Fumbling Towards Geekdom

Should have seen this coming

2011-08-16T21:26:00.003+10:00

This time last year:

Hey! Here's a new thing! The university executive (Vice Chancellor and friends) would like to know about issues affecting the 'man on the ground'. Specifically, early career researchers. What would improve our lives? They encourage us to form a group to brainstorm improvements and promise to consider them. For example, they say, maybe early career academics would like to have more bright colours in their offices to make things more cheerful?*

_______

* Not the actual example, but I don't want this to be too googleable.

Early this year:

We have a working group. We discuss all the issues that specifically affect early career academics. We are unanimous that the number one problem is lack of job security. We brainstorm ideas. We approach the executive informally to sound out how they would feel about providing some 'safety net' funding to support young researchers for short periods between successful grants. Yes! They say. That sounds excellent. This is exactly the sort of initiative we would support! There is lots of money for that sort of thing right now. And specifically, maybe we could support people with brightly coloured offices?

(We should have listened to the subtext here.)

After months of discussions, budgeting, meetings, etc, we flesh out a proposal and deliver it to the executive. They call us in for discussion. "Hmm..." they say. "This might actually cost money."

"But you have a lot of money right now," we remind them.

But apparently they have just decided to spend 45 million dollars on bringing in international academic superstars.

"We will get back to you with our official response in a few days," they promise.

After a few days. Today, in fact:

Dear early career researchers,

We have considered your proposal to provide a safety net for early career academics who are on external funding. It seems like a great idea. We would just like a few minor changes to your plan. Specifically, instead of providing funding, we would like to provide some bright paint colours. And instead of this funding employing people, we will make department offices more cheerful. Although this may not solve the underlying problem you have identified (lack of job security), it will cost less money. It will also be a good test case. In 12 months we will check back and see whether, as your proposal suggests will happen, more young fellowship holders have been attracted to our university, and if they have, we may consider providing more funding to your initiative. Please reword your proposal so as to implement these minor changes.

Best regards,

Your friendly Vice Chancellor.

Things are weird

2011-07-20T10:09:00.002+10:00

Someone just offered us $30,000. A PhD student in Geekman's department is, by some quirk of the system, drawing both a PhD scholarship and a postdoc salary. He doesn't want them. He asked the university to take some of the money away, but they won't. And now he is trying to give it away. He thought we might like it to help pay off the house. We turned him down. But that was a weird conversation.
I have now been asked to teach into five different courses this semester. People seem confused when I suggest instead that maybe they should get the people they JUST HIRED to teach the courses instead of the person who they just rejected. "But those people can't teach!" they complain. "And you're so good at it!" Yeah. Isn't it nice that, as we are always being told, our university values teaching so highly.
I am going to Japan on Saturday. (Osaka, Kyoto). Any tips?

Sadly, I have had student essays that make less sense than this

2011-07-13T21:36:00.002+10:00

I bought one of these LED faucet thingies, and it arrived today.

The packaging was the real treat, though. A word for word transcription follows below:

"Led Faucet light is the tap water can change the color of the tap high-tech products, Now theworld best-selling pop. Rotation can be installed at the tap on the use of, Open the faucet, Singularly immediate outflow of the light-water column, illumall washbasins, Dreams in the same sense."

And on the back:

"Now high-tech world of popular electronic products, Rotation can be installed at the tap on the use of, And allows you to tap the water column color, glorious!"

Glorious indeed.

It gets better

2011-06-30T12:40:00.002+10:00

They just created a new job so that they can hire one of the men.

This is someone who is universally acknowledged to be a pain in the arse and to have done quite badly at the interviews. (The one who said our students suck.) So he would not have been a good choice for a teaching job. So they created a job with no teaching responsibilities so they can hire him anyway.

I guess it's nice to know they CAN create random new positions when they feel like it. Maybe they'll feel like it for me too one day.

And now they want to know...

2011-06-29T19:00:00.004+10:00

... whether I can teach some courses for them next semester.

Teaching is not included in my current contract.

Unfortunately, I can't just suggest they get the people they just hired to teach these classes since the new hires don't start until the beginning of next year. But damn! I do not feel especially motivated right now. Perhaps they might have considered waiting more than two days after rejecting me for a job before asking me to teach. I guess they are in a rush to cover the courses. (Next semester starts in about a month).

And I'll do it, because the person who fell ill and needs her classes covered is awesome and she is stressed about it, and because the department is offering to put some extra money in an account for me that I can use for research expenses.

But did I say damn! already? Yes, I believe I did. But I'll say it again.

Damn.

Job rant

2011-06-27T10:48:00.003+10:00

The only thing I'm kind of struggling with with this job situation is the thought that this was it. This was my only chance. Those gazillion retirements that are coming up as the baby boomers get to the end of their careers? They've all happened now, in our department anyway. We've had six retirements in the past couple of years. They replaced them with two hires at full professor level (but younger people who probably still have 20 years of career left), one at level C (so, maybe equivalent to the US associate professor level?) and this one junior hire. They may still be hiring one more junior person, but if they do, it will be to cover a sub-discipline that there is no way in hell I am qualified to teach, and I doubt I could even apply. The next retirements in our department are probably going to happen in around 15 years.

Geekman (fortunately) looks like he's set here for the foreseeable future. We aren't going to be doing an international job search any time soon. So I think I'm now committed to putting together one of those careers where you try and line up one grant after another. And that's pretty exhausting, if I can even do it at all. So many grant agencies don't let you apply for your own salary, and collaborative grants are kind of the exception in my field, so having other people willing to apply for a salary for me on their grant is unlikely. The big national grants scheme has just revamped all its funding rules, and I can't even tell if I'll be eligible to apply for a fellowship at the end of this current one.

Dammit. This is really hard.

Oh well

2011-06-26T12:03:00.005+10:00

I didn't get the job. But it did go to a woman, and she is definitely the best qualified for the position. People have been talking about this position as "B—'s job" ever since it was first advertised. And the short-term one has been offered to another woman, who is also a good fit.

The only thing that I'm upset about is that it became clearer and clearer through the selection process that the head of the selection panel, who is also my immediate superior and head of our department, has no respect at all for my research and doesn't really think I'm a "real linguist". I have to keep working for/with this guy for the next three years, and I really respect him, so it's quite upsetting that the feelings aren't reciprocated. I don't know what to do about that.

I guess I have to stop hoping for his support and just get on and do things on my own. As I have been. But it's exhausting.

And then the final interview...

2011-06-24T19:11:00.002+10:00

... was really weird and hostile.

I feel like it's pretty safe to assume I didn't get the job.

While we are talking about gender...

2011-06-24T12:00:00.003+10:00

I have been interviewed by 24 people so far for this job. Four of them were female. Two of those were PhD students. For two of the interviews I was facing a large panel consisting entirely of old white men.

And they wonder why selection committees in this department have historically never ever hired a woman.

Le sigh

2011-06-24T10:35:00.002+10:00

French guy "I was in Sydney on the weekend, and tried to strike up conversations with people in the street like I would in Paris, but no one wanted to talk to me. They even looked frightened that I would try to approach them. Australians are so cold and rude."

Me "Really? Everyone in Paris is happy to talk to strangers on the street?"

French guy "Sure."

Me "Huh. I would have thought some women there, like everywhere else I know, might be a bit nervous when approached by random men."

French woman (and French guy knows she is also French) "Yes, they are."

French guy "Ha ha, what, you think you're going to get raped in broad daylight in the middle of the city?"

Me and French woman, almost simultaneously "It's not about rape, necessarily. It's about street harrassment."

French woman "Yes, it's annoying when they follow you and ask for your number and won't leave you alone."

French guy "That absolutely does not happen."

Me "Yes it does. And then they call you a bitch, because you aren't being sufficiently friendly."

French guy "That has never happened to me."

French woman "Maybe because you are a man?"

French guy "But it has never happened to anyone I know. French people are not like that."

French woman, to me "You just haven't been watching—"

French guy, interrupting her "Women are so paranoid. Here in Australia anyway. They are probably all like Styleygeek, always worrying they are going to get raped."

Me "That's not what I said."

French woman "That's not what we're saying."

French guy "Well French women are not like that, anyway."

Day one

2011-06-23T09:46:00.003+10:00

I think the job talk went okay. People said it was fun. Hopefully it's okay to be fun. But if they want to hire an un-fun person, maybe I don't want to work there anyway.

Also, stupid ash cloud. Two of the candidates got stranded elsewhere so there was a last minute re-organisation of the programme, and one of my interviews got moved up to yesterday, when I wasn't prepared for it yet. It was the one about teaching, and I had planned to figure out a teaching philosophy and what courses we actually offer sometime last night. Oops. Still, I think it went better than the interview of the guy before me, who I overheard telling the selection committee that students at this university kind of suck.

The other two interviews were at opposite ends of the interview spectrum. In one, the three people interviewing mainly talked to each other. About cricket. I was worried about that, but talking to the other candidates later, they all had the same experience. The other was the one organised by the PhD students and man that was intense. It was mainly hypothetical questions ("What would you do if your student turned out to be a crack addict?"), with a few "are you a real linguist?" questions thrown in for the fun of it. (Seriously, "Define [technical term] and explain the various schools of thought on that concept.")

The hiking thing kind of turned into a half hour coffee stop and ten minute brisk walk around the botanical gardens, which would have been a relief, except that I didn't know about the change of plan in advance, so still spent ages trying to find an outfit that worked for interviews, job talk and bush-walking.

It's kind of weird interacting with the other candidates. Three of them I knew already; two I didn't. Everyone is being terribly nice to each other. It's quite exhausting.

Due to the rejig of the programme, I don't have any interviews scheduled today—just the candidate dinner. Tomorrow is my final interview, and then they are scheduled to make a decision and offer in the afternoon. I have heard rumours that two of the candidates will only consider the jobs if they are offered a LOT more money than is currently available, so I guess if the offer goes to one of them, we may not know the outcome for a few days while negotiations take place. These are the two currently working in the USA, and apparently they are horrified by the cost of living here, and don't see how they could survive on the usual salary.

My kitten is purring so much she has given herself the hiccups. That is perhaps irrelevant, but I'm a bit out of practice at this blogging thing.

Holy shit job talk etc oh dear

2011-06-17T19:32:00.003+10:00

The final Big Deal Thing out of this little catch-up-with-my-life series I seem to be running is that I have been shortlisted for a permanent job in my department.

*gulp*

Actually there are two jobs: a three year one and a permanent one. I only applied for the permanent one, but they seem to have pooled all the shortlisted candidates for both. So there are six of us being interviewed next week—some for both jobs, and some for one or the other.

The other candidates are all amazing and their CVs are terrifying and I don't know how I even got into the mix. I'm guessing I probably shouldn't say that in the interview, though.

The process is being run like a serious Big Deal Event. There are job talks and focus groups (with students, colleagues, and publishers) and interviews with the selection committee, and a reception and a dinner, and a hiking trip (to see who pushes who off a cliff, perhaps?).

Actually the whole hiking thing is confusing. My job talk is directly beforehand. The time my job talk is scheduled to end is the time the hike is meant to begin. I'm guessing this will not leave me time to change clothes without holding everyone up. But I'm not sure what I can wear that works both for walking in the Australian bush in winter, and giving a job talk. Then I have to come back and do focus group meetings directly afterwards.

Our department is at the extreme end of the casual–formal dress continuum. The last two people we hired wore jeans and bare feet(!) to their job talks. But I suspect there may be different standards at play for women. And the selection committee includes people from outside the department who are from disciplines where dress standards are a little... tidier. (Law, for example).

And then I'm not sure how I feel about being an internal candidate. There are actually two candidates who are currently in the department, and two of the others were here until last year before they moved overseas. Then there is one from the USA and one from Norway. The usual pattern of this department is to hire men who did their PhD here then went somewhere like MIT or Oxford for a couple of years. There is no one in this shortlisted group who precisely fits that pattern. There is a woman who does. And there's a man who did a postdoc here, then went to the USA after that, so is close enough. My guess is that those two probably have the best chance. I'm guessing the American has a very good chance too.

The biggest issue with being an internal candidate is that my entire LIFE right now feels like a job interview. Every time I've attended a seminar since being shortlisted, I've worried that I'm not asking smart enough questions at the end. If I miss a department event, I worry that people will take this as evidence that I am not sufficiently collegial. I feel like I need to be seen arriving early and leaving late.

Gah.

It will all be over this time next week. They plan to make the decision and offer on Friday afternoon already. Wish me luck.

Then there was this other thing we did...

2011-06-16T15:56:00.003+10:00

So obviously the cat was way more important, but also, we bought a house.

It was quite yellow.

But then we painted it.

We were quite lucky it was yellow, actually, because it didn't show well, and we got it for the lowest price paid for a house in this suburb for over a year. Even though it was in perfect structural condition.

Another example of the yellow:

After after the de-yellowing:

The bedrooms benefited both from a de-yellowing, and an un-horribling of the curtains.

The garden is small but pretty (and almost entirely native, with an automated drip watering system). The location is great: a quiet street one block from a nature reserve, with a 20 minute bicycle ride along cycle paths through parkland to the university. The neighbours seem quiet and maybe interesting: they keep ducks and chickens and their wireless network is named UnexplainedBacon.

There's central heating, which is relatively uncommon in Australia, and delicious this time of year—although I nearly died of shock when I saw our first gas bill.

I think we're going to like it here.

Introducing...

2011-06-13T15:55:00.005+10:00

Shoggoth!

Yes, we named our kitten after a Lovecraftian horror. But doesn't she look like a terrifying demon? A sleepy, sleepy, terrifying demon?

“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train, a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down on us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”

“Still came that eldritch, mocking cry: 'Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!'”

“Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings.”

“I had seen those primal sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate Elder Ones those whom the frightful Shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war of resubjugation”

Yeah, the vet didn't think it was funny, either. But I have a receipt for one vaccinated Shoggoth, which is more than Lovecraft ever had.

And then she miscarried

2011-04-11T17:45:00.000+10:00

Sigh.

I got a girl pregnant

2011-04-02T12:29:00.002+11:00

So yeah, we finally succeeded in my project to outsource the replication of my genetic material. The whole not telling anyone thing (since Claudia understandably wants to wait until she's past the highly-likely-to-miscarry period before making announcements) is tricky, because I'm very excited. So I thought to myself: I wish I had a secret place on the internet where I could talk about stuff to people who don't know any of the real-life involvees. And then, oh yeah.

So wow.

And she transferred two embryos this time, so it might be double wow.

Also, real estate agents suck

2011-01-20T15:53:00.002+11:00

Today I had to deal first with a random cold-call from a mortgage broker, whose "mate" (a real estate agent who showed us a place last week) told him we might be in the market for a "good deal on a mortgage". I don't recall telling the agent he could pass on our phone numbers to his mates so that they could advertise at us, but thanks anyway.

Then I had the following call:

"Hi, it's [random agent] from [generic agency]."
"Yes?"
"I'm calling about [address]."
"Yes?"
"You emailed me about it last week, so I'm just returning that call."
"I'm sorry, I've sent a lot of queries to real estate agents lately: can you remind me what I asked you?"
"I don't know. I'm just getting back to you."
"But I sent you an email. Don't you have it there?"
"No, sorry."
"Could you perhaps find it and reply to it by email?"
"I'll call you back."

The way to my heart is apparently secret rooms and bay windows

2011-01-20T10:38:00.005+11:00

We've now looked at 20+ places, and have identified four that we might actually be interested in. To put this in some perspective, there are currently 94 properties for sale in our price-range in the region we would consider buying in. The problem is, each of the four we like has a serious flaw. Do we hold out for perfection?

On the one hand, you might argue that we should definitely hold out longer, because if four out of the 100-ish on the market right now are great, then given the speed of turnover in this city (properties are usually on the market for less than three weeks), more great ones should pop up soon. On the other hand, these four have all been on the market since we first started looking, i.e. nearly four months now. Nothing approaching the awesomeness of these has shown up in that time. (On the third hand, why the hell are the properties that rate so high on our scale of awesomeness precisely the ones that aren't selling???)

Anyway, here's a sneak preview, should you happen to care, along with pros and cons.

Three-bedroom ancient monstrosity, oh my:

This place is 4.5 km (2.8 miles) from university, has the biggest lounge and kitchen of any of the houses we've seen, and has a beautiful garden with a whole lot of weird little outbuildings that have been used as chicken houses, greenhouses and an artist studio. According to the building report, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it at all, despite it being over 50 years old. On the other hand, it has no heating (yet), no cooling, and yeah, that picture in the top right is the kitchen. (Oh dear.) It also has no plumbing for hooking up a washing machine (WTF). Geekman doesn't like the exposed brick "feature wall" in the lounge (top left), and both of us worry that that room would feel like a school hall, and be impossible to keep warm.

Three-bedroom-in-a-park, and yes it's mainly about the windows:

This place is much smaller than the one above, and really the bedrooms are kind of ridiculously sized. But potentially we could knock out the wall between two of them and make a large one. It has the most amazing bay windows in the dining room (pictured) and one of the bedrooms. The garden is gorgeous and has mature fruit trees. It backs onto a national park. On the other hand it's about twice as far from university as the one above. But on the third hand (or whatever I'm up to now), the route is on bicycle paths through parkland all the way. The biggest problem with this place is that the building report lists a LOT of small issues that would each cost no more than a few hundred or a thousand dollars to deal with, but that together add up to about $20,000 of work, not to mention being annoying to have to deal with.

Two-bedroom plus secret office, but the body corporate fees of DOOOM:

This place is perfect except that it has the world's tiniest kitchen (it looks big in this photo, but that space is doubling as the lounge too. Oh, and the body corporate fees are twice what any other townhouse I've seen charges. (The two properties above are free-standing houses, but this one and the next are not, which is nice because we wouldn't have to do our own external maintenance, plus townhouses have better energy ratings, but sucks because of lack of control over anything much, and because of the fees.) It also has three bathrooms for some inexplicable reason, despite only having two bedrooms.

But! It has a secret room! And the bedrooms are reasonably sized, the whole place has heating and air-conditioning, lots of storage space, and a little private garden/courtyard as well as access to a communal herb garden and outdoor areas. It's only 2km from university (1.2 miles).

I am so in love with this next place I want to marry it but it doesn't like my hypothetical cat:

This is the most awesome place ever. It is a similar distance from university to the previous one, but the route is entirely on bike paths through parkland. It is huge and funky and I have frankly never seen anything like it before in my life. I WANT. It also has a secret criminal mastermind lair! The kitchen is a tiny bit smaller than we would like, but the three bedrooms and lounge are enormous. There is even room on the landing to have a desk and bookshelf and pretend it's an office. The only flaw is, perhaps, a fatal one: it is not possible to have cats in this building. And one of the main reasons we are considering buying a place is to get a cat. Gah!

The lowest asking price of the four places (the no-cat place) is 25% lower than the highest one (the bay-window parkland place). Ancient Monstrosity is part of a deceased estate, so perhaps they are more likely to accept a low offer. Body-Corporate-Fees-of-Doom is kind of weird, as it went on the market last year at a stupid-high price, then was withdrawn, and now it is back on the market for auction, and the lower end of what the real estate agent tells us is really quite reasonable (and puts it lower than any of the others in this list.) As for No-Cat-Ville, we happen to know about an offer the seller accepted (which then fell through), so we have a fair idea that they would take a bit under asking price as well, making THAT one the cheapest.

Advise me, O internets! How do we make this sort of decision! Or do we keep waiting?

No wonder his research is about two years behind schedule

2011-01-18T15:21:00.005+11:00

Colleague: "So I have these Word files that contain lists of data, and they are in this format." He shows me some short Word tables. "Do you think it would be possible to put the data into Excel?"

I copy and paste it right out of the table into a spreadsheet. "Like that?"

"Yes!" he says. "Wow. That's great!"

"How many of these files do you have?" I ask. "A few hundred? A thousand?"

"Fifteen."

"So it would only take..." we both say at the same time.

I finish the sentence with "5-10 minutes" as he says, "about a day's work."

Today is full of cunning traps

2011-01-17T18:35:00.003+11:00

Me, to real estate agent: Have you had a lot of interest in this property? How many people came through on Saturday?
Real estate agent: Oh yeah, yeah, you know how it is. Yeah, there were a few. Some people came through.

[...]

Real estate agent: So how much do you think you would pay for a place like this?
Me: "Yeah. Yeah, you know how it is. Yeah, I'd pay a bit. I'd pay some money for it."

I see your cunning plan

2011-01-17T14:25:00.003+11:00

Geekman, via text message: "Do you want some coffee and cake?"

Me, "What sort of cake?"

Geekman, "Actually, I don't have any cake."

Me, "That's okay. I'll just have coffee. Shall I come over to your office?"

Geekman, "Yes. Can you bring some cake?"

Win-win

2011-01-05T20:03:00.002+11:00

Geekman, while I am massaging his feet: "This is a win-win situation!"

Me: "I don't think that word means what you think it means."

Geekman, waves one foot: "Win." Then the other. "WIN."

Propaganda

2011-01-01T13:48:00.004+11:00

Listening to the radio just now, A Winter's Tale came on. Hah, I think. I know that song. I had forgotten about it completely, though, for years. Why do I know it? Oh yeah, we used to sing it at school, at Christmas assembly and in choir at Christmas time. I start humming along.

But wait! What is this? The words! They are different!

The normally formatted text below is the original. The bold italics show the version we sang at my (supposedly non-religious) school.

The nights are colder now.
maybe I should close the door,
And anyway the snow has
covered all your footsteps
And I can follow you no more.
The fire still burns at night,
my memories are warm and clear;
but everybody knows
it's hard to be alone at this time of year.

It was only a winter's tale,
Just another winter's tale,
And why should the world take notice
and see how the world takes notice

of one more love that's failed?
of love that never fails

It's a love that can never be
It's a love that will always be

though it meant a lot to you and me
and it means a lot to you and me

on a world-wide scale
but on a world-wide scale

we're just another winter's tale
it's just another winter's tale

All I can think of is that our rather religious choir conductor (who was the principal's wife)*, interpreted the song as being about the birth of Jesus, and objected to the idea that the nativity was "just another winter's tale", so changed the words when she taught it. I can't believe I only discovered this now!

____________

* And who also managed to get an anti-evolution video shown as an "extra credit" activity during the period when we were learning about Darwin in our science curriculum.

Christmas dinner

2010-12-24T18:27:00.002+11:00

Anastasia and Dr Crazy have inspired me to ~~gloat about~~ describe my Christmas dinner plans too.*

This year it is just us. Just the Geekman and me. But will that stop us from cooking as though we are having 20 dinner guests? No, it will not. In fact, we will have EXTRA TIME FOR COOKING! Because of no dinner guests. Hah.

We plan to start off by piling the table with small snack-like things, which we will eat throughout the day. This means:
Dolmades
Olives
Smoked salmon spread with cream cheese and rolled up into little parcels
Prosciutto wrapped around pieces of melon
Strawberries**
Blueberries
Mango

There will also be gin and tonics, and vodka and orange for random slurping throughout the afternoon.

Then we are going to have an actual Christmas dinner, in three acts:

Act I
Mushroom and smoked fish canapes (1982 says hi!)
Scallops with lime and vodka sauce

Act II
Cornish game hens with sage and orange glaze
Swedish meatballs
Braised red cabbage
Glazed roast beetroot
Pioneer woman's burgundy mushrooms
Sourdough bread

Act III
Banoffee trifle
Cheese platter

Then we are going to spend the evening drinking mulled wine and port, and eating homemade chocolate truffles.

Yes, it is eclectic. And we will probably die of exploded stomach syndrome before we finish it all. But it is all our favourite foods, and it will be AWESOME.

__________
* Is anyone else a little worried that when you have been talking to a real life colleague or family member recently, you might have mentioned something delicious you are cooking, which they might google in order to find a recipe, and then they might come across your blog? No? Just me, then.

** The best thing about Christmas in the middle of summer is the berries. The worst thing about Christmas in the middle of summer is how the berries were $2.99 a punnet last week, and they miraculously leap up to $6.99 on Christmas Eve. Also that if you want ripe berries on Christmas day, you have to brave the craziness that is the grocery shop a day or two before. In New Zealand, I remember that the milkman used to deliver strawberries along with the milk on Christmas Eve. That was a much better solution.

Christmas greetings and wotnot. Also: eep!

2010-12-23T21:36:00.003+11:00

Greetings from "Oh my god what are we doing holy fuck we are buying a house" land. Yes, it is said all in one string without any punctuation, just like that. Well, maybe there is punctuation of the sort that doesn't have an appropriate symbol other than *%&?!

Yesterday we got pre-pre-approved for a mortgage. This seems to consist of a verbal "She'll be right, mate" from a guy named Matto. (Oh, Australia, I do like you quite a lot actually.)

We haven't found the perfect place yet, but we have now seen a lot of imperfects, and have a very clear idea of what perfect will look like. It will not, for instance, be lacking any sort of heating system, insulation, and functioning ceilings. It will also not smell like Old People. I am currently in love with something completely impractical, but I think that's pretty standard practice when one is house shopping, and I'm sure I'll get over it.

In other exciting news, I made the world's best sourdough bread tonight, and recipe therefore will be posted here forthwith. (Hurrah for two pretentious adverbs in a single sentence! I should win some sort of prize. Perhaps my prize will be another piece of sourdough bread, and a glass of the quite remarkable krupnik from the recipe found here.)

Remind me why we are using a wiki again?

2010-11-09T11:48:00.003+11:00

Me: "Last time we tried to write a document collaboratively, it was a big mess, because of version control problems, and because everyone kept emailing me stuff to add in. And that was only with three people involved! This time there'll be eight of us!"

Boss: "So we could just use the project wiki to develop the document."

Me: "No, because the project wiki is public, and indexed by google. We don't want this document to be public. And we can't set the project wiki to private, because of [stupid software issues]. But we could use google documents to create something we can all access and edit, and that will handle version control for us."

Boss: "Google wha-?"

I explain. He looks blank. "Okay. But just explain to me again. What's a google? Is it like my Firefox thing?"

Realising I should work with what he knows instead, if I actually want him to adopt the technology: "All eight of you already know how wikis work, right? Well in that case, I'll set up a private wiki on [site that we already all use for something else]."

Boss: "Can't we just all email you stuff and get you to keep the versions straight?"

Me: "Can't we just NOT do that?"

Finally everyone agrees to use the private wiki. I set it up, explain to everyone who forgot how to access the site how to find their username and password. Walk a few people through using the system. I set up all the necessary pages and headings so that no one needs to learn any formatting commands, but can just click under the appropriate heading and add text.

Boss: "I want to write all my text in RED!"

Me: "Um, why?"

Boss: "Because that's what colour it is in MS Word when I use track changes! And that way everyone will know it's me!"

Me: "Well, we don't really need to know who wrote what in this document. But if you want to, here's how to format things in red."

Boss: "What? I have to type what? Brackets? And "red"? What a pain! Isn't there a drop-down box in the file-menu-whatsit?"

Me: "You don't HAVE to colour your text."

Boss, in email to the rest of the group: "It looks like it might be too complicated to use the wiki, so I think we should all just type up what we want to add in MS Word, and get StyleyGeek to put it in the wiki for us."

Le Sigh.

Two goodnesses

2010-11-07T13:53:00.002+11:00

For the 1% of you who hasn't already seen this:

From the Rally to Restore Sanity, via Sociological Images

And in other news, you must make this coffee-streusel-walnut-caramel cake. No, really. I don't care if you don't like coffee, or walnuts, or caramel (although if that's true: what is wrong with you?) They all come together to make some sort of magic that is nothing like the individual ingredients. Look, just go and make it. It is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.

More interestingness

2010-11-01T11:24:00.003+11:00

Our small university publisher is being taken over by a Big Name Big Deal publisher. I wonder whether this means the books in press I have stuff in are going to be published with the better imprint? That would make me really quite happy.

It looks like there might be a chance I can change my fellowship to a four-year option (with teaching) instead of the three year (no teaching) one I currently have. *ponder*

And my (new) department is about to advertise a job. They have never ever hired a woman in the long history of the department. And the university is getting progressively more annoyed with them, every time they continue to select the one man out of a pool of highly competitive women. So this time they have decided to advertise specifically for women. I.e. no men can apply.

This is pissing off a lot of people. Mostly men, who would otherwise be applying. But also some women, who feel like they wouldn't be taken seriously if they did get the job, because people wouldn't believe they are good enough to get a job without affirmative action. I don't really know what to think about it, myself. What about you?

Rejection

2010-11-01T11:18:00.004+11:00

I just got the world's nicest rejection letter from the TT job I was waiting to hear from.

I'm really quite ridiculously happy about this rejection. For one thing, because I did. not. want. to have to choose between that job and my fellowship. It would have been a really tough decision, and I would have second-guessed myself for years to come. NO ONE turns down a TT job in a location they would really like to live in. And NO ONE turns down a national fellowship.

I am also happy because it was the first TT job I ever applied for, and I got an interview. That gives me hope for the future.

And finally, they said I gave an excellent interview and was an extremely strong candidate, but the other person was a better fit. I have no trouble believing that. I was such a bad fit for the job (as advertised, anyway) that I almost didn't apply. I still don't really understand why I got an interview.

So yay for rejection! WOO HOO!

Random bullets of "I still can't quite believe it"

2010-10-30T13:28:00.003+11:00

I think I will start my fellowship in April.

April sounds like a good month. My current boss wants to keep me until the end of February, and now that I have some leverage (I can leave any time I want) I get to do fun stuff on the current project. No more data entry!

Between February and April I am going to do... NOTHING.

SRSLY.

I haven't had a holiday where I didn't take work with me since before grad school. Um, 2003, I think. I submitted my PhD half way through my first semester of teaching full time, so yeah, no time off to recover there. I can't think of anything more blissful than four full weeks without any responsibilities. I might not even get out of bed.

When I start, I move buildings/departments/offices within our university. Linguistics at our university is split into two departments, and this fellowship will be held within the other one, since their research focus is more in line with the topic of my new project.

It's a pretty different culture over there. Besides linguists, my current department is full of language teachers and literature specialists.. They also all have huge teaching loads, so everyone is always frantically rushing from one class to another, and it's impossible to schedule social activities.

The other department is full of anthropologists and historians. Anthropologists are weird. They sleep during the day and work at night. They lurk around tearooms and photocopiers taking surreptitious notes about other people. They like seminars and workshops a LOT. They go away to the field for a year at a time and return looking slightly feral, no longer quite in touch with modern society, and smelling faintly of quinine.

The new department has morning and afternoon tea together EVERY DAY. No one teaches. They have weekend retreats in the middle of nowhere. They have secret parties that they don't invite the teaching staff to. (And I just got my first invite to one yesterday). Apart from the PhD students, they are all male. I feel like I am joining some sort of fraternity.

The building my office is in right now is solid and square and conventional. It has windowsills full of parrots, and no air-conditioning. It has one- and two-person offices, depending on one's status. The new building where the "other half" lives is actually three hexagonal three-and-a-half-story buildings connected by random walkways on split half-levels that are only accessible from hidden stairwells. Once inside, no one ever finds their way out again. Staircases move from week to week and sometimes walls spring up in the middle of corridors. The linguists live in two places: the "dungeon" (basement), single-person offices below ground with no windows; and the top level of the building, which has large airy offices that are shared by four to six people apiece. The dungeon is overheated and the upstairs is over-air-conditioned. I wonder where I will be?

Starting April, for the following three years, I get to do nothing but research, all day every day. I have money to go to several conferences a year, including internationally. I can do a whole heap of fieldwork. I can employ a research assistant. My time is my own, and I answer to no one except the funding body, who require annual reports. This degree of freedom makes me kind of dizzy.

I think I will buy a lot of stationery.

The longer version

2010-10-25T18:00:00.003+11:00

I am obsessive.

The national grants that I just got one of (OMFG) were due to be announced today, so like most of the rest of Australian academia, I had the grant funding organisation's webpage open in on my computer all morning, and clicked "refresh" every ~~10 minutes~~ oh who am I kidding— 30 seconds. Sometimes I clicked two or three times in a row. Just in case the first click didn't work.

Click. Click. Click. Click-click. Clickity fucking CLICK.

I had a lunch date, but she canceled, which was good, because that way I could spend more time clicking. Click. Click-click.

Then I had a gym date, which I didn't cancel, because my god I had a lot of nervous energy that needed burning off. I set up filters on AwayFind so that any emails with key words corresponding to the grant or to the TT job I am (still) waiting to hear about would be forwarded to my mobile, and went off to the gym.

Half an hour later, Geekman showed up.

"The grants have been announced," he said, looking glum.
"Oh." I surreptitiously check my phone. Nothing. "So I didn't get mine."
"I couldn't bring myself to look," he said. (I KNOW!)

And would you believe, I actually did another 20 minutes of my workout before I gave up and stomped back to my office, certain I had missed out. (Because of course I hadn't programmed my AwayFind filters to check for emails titled "congratulations", which were all that my inbox was stuffed with.)

Stomp stomp stomp. Stomp-stomp. Stompity.

The first five minutes of the walk back to the office I felt resigned. Of course I didn't get it. I'm nowhere near that good. What did I expect? I still have options for next year. (Even if they suck.)

Stomp stomp stompity.

The next minute or two I spent on fantasizing about getting out of academia. I dreamed a few nights ago that I was working at a carnival as an ice-cream seller. That was a pretty good job.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

Then I got angry. Fucking academia! Why does it suck so much?! Why can't I even get a little bit of a job? Even for a year? Why is it people are happy to pay me to teach undergraduates how to do my subject, but they won't pay me to actually fucking do the research myself?

Stomp fucking stomp. Up the steps towards my building.

Then came shame. I was going to walk down that corridor, and everyone in my department would know I hadn't got the grant, and would think I was pathetic for even trying, and would wonder why I had imagined I was good enough to get a fellowship. I hoped I wouldn't run into anyone.

Scuttle scuttle. Scuttlety. Scut. Hiding my face. Past the open office doors. Trying not to cry.

And my inbox was full of congratulations.

As well as this bizarre and hilarious message from the research office:

Dear grant applicants,

As previously advised, we expect the [national grant] announcements today.

There are 4 categories of emotional response to an grant announcement. For each emotional response there are important and coded rules of post-announcement etiquette that are important to obey.

I identify the 4 categories of emotion below ... Please read on if you want to be optimally prepared to manage your post-announcement experience.  

(1) SMUG AFFIRMATION (approx. 1% of population) 

Characteristics: The grant gets up, but you knew you had this in the bag anyway. You find it ridiculous that the [grant funding body] took 8 months to confirm what was clear on submission: This is great research and you're the only person who can do it.  

Advice: No matter how polite your colleagues are to your face, they envy and hate you in equal measures. Best to keep a low profile for a couple of weeks. DON'T express commiserations to your colleagues who have missed out. The tiniest drop of condescension - real or imagined - could be a death sentence. And don't complain about how the [grant funding body] cut your budget by 30%, and that you can't possibly do your research for only $500k.  

(2) BLISSFUL SURPRISE (approx. 29% of population) 

Characteristics: You really didn't expect this to get up ... and then you get it! A thrilling few seconds of joy followed by oceans of relief ... followed by the sobering realization that you now have to fulfil all the insane promises you made to the [grant funding body].  

Advice: Please, no whooping, high-fiving or popping of champagne corks in the corridors. Behind those closed office doors are people who missed out and some of them are wishing you harm. Best to lower the blinds, shut the door, and jump up and down in silent and discrete excitement.  

(3) RESIGNED HOPELESSNESS (approx. 20% of population) 

Characteristics: You knew you were never going to get this grant. Maybe the reviews were cranky; maybe you think the [grant funding body] are prejudiced against you / your field / your methods; maybe you've been rejected so many times in the past you're just broken. When it comes, the rejection is a miserable full stop on an 8 month journey of pain and ritual humiliation.  

Advice: Congratulations, you're now 1 year closer to the moment when your grant will get up. You're good enough, and your efforts are noticed and respected. Come along to the Grant development Workshop in November (more soon on this). We can rebuild you.  

(4) GUT-CHURNING DISAPPOINTMENT / VENGEFULNESS (c. 50%)

 Characteristics: You put a lot of work into this, the project was good, the reviews promising. Then BAM! ... Nothing. A few moments of numb denial followed by an emotional descent so steep that you get vertigo.

  Advice: When your disappointment morphs into a blistering rage and resentment - as it surely will - there are certain things to remember:  
If you're slurring your words, now's not the time to confront that colleague who never believed in you or to send that e-mail to the [grant funding body] 
Don't blame yourself: There's surprisingly little evidence that you can "jinx" a proposal by secretly thinking to yourself that you've got a good chance this time
Although your escape fantasies are understandable, it is quite rare that people transition from being academics to being world-famous actors, writers, or inventors
Don't lash out at your friends, family or pets. They don't really care that your grant didn't get up and love you just the way you are.

What worries me is the number of warnings in that email about colleagues wishing you physical harm. Should I be arming myself before going to campus tomorrow?

Oh. My.

2010-10-25T14:32:00.003+11:00

I still haven't heard about the TT job. Which probably means I'm out of the running.

But I don't care!

Why don't I care?

Because my name is on this list (pdf).

I am now sitting here staring blankly at my computer screen, because getting one of these fellowships is the main thing I have been working towards for the past three years, and now I have it, I don't know what to do.

Drink wine, perhaps. Yes. That's what to do.

I'm going to hear about a job tomorrow

2010-10-17T19:16:00.002+11:00

A full time, tenure-track job. I interviewed last week. They said they'd contact me by tomorrow.

Oh my.

Update: the selection committee is "having trouble coming to a decision", so they won't be able to let me know until later in the week. That's good, right? (Or at least, it's not bad.)

Wow

2010-09-26T12:32:00.002+10:00

We just caught a student who had posted flyers around the department(!) asking to buy an essay for one of her classes.

Problem is, she hadn't had any takers yet, so hasn't actually committed the crime. Can we "prosecute" her (i.e. kick her out) for planning to cheat? Time will tell.

I think an elaborate sting operation would have been more fun, myself.

Tragic, but necessary.

2010-09-24T21:44:00.002+10:00

Yes, I did just add a new category to my blog, and went through back-labeling posts. It's called "what the fuck is wrong with hairdressers?"

This is why I only go to the hairdresser once a year

2010-09-24T21:25:00.004+10:00

Hairdresser: "After this cut, I'm off for the day. I'm going to go to the supermarket and buy a family-sized block of chocolate and eat it all by myself."
Me: "I'm impressed! I think I'd feel awful if I ate that much chocolate at once!"
Hairdresser: "You mean you'd feel guilty? Because of cheating on your diet?"
Me: "Oh, no, I just mean I'd feel sick. I'm not on a diet."

She steps back and looks me up and down. "Really? Huh."

Then, five minutes later:

Hairdresser: "So, I'm moving house right now, and it's so stressful."
Me: "I know what you mean. Do you live on your own, or share?"
Hairdresser: "On my own."
Me: "Well, then at least moving doesn't mean worrying about whether your new housemates will be crazy people, huh?"
Hairdresser: "Crazy people? Oh, like Chinese or something?"
Me *blink blink*: "No, I mean CRAZY* people."
Hairdresser: "Oh, like gays."
Me: "What??? No! Like people who steal your underpants or label the toilet paper or insist that you vacuum the cat or something."
Hairdresser: "People like that are probably druggies. You have to watch out for druggies."
Me, carefully: "Uh huh?"
Hairdresser: "Yeah, my mum's a druggie."
Me: "Oh, really? I'm sorry. That must be hard."
Hairdresser: "Yeah, like she's on these anti-depressants and vitamins and stuff. The doctor prescribes them, but it's just as bad as pot or meth, you know?"

File under "not going there again". Which is sad, because she did a cute cut:

___________

* Like hairdressers, for instance.

Father knows best

2010-09-14T23:51:00.004+10:00

This is old news, but it never fails to completely amaze me, when I stop to consider it, what the grant-awarding body who funded our current project considered "necessary" and "unnecessary".

Our project, anonymized slightly for Google avoidance, is basically the following:

1. Create innovative database that no one else has tried to build before, with exciting mapping interfaces and automatic language reconstruction tools.
2. Find all historical and current data ever on [huge topic] for any of 1000 languages and enter them into this database (a.k.a crucial but mind-numbing research assistant drudge-work).
3. ...
4. PROFIT!!!

(Okay, you can forget about #3 and #4. I couldn't help myself.)

Anyway, guess what the grant organisation decided to cut from our budget? (Because, given the nature of the project as described in 1 and 2, there's clearly no need for these items at all.)

Ready?

........

1. Our entire programming budget.
2. Research assistants.

Yeah.

The elves and the shoemaker: academic version

2010-09-12T19:33:00.002+10:00

I'm currently collaborating with someone on a joint grant application. She has an amazing amount of energy and enthusiasm, so that ideas and drafts(!) just seem to keep bubbling out of her at a rate I can't keep up with.

It's a little awkward, in that I have between half an hour to an hour per day that I can afford to devote to this project, and it takes about that long each day to catch up with reading the stuff she sent me since the last time.

The wonderful thing, though, is that there's a time difference of 8 hours between us. (She is based in Germany.) That means I go to bed each night, and when I get up in the morning, sitting in my email inbox are 10-20 pages of writing that magically happened while I was asleep.

I have to find a way to make this happen with all my projects.

Scheduling committee meetings... by committee

2010-09-10T16:25:00.001+10:00

This post at Bardiac's reminded me of a committee meeting yesterday.

We were just winding up and the usual question, "When shall ~~we three~~ we eight meet again?" was asked.

"I'm away for a couple of weeks in October," said one person.
"Which weeks?"
"All of them. And November."

"I'm away from next week until October," said someone else.

"What about our [slightly overlapping but not really the same committee] meeting on Monday?"

"Oh, no, I'll be around for that. So I guess we could talk some more about the issues we didn't get to today on Monday."

"Will everyone be at Monday's meeting?" someone asked.

General agreement.

"Well then, that seems like a good solution."

Just as we finish clearing off the table, some ~~bastard~~ helpful soul pipes up, "So we're meeting before Monday's meeting, then?"

And yes, it was generally agreed to have a pre-meeting meeting on Monday.

Sigh.

Thirteen - uh four - ways of looking at an earthquake

2010-09-04T20:37:00.004+10:00

Conflicting reports about the Christchurch earthquake:

Metafilter:
"Strong quake ay bro?"
"Yis bro, pretty strong."
"How strong would you say bro?"
"Strong as bro. Strong as."

My father (via email):
"You will hear that we've had a rather large earthquake in Christchurch (7.4). Just to let you know I’m okay. Couple of book cases fell over and china cabinet – so had to clean up broken crockery and now need to restore order to my library. I see on Facebook that most of my friends are bemoaning disorder to their book shelves. Better get back to work and clean up things – keep finding things that have fallen over. Hope you are well."

A sensible friend (via email):
"The only damage in our family was a broken mirror. Don’t trust what you see on TV – it’s mostly brick buildings in the inner city (which has been sealed off) that have been badly harmed, and even there it’s mostly the same buildings shot from different angles. Outside the inner city, it’s just chimneys and windows. And burglar alarms rending the night."

My mother (via phone, crying):
"It's so scary! And I couldn't sleep all night because I sat at the top of the stairs waiting for aftershocks! Because my roof might have fallen in! And I won't sleep tonight, because I don't think I should go upstairs until it's all over! And I'm so frightened! And I can't leave town because another earthquake might happen when I'm in my car and a bridge might collapse! And I'm too scared to leave the house! But I'm scared my house will fall down! And I need to go to church but I'm too scared to go into the city! The buildings might fall on my car! Or I might get shot by looters! And the radio says not to flush the toilet, but I was so scared that I really needed to take a shit, so I got a black plastic rubbish bag and put it into a bucket and—"

"You know what, Mum? I don't think I need to hear this."

"But you do! You NEED. TO. KNOW.

A quickie

2010-09-01T15:31:00.004+10:00

Please don't hold your conference two days before Christmas.

That is all.

No, wait, actually, that isn't all. While we are at it, here's a longer wish list:

Please don't send me an email, then call me up to tell me what your email says, then drop by my office to tell me the same thing again. Some of us have work to do.

If you are "collaborating" with me, please don't hassle me for months about the importance of getting an application written long before a deadline, then refuse to look at draft of said application until a few days before said deadline.

Especially if you then want (me) to totally rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

Please don't ask me to guest teach your class, then micro-manage every aspect of my lesson plan so that you might as well just have written the damn thing yourself and asked me to deliver it word for word.

If you are going to micro-manage my lesson plan, please make time to read it through well in advance, so that you don't ask me to redesign it from scratch an hour before class begins.

Please give me a large piece of chocolate cake and several ~~glasses~~ bottles of red wine.

What's on your academic wish list today?

Snakes! In a box!

2010-08-30T23:01:00.002+10:00

At a market the other day, we found this guy looking quite unperturbed by the fact that one of his snakes was making a break for it:

The very next day, we got to see this beauty in the wild.

Yes, we just spent the weekend up North.

Here is one reason why we didn't go swimming. (Yes, this was also in the wild, on the Daintree River.)

This was another:

And just for good luck:

How does that work?

2010-08-26T10:21:00.002+10:00

Referee: "So, do you really want this job?"
Me: "Yes!"
Referee: "Okay then, I'll write you an excellent reference."

So, if I had only sort of wanted the job, he'd have written me a mediocre reference? WTF?

I can haz coffee and cake?

2010-08-24T20:47:00.003+10:00

Yes, this bill originally said "Haz(elnut) truff(le) latte".

No, we couldn't help ourselves.

Yes, they still processed it. Without laughing, even. N00bs.

Skiing

2010-08-23T23:26:00.002+10:00

Some photos from our cross-country skiing trip the other day:

The road on the way there, looking stereotypically Australian and as though we weren't likely to find any snow any time soon: nah, mate.
To be honest, we were still several hours drive away from the snow at that point. (I'm so envious of people like Bardiac who can step outside their door in winter and ski.)

More of the Australian stereotype:
I wish we'd got photos of the kangaroos in the snow as well, in order to collect the full set of stereotype, but they hop hop hoppity struggled away before we had a chance to wrestle our cameras out.

Some of our group spent a lot of time having little rests in the snow.

This is the same guy. I was having a good laugh at his expense while examining this photo, until I saw the tiny flat smudge of yellow about a third of the way from the right. I zoomed in, and yes, that is me. Face-planted.

And the real result of the day: my arse-bruise. More of an upper-thigh bruise, really, but arse-bruise sounds much more exciting.

More (photos, not arse-bruises) here.

How to communicate with the natives

2010-08-22T14:16:00.002+10:00

Lately I've been spending a lot of time poking around in elderly grammars and dictionaries of Aboriginal Australian languages. Here are a few of my favourite (i.e. most horrifying) finds:

From a language sketch from 1858, the following sentences are translated (since presumably these are the sorts of communications one might need to make with the "natives"):

"Now my blackfellows, make haste and get your breakfast. We will be going."

"Go and fetch them, there's a good fellow!"

"You are lazy! Dry your trousers!"

"Come here tomorrow and cut me some wood and me give you white money."

From a book of a similar age, the paradigm for "you are a harlot, she is a harlot, they are all harlots".

And from the latter book, a word is given that is translated as "intercourse, in both the good and the crude sense".

(And here was me thinking that the "good" sense was the crude sense.)

Hop hop hoppity PLOP

2010-08-21T19:34:00.003+10:00

Kangaroos hopping (well, struggling, really) through the snow are awesome. And kind of surreal.

I did a ridiculous amount of cross-country skiing (a.k.a. cross-country face-planting) today. With a fresh dump of powder and perfect weather, it was the best day I've had in ages.

Photos later. Including my spectacular arse-bruise.

I totally get why academics reply to emails with "Screw you"

2010-08-18T21:36:00.006+10:00

Seriously: this is why email was invented

Several months ago, I sent Dr Fruitloop the answers to a survey that we are filling out jointly, the answers to which will be included in a book another colleague is compiling. She said she would add to the survey and forward it to the editor.

Three weeks ago I received an email from the editor asking for our survey anwers by the end of the month. I check with the editor, and no, he definitely never received our survey.

I email Dr Fruitloop, reminding her that sending our answers to the editor was getting urgent, that he needs them by the end of August, and offering to compile and forward them myself if she'd just email me her contribution.

"That is strange," she says. "I forwarded our survey to the editor months ago. I suppose he hasn't had time to look at it yet. But I will be seeing him in October, so will ask him about it then."

Yeah... no.

**********

Other exciting adventures with Dr Fruitloop

In November I am going to be visiting the country where Dr Fruitloop works. Back in February she already started telling me how essential it was for us to meet and work together, sharing data and collaborating on a paper or two. When I told her in April that I would be coming over in November she expressed excitement and tried to persuade me to plan several weeks in her city. I explained that I could only manage one week, as I had conferences and other obligations, but that I would be available the whole week for us to work together. Asked if she had a preference for which week in November, since I could arrange my travel to be with her for any of three different periods. No, no, any of them would be fine.

Just before I booked my tickets last month, I emailed her again and confirmed that yes, the week I had in mind was good, she would be there, we could work together. Booked my tickets. Sent her the dates.

Today I get this email:

"I am looking forward to meeting you. I should warn you, though, I will be very busy that week. Please let me know what day you would like to meet so that I can set aside some time."

And now I congratulate myself heartily. When I booked my tickets, I paid a little extra so that I could retain a back-up option. (Let's just say I had a feeling about this woman.) And now it looks like I'll be spending that week ~~partying~~ collaborating with friends in Amsterdam instead.

I know how he felt, but... wow.

2010-08-17T18:17:00.003+10:00

Email from an editor, a colleague of mine, to a potential contributor:

"Dear Author, thank you for your submission. We feel that it has great potential, but we would need you to expand the background section. Also, your use of [technical term 1] and [technical term 2] is unusual, so we would ask you to reconsider this and if you do choose to use them, please explain your definition in the paper, and justify using them this way."

By return email five minutes later (so clearly a carefully considered response).

"Screw you. I won't use ANY technical terms then. See if I care!"

Yes, this really happened.

Inspired marketing

2010-08-10T14:05:00.001+10:00

A couple of awesome signs I saw in shops lately:

Strange things about job hunting

2010-08-09T19:11:00.005+10:00

The weirdest thing to me about the jobs I've applied for recently is that the application requirements are so much less work than grant applications are. You can write a job application in a day if you have to (not that I would recommend that). For a grant application you need months. My last grant application was 127 pages long, not counting the fact that it had to be submitted in triplicate. It had five separate sections, all of which had at least five more multi-page subsections, and one of which required 30 pages of associated text. Then you had to add your CV, a detailed budget, a budget justification, etc.

The last job application I wrote specified a 1-page cover letter and a CV and absolutely-do-not-send-extra-unsolicited-material-kthxbai.

While I understand that job committees are far too busy to read 127 pages of application, and grant-granting committees clearly have nothing better to do, it seems wrong that so much more effort goes into something that at most will give you a three-year position, while a page of writing, a CV, and an interview could put you somewhere for the rest of your life.

Strange thing #2
I always assumed it would be a good idea, when on the job market, to have a professional web page. Or at least a presence on somewhere like academia.edu. Now, however, I am glad not to have the former, and regret a little bit setting up the latter. Every job application is a case of framing yourself so you sound like the person they are looking for. Let's say my PhD is, for the sake of argument, in macaroni-sculpture, I TAed for Eating Paste 101 and I did some advanced coursework in Noodles Throughout the Ages. Also, I have one paper out on an analysis of Glittery Sparkliness in Children's Crafts, and am currently working on one on Why 5-year-olds Suck at Art.

Okay, so I see myself as moving into the area of children's art, but there aren't any jobs in that right now, and I'd be happy to try and diversify into The History of Pasta, or Edible Artwork, or even Child Development. For jobs in each of those fields I'm going to emphasise very different parts of my experience, leave out some irrelevant stuff, and claim that oh yes, the subject you need taught is my favourite ever discipline and I can't wait to do more of it.

If someone reading one of those job applications happens to look at my web page or academia.edu entry and it's all children's art yay! with no mention at all of whatever I just claimed to be most interested in, they are going to be On To Me (TM).

Strange-but-related thing #3
Knowing the people in the department that is advertising (or more specifically, them knowing you): also not so great akshully. For similar reasons to the above. You might think you would be perfectly competent teaching Edible Artwork and would be willing to shift your research in the direction of The History of Pasta, but if they know that your dissertation was all about macaroni sculpture, that you presented papers on macaroni sculpture at three conferences in the past year, and (worst of all) if they were present when you got drunk at dinner a few months ago and talked about how you are glad you don't have to employ any of that stupid history theory stuff in your research, you are... doomed.

And hopefully we all feel better about our job chances now for reading this. Oh yeah. I know I do.

DOOOMED.

Doors: who needs 'em?

2010-08-02T20:57:00.002+10:00

Of all the conversations I recorded and transcribed during my time on Pirate Island, some of my favourites are practically useless for linguistic purposes, but still amusing snippets of day-to-day life. Like the following.

The context was that Edward, my host, was just finishing up a wood carving that was to be a gift to a nephew on his upcoming birthday.

Edward: "And after this one, I has another project."
Me: "Oh yeah? What is it?"
Edward: "Fixing Kori's door."
Me: "What's wrong with Kori's door?"
Edward: "He haven't got no door."

Let them stare, let them stare, let them stare!

2010-07-31T19:24:00.002+10:00

Walking home through town just now after a mid-winter Christmas yoga party*, I thought people were looking at me funny because I was carrying a towel. Now that I'm home I realise that no, it might have had something to do with the tinsel around my neck and candy canes in my hair.

Oh well.

_________

* like a real party, but with more exercise.

Harmless and misguided advice

2010-07-28T21:33:00.002+10:00

At a career-coaching workshop today (don't ask), we were given the advice that we will come across more positively (and feel more capable) if we always replace the word but with and.

This is not a smart thing to say to a bunch of academics.

Philosopher: "But—"
Workshop coordinator: *Ahem*
Philosopher: "AND the two are not logically equivalent."

Computer science guy: "If I do that in my code, my compiler will barf."

Linguist: "Sometimes 'and' doesn't make grammatical sense!"

We all start coming up with impossible examples of and-sentences, or ones where the sense changes dramatically if you switch from but:

"The party was all and over, when they started clearing up."
"Everyone and my father showed up to my graduation."
"I planned to go to the gym and I didn't want to."
"I would have won the Nobel Prize, and there isn't one for sky-diving."

"People! People!" said the coordinator, exasperated. "Just try it, okay? It really works! Why, just recently I had a client who kept saying how he really wanted to take an expensive training course, but he needed to find enough money. Finally, I challenged him to turn that but into an and. So he tried it out: 'I really want to take that training course, and I need to find the money for it.' And just like that, he turned things around! Now he's taken the course!"

I asked, "Where did he get the money?"

"I don't know," said the coordinator, with a you are missing the point glare. "I guess he used a credit card."

I smile. "So he did the training course AND he's now hugely in debt?"

More on the Robinson Crusoe experience

2010-07-24T13:03:00.005+10:00

One of the problems with my beautiful Pirate Island* is that there is really no way to get there or back. Of course, this is also one of the advantages, as it's the reason it has kind of escaped academic notice and also why it has managed to remain mostly uninfluenced by tourists or the rest of the world.

If you want to go to Pirate Island, here's what you do. You call up the one and only shipping company that is responsible for delivering supplies (a couple of times a year, on a totally irregular basis.) You have this conversation:
"So, when do you think the next boat will be going to Pirate Island?"
"Um, maybe later this year."
"So, June, July, August?"
"Yeah, probably. Sometime then."
"Okay, I'll call back in June."

Then in June: "Hi, when will the boat be going?"
"Maybe next week? Maybe next month?"
"When do you think you'll know?"
"Maybe next week? Maybe next month?"
"I would like to get a lift with the boat. Can you call me when it's going?"
"We probably won't know until the day before." (Note: it would be very difficult to get a flight out to where the boat leaves from with less than 24 hours notice.)
*sigh*

A week later: "So, how's it going with that boat?"
"Oh, we just left. But there'll probably be another one in December. Or maybe February."

So then you resort to Plan B. Plan B is that you book a flight to the closest island (still 600 km away), and then go and hang out at the docks every day, hassling the private yachts moored there until someone agrees to do a little detour (of about 200 km) and drop you off on Pirate Island on their way elsewhere. This option only applies from July to September, as that's the only time the wind and currents cooperate enough for a sailboat to approach the island. Fortunately, it takes about 10 days to find a boat willing to take you, so you have ten days of ~~enforced cocktail drinking on the beach~~
busy preparation for fieldwork:
Unfortunately, what nobody told me until AFTER I landed on Pirate Island, is that there's a little conspiracy which might stop you getting off again. First, yachts kind of depend on currents and winds, which only let them go in one direction past the Island. This means you aren't going to get a hitch-hiking opportunity to go back to your original departure point. Secondly, the only place yachts are going when they leave Pirate Island is to another country. And as Pirate Island isn't an official point of departure for the country it belongs to, it's actually illegal for you to hitchhike off it with one of those yachts. Now, I did kind of know about this, but all the yachties I spoke to before I left said, "Yeah yeah, but no one really cares about that. If it was me, I'd be happy to take you anyway."

Turns out, tiny islands full of people who get little opportunity to exercise their authority over people outside of their own family LOVE bureaucracy. Oh yeah. And there is NO WAY they are letting you depart without the proper paperwork.

One of the locals, inspecting my research for compliance with government regulations

Once I discovered all this, I realised I was going to be stuck on Pirate Island for the rest of my life.

Fortunately for me, for the first time in about 30 years, a government boat was doing a tour of all the islands in order to audit them and make sure they were complying with all government regulations. (Like, Dude, really: use life-jackets. And maybe your kids should actually attend school sometimes. And when did you last have a pap smear? What? No doctor? That's no excuse.) They were on a boat with an engine, and they were going back to the main island. And they had room for a stray linguist. Well, not really: they were licensed to carry 6 people, but ended up taking 11.

The one point of connection with the outside world, and how I found out about the incoming government boat

On the one hand it was probably lucky that I had visions of having to stay on the island forever. The seasickness on the outward trip was so horrific (five solid days of throwing up every time I opened my eyes), that it took a lot to convince me to ever set foot on a boat again. The only thing worse than that would have been... well, staying. It wasn't until about two weeks before I left that I heard about the government boat that would be coming through, and by then my only reaction was a heart-felt hallelujah! Unfortunately, what I heard was, "Government boat coming. You can get a lift home. Maybe on Wednesday." Then, "Boat maybe not coming Wednesday. Maybe Friday." Then, "I saw the boat this morning! Nah, just joking you. Ha ha!" Then, "There's a boat coming in! Probably your boat, eh! You can go home! No, wait, wrong boat. Just some French tourist."

Anyway, all of this is background to the real point of this post, which is that I've just been looking back through the diary I kept during the trip, and re-discovered my journal entries for the final few days on the island. This is how they began:

31/08/09
The government boat** is supposed to arrive today. No sign yet.

4/09/09
The yachts all had to leave last night because the wind changed to the North. Does this mean more delay for the S.C.? Besides missing my flight and imperiling my job, I'll go mad if I'm trapped here much longer.

5/09/09
Where is my boat?

[At this point, I seem to have given up keeping the diary, and instead have started writing personal stuff directly into my fieldwork notebook. (I told you I'd go mad.)]

9/09/09
[Scrawled underneath a description of accent differences between women and men]
Still no freaking boat.

10/09/09
[Next to a set of examples of question formation]
The boat arrived last night but has engine trouble and has torn its sail. The one person with mechanical skills is refusing to help repair it because the boat owner did something to piss them off three years ago. I'm never going to get out of here.

11/09/09
[Under a description of passive constructions]
I want to go home.

And then, it appears, I did.

Waving goodbye as the dinghy moves away from the shore, carrying me to the boat which would carry me to the main island, which had a taxi which would carry me to the airport, where an aeroplane would carry me (six days later, without any sleep, shower or change of clothes—sorry, fellow passengers!) HOME.

The most beautiful sight I saw all month

___________

* Yes, this is a pseudonym, but it's what people in my department generally refer to it as.
**the initials of which are S.C.

Tips for the yoga n00b

2010-07-21T08:19:00.001+10:00

or: I went to yoga four days in a row and now I think I might die.

Yoga: yes or no? Do we like it? I think I like it. I was sucked in by a special deal from a new yoga studio where you pay $20 and can attend as many classes as you like for the next 20 days. Because I am a cheapskate and like to get value for money, I was going to attend ALL OF THEM, WOO-HOO! Then it turned out there are something like 15 classes a day, so I lowered my expectations. But probably not lowly enough.

And now I have questions for any experienced yogis among you:

Am I meant to feel like this? By "this", I mean: after each class I feel like I'm going to throw up. I get a pounding headache, which sometimes starts during the class. And I am incapable of doing anything else all evening except lying on the couch shaking. I have tried drinking more water, drinking less water, eating beforehand, not eating beforehand, pushing myself in class, taking it easy in class: it all makes no difference. Is it just an adjustment period? Is it the heat? (The room is set to 32 C (90 F)). And if anyone starts in with "elimination of toxins" I want peer-reviewed citations from medical journals.

Why is downward-facing dog so hard? The teacher keeps saying it is a relaxing posture. I disagree. It is an arm-trembling, shoulder-cramping, blood-rushing-to-the-head posture. Am I doing it wrong? Are there ways to make it easier? And as for raising a leg, ha ha ha, don't even think about it.

Holding my arms in the air for minutes on end, no matter what the posture is. It ****ing hurts. Let's just not, okay?

I'm pretty sure none of these can be a strength issue, because I'm pretty strong. I have almost no flexibility and (clearly) no stamina, though, so I guess that's the problem.

How long until it gets easier?

Aha!

2010-07-19T21:11:00.003+10:00

I finally figured out what happened to my blog roll. I used to have two blog rolls: one for the blogs I liked, and one for the blogs I really really really OMG liked. Then I decided that was promoting a hierarchical undemocratic society, or something, and got rid of the überblogger list.

Which—duh—meant all my absolute favouritest bloggers were no longer listed anywhere at all.

So the take-home lesson from all this is this: if you noticed you were not on my blog roll when I did my little spot of housekeeping the other day, you should take it as a compliment.

Question for my American peeps!

2010-07-18T12:24:00.002+10:00

In Australia we don't have "composition" courses at our universities. You, as I understand it, do.

All I really know about these classes is informed by my extensive knowledge of academic blogs, so my understanding might be a little bit biased. (Y'think? Yes. You talking to yourself? Yes.) As far as I know, composition courses are usually taught by adjuncts or TAs in the English department, in many places are compulsory for students from all disciplines, not just literature or language majors, and involve lots of practice in writing academic-style texts. (Please correct any misapprehensions here.)

So I was recently talking to some fellow post-PhD wannabe academics, and we were commiserating about how even the scummiest low-level underpaid adjunct jobs are hard to come by. We need more badly paid teaching positions that are only semi in-our-fields and for which we are overqualified! Yeah! And since these guys are in English, they suggested that we could create sucky jobs for all of us if we could only persuade the university to bring in composition courses. They then talked to their HOD, and they seem interested, and it looks like the English department might be willing to try it in collaboration with linguistics (i.e. me).

My questions to you are the following:

Is this a really bad idea?
Do composition courses work? Do students improve their writing skills through direct instruction in composition more than they would just be writing regularly in their own disciplines over the three year undergraduate period?
Assuming that there is no way in hell we would be able to make these courses compulsory, how could we avoid turning them into English-for-second-language-learners classes? (We have a large non-native English speaking population here, and for obvious reasons, composition courses are likely to appeal to them more than they would to the average student).
The English department people are considering trying to attract public servants to these courses too (public servants taking one-off university classes are a lucrative and sought-after market in this city, as their departments happily pay full fees). Do you think it would be possible to create some sort of coherent writing course that would work for both academically-oriented undergraduates and professional public service writing? (Personally, I think it sounds really difficult, but perhaps not impossible, given creative course design).
If you have taught composition, do you focus on academic writing as a genre, or more generally on constructing coherent, grammatical, well-phrased texts?
Anything else we should be bearing in mind?

While we were sleeping

2010-07-16T16:49:00.006+10:00

Well, okay, while I was having a little hiatus over the past year or so, lots of things happened. Some of them are deadly boring: I went to bed and got up more than 300 times. I had breakfast a lot. I wrote a lot of sentences. I'm pretty sure I showered. You don't need to hear about all that.

What you do need to hear about is my super cool field trip to my super cool secret location with the super cool grant funding that I did actually end up getting. I'm going to continue being cryptic about the location and all, since it is also super googleable, and now I am starting to make a name for myself in writing about it. But I'll post some little anecdotes now and again in this space, just so you don't feel you missed out.

For now, a handful of photos.

The island spent a lot of time trying to impersonate a postcard:

This is the main "town":

And this is what's for dinner (on special occasions: usually it would just be fish and rice):

Where to even start?

2010-07-15T09:45:00.004+10:00

"Look, two of the cooks in this restaurant are orientals! Do you suppose orientals have a special talent for cooking?"

And not only did they have no idea why that would be considered offensive, but the only lesson they seem to have taken from my white privilege/racism 101 lecture was that you shouldn't call people "orientals"—or at least not when I'm in hearing distance.

Why yes, I have been visiting family.

Housekeeping

2010-07-10T16:23:00.001+10:00

I updated my blog roll, and removed all the blogs which no longer had functioning URLs or had been eaten by spambots, or gone into hiding, etc.

It's kind of sad how many of them that was, in the one year since I stopped writing here. Time moves fast in the blogging world.

If you aren't there (anymore) and would like to be, please let me know. I didn't remove you because I hate you. Really.

My next book proposal is going to someone with a promotional budget

2010-07-07T18:45:00.003+10:00

I'm at the national conference for my discipline in Australia right now, and went to the book exhibition today (where I spent $98 - shh! Don't tell Geekman!)

Those of you who know my real name will be able to imagine how exciting it was to see this table. (Assuming the resolution is high enough, anyway).

It's my book! My book!

And only a little bit spoiled by the highly professional sign the publishers used to label their table.

Classy, guys. Classy.

I say "R7"; you hear "ass heaven", and really the product marketing team should have thought of that

2010-07-03T21:25:00.005+10:00

I bought one of these the other day and this morning it finally arrived!

(Image shamelessly stolen from random google images search, as I currently don't have a functioning camera).

Although it looks like an e-book reader, it is really one of these in disguise.* That is, sure, it reads e-books, but it has a fully functioning Ubuntu system under the hood, and you can do anything with it that its frankly rather embarrassing 600 MHz processor and 256 MB of memory allows you to. I actually bought it for working on at cafes and the like, and together with a USB keyboard like this (still in the mail), it will be almost like having an entire desktop computer (from 1998) that miraculously weighs less than a pound and fits in a purse. It has practically no hard drive space either but I'll buy it a pet 16 GB SD card (once I get over my rage at having tried to do so on eBay last week and getting scammed), and together with dropbox, which I use for just about all my files anyhow, that should be plenty of room.

So not really an iPad killer, but perhaps a netbook-lust killer. I was deluded for a while into thinking I wanted a netbook, but this is even more portable, cuter, runs linux out of the box, and has a touchscreen.** For $350 AUD, that's pretty good going. I'm currently trying to build it a little case, and a stand, and kiss it gently and tell it it's pretty and all the things one does with a brand new gadget.

________
* But lighter, and without the parallel WinCE and Android OSes taking up extra space.

**Of course, what I really (truly madly deeply) wanted was one of these or these. Mysteriously, however, all smartbooks seem to have disappeared from the market before they even hit it. (Technically the Always Innovating smartbook hasn't quite disappeared, but I find their statement under the "order" tab a little suspicious: "The current Touch Book production is in stand-by and will resume in the summer [this statement has been up since January] when we will release our newest and craziest innovation. Ordering today ensures you a better place in the queue list, and you will be offered the option to upgrade." No one except me seems surprised by this bellyflop. After all, who wants a tiny, cheap Linux-based tablet with a 10-hour battery life and detachable keyboard? Um, me. That's exactly what I wanted. So I had to damn well build it myself (said the little red hen). And she did.

Jobs

2010-07-03T15:50:00.004+10:00

I have one grant application under consideration, and have to complete and send in another two in the next three months.

There are two job applications due next week. One due at the end of July. And our department will be advertising at least one position later this year.

One of these things has got to work out, right?

Sometimes I allow myself to imagine, for just a second, that more than one of were to work out. And! And! I would have a choice. A delicious tasty choice about where to work. Wouldn't that be lovely?

But I'd settle for one.

What I really look like

2010-07-01T09:20:00.003+10:00

Once upon a time, I used to be a penguin. While cleaning out my mother's storage space a few months ago, we found photographic evidence.

I just thought you'd want to know.

See me make noob mistakes

2010-06-29T13:51:00.003+10:00

A little tip to my past self and anyone else in a similar position

When you see a job opening that looks really awesome and that you plan on applying for, do NOT send out feelers to people who are better suited for it than you are, to see if they will be applying too. Because if they weren't already, they ARE NOW.

Hrmph. At least they're grateful to me for pointing it out.

So that was weird

2010-06-29T09:10:00.002+10:00

I was just cycling along the footpath (which is legal in my state), and almost got run over by an oncoming car, driving at full speed, ALSO along the footpath.

Car chase? There was no obvious pursuit. Maybe he was trying to escape the imaginary policemen in his head.

In other news, I think I just snubbed the Dean. Passed a vaguely-familiar looking woman just outside our department, who grinned at me like a manic shark. I gave her my best "I don't smile at strangers this early in the morning, you freak" ~~glare~~ uncertain half-smile back. Five minutes later, I NOW realise who it was. Oops.

The longer version

2010-06-28T15:13:00.001+10:00

So um, yeah. How about that? It turns out that the Real World was not all it was cut out to be. Also, Facebook turned out not to be the Real World. And when it came to the REAL Real World, I turned out not to be very good at it, or at least not as good at it as I am at blogging.

Most of the issues surrounding why I stopped blogging still stand, of course. I've decided to try to avoid posting anything here that might offend reasonable colleagues, family members, etc.* I'm sure I can still come up with amusing inoffensive things to say, and save the best of my obnoxiousness for anecdotes about random strangers. (Note to self: disguise all stories about family and colleagues so that everyone thinks they are referring to "random strangers").

I have also decided to no longer check the blog's stats, or at least not the IP addresses of people reading. Or at the very least, not to memorise the IP addresses of computers inside my department. Hmm... maybe I'm not as committed to this as I had thought I was.

And finally, it turns out that the whole not-enjoying-blogging-anymore thing was related to a general not-enjoying-anything-anymore thing, which was alleviated quite nicely through a well-calibrated prescription of happy pills. Better living through adjustment of brain chemistry FTW!

And now I will happily burrow my way back into my soft warm blog and reacquaint myself with you all in the comments. Hurrah!

________________

* Unreasonable colleagues and family members, on the other hand, can just suck it.

tap tap tap Is this thing still on?

2010-06-28T08:50:00.001+10:00

I might be back.

Last post

2009-02-25T22:00:00.003+11:00

I've decided to stop updating this blog. There's a whole bunch of reasons why. In no particular order:

1. I feel like this was a record of my time as a grad student, and that period in my life has been over for a while now.

2. I actually have a job that it looks like I might quite enjoy. And, you know, maybe even want to keep. If I post rude things about the other project members on the internet behind their backs, maybe I won't get to keep it after all. And without posting rude things about my colleagues, maybe I won't have enough blogging material (see point 4).

3. In the last couple of weeks, I've become aware that a few colleagues, both at my university, and people I know in a professional setting from other universities, have started reading here. This feels really weird to me.*

For those of you who've been hanging around since forever, you may remember that a couple of years ago a post here was featured on Lifehacker, and I got 7000 hits by lunchtime. My writing muscles were completely paralysed for the next few days, mainly because I had no real sense of who my audience was. This feels a bit like that, except maybe from the opposite direction. I do have a clear sense of who my audience is, and it's become a bit too diverse for comfort. Up until recently, I think most of my readers were other pseudonymous bloggers with whom I had a sort of reciprocal reading arrangement. Now I think maybe close to half my daily hits are people from my real life. And that just feels odd. I'm thinking I might try, you know, TALKING to people instead of blogging.

4. I've run out of parrots. I've posted over 100 photos of parrots, and that's pretty much all there is. Yes, in the whole of Australia.

5. I've heard there's this thing called the Real World. I'm thinking about spending some time in it. Well, either that or on Facebook.

I think I had some more reasons, but I've been putting off writing this post for so long that I've forgotten them all. (Reason #6: I keep on putting off writing here, which is maybe a clue that I don't actually WANT to keep writing here. And I'm totally over doing jobs that I don't want to do for no money. (Thanks, Academia.))

I'm going to keep the blog up here, for a year or so, or until I figure out how to back it up in a form I'm happy with. And you never know, I might find I don't get the hang of this Real World thing, and am back here again this time tomorrow.

We'll see.

Thanks to all you wonderful readers for the past few years of loyalty, hilarity, community and other things that end in -ity. Seriously, though, you've been some of the best things (and people—I'm pretty sure you aren't all inanimate objects) in my life in the past few years. The only reason I've been hesitating to shut this blog down for the past few months is because of you. (And you. And you.) I'm even a little bit grateful to the trolls: it's nice to think I've had my own little pet trolls from time to time. (I wonder if that's an achievement I could list on my CV?)

PS: I'm leaving comments open, because I'd love you to say goodbye if you want to do so, but please don't think I'm fishing for people to ask me not to stop blogging, because if you do that you'll just make me feel guilty and that's no fun for either of us.

_____________

* Shannon, this is not about you. Nor is it about you, Joanna! If I haven't mentioned your name in this footnote, then yes, it probably IS about YOU.

Too much Maori used in NBL commentary!

2009-02-23T12:32:00.002+11:00

Okay, this is weird. And kind of cool. Not only is the only free-to-air coverage of the NBL semi-final on Wednesday in Maori only, but usually when someone is "not happy with the amount of Maori language content" on TV, they mean there isn't enough of it!

Foxtel has never been happy with the amount of Maori language content there is in coverage of Breakers' games

If all sports coverage in New Zealand was in Te Reo only, I wonder what that would do for the number of Pakeha enrolling in Maori language courses?

A 11:30pm sort of thought

2009-02-21T23:34:00.003+11:00

Of course, if I had been teaching this semester, one advantage would be that I could yell out the window at the first-year students having the world's loudest party across the courtyard from our apartment to ~~"Get off my lawn"~~ "Cut out the noise or when I see you in class next week your asses are going to FAIL."

Bring out the drama llamas. Oh wait, they already did

2009-02-20T10:13:00.004+11:00

My department is full of the kind of insanity right now where it would probably be a really bad idea to blog about the specifics. Let's just say that it's the kind of insanity that involves spontaneous resignations, un-resignations, rumours of lawsuits, blackmail, and classes (which start on Tuesday) left in the lurch.

All of this means that I'm quite popular right now. Yesterday I was treated to yet another example of people who can't do the math, this time suggesting that maybe I should give up my new job ($45,000, 28 hours a week, at least 1 year guaranteed, possibility of a further year) in favour of stepping into the breach ($10,000, 40+ hours a week, can only guarantee two months of work). Admittedly the amount of money offered increased dramatically as the conversation wore on, but even so, I am running very fast in the opposite direction.

Oh, and the ironic timing of this all? Due in equal parts to the current hysteria and another situation, our department might actually have been in a situation to advertise a new faculty position. Which, you know, YAY. Except that the university chose yesterday to announce a hiring freeze. Awsumness.

I don't really have a way of ending this post, except to say, HOLY SHIT. And to reiterate how glad I am to have the new job I do, as I otherwise would be bending over backwards to take on some major teaching at a crappy payrate at three days notice.

Brief question

2009-02-18T09:37:00.003+11:00

In a grant application (Geekman's): "The significance of the proposed research cannot be overstated."

Yea or nay?

At least I'm not teaching. (Now with bonus jellyfish).

2009-02-17T22:33:00.004+11:00

Things are weird around here. The students are back. It's orientation week.

Today that meant llamas.

I have no idea. But there were llamas outside our building.

Also, undergraduates.

The llamas looked like they were more heavily into personal hygiene.

And while we were having a civilized department dinner in a local restaurant tonight, be-grass-skirted undergrads with Hawaiian leis around their necks came rushing in, ordered water, chanted incomprehensibles loudly, downed the water, and ran away giggling.

As well as the students, baffling things happened to me in a supermarket.

Specifically:

The copy on the back reads: "Instant natural jellyfish is a kind of seafood of high-protein and lowfat, containing indispensible trace elements iodine and iron. To human beings, it has the unique refreshing and crisp and tender and smooth tastes of its own."

And this woman is obviously having a little astonishment (and perhaps a sexual fantasy) brought on by the crayfish in her soup:

You too will have to remove your strappy top when faced with our instant noodles. Or jellyfish, as the case may be.

So, wow, yeah, a job

2009-02-14T13:58:00.004+11:00

I got a job.

I.

got.

a.

job.

I didn't think things like that happened to people like me. Woo HOO!

Admittedly I think I'm still a bit over-qualified for it. It's quite a long way down the academic pecking order. But it also has the potential to be what I make of it. There's some administrative work and some data entry, but also some actual linguistic analysis, the opportunity to sit in on research meetings and have my say, lots of fun digging around in libraries, and I'll get to help write papers and co-present at conferences.

It's 80% of full time, which should leave enough hours in the week for me to continue my own research as well.

Initially it's for a year, then they have to advertise, but if I've been a good girl they'll advertise internally only and write the job description to fit me.

And it's a real. live. salary. More than I've ever earned before.

The process of getting this job has been a bit of a roller coaster, so in between the waves of elation I just feel kind of exhausted. The story went like this:

Two weeks ago: a friend who currently does this job comes to see me with the exciting news that she got an ongoing lectureship at another university and will be leaving. Together we lay plans to scheme me in as her replacement.

Twelve days ago: Friend's current boss comes to see me. Friend is leaving! He will need to replace her! Am I available? Yes? Fantastic! They will be so happy to have me! They don't have anyone else in mind for the position! But maybe they will have to advertise it. (Maybe I'd prefer them to advertise it?) They will find out and get back to me.

Ten days ago: friend says she doesn't think they have to advertise. From what she hears, they are planning to appoint me.

One week ago: Out of the blue, I hear they have offered the job to someone else.

I sulk.

Five days ago: I write an email to the other people involved in the project, who I have not had a chance to talk to about this position. I explain why I would be awesome for the job. I say I know they offered the job to someone else, but that if he doesn't accept it, please to still consider me.

Four days ago: I get a reply to say they did NOT offer the job to the other guy. Well, you know, they kind of did. But conditionally. They are still trying to find out how close he is to finishing his PhD and if he won't be finished in time, maybe they don't want him. They aren't sure. They'll get back to me.

Two days ago: They email both of us, asking us to apply in writing with CVs and letters addressing five selection criteria. 'It doesn't need to be polished' and—oh yeah— they'd like the applications within 24 hours please.

Yesterday: I finish my application and get feedback from everyone I can think of. Rewrite it. Submit it. Five minutes later I hear that the other guy changed his mind and doesn't want the job after all. I am back to being the only candidate. I have the job offer in writing.*

I start on the second of March.

__________

* This is important because this is the same project that offered me a postdoc last year (verbally only) and then when we got to the point where contracts were about to be drawn up, they turned around and advertised the job instead, with a selection criteria that excluded me from even applying. Of course, this now means I will be working with the guy who ended up getting "my" postdoc and is doing funner work and earning twice as much as I will be. But I think I'll be okay with that, even though (yeah, I know) I sound a little bitter about it here.

A little request

2009-02-12T14:35:00.002+11:00

Dear blogfriends,

I love you all. Really I do. But please please please if you happen to run into someone from my department, don't say, "Oh yes, I know [real name]: I read her blog!" If you accidentally DO mention this little piece of information, please then also let the person know that the blog is anonymous and that I would like to keep it that way. Then they won't happen to say loudly in front of other, more senior colleagues, "Hey, I just heard you have a blog!"

I'm not mad at you. I just thought I'd better clarify my anonymity preferences.

Love,
StyleyGeek.

I really want to use this in a class

2009-02-05T09:00:00.000+11:00

I'd love to use this in a class to teach about dummy subjects.
Sadly, as Geekman pointed out, that would probably require me to first explain how venn diagrams work, and then the origin of the quote. By which point it probably wouldn't be half as funny.

Sigh.

(Image from GraphJam)

Ooooooooooh...

2009-02-04T21:09:00.002+11:00

... free money!

Am I meant to feel guilty that I plan to squirrel it away rather than spend it to stimulate the economy?

Strategies I've been forced into thanks to this ****ing heatwave

2009-02-04T09:00:00.000+11:00

Bringing a towel to work and taking cold showers every few hours.

Sleeping in the lounge with the balcony doors and curtains wide open (verdict: does not help).

Bringing a laptop to work and working in the air-conditioned tea room instead of my heat-trap office.

Stealing fans from other people's offices while they are out to lunch.

Setting out bowls of ice-cold water for the cockatoos to bathe in when they show signs of impending heat stroke. (Honestly, there is nothing more piteous than a panting cockatoo, wings stretched away from its body, drooping against your window.)

Giving up and going home to lie under the air-conditioning.

I fail to believe this is a direct quote

2009-02-03T10:05:00.002+11:00

In this article in the NZ news today, a bank spokesperson is quoted on the question of whether snow in London prevented people from trading the NZ dollar yesterday:

"It probably matters not for they will have time for another crack at the NZD."

Seriously? "It matters not, for..."??? Has New Zealand English changed THAT much since I've been away? Or has the ANZ begun employing wannabe Shakespearean actors?

(Also, the juxtaposition with "another crack at" made me laugh.)

I always harbour fond hopes he might decide to go inside and do my filing

2009-02-02T20:23:00.001+11:00

Hypothetical (Note: I have not (yet) been offered this job)

2009-02-02T13:40:00.005+11:00

Imagine you are unemployed and someone offers you a job that they could reasonably assume you would find attractive.

They give you a choice:
(1) you can have the job automatically, and start right away, with a contract for a year, at the end of which they will have to advertise the position and you may or may not be successfully reappointed.
or
(2) they advertise the position now, which will take a few weeks (perhaps a month or so), and they expect a lot of applicants. Moreover, the selection criteria are unlikely to fit you very well (i.e. your only chance will be if no one with a certain qualification applies). BUT if you are successful, you will receive a two-year contract.

I would choose (1), no question. Someone who I said this to was quite surprised, having expected me to choose (2). I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly even consider choosing (2). Or am I just unusually risk-averse?

What would you have chosen?

In a Bond-like feat of counter-intelligence...

2009-01-30T09:39:00.004+11:00

What strikes me about this story—apart from the obligatory angle of OMG the SIS is spying on people!—is the following line:

The file continues to track Leadbeater's life, although the SIS lost track of her when she married and took her husband's name.

Awesome job, dudes. Note to self: in order to evade NZ's top intelligence people, just get married and change your name. SO SNEAKY!

How to spend nine hours doing five hours of work

2009-01-29T20:56:00.004+11:00

I quite enjoy reading Dr Crazy's lists of things she works on in a day. Maybe it's because I'm nosy, or maybe it gives valuable insight into what it's like to be a real academic. Either way, I thought I'd show you what it's like to be a FAKE academic, in the form of detailing all the crap I did today.

But because I'm long-winded and incapable of not editorializing, you get the uncut version rather than the snappy List of Crazy.

Today I managed to land myself in a situation where I ~~had to~~ was privileged to be working for ALL of my bosses all in the one day. Yet despite beginning work at 9 and leaving reluctantly at 6:30, I only succeeded in getting through five hours of work I can actually bill anyone for. How does this happen? you may very well not actually ask because you aren't interested. But I will tell you anyway. Ha ha!

9:00–9:20: Waiting for one of the people I do research assistant work for (henceforth 'Boss #1'). He asked me to be there at 9am so we could get an early start. Despite not sleeping at all because of the horrible heat-wave we are having in my bedroom lately, I forced myself out of bed in time to make it (but only by skipping breakfast). Boss #1 waltzes in 20 minutes later, saying, "Wow, I just couldn't drag myself out of bed this morning. Must be the heat."

9:20–12 o'clock: I photocopy a 600-page book for Boss #1. It apparently doesn't occur to him that it costs him more to pay me to copy it than it would for him to just buy a copy (or steal the library copy and pay the 'lost book' fine). Nor does he seem concerned by copyright.

10:30–11am (yes, we did just go back in time here): Colleagues persuade me forcefully to come and have morning tea as a break from copying. Since they are all salaried, it does not occur to them that a half-hour break loses me nearly $20. But they are persuasive. There is coffee. And we actually talk about research, so it's not wasted time.

12–1 pm: Usually I take 30 minutes for lunch and/or eat at my desk while working. Today there is free lunch (!!!11!eleventy-one!) in honour of something Asian. Unfortunately the walk there and back, queuing for food, and talking to people there means I use a full hour for lunch. It does not occur to me until later that I could have bought a nicer lunch with the money I would have earned if I had worked that extra half hour instead of using it to seek out free food. Sigh.

1–1:30 pm: Boss #2 sends me to the library to hunt her down a journal article. I start with the online journal, but alas, the one issue I need is the only one since 1984 that they haven't digitised. Fortunately our library has it. Unfortunately it appears to be on the level that is undergoing repairs and I have to send a grumpy librarian into the roped-off depths to fetch it. Even more unfortunately it is not on the shelf and I have to submit an online request for them to look for it. Even more unfortunately, my library card no longer works all of a sudden.

1:30–2 pm: I try to work out what is wrong with my library card. The librarians try to work out what is wrong with my library card. Epic fail. Finally it is discovered that they accidentally overwrote my newer staff profile with the old (supposedly deleted) student profile. I am still weighing up whether I can bill Boss #2 for this period of time, since I wouldn't have had to get my card working if I weren't having to order her journal, but on the other hand, I still would have had to do it eventually.

2pm–3 pm: Ice cream break. I can't handle the heat. Yes, it's a long ice cream break. This is the one period of the day where the lack of productivity is truly and honestly all my own fault.

3pm–3:45 pm: I return to my office and find it writhing with what appears to be panicking ants. Presumably they are panicking because they have accidentally found their way into an OFFICE and there is NO FOOD. This doesn't, however, mean that they return the way they came. I sit down to do some work, but when the ants decide to undertake an epic journey of exploration into my cleavage, I am forced to take action. I spend the next half hour trying to find out who at the university is responsible for pest control. When I reach them, they assure me they will deal with it by next week. Awsumness.

3:45–4:45 pm: Work for Boss #3. This is so excrutiatingly boring I want to tear out my eyeballs, and I long for those good old days (this morning) of endless photocopying. Brief moment of levity thanks to an entry in a (senior!) academic's journal article's bibliography that actually says, "[Surname, First name]. File on my computer. 2009." I change it to "Unpublished manuscript".

4:45–5:45 pm: I suddenly realise that I haven't checked my email all day. Unfortunately doing so catapults me into an unexpected skirmish between Boss #3 and his publisher, who have been sending each other emails all day with increasing levels of hostility, and passive-aggressively CCing me in. I sort things out as best I can, but lose another 30 minutes to replying to emails that I can't, however creatively, bill any of my bosses for.

5:45–6:30 pm: Back to the eyeball-frying job for Boss #3. Eventually I gnaw off my own hands in a bid to get out of having to reformat a LaTeX manuscript into Word, and give up for the day, not having finished what I set out to accomplish.

In summary, the actual paid part of my day was 2.5 hours in the morning for Boss #1, half an hour at the library for Boss #2, and 2 hours 15 minutes in the afternoon for Boss #3. I was present and not-on-an-ice-cream-break for 9 1/2 hours, of which I get paid for 5 1/4.

Quick calculation: earnings for the day: $180 before tax.
If I earned minimum wage at McDonalds, I would have earned $136 (assuming I worked all 9.5 hours, which I guess I might not have, given an unpaid lunch break).
So that's at least a $46 advantage. Plus an ice cream break. Whew!

THIS is why I'm an academic. Good thing I remembered.

Ah yes, people asking me to work for free: must be Wednesday

2009-01-28T22:05:00.003+11:00

So I'm sitting in my office at 9:30 at night working because I have so much shit to do I am stressed out of my little treehouse, and a certain senior colleague drops by and makes himself comfortable on the edge of my desk.

"Hey, you know what's fun?" he asked. "If you're working in the evening, and you need to take a little break?"

"What?"

"Well, you can go next door to the linguistics library, and do a bit of tidying. It's in a terrible state! And you know, with the budget cuts and all, we had to stop paying someone to organise it. So if we all just shelve a few books here and there when we're tired of working, it'll get back in shape in no time!"

He beamed at me. "You know what I did last night?" he continued. "When I'd shelved some books and tidied the tables, I chose a section, and I re-alphabetised it! Would you believe: someone had shelved Jones after Joseph, and Jenkins before Jamison! Anyway, I've done I–K, so feel free to take any of the other sections when you get a moment."

A rose by any other name...

2009-01-28T13:55:00.002+11:00

We have an oldish, very polite British chap in our department who works on translation. He often goes around from office to office asking people what they think the precise difference in nuance is between various words, or whether a given word has a certain connotation for people of different generations. Today's encounter, however, made me laugh.

"Excuse me," he said, passing me in the corridor, "can I ask you a question?"
"Sure," I replied.
"Do you think there is any semantic difference between the words 'tosser' and 'wanker'?"

I had to think for a moment.

"If there's a difference," I eventually replied, "I think it's very slight. Maybe 'wanker' has more of a connotation of the person being stuck up, while 'tosser' is more of a general insult."
"Hmm..." he said, "Thank you. That's helpful."
"What on earth are you working on?" I asked, as he walked away.
"Oh!" he said, "It's not for my research. I'm writing a letter to the National Radio, and was trying to decide which I should call them."

Even professors can be special, special snowflakes

2009-01-22T12:11:00.004+11:00

Me: "Okay, just to recap: you want me to standardise headings, figures, tables and example numbers; rewrite part one so that it actually makes sense*; check all the references; and make the formatting of the rest of the manuscript consistent?"

Prof: "That's right. Technically we should contact the people whose figures and images we are using and get copyright permission, but I don't have enough money to pay you to do that. It's cool, anyway: the publisher I'm using doesn't check that sort of thing."

Me: *gulp* "It wouldn't be too hard to contact them..."

Prof: "No no. This publisher was sued last year and it was fine. He just turned off the lights and hid under his desk until the lawyers went away. No one will bother trying again."

Me: "Yes, but—"

Prof: "So, about the formatting."

Me: "Right. Do you have a copy of the publisher's stylesheet I can take?"

Prof: "I've got one. But I don't like it. I think those styles are ugly. So we're going to ignore it. Here's how I like things formatted: [long list of weird-ass personal preferences]."

Me: "Don't you think the publisher will just reformat it to their own stylesheet anyway? So maybe we should just—"

Prof: "God no! They are far too lazy for that."

Me [thinks: and too busy being served with copyright infringement notices] "And what about the references?"

Prof: "Oh, whatever style you like. And don't waste time doing things like making sure they all have the same capitalisation or all have full stops after the date or anything. No one really cares about all that."

All I can say is that I'm going to make sure I get my money BEFORE this gets sent to the publisher, and then I'm going to run far far away. Also, for once, I DON'T want my name in the acknowledgments.

_____________

* Okay, so I didn't phrase it like that. But that's totally what she's asking me to do.

I totally swear I am not making this up even a little bit

2009-01-21T21:57:00.002+11:00

We recently received the following email from our administrators:

Dear all,

For security reasons we are cataloging all weapons. Please advise if you keep knives, guns, blowtorches, explosives or similar in your offices.

Regards,
Admin.

In related news...

2009-01-20T18:35:00.003+11:00

(Well, related to one of the random bullets, I'm sure), the publisher for my edited volume just contacted me to ask if I have any ideas for the cover! Whee!

Unfortunately, I suspect my initial thoughts (only in my head, never fear) of
(a) an epic battle between a giant squid and a fearsome white pointer shark
(b) pretty sparkly unicorns dancing in a meadow of flowers
would probably be rejected as 'inappropriate'. Pfft.

I at least need to specify a colour. This publisher has an unfortunate tendency of going with lime green or puke yellow if the author doesn't request anything different.

So what say you, wise readers? How do I come up with a sufficiently abstract yet attractive and not-stolen-from-anyone-else idea for the cover of a book about grammatical change?

Random bullets of 'If I don't blog in bullets I probably won't bother at all'

2009-01-20T15:49:00.004+11:00

Geekman's new deodorant has a scent I have christened 'feral citrus'. (If you'd like to hire me for your marketing department, just shoot me an email.)

Actually, you should probably hire Geekman for your marketing department too. I can't get his marketing slogan for Super Cheap Auto* out of my head: 'More better faster. (Cheaper)'.

The advantage of there being no part time teaching budget whatsoever this year is that I don't ~~get to~~ have to, you know, like, teach. So I can feel superior to all the poor sods currently stressing about enrollment numbers and syllabi and "learning management systems" and best practice and shit. (Plus, it means I'm available for your marketing department. Feral citrus: remember.)

Also, I don't need to teach because I totally have other options. Like, four of them. And they each pay ~~quite a lot~~ a pittance that is slightly higher than what teaching would have. And only one is boring and unrelated to linguistics.

Totally not at all even a little bit connected to that last point: I have finally worked out why, while I was editing a collected papers volume ~~last year~~ for the last four fucking years, senior academics would chide me and tell me it wasn't so hard really and I must be doing something wrong. It's because said senior academics, when they "edit" a volume do so by hiring someone like me to actually do the, you know, EDITING. And formatting. And hassling of contributors. It turns out it IS quite easy to edit a volume if all it involves is managing research assistants and the occasional phone call to the publisher.

I can't even pronounce 'Obamabilia'.
Hmmm... what else? It rained a little bit today. And Geekman and I took the afternoon off to eat doughnuts, drink coffee, and do a jigsaw puzzle.**

The End.

___________

* A company name that I swear we did not make up even though it totally sounds like we did.

** Which is not a euphemism, but given the context, it sounds as though it should be.

Did Al Capone take over my country when I wasn't looking?

2009-01-16T23:05:00.004+11:00

I had the weirdest conversation about New Zealand today.

The guy cutting my hair, originally from Korea, said he always wanted to travel to NZ but was scared to because of "all the gangsters".

"Gangsters?" I asked. "I don't think New Zealand is known for its gangsters."
"Yes, yes!" He assured me. "Very dangerous. I see it on SBS. A documentary. New Zealand has very many gangsters."
"Well, I know crime is high in some cities, but there are plenty of safer places too. Where would you like to go in NZ?"
"I like to camping," he said. "I want to walk native bush. Milford Sound."
"I'm pretty sure you'd be safe from criminals out in the bush."
"No!" he replied, shooting me a look of obvious contempt for my ignorance, "NZ have very many gangsters. Nowhere is safe."

Donation update

2009-01-16T09:42:00.004+11:00

Claudia was due for her first frozen transfer today. You may remember there were four embryos total, of which one had already been transferred, unsuccessfully.

So yesterday the clinic started defrosting. The first and second ones to defrost didn't survive the process. The third (their last chance) did. Claudia and Rob started the trip to Sydney at five o'clock this morning. Halfway there they had a call from the clinic not to bother. The third embryo had not continued to develop.

So that was that. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that we only got one transfer from 40+ follicles (22 fertilised eggs). The clinic had also said they had a near-100% successful thaw rate, so we're all wondering how come we got to be such outliers.

I've offered to do another cycle if they want to try again. I initially thought I'd do one only, but honestly the last one was no big deal, and I'm too invested in the process to give up now.

Probably only of interest to locals

2009-01-15T12:18:00.005+11:00

I've been trying to find out what you can legally do in Australia to get money for a car that is unroadworthy, but still basically functional. NOWHERE online is this information forthcoming. So I thought I'd put up a short post here detailing what I've found out, in the hope that it might be useful to other people searching for the same information.

It seems you might be allowed to sell a car "as is", without passing a roadworthiness test, but you still need to have it inspected by a mechanic, and give the buyer the mechanic's list of what needs to be done to make it roadworthy; also you have to take reasonable steps to ensure that the buyer does not drive the car home from the sale: i.e. you can be prosecuted if they drive it with your knowledge. This all seems like too much hassle and expense for a car that is probably only going to sell for $300. Note: I was also unable to find out whether this is true for the ACT*—the information in this paragraph is based on what I could find out for some other states.

Inside the philosophy factory told me that charities in the USA will sometimes buy old cars, since they can sell them for scrap. This doesn't seem to be the case here.

Wreckers vary wildly in terms of how much they will give you, or whether they want your car at all. Nonetheless, this turned out to be the best option. I called 10 wreckers around the ACT. Most don't even answer their phones. Five did: two didn't want the car; one was willing to give us $80; one offered $50; and one (Queanbeyan Auto Dismantlers) offered $200. (You can guess which one we went with.) The two wreckers who didn't want our car at all also recommended trying Queanbeyan Auto Dismantlers, so I guess they are the biggest or otherwise most likely to buy cars.

Incidentally, the wreckers who offered money for the car were only interested once I told them we could drive the car over to them. If your car is undriveable, I think you'll be lucky not to have to PAY someone to take it away.

_____________

* Note: I'm deliberately including my state here, despite my anonymity. Otherwise this post is pretty much useless in terms of people searching for relevant info. However, I'm still avoiding using my city's name, as I prefer google searches for [CITY] + [UNIVERSITY] or [CITY] + linguistics not to list this blog in their results!

How to negotiate like someone who hardly knows what they are doing

2009-01-12T21:23:00.003+11:00

We bought a new car!

Well, okay, actually it's really quite old.

But!! It's newer than our current one, which is what counts. And it's all blue and shiny. Hooray! It also has special features like power steering, air conditioning, and other things that have been standard in cars since 1753. Such as paintwork. And suspension.

Woot!

Here is a photo, not of our actual car, but a stunt double:

And the technical specifications, for those who like that sort of thing.

I would like to state for the record that I hate cars, and I hate buying them. I also hate driving them. I would like nothing better than to live without a car, and I'm not just saying that for my green credentials. But it turns out to be quite difficult to live in this city without one, and an annual public transport ticket for both me and Geekman would cost more than a car does to run. By quite a lot.

The absolute worst part of buying a car is the negotiating. I have no clue what I am doing. Our friend Jana, who was visiting when we first started test driving cars, gave us the advice that we should begin by pointing out all the flaws with the car, and why it is overpriced, and then make an offer. Unfortunately(?) this car had no flaws. And was not overpriced.

But, watch and learn from the master. This is how my negotiating went:

Geekman, whispering: "I'm going to stand over there in the corner and pretend this isn't happening, okay? Good luck."

Me, to the owner: "Um, yeah. We like it. It's a good car. [Frantically tries to think of any problems with it or features that are lacking. Fails. Moves straight to step two in the negotiating process.] We'd like to offer you $4,500 for it."

Car owner: "Huh. You know, these are listed on Red Book for $7000–9000."

Me, with an inspired, yet traditional comeback: "No they aren't."

[At this point I realise I might be digging myself a hole, because the next obvious step is to pull out the notes I made about the Red Book listing, and while it wasn't $7000–9000, it WAS a range that meant this guy's asking price was totally reasonable.]

Car owner: "You've got to look at the features, anyway. This one has power steering and aircon and a good CD player."

Me, at a complete loss for any further bargaining tactics, also thinking that his price really is quite acceptable: I stare blankly.

[Silence]

Car owner: "Yeah, okay, you can have it for $4,500."

I guess the good thing about buying privately instead of from a dealer is that the seller is likely to be equally clueless as you are.

Now that you have observed my mad negotiating skillz, here's a quick quiz for you.

Imagine you are the seller. Which of the following are NOT selling points, and therefore should probably NOT be emphasised while potential buyers are inspecting your car?
(a) "It's really quite tinny. You get a lot of road noise."
(b) "It's a beaut car, but. It's never had no issues or nuthink."
(c) "I wouldn't drive it on long trips like to Sydney or somewhere. The engine's not really that powerful."
(d) "It runs off a tank of petrol literally forever."

Answers:
(a) and (c) are things you probably shouldn't tell a potential buyer.
(b) is acceptable, and will add to your Authentic Australian cred.
(d) is something I probably won't complain about if it turns out to be truth rather than grammar.

Cryptic

2009-01-11T19:45:00.000+11:00

High school flashback

2009-01-09T13:24:00.002+11:00

The gym changing rooms today are full of 14-year-olds getting ready for a soccer tournament. Oh the angst! Oh the bitchiness! Oh the "casual" swearing, followed by a quick scan of the room to see if anyone's impressed. Oh the attempts to get changed into gym gear without actually exposing any skin to your classmates.

Actual conversation:

"Oh my god, like, get OVER it."
"Oh my god, like, NO."
"Oh my god, like, YES."
"Oh my god, like, what the hell?"
"Oh my god, like, she said get OVER IT."

Something that never fails to amuse me

2009-01-09T09:48:00.002+11:00

The person who is in charge of administering grant money at our university has a surname which sounds exactly like French for "pays well".

Do you know anyone with an exceptionally appropriate (or inappropriate) name?

Caveman with a million dollar view

2009-01-08T14:52:00.003+11:00

We were in Sydney in the weekend and on a walk around the coast near Bondi beach, we came across this guy living in a cave amongst the rocks.

He didn't seem to mind people taking photos, although I felt a bit guilty treating him like a tourist attraction. The only information I've been able to find out about him since is this story, which doesn't give a lot of details. The short version is, his name is Jhyim Mhiyles (he likes the letter y because it supposedly represents the trinity), and he has been living there for eight years.

Given that you'd usually pay upwards of a million dollars for a beachfront property at Bondi, I think he has found an brilliant alternative!

Hey, check out my site meter!

2009-01-07T11:07:00.002+11:00

This blog just hit 100,000 visitors!

The 100,000th was whoever lives in Wilson, North Carolina, with the IP address starting with 66.26.66, who clicked over from this old post on Everyday Scientist. (You are also using WindowsXP, Firefox, your system is set to English language, and your monitor resolution is 1024 x 768. I know, spooky, huh?)

I'd offer a prize, but since you stayed for 0 seconds and only viewed one page, I can't imagine you'll be back.

This post brought to you by Stalky "OMG I can't believe you can get that much information about me" McStalkerson.

Fumbling Towards Geekdom

Should have seen this coming

Things are weird

Sadly, I have had student essays that make less sense than this

It gets better

And now they want to know...

Job rant

Oh well

And then the final interview...

While we are talking about gender...

Le sigh

Day one

Holy shit job talk etc oh dear

Then there was this other thing we did...

Introducing...

And then she miscarried

I got a girl pregnant

Also, real estate agents suck

The way to my heart is apparently secret rooms and bay windows

No wonder his research is about two years behind schedule

Today is full of cunning traps

I see your cunning plan

Win-win

Propaganda

Christmas dinner

Christmas greetings and wotnot. Also: eep!

Remind me why we are using a wiki again?

Two goodnesses

More interestingness

Rejection

Random bullets of "I still can't quite believe it"

The longer version

Oh. My.

I'm going to hear about a job tomorrow

Wow

Tragic, but necessary.

This is why I only go to the hairdresser once a year

Father knows best

The elves and the shoemaker: academic version

Scheduling committee meetings... by committee

Thirteen - uh four - ways of looking at an earthquake

A quickie

Snakes! In a box!

How does that work?

I can haz coffee and cake?

Skiing

How to communicate with the natives

Hop hop hoppity PLOP

I totally get why academics reply to emails with "Screw you"

I know how he felt, but... wow.

Inspired marketing

Strange things about job hunting

Doors: who needs 'em?

Let them stare, let them stare, let them stare!

Harmless and misguided advice

More on the Robinson Crusoe experience

Tips for the yoga n00b

Aha!

Question for my American peeps!

While we were sleeping

Where to even start?

Housekeeping

My next book proposal is going to someone with a promotional budget

I say "R7"; you hear "ass heaven", and really the product marketing team should have thought of that

Jobs

What I really look like

See me make noob mistakes

So that was weird

The longer version

*tap tap tap* Is this thing still on?

Last post

Too much Maori used in NBL commentary!

A 11:30pm sort of thought

Bring out the drama llamas. Oh wait, they already did

Brief question

At least I'm not teaching. (Now with bonus jellyfish).

So, wow, yeah, a job

A little request

I really want to use this in a class

Ooooooooooh...

tap tap tap Is this thing still on?