Over reacting jack ass

Thats me. I jumped twice in the last few days. First, I got an email from the potential date earlier this morning. Apparently her PC broke down and being an arts major she didnt have a spare box lying around. I dont understand how people can survive with just one desktop. I need atleast 2 desktops and a laptop to function at any level of efficiency. I digress. Anyways, we are going out Friday night for dinner and drinks.

Remember the whole drama of someone managing to break through my shroud of annonymity? Turns out that was a false alarm. I wrote a script to scan through all my logs of every single web presence of mine to find any pattern in activities over the last 2 weeks. There were no candidate signals for any respectable corelation thresholds.

What a freakin drama queen. I blame caffine for all this.

You havent got mail

I met this wonderful lady a while, and we hit it off. We exchanged like 6 emails each day for 4-5 days, and then went out for drinks. It went well too. Then she had to go out of town of for a few days. When she came back, I asked her out to dinner and she took a raincheck. Ok, I can understand that. For the past few days the emails have been drying out. I sent her another dinner invite a couple of days ago, and havent heard back since. Ahhh.. the agony of the wait, the shame of that ensues a blank screen. Oh well, One down, a half billion to go.

What if the guy who defined "Normal" wasnt normal?

I am 55% nomal? Who are they kiddin?

Oh not again

The inevitable has happened. Someone I know has found this damn blog. The question is do they know its mine? I am going to intensively track activity on all my web presences over the next few days to answer that question. I know this person pretty well, so I think I can reason with him/her/it and ask him/her/it to keep it under covers. But I wish I didnt have to. Oh fuck.

Fingers Crossed

I am done with the device design. I think I have two viable designs now. All the simulations say it should work. All my instincts say it should work. Now the biggest question is will reality agree with me?

The day that was

Yesterday evening was just brimming with “Eureka” moments. J and I got down brain storming again. We were just shooting air, and one idea after another was just flowing out. Nearly all of them were good ones. So apparently meetings can be a good thing once in a while. Wait, this was not a scheduled meeting, so I take that back. Anyways, today J was talking about filing for patents on two of those ideas, and this time he might even include me in the list of inventors.

Monday Morning

I had an unusually good Monday morning. I got up around 7.15 AM, which is about 2.5 hrs before my usual time. None of my roommates were up at that time, so I had the entire house to myself. Spent 20 mins in the shower planning out the day, a leisure cup of coffee, watched a bit of news, and got ready for work. I need atleast an hour of “alone” time in the morning.
I reached work before anyone was here. Amazingly I spent less than 4 mins clearing emails, got straight to work. Had a pretty productive few hours before J walked in. He wanted to discuss a few ideas. I am all for it, but I would really appreciate if he waited till I was goofing off and not actually working. Anyways, he spent nearly 45 mins with me. I like discussing with him, its intellectually simulating. However what bugs me the most is that he files for patents based on our discussions but doesnt include me in the inventor list. Guess thats the price I pay for being an intern.

My new device design is ready. I am working on the final few tweaks. I am starting fabrication in a few days. Fingers crossed, stomach twiching, heart racing, nerves wreaking.

A Must Read

There is an article in the latest issue of IEEE Potentials that discusses how to approach research. I think the article was titled “Balanced Research”. Even though it is in a tech journal, the article would equally apply to all fields. I wish this article had been written a few years ago when I was just starting out in grad school. I cannot post a link to the full text of the article since that would be a copyright violation, but if you drop in a note at pseudosanity at gmail dot com I would be glad to email it to you once I scan it.

The Fun Begins

QoH got his tenure. I have dreaded this day for a long time now. He had applied last year but was turned down since he hadnt graduated enough students and his publication list was pretty slim. Then he became buddies with a heavy weight prof in the department and made him his mentor. The other prof is in line for the Dean’s post and no one has the guts to counter any of his recomendations. So now, QoH is a tenured faculty. This is not good. I know I should be happy for him, but I am not.

About two years ago QoH was a decent adviser. He really cared about his students and their welfare. He infact gave couple of grad students a whole quarter off while supporting them so that they can do some soul searching and sort out personal issues. I have never heard of a prof who has done that. He used to drop in on us in the lab regularly and discuss research. He threw parties at his home. He was generally a fun person to be around.

Then he met this departmental heavy weight. It was a marraige straight from hell. He learnt every single bad trait of this prof, but passed on the good ones. He transformed into a major egoistical control freak. He started using terms like “my lab”, “my research” and stuff. He started enforcing all kinds of management tools like TRP reports, performance reviews, ranking of students, heirarchy structures, and a lot more. He bought into this whole management through fear policy. He for some reason thinks that he owns us and all of our time. He stopped being our advisor and started being our manager. I dont remember the last time I got any research advice from him. In the last year alone two grad students have left the lab because of his attitude.

But he has been really good me in certain aspects. For example, he let me co-author this book chapter. He asked me to the second author on a paper that was published in an extreremely prestigious journal. There are professors with 25 yrs experience who havent been published in that particular journal.

Now that he has tenure, all chains are off. He has unbridled freedom to do whatever he wants. I emailed him earlier this afternoon asking him which budget he would like me to charge the registration fee for the conference I got accepted to. He replied saying I should withdraw the paper coz he thinks it is not upto par. What the fuck? The paper was peer-reviewed and only then was it accepted. Is he saying that he knows better than the three reviewers and the entire technical committee? More importantly he had the full text of the paper even before I had submitted it. He had even suggested a few modifications to earlier drafts. Couldnt he have asked me to withhold the paper then? This I am sure is the first of many nightmares he is going to put me through.

Misdiagnosis

For the past few days I had been dull, had no energy, and was basically a mess. I was thinking it was me being depressed or something. Today I went to see my doctor for an entirely different problem, and he asked me if I was feeling ok. Turns out I have fever. How can I not notice that? I mean how dumb do you have to be to not notice that your temperature is way above normal, your pulse is racing, and you have sweat pangs every now and then? God I am an idiot.