breakfast and did some things around the house (dishes, laundry) that needed to get done before my husband returned from his conference trip. (I would feel bad if he came home to a mess in the kitchen and couldn't put his dirty clothes in the washing machine.)
I didn't get to work quite as early as I would have liked - not until 10 or so, I think. I had some email to catch up on, including last-minute extra credit work from students that needed to be entered in my grade book. I had committee-related email piled up in my Inbox in the aftermath of the conference, but decided to ignore it in favor of more urgent work for the upcoming finals week.
I had started writing a take-home final exam for my HCI students on Saturday. I like to leave myself some time to come back to the questions later and see if they still make sense. So I reviewed the exam and revised a few questions, though overall it seemed fairly good. I created a PDF and posted it on the web for students to download, then sent them an email to let them know it was there, as I had promised. Take-home exams are pretty common at my institution, though I've never posted one on the web before. I trust my students to follow the rules laid out for the exam, and I set up the web site so they would have to read the rules before downloading the exam problems. I'll take it off the web as soon as all the students have turned their work in.