Entered on 27 August 2003 at 8:45 a.m..
Good days and Bad days
I had a great day yesterday. I had been staring unenthusiastically at my wind-field-model chapter for the past few days, and then yesterday poof, I had a wave of inspiration and got it into much better shape. Then I moved on to tackle Ch 5, the airspace chapter which is very computer sciency. I've fixed it up as well, and just need to construct an appropriate summary and it will be ready to go to my editor.
And wouldn't you know it, just when things were looking good, I get corrections from Ch 7 from my supervisor. His prognosis; it was OK, but I'm not stressing the implications enough or talking about my coverage enough, or anything else. Sigh. I have trouble not becoming very bitter when I get some of these comments. Especially the ones which talk about my coverage and validity of the test cases. It just makes me want to scream, "well if you had actually been involved with this research, and paid attention at meetngs instead of going off on random tangents, you might have been able to offer usefull suggestions in an appropriate time frame!" Good thing he isn't here in person. I think we get along better this way. It isn't that his points aren't valide (they are which is why they make me so angry), but they reveal lots of cracks in his qualifications. For instance I thought that a full factorial design was a standard term used by scientists. He doesn't understand it. And despite having explained several of my graphs to him in person he still doesn't get them. But instead of offering useful advice like, I think you should phrase it this way, I just get question marks.
And to top it all off, today Mars is the closest it has been for 60,000 years. To put it better I will quote the guy on the radio, "The last time mars was this close, humans were living in caves." And after a summer of beautifully clear skies, we have coast to coast cloud today. I'm gonna have to take a laser pointer to the sky and pretend to see Mars.