today at work

... since I didn't do much else; a travelog for today.

woke up at 9 because I had switched the alarm clock to CD mode (to listen to a CD in the evening) and the alarm turned the CD player on at the intended 8:30. (Dumb design: it does not play the CD, which would have worked correctly in waking me up.) Thereby missed the hotel breakfast and arrived at work at nearly 10.

The supervisor of my internship asked me if I had work -- I do, but I'm not moving real fast on it. I need to work with another student X, but he (and the supervisor) are busy finishing a paper for a future conference. I did some work, read Livejournal, and went along for lunch with some of the other researchers in this lab. We talked about localization (one is married to a localization engineer) and internationalization; the discussion wandered into character-encoding, and the van full of geeks was excited. They have asked me to give a talk next week on this subject -- which I can do; I have a prepared talk on it that I've given once or twice a year since 2002. (I think evan, caracola and mattm were in the audience at one of the first versions of this talk.) We joked over lunch about the inappropriateness of "lucky" as the name of a restaurant, and about the uselessness of Onstar.

After lunch my supervisor and student X gave me the latest draft of their paper they're working on. (I'd read an earlier draft and really marked it up heavily). I assumed there wouldn't be much more. But about half of my changes were ignored, I think, or enough was rewritten that there really wasn't a complete passthrough. Also the damfulething was written in MS Word, so it was very hard for them to correct. I spent a good two hours or more going through this paper in more detail.

At the same time, I was carrying on a conversation in occasional email with Advisor, trying to figure out when I might get a raise now that my MA is done.

Back to the now-mared paper: in giving it back to them, I wound up sitting with the two of them for nearly an hour. My standards must be high; I wasn't just correcting spelling mistakes (though I did that too) I was finding consistency in their overall story. Overall, I feel like I was practically handing them the outline and saying "here -- make it fit this." Oh, and there were references that didn't match the body, and body references that never made it in the reference, mis-spellings, partial sentences, sentences with extra text, passive voice. Oh, and one really bad decision having to do with significance testing ("that's just not how you use a t test!" I wanted to write, but I was nicer). By the end of the time when we sat together to go over my notes, the two poor guys seemed a little shell-shocked. Since one of them was actually my supervisor, it was an odd experience (though gratifying) to hear him switch to a register where he was the supplicant: "Do you think we have a lot more writing?" he asked "I was sort of hoping we could be done with only minor edits."

They seem convinced that they don't want to give it back to me. That's too bad, since I think it would benefit from that. Some of my suggested changes are structural, and some will require new text -- all of those changes will require another pass, and by not having anyone look at it they save themselves short term awkwardness at the price of published embarrassment. Oh well, not my problem.

I left, came back to the hotel, ate dinner, and watched Spiderman 2 on cable. This was a fairly good movie, considering my low expectations. Talked to imtboo for almost two hours, wrote this journal, and now, I'm falling asleep while typing. Must go to bed.

A tragedy of less than epic proportions: no interweb.

They've taken away my Internets. Yes, I can still see LJ through the dumb web-proxy, but my supply-closet access to the internet was discovered by some zealously paranoid network person and removed. Now I can't check email except at the hotel. Great.

*shakes fists in minor impotent whinging at the sky*

I think I'll probably be able to get it fixed -- I can't transfer anything from my lab computers to this office without it -- but the people whom I should ask are all out of the office all day. Ah well.

[meme] first contact [imtboo]

It's a chain letter meme, adapted from imtboo's post here. She posted about a friend's first comment in her journal, so I'll post about her first comment in mine.

imtboo's first comment in my journal was a recommendation to go visit Neah Bay, along with a mysterious hint about her identity. In the ensuing thread (over two days), she flirted with me, I flirted back, we discussed Romance languages and romance -- appropriately enough -- bloomed as she asked me out ("I am not hitting on you", sheesh) and I accepted (after, I think, this hint from caracola), leading to this date, and we're together eleven months next Friday.

I miss her. This is the longest I've been away from her since then. We still haven't visited Neah Bay.

[As a postscript: I discovered today that if you google for lj imtboo, my journal comes up as the first link.]