This is a crazy quarter in terms of traveling. Normally I don’t travel much, if at all, during the academic year (except during breaks). But this quarter, I have three back-to-back trips in October and November. So today has been travel arrangement day. :P
October 16-19 I’ll be at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) annual conference in Toronto, where I’ll be on a blog-related panel that Alex Halavais put together. Minor detail…I need to write the paper. Ack. (It’s based on some earlier work I did related to Usenet, so I’m not at ground zero. But I’m still a little panicked.)
October 26-28 I’ll be at a workshop in Albuquerque, NM, for PIs (principal investigators) in NSF’s ITWF program. Everyone who’s gotten research money over the past few years from that program will be there to talk about their research and share ideas, results, etc. I’m excited about this, because it’s a great opportunity to get to know other researchers in the area of women and computing. However, because of the spam filtering problem I mentioned yesterday, I didn’t know I had to prepare a 5 page summary paper—which is due Monday.
November 2-4 I’ll be at the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, CA, where I’ll be on a keynote panel on blogging “Top Tech Trends for Libraries” (sort of a ‘do-over’ of the ALA panel I was on, but sharing the podium with new people), and then doing a separate presentation on “Beyond Blogging.” I’m way behind on getting the paperwork done for that, too. (If y’all are reading this, I am coming. Really. I promise I’ll have everything filled out and sent back by the end of this weekend!)
All that has to be balanced with MW afternoon teaching schedule. I really don’t feel good about missing more than two classes a quarter (it’s only a ten-week quarter, so there are only 20 class meetings). So that means rushing home on Tuesday the 28th and Tuesday the 4th (including a red-eye flight home for the latter), so that I can make it to my Wednesday 2pm class.
Which is a very roundabout way of saying don’t be surprised if blogging falters a little during the next couple of weeks. That’s a lot of stuff to prepare for.
Days like today, which are shot all to hell by meetings and administrivia, are when I most need a good laugh.
Today’s good laugh was brought to me by Accordion Guy (aka Joey deVilla, who I sure hope will be in Accordion City when I’m there next month for AoIR).
He blogged about an accident at Lockheed-Martin involving a satellite. According to the news report,
The mishap was caused because 24 bolts were missing from a fixture in the Ïturn over cartÓ. Two errors occurred. First, technicians from another satellite program that uses the same type of Ïturn over cartÓ removed the 24 bolts from the NOAA cart on September 4 without proper documentation. Second, the NOAA team working today failed to follow the procedure to verify the configuration of the NOAA Ïturn over cartÓ since they had used it a few days earlier.
Here’s how Joey ended his post:
I can see the instant message chatter going on at Lockheed right now: [RocketMan23] SRRY BOUT BORRWING BOLTS WITHOUT TELLING U BUT U SHULD HV CHEKD LOL
Does anybody else ever have the experience of looking at something they’ve written a few months earlier, and not recognizing it all as their own work?
I’m sitting here trying to work on my paper for the AoIR conference, and the obvious starting point is the abstract for the talk.
Now, I wrote that abstract. (I even went back and checked my outgoing mail file to be sure. Yep, it’s a verbatim version of the abstract I sent to Alex back in February.) But I’ve read it over about ten times tonight, and I’ll be damned if I can recognize it as my own. Where did I come up with that stuff? Why can’t I dredge it back back out of my memory banks and pick up where I left off?
I’m probably insane for even acknowledging how foreign it looks to me now, considering that people who will be at the conference expecting me to speak knowledgably on this topic are probably reading this blog. Oh, well. Welcome to my world.
On the bright side, despite my sieve-like memory, I’m quite impressed with my February-self’s ideas, and hope that over the next few days I’ll remember enough of what I was thinking about back then to write the paper that I described so well.
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