On the subject of people in online communities having previously undiscovered offline connections, see "The fluorosphere bends back in upon itself" from the comments community at Making Light. Wow.
It's a small world out there. For additional commentary, see the comments at Unfogged.
The ceremony last night was lovely, and commencement's tomorrow. I'm now a little sad that I didn't invite anyone besides mr. s., not because it's going to be so wonderful (we'll be lucky if we're out of there in three hours!), but because I didn't give anyone else the opportunity to share in my pleasure at reaching this milestone. What was intended to be attentiveness to people's busy schedules could be construed as something decidedly less gracious. I wish I'd considered this earlier.
Upon further consideration of these and other issues, I decided to hold off on the big to-do until next year, and did not participate. I have no regrets.
Seriously amazing. It may have been helped by the fact that my shoulders were taped back after physical therapy, which gave me the posture of an enlightened monk, but in spite of a hugely packed schedule* with not a few snafus, nothing touched me today. It was awesome.
*software demo, two interviews, planning meeting, focus group facilitation, phys. therapy, end-of-year celebration preparation, and celebration itself
Began today. I'm currently at about 1 minute per unit, which means I'll be doing about 24 more hours of coding. I've also got some concerns about the final scheme structure, but am hopeful that as time goes on it will make more sense.
I've always been attentive to the underdog, which is problematic when coding masses of data. I'm going to have to learn to be comfortable with answering the questions I've got, versus being bummed about all of the cool interactions I'm going to have to overlook this time around. Still it's exciting to be finally getting going, though I realize now I'm going to have to take frequent breaks and be ok with that. I should probably say that coding will take 36 hours, and that's before any data entry, much less the analysis or writeup.
Off topic, I wonder if internet discussion groups are reassuring to people who are paranoid that their experience is created just for them. Imagine the system complex enough to maintain so very many different personalities that are essentially stable over the long haul? Might be different offline, where one is by necessity "interacting" with fewer people, but online - the time constraint would be problematic, I think, and so perhaps comforting that there really are that many different people with whom you agree.
My assistantship is coming to an end, and with quite a bang, too. There's a project that needs to be completed by the end of the week, and we're down to the wire. This leads to some pretty outrageous behavior on the part of people who've known this was coming for over a year.
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<redacted impolitic description of certain behaviors>
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Sometimes, I really wish I were the kind of person who could respond to such situations with a casual "that's just not my problem" and walk away with a smile on my face. Oh well.
I've gotten the sign off and am now seriously revising my methodology chapter, which is kitchen sinky in terms of content and scope. Apparently, I've thought this before. While meandering through the text I came upon the following (italics indicate text revised for online consumption):
SIDEBAR: The outcome of this measure will indicate whether the community prefers things that are blah blah and blah blah (e.g. a lower explanation ratio will indicate that blah blah occured) versus some other things which have a higher explanation ratio (indicating that something else is happening).
SIDE SIDEBAR: WTF was I thinking?*
I'm still not entirely sure, but now that it's approved I have to figure it out.
*This might be funnier if I could post the original material, but perhaps not.
