It’s not even a month into the new academic year and I’m already writing a persona/scenario!
I really do enjoy creating my little fake perfect people . . . even when they have problems, they seem like they’re perfect problems (problems that are perfect enough to solve with whatever project concept my group is working on).
“After three months, I finally have my IRB approval.”
gulp.
It BETTER not take that long.
Or I just won’t graduate anytime soon.
I think I dreamt about blogs and my thesis last night. I don’t remember much of the dream. I just know that it wasn’t a nightmare or a good dream, either. It just felt tedious.
I don’t want to dream about my thesis or blogs.
When I was younger, I used to have a very vivid memory of my dreams. For some reason, over the past few years, I just can’t recall hardly any of my dreams. I wake up in the morning knowing that I had dreamt about something but I just can’t remember what it was or how it happened.
I hate Excel – you know that sketchy place on South U. that provides cheap coursepacks by having students make the copies themselves and thus exploiting a loophole in copyright law. It stinks. It’s hot. It’s messy and dirty. The lines are always way too long. Their copy machines are super old and slow and the copies always come out misaligned and fudgy. This afternoon, I spent at least an hour getting my 300+ page infoviz coursepack – that included having to stop seven times to clear paper jams and then having to move to a different machine because the one I was at kept jamming (not that the second machine didn’t jam either). When I was making my copies today, I kept thinking that this place looks like a scene straight out of a bad John Grisham novel. It’s like we were all there trying to secretly make copies of confidential documents or something. That plotline kept me amused and silenced that voice in my head that kept saying, “Why am I here?!? Why can’t this coursepack be in a PDF on CTools? Why am I spending a perfectly nice, sunny Friday afternoon holed up in a hot, stinky room?!?”
I wish all of my coursepacks were at Dollar Bill. Sure, they’re more expensive but at least they’re quick and professional and I don’t have to make the copies myself.
And they also use the software that I worked on this summer! :)
I’ve been meeting some of the new SIers over the past few days. A few of them have come up to me and said, “I know you! I saw your web site!” I think a disproportionate number of them have checked out my portfolio because I’m the third person down from the top and I’m the only one listed above the fold who actually has a site. Every single time one of them approaches me, I keep thinking, “Eeeck!! Damn that selection bias!”
It has been a busy week in the bubble that is Ann Arbor and grad school. Nonetheless, I am still alive and doing rather well. The next semester will be very exhausting and busy, yet I am very excited about starting a few new things. My new apartment is awesome. I’ve been walking everywhere. School is a 20-minute walk and downtown Ann Arbor is about 10 minutes away. It is a very nice change from wasting three hours everyday just being stuck on the freeway. My apartment is still a giant mess, though, but I feel like I’m getting closer to getting organized. I’m hoping to unpack and organize the last few boxes by the end of this weekend.
In a little over one day, I’ll be back in Ann Arbor. What happened to the summer? How did it fly by so fast? I still feel like I have so much to do before the semester starts, which is stressing me out. Nonetheless, I’m excited. It should be an interesting year. I really can’t wait to get back and meetup with all of my friends whom I’ve missed this summer. I also can’t wait to finally unpack for good and to get settled in to my new apartment.
I have a lot to do in the next twenty four hours.
