While I'm posting pictures of weirdness

There's this sign, located not so far from the hedgehog picture of the last post.

To me, the most obvious interpretation is as a command followed by the reason you should obey. Like, "Drink water—it's healthy".

Rorschach test

I pass this painted box most days. I think the hedgehog is meant to be sitting on a flower, but that is totally not what I see.

It's like anonymous blog comments, but in real life!

This little grammar war has been taking place on the walls of our department corridor this week. There is much speculation about who wrote the typed response—it looks like it must have been a faculty member, but no one is admitting to it. (That could be because of the words "pedantic" and "prick" that other faculty members have been bandying around ever since it went up.)

It's especially rude given that the original sign-writer is also a member of the department, and therefore the anonymous response is by one of her colleagues.

I just can't believed they cared about it this much. Whew!

(I've also been amused at the number of students I've seen taking photos of the sign. Some even admitted they are putting it on Facebook or on their blogs.)

Postcard from the land of self-censorship

Geekman complained that my recent blog entries have been all mean and bitchy. Have resolved to be a nicer person.

Came up with three possible posts in the last 24 hours, but had to suppress them all due to excessive snark.

Sigh. It's so hard being sweetness and light.

Sucks to be you. Or me. I forget which.

Now, why is it that women tend to get worse teaching evals than men?

Overheard in the gym changing room today:

"She is SUCH a good teacher. I'm so lucky to be in her course. You know, she's just so kind and loving and really cares about her students as people. And she never hurts people's feelings and takes her time to get to know you."

If that's not a description of 'good teaching', then I don't know what is. Oh, wait, yes I do. How about: "She's such a good teacher. She makes the subject interesting and relevant, and explains things clearly. And she develops exercises and assignments that really help you learn."

Also? I'd like to hear the first description applied to a man:

"He is SUCH a good teacher. I'm so lucky to be in his course. He's just so kind and loving—"

Nope, wouldn't fly, would it?

And what's more...

... the counselor suggested that to give Geekman a "role in the process", he might want to "document our journey".

By taking up scrap-booking.

So that was a waste of time

Today we had our first counselling appointment for the egg donation. The counsellor irritated the hell out of me by behaving like a stereotype. And I hated her skirt. (Yes, I'm superficial. But dude, a bright blue leather miniskirt? You would have to be 16 to make that work.)

If there's one thing that pisses me off in a counsellor, it's cliche-speak. I think that Geekman and I were pretty much in agreement with that, though, as he whispered to me at one point, "If that woman uses the word 'space' one more time, I'm going to make her define it. Using mathematical equations."

Also? Admitting that you don't usually do egg donation cases since you are filling in for a colleague, but that you did some 'research' on the issues yesterday? That's not going a long way towards giving us faith in your competence.

So then there was half an hour of (fairly obvious) questions (about issues that just about everyone I've ever discussed egg donation with has also brought up) posed like she was so proud of herself for thinking of them. And 'how did that make me feel'? It made me feel like I should be patting her on the head and praising her for good thinking.

And by the way, did I mention the skirt?

Apparently, working "late" is the exception, not the norm

We just got an email from the university sent to all staff (all 3000+ of us), asking us, in light of a recent robbery on campus, to please let Security know whenever we are going to be working later than 6pm or in the weekends.

I sure hope they've set up some extra phone lines.

Bicycle fail

Those of you following the bike tyre saga at home will be pleased to hear that THIS time (slow leak in front tyre for the past month; explosive flat two days ago in the back) I finally gave in and bought pre-slime-filled, special un-flattable inner tubes.

One of them even came with special, straight-out-of-the-packet holes! Yup, that's right. Three of 'em. Since I had bought the last two tubes the shop had in my size, I decided to patch the holes instead of returning the tube. Unfortunately, I only spotted two of the holes to start with. Fixed them. Put the tyre on (back wheel, so very frustrating to fix). Pumped it up.

Aaaaaaaaannnnnnd....five minutes later it was totally flat. At which point (okay, actually after another twenty minutes of wrestling the wheel off) I found the third (quite tiny) hole. I was out of patches by then, so I took all my wheels off again (okay, both wheels, but "all" conveys my sense of frustration far better), reorganised the tyres so that the good slime tube was on the back, replaced the front tube with the old, slow-leaking one, and vowed to return to the shop and bite someone in charge until they give me a refund. (Also to do: recover from parenthesis addiction (maybe).)

The thing is, I thought slime was supposed to SEAL small holes.

Universe? What am I doing wrong???

In other, totally unrelated news, this is hilarious.

Why taxpayers love universities. No, really.

I'm a member of a teaching development group on campus which recently got a small grant to employ some administrative assistance. We haven't used any of the money yet.

Yesterday at our meeting one of the members brought in a huge new handbook the university had printed. "It's full of really important teaching-related stuff," he said. "Case studies, policies, and all sorts of things." We suggested he tell us a bit about it, but he admitted he hadn't read it.

We sat and looked glumly at the 300+ pages, each reluctant to volunteer to wade through it all.

And then... And THEN! We came up with a solution of such genius that I can hardly bring myself to share it with you, in case it blows your minds. So I'll whisper it very quietly. We are going to use some of the grant money to employ someone to read the handbook FOR US. Do you see where this is going? The university will be paying someone to read its own policies!

I'm sure if we set it up right, we could use it as the basis of some sort of perpetual motion machine.

At some point in their careers, IT people start deliberately designing interfaces to piss you off. Here's why:

As one of my many part time jobs, I do Random Website Stuff_TM. My most recent brief was for another department, who wanted me to create a Google Maps-based application for their website that shows the fieldwork locations of everyone in the department, along with little info bubbles giving the researcher's name and some other details.

So I did this.

Then I released it to a small group of their profs to get some feedback. Here's some snippets from the emails that ensued:

1. "Please remove the titles "Dr, "Professor" and so on before our names. This looks wanky on a website."

[I do so]

2. "Please put "Dr, Professor" and so on before our names. A website is a public face of the university and needs to look official."

[Sorry dude, over-ruled: the guy in #1 was your boss]

3. (From the guy who originally requested I base the map on Google Maps because he likes the way it looks): "Can you make the sea less blue?"

[I'll just ask Google to dump some bleach into the ocean before they snap their next satellite shot, shall I?]

Then yesterday I made the page live and sent an email to the whole department that prominently (i.e. right at the top) included the following:

If you wish me to move the location of your marker on the map, I need you to send me the latitude and longitude of where it should be located. (Small villages in the Pacific are generally not marked on Google Maps, and sometimes I had to guess about the location.)

Today I received nine requests to move markers. Guess how many gave latitudes and longitudes? (If you guessed "one", then you're giving them too much credit.)

Here are some representative samples of how much information they included in the requests:

"Can you move my marker a bit further south?"

"My marker should be about halfway between [two villages that aren't marked on the map]"

"My markers aren't quite in the right position. Can you fix them?"

"I think [other prof's] markers are wrong. I don't know if they should be further east, but definitely they need to be by a river. One of the big ones."

I replied to these, saying, "Can you please send me the latitude and longitude of the correct position?"

So far I've had one reply: "I think it's probably in Wikipedia."

A virus is forever, not just for Christmas

Geekman: "I nearly opened a virus today. It was very clever. It pretended to be one of those e-greeting cards, except that the "link" was an attached .exe file."

Me: "Good thing you noticed."

Geekman: "Well, it's not like it would have mattered anyway. I was using Linux. Although... I think the way I've set things up, it would have automatically been opened under Wine. [a sort of virtual Windows system that runs under Linux]"

Me: "So you could have emulated the virus."

Geekman: "Ooh! This could be fun! I could run virtual viruses in my virtual Windows!" (Scurries off to try this out).

Yes, folks, we are living in an XKCD strip.

Newsflash: Canada is a separate country

A friend of mine is moving to Canada for a year for a postdoc. Her tickets route her through the USA where she transfers from international to domestic, but she leaves the USA the same day. Obviously she has a valid one-year visa for Canada. As for the USA transit period, normally, when Australians or NZers travel to the USA for fewer than 90 days, they can go without a visa under the visa waiver program.

As I understand it, 1 day < 90 days.

BUT. It turns out that since her onward tickets are to Canada, she has to apply for a visa for the USA that is valid for the entirety of her stay in Canada.

In other words, in order to work in Canada for a year, she has to have a 1-year visa for the USA.

She finds this out now, three weeks before departure. Chances are, she can't get a 1-year visa for the USA between now and then (although she is having to travel to Sydney next week for an interview at the United States Consulate on the off-chance they might be able to rush it through). Her back-up plan is to reroute her flights so that she no longer passes through the USA.

And the fact that is possible totally negates any reasonable justification for this visa requirement. If you can enter Canada from elsewhere and not be required to have a visa for the USA, then it isn't as though this requirement is doing a great job of border protection, right?

I just don't understand. Does the USA somehow own Canada after all?

Uh, thanks for the tip, kid.

Rob and Claudia told me their six-year-old daughter (from his previous marriage) came up to them the other day, all excited.

"Daddy, do you and Claudia still want to have more babies?" she asked.
"Yes, we do..."
"I've found out how to do it! You need to have SEX."

Itty-bitty scary StyleyGeek

The couple who I am donating eggs to and I had our first joint appointment with the IVF doctor yesterday.

All of these people need better pseudonyms. Geekman suggests calling them Flappy, Flappy and Dr Flappy, but while those are excellent parrot names, people are a little harder. Well, actually, the doctor is easy. She comes across as friendly and competent, but also a little intimidating. So I'm going to go with Dr. Intimidating. As for the couple, (for secret reasons known only to myself, nya ha ha ha!) I'll call them Claudia and Rob.

Anyway, the upshot of the appointment is that all of my tests came out perfect, the examination the doctor did on the spot showed that I was perfect, my answers to her rapid-fire 20-questions game (Do you drink? Do you smoke? Do you take vitamins? Do you floss? (Yes, seriously: apparently it's important)) came out perfect.

A little unnervingly, Dr. Intimidating dictates her patient notes while you are there in the room. ("Donor is in perfect health and clearly highly intelligent." She turns to me and says, "You're scary.")

So apparently I am scary. It turns out this is not just because I am so awesome that I scare people. People who are young, fertile and "itty-bitty" (her descriptor, not mine—I would have described myself as "slim" but hardly "itty-bitty") have higher risk of side-effects from the fertility drugs. But it sounded like she had a sensible plan for taking that into account with regards to dosage and monitoring and so on, so that's cool.

So Dr. Intimidating ran through the stages of the procedure with us, took ten minutes out for a seriously engaged and well-informed discussion about linguistic theory (see: "intimidating") and to ask Rob about his latest physics research, and then charged them $400 for the appointment. I think that might just about cover the latest payments on the white leather lounge suit in her office, but possibly not the hand-painted wallpaper in the foyer.

Actually, I'm kind of surprised by how much of this IVF treatment is covered by the public health system here. I always thought of IVF as costing the parents-to-be tens of thousands of dollars per cycle. (Well, I guess it maybe does in the USA). Here, the actual costs are as follows:

Preliminary tests: $350-ish
IVF clinic fee: $3950
Appointments with doctor: $250 per person for initial consult; $150 thereafter. Usually there are three or four appointments per cycle.
Medication: $4000+
Anaesthesia: $400
Surgeon's fee/other day surgery costs: variable
Total: around $10,000 (+ day surgery fees)

What the couple themselves have to pay:
Preliminary tests: $40-ish
IVF clinic fee: $790
Appointments: $30-ish for initial consult; $15-ish thereafter
Medication: around $400
Anaesthesia: around $80
Surgeon's fee/other day surgery costs: variable
Total: around $1500 (+ day surgery fees)

The rest is covered by the public health cover that all Australians have. Seems like a very good deal!

Anyway, the next step is counselling, which is scheduled for the week after next. "Just to see if any of you are crackers," says Dr. Intimidating.

Meanwhile, I am scary.

When error messages attack!

My computer terminal window has resorted to hissing at me (apparently in warning):

I think this means I should step away slowly and calmly, so as not to anger it further.

Overheard

This morning I overheard this part of a conversation and was totally horrified...

"So, you have a dog, right?"
"Yeah, but I keep forgetting to feed it. And then it gets sad and I can't bear to look at it, because I feel so guilty. So I've been avoiding it for a while now."

I was thinking about calling the SPCA until the next sentence:

"Well they only started that application so you'd feel you have to come and check your profile every day. And then see more of their ads."
"Yeah, Facebook's become totally evil. It's no fun anymore."

When you disobey every single request in the publisher's stylesheet, it's people like me who suffer

You know you've been spending too much time formatting manuscripts when upon hearing KLF's Justified and Ancient, your first thought is "No! Left aligned, dammit!"

Because monsters are so comforting

A colleague of Geekman's, explaining how he "helps" his wife sleep:

"The problem is, there's this dog next door that barks and growls all night. My wife lies awake and gets angrier and angrier listening to it. So I tell her stories to help her out. Like, I tell her to imagine that we're camping, and the dog is guarding the perimeter of the camp, and the reason he's barking and growling is that there are monsters circling the camp trying to get in at us. But the dog is doing a great job of keeping them away. So then, when she hears the dog barking, she knows it's a sign that she's safe and it's okay to sleep."

Or, you know, it's a sign that there are monsters out there trying to kill her. And she'd better hope the dog doesn't go silent, because we all know what that means.

It's a good thing this guy doesn't have kids; that's all I can say.

Shortcuts: I'm doing them wrong

You have to love Google Maps, since they allow you to share your* stupidity with the whole internet.

Exhibit one: the sensible route that anyone else would have taken



Exhibit two: my 'shortcut'


_______________

* By 'your', of course, I mean 'my'.