decidedlyodd

So first things first… The good news is that I finished my article and uploaded it around 10:30am this morning and I didn’t even have to stay up all night (went to be at 3, then got up at 8 for the home stretch). The bad news is that it doesn’t contain the results my advisor was hoping for. We have an extension until Monday night to make more changes, but I’m not convinced I can get those additional results in any good way. There’s just not enough time to carefully consider the new models necessary. To make things worse, adding these to the paper will make it stronger, but overall I still feel like the whole thing is rather on the weak side. One way or another, it has still been a good experience, since I was able to get the implementation, details and math down on paper. It will certainly come in useful in future work on this project, even if it doesn’t get accepted.

Earlier today I went to the departmental picnic. Talked to various people, had a grilled hamburger and a bunch of chips, avoided the rain which never seem to come. Afterwards, Jason, Sara, Casey and I went to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Jason was disappointed, but I thought it was ok. I wasn’t expecting too much though, given the way books always seem to turn out as movies. Of course, they left a lot of the details out and a lot of the humor fell flat without that context. Even still, it’s probably just one of those things that worked better as a book.

In other news, I got my copy of Tiger (aka Mac OS 10.4) yesterday. Unfortunately, I couldn’t install it yesterday since I was focused on getting the paper out. I tried to do it this afternoon as well, but kept getting a crypic “there was an error, please try starting the install again” error messages. After some investigation, it appears that my hard drive was in serious need of an fsck. Disk Utility is repairing the volume right now. I guess I just assumed that Mac OS would have done the same thing as operating systems like Linux and periodically run fsck or the equivalent. Looking back though, I can see why that’s not the case.

Hopefully, everything will go ok and I’ll be able to actually get Tiger to install before I head off to the WXYC 80s Dance tonight. I’m working a merch shift from 1-2am, but I think I’ll head over early. Now that there are these problems with this paper that I’ve invested so much time and stress in over the last few weeks, I really just need to take a break from the insanity for at least one night.