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So in the last week when I haven’t been posting, I’ve been working on my DPS poster (which is just about done and about to go to Kinkos!) and a related article draft. During this whole time my laptop has been cranking the music.
I’ll admit, I have the worst taste in music. When working I tend to use my purchased library from iTunes that consists of Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha and Christina Aguilera. If I’m really angry I put Garbage’s Bleed Like Me album on repeat. I think my fellow grad students at University of the Frozen Tundra are grateful I’m not around especially as I have a slightly bad habit of singing along with my music if I’m deep into doing my work and I really don’t notice when I do that and am using headphones.
But in the last few weeks my phone has been ringing off the hook- the advisor and I have a few too many irons in the fire so we’ve been skyping and cell phoning often. I know it’s my advisor because Daft Punk’s Technologic is my ringtone for him. I think it’s fitting with the lyrics “Write it, cut it, paste it, save it, Load it, check it, quick – rewrite it”. Yeah that’s basically my life dealing with my advisor. It took me a while to decide on that ringtone for him however- I had contemplated Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus as the advisor is the one that tells me to keep plugging on even when I’m pissy about job applications or paper reviews. Lately I’ve been thinking of changing to Gaga’s Telephone- the section with Beyonce singing about how she should left her phone at home because this is a disastah, but I don’t think I’ll do that until after the DPS or else I might have to explain the ringtone to collaborators (Eeek!).
But now I’m curious- what music did other astronomers and planetary scientists use when they were writing up? Do they still listen to that music during time crunches? Because god knows. . .I don’t know how I’d explain being 40 years old and rocking out to the Britney.
Dear fellow graduate students,
I hate to break this to you, but you look like an f*ing tool when you email all grads bitching about how you can’t find the green laser pointer and how this is completely unacceptable and it should always be stored with the outreach laptop!11! And you really look like a tool when you send the email out the next day saying “Oh I found it hidden with all the laptop cords.”
Perhaps along with the ethics training we do need to have some discussions re: professional conduct via email and how if you’re going to be a pill, maybe you shouldn’t do it from you work/school email account and should use a personal account for that sort of thing.
Sincerely,
So glad I’m not there anymore.
Some days I love my life. Other days I hate my life and those days would include the days I have to write conference abstracts. I especially hate my life when I write the abstracts for LPI organized conferences- it’s like they want a mini paper as a freaking abstract.
Let’s all be honest: for most of us signing up for conferences means that we’ve managed to give ourselves a deadline to get something done. In my case I find it handy- then I know that I’ll have X done approximately in time for the conference. For that reason I much prefer the following type of abstract:
“I did some shit with some data. Or rather I will do some shit with some data about 2 weeks before the meeting when I realize that it’s sneaking up. Oh by the way, here is me talking out my ass about some “preliminary results”. They may be right, or when I get my poster/talk together I may decide my preliminary results are wrong. But hey, they’re preliminary and I told you that so don’t quote me on it m’kay?”
I know I didn’t finish the science for my DPS talk last year until about 10 minutes before I needed to upload the sucker. I am however happy that I waited until the last minute as my talk turned out better after to talking with folks at lunches and finding out what sort of info they wanted to know.
Since I feel comfortable sticking with a theme, and the Scientae Carnival is about “school” suplies I’m going to talk about more “school” supplies! Today’s topic is the iPhone.
I was late to the cult of iPhone. I remember my officemate getting the first iPhone and immediately bragging about how he was using jailbreak. I of course sat there squinty eyed going “but why would you want an iPhone when the first thing you need to do is circumvent the operating system?”. But finally this last year after our move to the land of the wanna-be Ivy I gave in and ditched T-Mobile after multiple crappy changes to their internet service and went to AT&T and purchased the iPhone. Yes, my iPhone has music and videos loaded on it for the dog walking and the plane flights to telescopes, but I also feel love for my apps. I don’t have many, in fact I only have 1.5 screens worth. But the two most handy items I have are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is handy for communicating with astronomer friends on trips and Twitter. . . well I have an unnatural love for twitter.
My love for Twitter as a scientist is related to not needing to be in 5 places at once. At the AAS meetings you can easily find tweets from a parallel session you couldn’t make with the meeting’s aas hashtag (this next meeting in Jan will have the hashtag #217). During the press conference for the Astronomy Decadal Survey I sat in a room watching with a ton of people cursing the rambling that was going on but found a link to an high level review of the results in a tweet. I’ve also seen info from other conferences thanks to other scientists who live tweet with their iPhones after asking their followers if there is any interest. This week I’ve learned about astronomy education, the fires near Boulder Colorado, the latest hurricane updates, how to play with tables and databases in Python, the peach and apple statuses at the local orchards, the Gemini Observatory transition plan, and oh yeah football scores from my undergrad institution (and that’s just tracking back to Friday).
Downsides to the iPhone are plentiful though, the most obvious of which is that you’re always plugged in. Sometimes being plugged in is good- at conferences you can plan and maneuver lunches and dinners via friends on twitter, or via text message. But if you’re like myself you also have an email addiction. I blame my job before undergrad where I was expected to turn around email responses as fast as possible. Thanks to my iPhone I’ve spent a number of Sundays cursing because I could check my email while I was out and saw yet another email from the advisor wanting something. However deactivating push capabilities for your phone (where servers can push data to your phones) can keep the headaches to a minimum.
So the iPhone- it’s handy! I find myself lusting over the iPad now for the reasons of Pages and Keynote, but I’ll wait until the second hardware release. As it stands I think I shall leave my laptop behind at the DPS meeting and use just my iPhone as I’m only doing a poster, and I don’t feel like lugging my laptop all over the US. Perhaps in a month I can say how useful it is to have only one’s iPhone to stay plugged in.
So earlier this week I had to request a graduation packet from the University of the Frozen Tundra. It not only has handy documents like the Reviewers Report (the yes, this is or no, this isn’t ready for defense form), but it’s the only way I can actually get the formatting guidelines for the dissertation!
The grad college is quite helpful in that they make templates available in LaTeX and Word so you don’t run afoul of the ruler wielding person in their office, and they clearly state the margins on the website, but other items like font sizes are missing. I had to require the packet to find out that only standard fonts 10 point or larger are accepted and it must be double spaced (okay that one I figured out from the LaTeX template). Oh and there is an exception for examples, quotes, tables and charts that say “similar size and easily readable” followed by “no smaller than 9 points”.
Shit. Guess who has tables that only fit on the page in /rotate with /tiny in LaTeX? I guess I’m going to have to break up tables. And I need to figure out who to write to request permission to reprint my thesis articles in my dissertation. Guess with this last manuscript when I submit the copyright form I can double check things.
So what did I see in my inbox at University of the Frozen Tundra, but the colloquium schedule for the next term and at the end of the month, my advisor’s other senior grad student is scheduled to defend in the standard colloquium slot.
While this other student has been around longer than me by at least a year, it’s hard for me to not be jealous. Ze’s scheduled to defend because he has a job lined up. One I heard about last time I was in the Frozen Tundra which makes me a little uneasy. I don’t think he has the experience. I also think that this person defending is problematic as they have zero first authored publications right now.
In the end this all doesn’t really effect me, but I am a bit pissed that I have 3 first authored pubs right now (with 3 more lined up, one should be submitted in the next month) and I’m living in rejection city. More often than not I’ve been feeling like I can’t win- I don’t have a famous advisor and I’m not doing something like cosmology which is sexy and has like 80 million postdoc postings.
So for today, I think I may have a quality sulk with my next manuscript and will plot all my fellowship applications for the next two months.
I Study Asteroids 