Great Student Excuses

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, here's a link to a new collection of the best student excuses:

Best Excuses

I would have posted these sooner, but....

Productivity

Ok, so I feel that I have overcome whatever was causing my productivity blockage. Since arriving at Urban U, I have been extremely delinquent with respect to that great academic mission: Publish or perish. I managed to thrive rather than perish by squeezing out a few random publications, symposium proceedings and book chapters, but mostly by getting several good sized grants. Whatever my deficiencies, it seemed to have worked ok, I was promoted and tenured this past spring (with a nice raise negotiated without an outside offer -- the impossible dream in academia).

But I have been unhappy with my progress. I have so much data awaiting publication, it's embarrassing. I am (at least) a decent writer and I want to contribute to the literature (and please my granting agencies). I feel ready to change and start getting this stuff out of my lab and into the world. This summer, I managed to admit my block to one of my close friends, a certified Genius and an especially prolific publisher. Admitting publication block to another academic was huge for me, and felt like a tremendous relief. We talked about how he views the rewards he gets from publishing, where I've always felt the rewards in gathering the data. Since then, I've started looking at writing and publishing as rewards in and of themselves, and it's actually worked pretty well.

In December, I looked at my works-in-progresses and realized that with some hump-busting, it was entirely reasonable to set a goal of one submission per month through the rest of the academic year. I polished off and submitted my first ph.d. student co-authored paper. Early in January, I also put the finishing touches on an encyclopedia chapter that'd been sitting on my desk for months. I'd like to keep my 1-per-month resolution with peer-reviewed pubs, but if I can't finish one of the other close-to-completion MS's soon, I'll take that as the January submission.

All the projects with foreseeable completions are listed on the far right. Let's see if I can keep my resolution. Look for progress on the "Thresholding" and the "differential conditioning" papers.

(Sunday) Cat Blogging: When she sits around the couch...

I meant to post this as a Friday cat blog, but I'm clearly not yet organized for regular postings. In any case, here's kitty. She's actually slimmed down from when I inherited her. She's my darlin' lil watermelon.

The Glory of Tenure

So I was reading the paper this morning, seeing that the NY Giants have given Tom Caughlin another year, and I thought "god, it must be nice to have a job where it doesn't matter how badly you suck." And then I thought, yeah, it is.

Meanwhile, I've been too busy to post on my second day at this! Spent all day on the phone or in committee meetings yesterday. And I'm supposed to be on break! I've got more to say later...

This isn't how I planned to spend my day

What kind of moron uses a ratty old timer that he inherited from a million years ago to control the lights for a major research project on studies of daily patterns of animal behavior? Professor Dude, that's who. And today, instead of revising his grant, reviewing that manuscript, writing that manuscript, or simply sitting on his ass reading blogs, professor dude did battle with this bad old thing. Today he learned that sometimes the little switchey things get loose and the lights don't turn on/off when they're supposed to. You'd think that when we have those weekly meetings where professor dude spends like 30 minutes discussing the stability of the temperatures and such in the animal room, somebody mighta mentioned something. Well, problem solved now, because the darn thing no longer keeps time at all. Two (?) hours lost tracking down replacement part, electrician, etc. The good news is that our head electrician is way cool and I'm starting to reap the rewards of longevity here. The nice cordial relationship I've managed to develop with the nitwit who was the project manager when I originally got to Urban U has also paid off. Said nitwit is now the head nitwit in charge of all tradesman. Ever since he hasn't been in charge of getting my lab built we've gotten along much better (over the past coupla years, at least), and now he's coming through for me. So stay tuned for the new hotness that is the digital programmable timer!

There was progress on other fronts today, data were had by some. I conducted my first phone interview for our job search today and that was quite exciting. I'll be posting on that business sometime soon.

Late to the party

Ok, so I was kind of blog-obsessed for a while, mostly out of disgust with mainstream media and news/opinions, and partly as a procrastination tool. I found some great political and news sources out there, and along the way I discovered the blog, the anonymous rantings of some lone individual. Now, like most people, I really couldn't give a rats ass about the thoughts of some wacko I don't even know. But I discovered that there are some really smart bloggers out there, fantastic writers some, who actually have something interesting to say on a very regular basis. I don't expect to join their ranks, but I'm grateful for their inspiration.

The rest of my blog obsession was really excitement about the discovery of a new way to procrastinate. Lately, I have really been working too hard and not finding new joys of procrastination, so maybe starting a blog will bring some joy back to avoiding noxious tasks.

I was inspired by the 365 project, and started this blog with the intention of starting both the Yo!blog and the 365 at the same time, but really, who am I kidding? So I'll make this a bit of a single young academic blog and a bit of a photojournal. If can actually have any consistent voice (and posting discipline) maybe 2008 can be the year of my 365. Here goes something, I hope.