Category Archives: Passing thoughts

Monday brainteaser.

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This is our third teaching day of the semester (which started last Thursday), so of course, WebCT’s servers decided that it would be a good time to freak out. (The official description:

… experiencing network latency within our VA2 data center that may be affecting your Blackboard environment. This may result in increased latency and/or packet loss when trying to access your hosted Blackboard system.

But you can’t tell me that this doesn’t amount to the servers freaking out, especially as they are still “working with our Infrastructure team to determine the cause and to work towards a resolution.”)
So here’s the brainteaser:

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On the perils of choosing a T-shirt on a Friday that includes a committee meeting.

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One of the best things about Fridays on my campus is that hardly anyone is around. Not only does this make parking less of a headache, and interruption mid-task less probable, but it means that there’s even less pressure to dress in a manner that asserts, “I am a responsible adult!”
I mean, I am a responsible adult, but must I prove it by wearing a suit?

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Thursday night RBOC.

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* After watching The China Syndrome tonight, I will henceforth refrain from saying “Coffee is for closers!” when I see Jack Lemmon on screen. Getting mad about falsified X-rays of welds makes his character, Jack Godell, an official friend of this blog.
* My online Philosophy of Science course has been switched on for about 12 hours and already more than 50% of the enrolled students have logged in to the course. That’s good! (Sometimes, weeks into the term, I’ll get phone calls asking, “So, when and where is the class going to meet?”)
* My soccer team (of six-year-olds) seems to have grown an attention span over the summer. That’s also good!
* The surprise that three separate people expressed to me today that I, as a female parent, would be a soccer coach? Less good.
* For this evening’s soccer practice, I wore a T-shirt with a buckyball on it. Does that make me a nerd?

Piecing together what happened in New York last weekend.

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Actually, my memories of the semi-spontaneous confluence of ScienceBlogs sciblings in the vicinity of the Seed mothership this past weekend are quite vivid, and I’ll put up a proper post on that later today.
But in the event that I hadn’t remembered things so clearly, and had to piece it all together from what came home on my digital camera, my reflections on the last few day might be distorted.

I might end up with something like this:

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Pushing the juggling metaphor a little further.

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An old friend turned up to comment on my post about juggling, and as a woman in academia she has some familiarity with the metaphor and with the reality it’s supposed to capture. She writes:

The department chair when I was hired … suggested that although we’re juggling lots of balls, the ball representing our families and home life is made of glass. I COULD take that as a message that taking care of my family is my most important job (and my work is not? grrr.) but I think he meant it more as that part of our lives outside of work supports our lives IN work, and if that one cracks, it’s all going to break down.

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Balance is a nice idea, but my reality is closer to juggling.

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Friday, my better half was preparing to cross the international dateline for a week-long business trip and my parents were getting ready to board a plane for a week-long visit at Casa Free-Ride. As I contemplated the prospect of digging out our guest room (known in these parts as “the place clean clothes go to wrinkle”) it became clear to me that the chances of my finishing writing (and preparing overheads for) the two presentations I will be giving at the conference that starts the day after my parents depart before my parents’ arrival were nil. Of course, this means that I will not be kicking back for a relaxing week with my parents and my children, but will instead be trying to cram Scholarly Work into the interstices.

So, when Zuska said, “Hey, you should write a post about balance for the upcoming Scientiae Carnival!” how could I refuse?

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Murphy’s law of conferences?

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Let’s say you’re looking at a wide-open fall semester, and you are asked to be a participant on a panel at a conference. Since your semester is wide open, you agree.
Months later, you’re asked to be a participant on another panel at another conference. Except for the conference you already committed to, your semester is still wide open.
What do you suppose the chances are that the two conferences overlap in time? And meet in different cities? Was this predictable, or am I just lucky?
(It looks like the two panels will meet on different days. Assuming no plane-grounding weather events, it should be do-able.)