Bounded in a Nutshell

A selection of things that are raising my ire at the moment:

• I'm sick, and have been all weekend. It's not bad enough that I need to go check in to a hospital or anything -- really, it's just a cold with some annoying refinements -- but it's bad enough to kill my ability to think in a concentrated fashion. (Anyhow, being sick in a city where you have no friends close enough that you can call them up and say, could you return my library books for me?... is pretty sucky in general.)
• Speaking of killing, my desktop at work chose to die today. No idea why; I was unplugging an unmounted FireWire drive when the thing shut down and refused to start up again. Since about 90% of the things I need to do right now are on computer -- and better than half of those really benefit from the large screen of my desktop, compared to the tiny screen of the clamshell -- well, it's a good thing perhaps that I don't have the focus to work today, since I also don't have the tools either.
• The other 10%? Grading. Damn you, grading...
• I'm supposed to be giving a colloquium talk in about a week and a half at my doctoral institution. Pretty cool, right? Well, it would be if I had anything to talk about for the better part of an hour. I've sort of got one reliable standby for such things -- a whole complex of topics which are being spun out into papers over time -- but my principal partner in this endeavour is defending his dissertation the day previous and will be talking about precisely this stuff. I suspect that having too much overlap between our presentations might reflect badly on at least one of us.

I suppose that's really it, on top of the baseline crap that one puts up with. On the other hand, I'm meant to be giving tests in two of my classes tomorrow... so I only have to prepare one lecture for tomorrow, and can sit at the front of the room and sniffle silently through the other two periods. That's something. And hey, at least I live in a country with a sane, sensible governm-- um, well, never mind.

So the sun's shining today and the skies are clear. If this was back home, I'd be saying that the temperature reached double-digits today; that doesn't make so much sense where I am, but it's true nonetheless.

I've been getting a lot of people asking me if I'm doing anything special for Easter. This is, to me, something of an odd question: not just because I live a predominantly secular life (which my interlocutors may well not know), but also because I'd never realised that Easter as such is a big deal to your average American. The vibe I'm getting is that it's a good time to be with family, but (and in sharp contrast to my homeland) it's not like we get any extra time off around Easter to go visiting. Since I have no immediate family within about a thousand kilometers, no extra time essentially means no family time.

Some w00tastic news from ecogrrl today; that's one more of my close friends on track to prepend "Dr." to their name. For the rest of y'all: what are you waiting for?

Some moron in a minivan managed to reverse into the front of my car today. What happened was they realised that they were in a drive-through lane, or possibly they knew that already and realised that they didn't want to be in a drive-through lane; in either case, their lizard-brain response to this was to throw it into reverse and advance to the rear as rapidly as possible.

In this case, of course, "as rapidly as possible" means "without regard for other vehicles that might have appeared behind them in the interim". I was already in reverse at the moment of contact, since I was following my usual policy of trying to be courteous about such things, but apparently I wasn't moving fast enough.

Being hit didn't bother me particularly, since there wasn't any damage done, but it did annoy me slightly that the driver immediately scarpered. I suppose that it's technically a hit-and-run at that point, so I could have called the police and tried to make life difficult for 2K7304. I still maintain the illusion that eventually stupidity and selfishness catch up with one, though, so I've decided to let karma do my work for me.

In other news, I've got a proper bookshelf in my office now... and it only took two and a half years. I'm telling myself that this is the key element in a plan that will render my office relatively tidy, but you might have noticed that I lie to myself a lot.

Hey all. Back from Florida; I'd posted an entry from the conference (see below), but due to some quirk of Blogger it hasn't shown up until now.

It was, I think, a good conference. I've got three new research projects to puzzle over, with three different collaborators, so that's pleasant. Good response to my talk by the masses of mathematicians there; between that and getting an acceptance to a (fairly) prestigious journal, I seem to be building a bit of a career here. Nice.

The not-nice part had to do with my return flight... which was through Chicago this past Thursday, a day apparently fraught with weather-related complications in that part of the world. My flight to Chicago was delayed, due to some bizarre system of confliect resolution between airlines when a major airport is experiencing difficulties. I did manage to get into O'Hare barely in time for my connecting flight... or would have, had they not cancelled said flight earlier in the day. (The airport in Florida has free wi-fi, so I discovered this well before boarding my first flight for the day.)

The thing that annoys me most about the whole experience is the airline's apparent attitude that information is on an immediate need-to-know basis. The folks at FLL refused to give anything more than a vague estimate for a departure time until about twenty minutes before boarding; further, I was told that no help with accommodations in Chicago would be offered (since the delays were not the airline's fault) and so made my own arrangements over the internet... and then got to Chicago and found that no, actually cut-rate hotel rooms were available after all.

Just a quick update for anyone who's started depending on regular Tuesday Nutshell fixes and were perturbed by the radio silence yesterday. Currently in Florida at a math conference; I'll be posting a fuller account of my adventures here a little later.

One quick remark, though: more people have commented about my hat in the past four days than in the previous several months, I'm fairly sure. I suspect this is due to a ren faire that's going on just down the road on weekends these days, and so people are sensitized to such things.

The spring is taunting me. Every time I think winter's over, the next day there's multiple centimeters of snow on the ground.

It's a day of waiting, really. Next week's my annual trip to the Southeastern Conference, which is (as it usually is) in Florida. This is not what you might call one of the most highly organized conferences in the hemisphere, or at least it hasn't been recently, and so despite the fact that festivities start in less than a week they have yet to post a schedule of talks. I'm not terrifically worried that I'll be scheduled to speak at a time when I won't be there, since they've assured everyone that they take this sort of thing into account. I am worried that I might get an 8:00am slot, and I feel I can prepare myself better for this the more warning I have.

I'm also waiting for my most recent toy to arrive: a portable hard drive. It's supposed to be about the size of an audio cassette tape, and holds twice as much data as my current laptop. I'm buying this with my honorarium for the talk I gave in Dayton last month. ("My God, how the money rolls in!")

Given that I'm mostly getting this drive as a home for my music collection, it's legitimate to ask why I didn't go whole-hog into iPod-land or something. I'm not really looking for a player device, in that it's rare that I'd particularly want such a thing. I have a laptop, which can play my music just fine when I'm in a hotel room; I don't fly very often, and I'm on trains and buses even more rarely. And if I want calendar sync'ing I can always revive my old Visor (again).