Friday, November 27, 2009
Black Friday Blues
Greetings gentle readers from the Invisible Homestead, somewhere in the wilds of darkest New England. I have been up here since Tuesday, after facing the full terror of Thanksgiving traffic surrounding my old geographic nemesis, the Hudson River. I have spent years trying to devise a time-efficient manner of avoiding that accursed stretch of waterway, but it seems that there is a price to be paid if you want to drive east of New York state and that price is at least $4 and 45+ minutes around the Tappan Zee bridge. And that doesn't even begin to cover delays due to accidents near Danbury.
But in any event I am home, typing this blog entry from a netbook in what was once my bedroom. Home has changed, as it does everytime I come back. This time, there are new rugs, a new front path, and a new organizer in the closet. In addition, there are even more HD television channels, something that normally is not at all important since I do not own an HD capable set. The Invisible Sister is on night float for her penultimate semester at medical school, so we did not have a formal Thanksgiving feast yesterday night. Instead, we (i.e. myself and my parents) went out to a local restaurant, one of the few that was serving a Thanksgiving dinner.
There was a concern that because of my sister's schedule and my own dissertation writing, there would basically be no Thanksgiving this year. Fortunately, I was able to slam out a 61 page draft of my first dissertation chapter last Sunday, added in images (an additional 12 pages) by Tuesday morning, and drive up in time for the big weekend. So now, we will wait until Saturday when night float ends and have a big dinner with the whole family.
In the meanwhile, I have been trying to spend time catching up with old friends, which is good, although strange. These are people I have known for twenty years. I still remember working on geometry take home tests and history projects with them. But now, we are off at graduate school--whether for the liberal arts (like me) or for business or for operations research, or we are off in the real world working as programmers or engineers or what have you. Our lives have diverged in strange ways and our conversations are a strange melange of in-jokes and explanations of what has happened since we left home so many years ago.
Today is Black Friday, so I have been avoiding the shops which have opened up near my house since I moved out. I will probably get together with my friends again tonight but it's a long, uneventful day before then. I have not been entirely lazy...I have backed up some important data for my dissertation and worked on pub quiz questions, but all the same I am not used to having this much purely free time.
Which is why I am blogging, even if I don't really have that much to say right now.
Although, I should note, that I also had time today to begin working on the annual holiday movie quote contest. So that should be posted within the next week or so.
Until then, keep watching the skies.
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Greetings gentle readers from the Invisible Homestead, somewhere in the wilds of darkest New England. I have been up here since Tuesday, after facing the full terror of Thanksgiving traffic surrounding my old geographic nemesis, the Hudson River. I have spent years trying to devise a time-efficient manner of avoiding that accursed stretch of waterway, but it seems that there is a price to be paid if you want to drive east of New York state and that price is at least $4 and 45+ minutes around the Tappan Zee bridge. And that doesn't even begin to cover delays due to accidents near Danbury.
But in any event I am home, typing this blog entry from a netbook in what was once my bedroom. Home has changed, as it does everytime I come back. This time, there are new rugs, a new front path, and a new organizer in the closet. In addition, there are even more HD television channels, something that normally is not at all important since I do not own an HD capable set. The Invisible Sister is on night float for her penultimate semester at medical school, so we did not have a formal Thanksgiving feast yesterday night. Instead, we (i.e. myself and my parents) went out to a local restaurant, one of the few that was serving a Thanksgiving dinner.
There was a concern that because of my sister's schedule and my own dissertation writing, there would basically be no Thanksgiving this year. Fortunately, I was able to slam out a 61 page draft of my first dissertation chapter last Sunday, added in images (an additional 12 pages) by Tuesday morning, and drive up in time for the big weekend. So now, we will wait until Saturday when night float ends and have a big dinner with the whole family.
In the meanwhile, I have been trying to spend time catching up with old friends, which is good, although strange. These are people I have known for twenty years. I still remember working on geometry take home tests and history projects with them. But now, we are off at graduate school--whether for the liberal arts (like me) or for business or for operations research, or we are off in the real world working as programmers or engineers or what have you. Our lives have diverged in strange ways and our conversations are a strange melange of in-jokes and explanations of what has happened since we left home so many years ago.
Today is Black Friday, so I have been avoiding the shops which have opened up near my house since I moved out. I will probably get together with my friends again tonight but it's a long, uneventful day before then. I have not been entirely lazy...I have backed up some important data for my dissertation and worked on pub quiz questions, but all the same I am not used to having this much purely free time.
Which is why I am blogging, even if I don't really have that much to say right now.
Although, I should note, that I also had time today to begin working on the annual holiday movie quote contest. So that should be posted within the next week or so.
Until then, keep watching the skies.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Going Off Book
Tuesday I have to give a talk in conjunction with my dissertation fellowship. It's supposed to be about the chapter I've been writing, so my plan was to finish the chapter and then winnow it down into a talk. Unfortunately, I've written 40 or so pages of chapter so far, and I'm at best only halfway done with what I had originally planned. It is possible that I will be able to split this chapter into two chapters, which would be fine with me. Unfortunately I wrote an abstract based on the original chapter plan, so the talk is still based on the whole kit and kaboodle.
Since I have only half a chapter written and not enough time to really slam out the remainder before the talk, I've decided to do my best to cobble together a PowerPoint and go off book. This is an unprecedented academic experience for me. Although I've given scholarly talks at numerous conferences, this will be the first time I'll be doing it without reading off of a paper. Or even having a full paper available from which to read if needed!
Needless to say, I've grown rather paranoid about the whole thing, even though:
a. no one from my graduate program will be in attendance.
b. many of the key people associated with my fellowship, including the fellowship director, will not be there.
c. about half of my fellow fellows will not be there because of a history of science meeting this week.
However, my advisor WILL be there, which means I damn well better have something to show him. I still have hope that I will somehow be able to finish this chapter by Thanksgiving, though that will depend entirely on whether he thinks I can cut the current "big chapter" into two. And that, in turn, may revolve entirely around my presentation on Tuesday.
So we'll see. I spent today practicing giving the same talk over and over and over again, timing myself, tweaking the various slides, and getting frustrated that I can't seem to come up with a really engaging introduction. (I'm using the one I wrote for my chapter, but that seems to work better on the page than it does out loud.) I'm not sure if I'm ready, but it's getting there. I figure 3 more practices tomorrow and I should be ready.
I'll let you know in a little while how things go and whether or not I succeeded in making concepts like ferroelectricity, electroluminescence, and photoconductivity comprehensible to a non-expert audience.
Update (11/17): The talk went over pretty well. It ran longer than I intended, as is perhaps to be expected when dealing with an audience, but otherwise, I think I was generally comprehensible. The most disappointing aspect of the whole affair was the lack of attendance. As I mentioned earlier, I knew that there would be many people away this week or otherwise unable to attend, but even my advisor had to cancel at the last minute. Oh well, at least this is done and I can get back to thinking about that chapter I've been working on...
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Tuesday I have to give a talk in conjunction with my dissertation fellowship. It's supposed to be about the chapter I've been writing, so my plan was to finish the chapter and then winnow it down into a talk. Unfortunately, I've written 40 or so pages of chapter so far, and I'm at best only halfway done with what I had originally planned. It is possible that I will be able to split this chapter into two chapters, which would be fine with me. Unfortunately I wrote an abstract based on the original chapter plan, so the talk is still based on the whole kit and kaboodle.
Since I have only half a chapter written and not enough time to really slam out the remainder before the talk, I've decided to do my best to cobble together a PowerPoint and go off book. This is an unprecedented academic experience for me. Although I've given scholarly talks at numerous conferences, this will be the first time I'll be doing it without reading off of a paper. Or even having a full paper available from which to read if needed!
Needless to say, I've grown rather paranoid about the whole thing, even though:
a. no one from my graduate program will be in attendance.
b. many of the key people associated with my fellowship, including the fellowship director, will not be there.
c. about half of my fellow fellows will not be there because of a history of science meeting this week.
However, my advisor WILL be there, which means I damn well better have something to show him. I still have hope that I will somehow be able to finish this chapter by Thanksgiving, though that will depend entirely on whether he thinks I can cut the current "big chapter" into two. And that, in turn, may revolve entirely around my presentation on Tuesday.
So we'll see. I spent today practicing giving the same talk over and over and over again, timing myself, tweaking the various slides, and getting frustrated that I can't seem to come up with a really engaging introduction. (I'm using the one I wrote for my chapter, but that seems to work better on the page than it does out loud.) I'm not sure if I'm ready, but it's getting there. I figure 3 more practices tomorrow and I should be ready.
I'll let you know in a little while how things go and whether or not I succeeded in making concepts like ferroelectricity, electroluminescence, and photoconductivity comprehensible to a non-expert audience.
Update (11/17): The talk went over pretty well. It ran longer than I intended, as is perhaps to be expected when dealing with an audience, but otherwise, I think I was generally comprehensible. The most disappointing aspect of the whole affair was the lack of attendance. As I mentioned earlier, I knew that there would be many people away this week or otherwise unable to attend, but even my advisor had to cancel at the last minute. Oh well, at least this is done and I can get back to thinking about that chapter I've been working on...
