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JMM Day 1
Spent the day at the JMM. Due to sufficient internet connectivity and a lack of talks that I was super-interested in, I was able to get a significant amount of real work done, which is a plus. Somehow, even though I find it hard to concentrate when there is a lot going on in the office, I didn’t have any trouble focusing while sitting around in a hallway in the convention center.
I wanted to say that was my first time back at a math conference after my stint in computer science, but then I remembered that I went to MathFest a few years ago.
Main differences between math conferences and HPC conferences:
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No free booze at math conferences.
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No “free” stuff given out at math conference registration (and paid for by your conference fee).
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No swag in the exhibit hall at math conferences. (I am not counting candy or pens as swag.)
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Math conferences do not have ridiculous trade show booths. Many, many hours (and dollars) go into producing (and shipping) booths for Supercomputing.
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Badges and badge-holders are simpler at math conferences. HPC conferences also have a lot of badge flair, in which one gets tiers of ribbons to stick on one’s badge as part of an academic dominance display.
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There is only a slight pretence of checking badges at JMM, mostly to keep the unregistered from drinking the AMS’s free coffee. At the computing conferences, they cared a lot about checking badges.
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Meeting Fatigue
We all survived the termite tenting with incident. Well, all of us except for the termites. And the ants. And all the other uninvited critters living in the building. Gwen was very popular at her cat resort. She and Sophie haven’t fought since they’ve been home.
JMM doesn’t really start until tomorrow, and I suspect that I am already over it. Even worse, I worry that I will have yet another weekend of suboptimal recreational internet time, and I will not have a chance to debug the freakin’ build script for this blog. (Any errors you have been seeing are because I have been lovingly building and uploading the pages by hand, sometimes forgetting to set essential environment variables.)
Since it is supposed to be rainy again tomorrow morning, I will probably take the bus to JMM and not worry about what sort of bicycle parking there is at the convention center. (Meanwhile, I live in a neighborhood so twee that there is bicycle valet parking at the farmer’s market.)
Mostly imagined sessions at the Joint Math Meetings
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AMS Special Session on getting reimbursed for going to San Diego and signalling that you are a serious mathematician.
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MAA Panel on enforcing the norm that the way the in-group teaches is better than the way that you teach.
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SIAM is no longer a headline sponsor entirely imaginary contributed paper session on cranks talking about blockchain.
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MAA Contributed Paper Session on people from my demographic who are just a wee bit too excited about hexaflexagons.
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SIAM imaginary workshop on taking the ferry from the Convention Center over to Coronado and hunting Pokémon native to the Hoenn region.
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Redacted imaginary session on That’s Not Funny.
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AMS Invited Lecture on an inoffensive topic by an establishment figure.
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MAA reception for socially awkward mathematicians.
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Some other society’s poster session (AMS members’ badges will warn them if they get too close to the room where this is happening because posters are for scientists and children.).
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Evil publishers will give you candy.
Note that I am so soulless that I will eat candy from Elsevier.
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New Directions in Zig Zag
After taking apart the first draft of the free-form shawl I was knitting, I have started again. This time I am working it the short way and making the zigs with short rows.
Sophie keeps trying to help. Which is why I don’t make much progress while she is around.
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Metaphors and Version Control
I came in to work this afternoon because I had no interest in hanging out all day in a hotel room with a neurotic cat. I’m still overwhelmed by all the amazing features that I am going to put into the thing that I am currently building, and I couldn’t figure out which one to freak out about first, so I decided to try out the free git class that Datacamp has been promoting very heavily over social media. Well, there went a few hours that I am never getting back.
Because I am approximately infinity years old, I grew up using cvs and svn, and everything was fine as long as my fellow Gen-Xers were in charge of setting up projects and such. But now everyone is much too senior to deal with such details, and the Millennials are taking over everything with git and Bon Iver and beer with way too much hops.
I was super-excited when the lessons started out talking about putting things in boxes and putting boxes in the mail. I love metaphors. Mostly I use git as a command-line version of Dropbox, and my strategy for dealing with Terrible Mistakes has been to find a non-broken version of the file on either GitHub or another one of my computers, and then copy the good file’s contents into the bad file and commit the fixed version.
Sadly, the git tutorial was mostly a collection of incantations without any insight. If you invoke these two spells in the wrong order, then you need to press control-x, control-s, control-x, control-c and then try again! Who knows why? Not me!
I’m still not entirely sure what sorts of objects git can act on nor what the relationships are between those objects. In case you haven’t guessed by the way that I have described my workflow, my mental model is that there are locations, and there are files, and files are elements of locations. There are also two functions,
pushandpull, that take all the files from one location and replace them with their counterparts in another location. And then there are the codewordsaddandcommitthat define this mapping on the elements (files).There were also a lot of small-picture things that annoyed me about this tutorial as well. The multiple choice choices were indexed by positive integers, but there was a consistent off-by-one issue. For example, you would press 1 if the answer were 0, press 2 if the answer were 1, etc. They should have either indexed the choices by non-negative integers or they should have used letters instead.
Also, even after you got a problem right, there was no additional information or solution provided. I had no way of knowing whether I got something right for the wrong reason. I know that this happened at least once because it asked me, “Which of the files…,” and I had narrowed it down to two of them, so I chose the choice for one of those two, and it said, “Great job!” and then moved on to the next question.
The auto-grader was also somewhat weird. There was a shell window where you could type commands. And sometimes the shell would tell me that some operation had failed, but the grader would tell me that I had succeeded. Other times, the opposite would happen: it would seem that everything went as planned in the shell, but my response would be marked wrong. Also, there were times when it told me to do one command in the shell, but I had forgotten the names of the files or whatever and wanted to do an
lsorpwdor somesuch so that I could remember the name of the thing to type in the one command, and it started freaking out on me. I would love to blame the hole in my brain for my inability to remember things, but really I just have a remarkably short attention span and only limited attention to detail. (Have I shown you the hole in my brain? A cursory search of my assets folder suggests not. Spoiler alert: It is not really a hole; it just looks like one to people not trained in how to read MRIs. It is actually an unusual vascular feature. With the word “feature” used in the same euphemistic sense of, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”)Meanwhile, I have spent so long on this rant that phpMyAdmin has timed out, and I have lost my small but delightful query that extracts the choices that I will let users pick from when I build this amazing dashboard that I have been procrastinating and self-sabotaging for far too many days.
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New Adventures with Poison Gas
Sorry for no post yesterday. My building is being termite-tented from today through Monday, and I had a lot to do to get ready for it.
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I had considered saving my money so that I could buy a house-house in San Diego. Considering how much of a pain in the ass it was to pack up what I needed for a weekend in a nearby hotel + move the cats out of the apartment, I am thinking that I might never move ever. Well, my apartment is on the second floor, and bad knees run in my family, so I might need to move to assisted living in several decades. But until then.
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The poison gas is so poisonous that all food had to be double-bagged in magical bags provided by the fumigation company. The poison gas so pervasive that it makes its way into the walls and into the wood structures of the building and deep into wherever it is that the termites are hiding; it could even make its way into sealed containers in the refrigerator (unless they are in the magic bags). The poison gas is so harmless that I don’t need to do anything special afterwards. The poison gas is so ephemeral that when they remove the tent all of the gas is gone from all of the nooks and crannies that it snuck its way into. Toothbrush? Needs to go in the magic bags. Fork? Don’t need to do anything.
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Gwen is spending the weekend at a cat resort (credentials: purring/parrot). Sophie came to work with me today and will be spending the weekend with us at the hotel. (If you follow that link after Monday, you will be looking at someone else’s cat.)
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Even though the natural disaster warning people have told me that I should have a bag ready with important things to take with me in case of a natural disaster, I had a hard time deciding what to take with me for the weekend of termite tenting. In addition to clothes + cats + the cats’ impedimenta, I ended up taking my birth certificate, social security card, and passport (because I know that I am going to lose at least one of these in the future, and I want to be certain that they were not lost or stolen as part of the termite tenting), one of my back-up hard drives, and two pieces of family heirloom jewelry.
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Wednesday Omens
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Woke up with a headache this morning.
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Last night there was a major accident on the 15 which closed approximately all of the lanes, and even now (over nine hours later) only two lanes are open. I had to go the long way around and up the coast on my way to work, together with everyone else who usually takes the 15 north. (We can discuss the use of definite articles with the names of highways in the future. Why do you say “the Thruway” or “the Mass Pike” but not “the 90”?)
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I asked HR to ask the health insurance rep to ask the health insurance company for the group number and assorted other codewords that I need in order to participate in our nation’s dysfunctional system for paying for health care. I have been told that they are not available at this time.
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Seemingly Obvious Advice for Job-Seekers
No matter what you have read on the internet about whether or not your application is read by robots or by humans or whether anyone reads a cover letter or whatever else the internet is telling you: If the job ad asks you to send specific things, you should send those specific things.
Somewhat related: For the next six months, I will still be screening resumes for a large class of open positions where I work.
Bright side: Today I received an application that included all the things!
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