All these things

Just a moment ago, I was busy listening to my favourite singing identical twin lesbians’ (relatively new) album. (Tegan & Sara, for those of you who don’t know.) I was also busy trying to work on a slideshow for a presentation I have next week, but was very much distracted by the multitude of vegetative matter that had sprouted in my garden due to the winter drizzle. The thing is, I’m struggling lots with this presentation, for the simple reason that;

I HAVE TOO MANY SUPERVISORS!

Seriously. I was talking to my beloved about them a couple of weeks ago, and he raised the question of how many supervisors I actually have. So I counted them;

1 x sensory science supervisor at Food Science

1 x winemaking supervisor

1 x wine chemistry supervisor

1 x analytical chemistry supervisor

1 x winemaking supervisor that used to be part of my previous project but now is just in the background as some sort of consulting presence

1 x multivariate statistical supervisor sitting in Norway in the town of As, sortof keeping a watchful eye…

That makes six in total… Way too many I’d say. See, the main problem I’m having with them is the fact that they all have their own ideas about what I should be doing, and some of them have too concrete ideas about what I should be doing whilst other don’t really care enough… This seems particularly to be a problem with the first four, because they seem to be the only four that actually sit in meeting with me and disagree about what I should be doing. It almost feels like I need another team, almost like a supervisor mediation team. Because I seem to have figured at least one of them out, but I’m only now starting to figure the rest of them out. Which makes this whole thing difficult, almost like an academic psychological minefield.

Hopefully, though, we will all soon agree, and I will soon have an actual project. Which would be awesome!

Reverse technology

This is a weird, ‘inversive’ though almost, but I’m going to try and explain it anyway. Ok, so I’ve just started doing my Masters degree, and nobody is quite sure yet what exactly I’m supposed to do in terms of experiments. There have been lots and lots of ideas, but if I were to carry them all out I would be at this university at about seven more years – and hopefully they would give me a doctorate for my effort. Anyway, so currently I have no samples and no course of action, so I’m just busy reading and reading and reading some more (and writing up things for meetings, and having meetings). This whole reading thing is creating a lot of paper though; because I print everything I read, for archival reasons and because I’m not really comfortable with reading from a computer screen. Why, you may ask? Well, because computer screens tire my eyes very quickly, the dimensions are all wrong (I happen to have a large-ish computer screen but it’s still not quite A4 length) and I like tagging, marking, writing on and holding my research (I have a complicated system, this is big for me).This whole paper thing has become a bit of a mission though, because I work a several locations (my home, my library, two academic departments that are rather far apart) and I’ve gotten a bit annoyed with having to lug so much paper around. An then I have this thought about how cool it could be if you could just compress paper into something small and then decompress it when you need it. I thought about it for a minute, a realised, duh, that is what having Adobe files on a flashdisk is all about, and I felt really lame.

But it still wouldn’t quite be paper, though.

(And yes, I can’t wait for the day when we actually have this kind of technology going around.)

What should my next blog post be about?

I’ve actually had too many ideas for a next blog post to actually settle on one (and writing several seems like too much work), so I would like to propose a poll. I shall list several ideas I had, and should I get a positive response regarding one of these topics, I may (or may not) write this blogpost. Here goes:

1) Annoyances with undergrads (general)

2 ) Annoyances with undergrads (slow-moving, traffic jamming)

3) Renting two bad movies on Saturday night

4) My new copy of Nylon Magazine

5) Mounting excitement for Cokefest

6) My deadline that has moved to today

Please vote now to avoid disappointment!

Learning about the Unscrambler

Ok, so here’s the thing. I’m a Masters student now. A just-started-dont-really-know-what-to-do-with-myself sort of masters student. I am just starting to learn how to make wine, half on-the side, half as part of my research. (I will also be joining the wine society today; also as part of my research.) Anyway, I’m actually just a little bit bored and unmotivated, as sitting around and reading scientific article is not a lot of fun. This is why I’ve been almost looking forward to the Statistics course on Multivariate Analysis that I’ve been doing yesterday and today. It’s something to do!

As this course is organised by the Food Science department, we’ve been garunteed of good food, and this has been the case. But learning to use the Unscrambler? A bit of a nightmare. I think part of the nightmare is a result of the fact that I don’t have a statistics degree like most of the other people doing the course, which means that even though I almost understand what the lecturer is saying, I never truly understand. And trying to understand makes your head tired, sore, and like a whole bunch of fluff by the end of the day.(I actually had trouble putting together coherent sentences by the end of the day.)

I have a whole day of this ahead of me today. And my flatmate is going shopping.