Stress Mode Plus Ultra
Nov. 26th, 2004 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drcuriosity[Note: This post is mostly for the purposes of stress-venting. Caveat lector.]
So, tomorrow (Friday) afternoon is the time for my departmental seminar.
There were apparently concerns in the department about my seminar not having a title and abstract submitted, despite the fact that I originally submitted them a goodly month ago. And the email telling me that it hadn't been submitted (or at least, that what I'd submitted hadn't arrived) didn't show up in my inbox until a couple of days after it was sent (i.e. late Tuesday/early Wednesday, after being sent early on Monday this week).
I found out about it Tuesday afternoon from my concerned supervisor, who'd just returned from a conference (my co-supervisor is overseas, again). I sent him a revised abstract (since my research has more direction now than my original abstract entailed), which he forwarded on. Wednesday, I finally got the email telling me that I hadn't submitted it (including stating that they didn't want the department to look unprofessional). And an email suggesting that since they didn't have one yet, they might kludge one together from my progress report introduction. Agh.
I pester the university IT department and try to get them to figure out why my email is going weird again - they ask me to send them email headers, and forward it on to a consultant. I send the departmental Powers that Be a reply with an apology for them not having one yet, let them know I'd just got the email and I was chasing up IT about it. And included the abstract again, just to be absolutely certain they got it.
Hours pass, and my abstract doesn't arrive on the departmental website, and I have no confirmation that it's got there. I ring up people in the department, and confirm voicewise that they have it. Small sigh of relief.
Now, onto the seminar itself. I've got 25 minutes for it. I've got probably too much material, but I want to make sure that people know that I'm trying my best to do Good Science, here. There are a few illustrations, and quite a lot of salient paper references.
Again, I realise that far, far too many of my references seem content to leave out things like hard data and methodology out of their papers. Pilot studies of seven designers. Surveys of a class of elementary school children.
Still. I've got a problem context, I've got motivations, I've got background. I've got design goals, I've got some hypotheses, I've got models to test. I've got a list of work done (both solution and shortcomings) and work to be done.
I don't have much in the way of hard figures. I've been too busy trying to solve the issues at hand to quantify that at stage [X], I only had [Y%] of the coverage/stability that I needed, while at stage [X+1] I had [Y+10%] - which is not to say that I don't have subjective measures of the same.
I don't have a particularly firm experiment plan at this point - I didn't know how ambitious I could be until I got the hardware (mostly) working.
I don't quite know how I'm going to pare down 30-odd slides and a short (25 sec) results video so that I can cover everything in 25 minutes, and still have room for questions at the end.
Hopefully what I do have will be enough, and what I don't have won't get me crucified. I'm nowhere near as confident as I'd like to be.
I also don't know why my supervisor didn't call me back this evening as promised.
Or what state I'm going to be in for a tech demonstration to the money people on Tuesday.
And I missed my weekly get-rid-of-stress roleplaying gaming tonight while trying to sort out some of this mess.
Arr.
So, tomorrow (Friday) afternoon is the time for my departmental seminar.
There were apparently concerns in the department about my seminar not having a title and abstract submitted, despite the fact that I originally submitted them a goodly month ago. And the email telling me that it hadn't been submitted (or at least, that what I'd submitted hadn't arrived) didn't show up in my inbox until a couple of days after it was sent (i.e. late Tuesday/early Wednesday, after being sent early on Monday this week).
I found out about it Tuesday afternoon from my concerned supervisor, who'd just returned from a conference (my co-supervisor is overseas, again). I sent him a revised abstract (since my research has more direction now than my original abstract entailed), which he forwarded on. Wednesday, I finally got the email telling me that I hadn't submitted it (including stating that they didn't want the department to look unprofessional). And an email suggesting that since they didn't have one yet, they might kludge one together from my progress report introduction. Agh.
I pester the university IT department and try to get them to figure out why my email is going weird again - they ask me to send them email headers, and forward it on to a consultant. I send the departmental Powers that Be a reply with an apology for them not having one yet, let them know I'd just got the email and I was chasing up IT about it. And included the abstract again, just to be absolutely certain they got it.
Hours pass, and my abstract doesn't arrive on the departmental website, and I have no confirmation that it's got there. I ring up people in the department, and confirm voicewise that they have it. Small sigh of relief.
Now, onto the seminar itself. I've got 25 minutes for it. I've got probably too much material, but I want to make sure that people know that I'm trying my best to do Good Science, here. There are a few illustrations, and quite a lot of salient paper references.
Again, I realise that far, far too many of my references seem content to leave out things like hard data and methodology out of their papers. Pilot studies of seven designers. Surveys of a class of elementary school children.
Still. I've got a problem context, I've got motivations, I've got background. I've got design goals, I've got some hypotheses, I've got models to test. I've got a list of work done (both solution and shortcomings) and work to be done.
I don't have much in the way of hard figures. I've been too busy trying to solve the issues at hand to quantify that at stage [X], I only had [Y%] of the coverage/stability that I needed, while at stage [X+1] I had [Y+10%] - which is not to say that I don't have subjective measures of the same.
I don't have a particularly firm experiment plan at this point - I didn't know how ambitious I could be until I got the hardware (mostly) working.
I don't quite know how I'm going to pare down 30-odd slides and a short (25 sec) results video so that I can cover everything in 25 minutes, and still have room for questions at the end.
Hopefully what I do have will be enough, and what I don't have won't get me crucified. I'm nowhere near as confident as I'd like to be.
I also don't know why my supervisor didn't call me back this evening as promised.
Or what state I'm going to be in for a tech demonstration to the money people on Tuesday.
And I missed my weekly get-rid-of-stress roleplaying gaming tonight while trying to sort out some of this mess.
Arr.
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no subject
[Sends lots of good luck vibes Morbid's way]
It'll be fine. These things always seem bigger than they are. But make sure you take some time off over the weekend :)
Hope to see you at something.
MArsden
Stressy Morbs
Date: 2004-11-25 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 06:52 pm (UTC)but we knew that... :(
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 11:34 pm (UTC)