It's been... crazy.
And yesterday was the last of it. At least the last of the fixed deadline kinds of stuff. For a while.
We've been re-analyzing some old data from before our satellite was launched, trying to understand what it's telling us about its performance. It's a fussy, detail-oriented kind of a thing to do, getting a dozen or more fiddly little one percent effects right. In mid-May I realized that I had only until the end of May to work on it, so I dropped work and quickly banged out a memo on what I'd done to that time. And how I did it. And what I'd found on the first pass through alllll of the data.
Vacation in Key West for a week, the first of June.
Then read sixty-four proposals for a peer review in late June. Basically no spare cycles in the mean while. That went pretty well, actually.
And then a conference held last week on supernova remnants and neutron stars. It would have made some sense to do these last two things in the other order, so I could learn about the field before I had to review proposals on it, but hey. I spent the week and a half between creating a poster on work we did last summer with a summer student. The paper has been accepted to the journal now, we hear.
And, arranged to suit my schedule, yesterday we had a "micro summit" on the old data-mining project. Which I hadn't touched since May, when I wrote the draft memo. Which was not a slide show, only a memo. Lotta words, not many figures. I managed to wikify the huge results table before the meeting, and we posted the link during the talk following mine.
Whoosh.
We now return you to your normal programming. Whatever that was. I have another project I dropped for the old data mining thing, back in the early spring. I should dig that out again.
And there's the WTFC deadline coming up. How are people coming on their projects? Do we need an extension?
I do have a few ideas, but nothing further than vague ideas. There's a song of Tom Waits, Poor Edward, that's been kicking around in my head since MFC4, whenever that was. Perhaps, in keeping with the cross-genre mashup theme, a story based on the characters and situations from the song, read aloud, with the song itself in the background. Yeah, like that'll all come together.
I've also been listening to Wendy Carlos' soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange, which is mostly switched-on Beethoven. I bet that wouldn't be so very hard to do badly, switching on something classical (and, I hope, short). I probably even have all the pieces required.
Or I could spend six-ish weeks revising my novel, yet again, and submit that to the WTFC reader/listenership. I don't think I'd do that, but it might be interesting.
We've been re-analyzing some old data from before our satellite was launched, trying to understand what it's telling us about its performance. It's a fussy, detail-oriented kind of a thing to do, getting a dozen or more fiddly little one percent effects right. In mid-May I realized that I had only until the end of May to work on it, so I dropped work and quickly banged out a memo on what I'd done to that time. And how I did it. And what I'd found on the first pass through alllll of the data.
Vacation in Key West for a week, the first of June.
Then read sixty-four proposals for a peer review in late June. Basically no spare cycles in the mean while. That went pretty well, actually.
And then a conference held last week on supernova remnants and neutron stars. It would have made some sense to do these last two things in the other order, so I could learn about the field before I had to review proposals on it, but hey. I spent the week and a half between creating a poster on work we did last summer with a summer student. The paper has been accepted to the journal now, we hear.
And, arranged to suit my schedule, yesterday we had a "micro summit" on the old data-mining project. Which I hadn't touched since May, when I wrote the draft memo. Which was not a slide show, only a memo. Lotta words, not many figures. I managed to wikify the huge results table before the meeting, and we posted the link during the talk following mine.
Whoosh.
We now return you to your normal programming. Whatever that was. I have another project I dropped for the old data mining thing, back in the early spring. I should dig that out again.
And there's the WTFC deadline coming up. How are people coming on their projects? Do we need an extension?
I do have a few ideas, but nothing further than vague ideas. There's a song of Tom Waits, Poor Edward, that's been kicking around in my head since MFC4, whenever that was. Perhaps, in keeping with the cross-genre mashup theme, a story based on the characters and situations from the song, read aloud, with the song itself in the background. Yeah, like that'll all come together.
I've also been listening to Wendy Carlos' soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange, which is mostly switched-on Beethoven. I bet that wouldn't be so very hard to do badly, switching on something classical (and, I hope, short). I probably even have all the pieces required.
Or I could spend six-ish weeks revising my novel, yet again, and submit that to the WTFC reader/listenership. I don't think I'd do that, but it might be interesting.
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