Grousing about tenure
I'm pretty stressed this month about tenure.
I'm giving a talk today by webinar, sponsored by NISO, so it's a pretty high profile speaking engagement. I'm kind of stressed about this, not because I don't know the material, but because it's so easy to have technical difficulties on a webinar (in my experience, anyway) and it's hard to be peppy and energetic when your audience isn't in the room and can't even respond.
The topic of the talk is more or less the same (comparative usability of library catalog software) as that of a loooong article I'm writing for a high profile journal, due December 1.
I am not necessarily behind schedule for the article, but it is going to be incredibly time consuming for the next few weeks and I'm already bored with it and just want it to be done. Among other things, I've already realized that my data is both compromised (and so part of the article is about how better to collect data next time) and stale (because publishing an article in a peer-reviewed journal takes so long, compared to software development). That is to say, I'm writing an article pointing out flaws in software, most of which have already been fixed -- and the remainder of which will probably be fixed by the time the article appears in print.
Anyway, most of my time between now and December 1 is either spent traveling (variously to Anaheim/Pasadena, London, and San Francisco) or working on this article. And much of the time on planes is probably spent working on the article.
I'm giving a talk today by webinar, sponsored by NISO, so it's a pretty high profile speaking engagement. I'm kind of stressed about this, not because I don't know the material, but because it's so easy to have technical difficulties on a webinar (in my experience, anyway) and it's hard to be peppy and energetic when your audience isn't in the room and can't even respond.
The topic of the talk is more or less the same (comparative usability of library catalog software) as that of a loooong article I'm writing for a high profile journal, due December 1.
I am not necessarily behind schedule for the article, but it is going to be incredibly time consuming for the next few weeks and I'm already bored with it and just want it to be done. Among other things, I've already realized that my data is both compromised (and so part of the article is about how better to collect data next time) and stale (because publishing an article in a peer-reviewed journal takes so long, compared to software development). That is to say, I'm writing an article pointing out flaws in software, most of which have already been fixed -- and the remainder of which will probably be fixed by the time the article appears in print.
Anyway, most of my time between now and December 1 is either spent traveling (variously to Anaheim/Pasadena, London, and San Francisco) or working on this article. And much of the time on planes is probably spent working on the article.