Whoa, look at me making an extra post this week!
Miracle of miracles! Unless I get lazy and don't post tomorrow, of course, in which case it will be business as usual.
It's been ultra-humid all week, but finally today it rained really heavily, so hopefully the weather will be nicer tomorrow. At least it's not as hot (although the humidity is worse really).
I'm super happy with Pokemon Go thus far (although, oddly, I've caught the most Pokemon while just hanging around my house. My university's campus has comparatively few for whatever reason). I need to visit the local park sometime, since there's supposed to be more Pokemon in parks. Could be neat!
Still coding baseball videos at work. I also got recruited today to explain the state of the project data to the lab manager. No idea why the project manager didn't do it; I'd guess either lack of desire to deliver more bad news or lack of time/interest to understand my explanation of the data (although it was pretty simple, since basically there's nothing to find due to ultraskew). Naturally the meeting derailed at the end into a long explanation of some past, unrelated study because that's how the lab manager generally does meetings.
The project manager is still miserable over the project (and told the other project manager that she almost wished the lab manager had just fired them when the project started to go wrong because dealing with it is worse). She told me she just doesn't know what to do. Which I find puzzling, because there's very little that we CAN do: the partner organization is in charge of recruitment for the Fall, so if they get the sample we'll collect the data, and if they don't (it's quite likely, based on past behavior, that they won't), then there'll be no data to collect. We can't do a thing about that. All we need to do is collect data to replace the data that was lost when the hard drive broke.
As I side note, I still wonder what exactly happened there (I haven't been involved in that so I haven't seen any of the relevant emails or been in the meetings, just head the project manager talk about it). When they sent it to the first data recovery place, supposedly it was a software problem. But now the second data recovery place has come back and said the entire drive is badly physically damaged, like it's totally scratched and ruined. Which raises a lot of questions, because a mechanical problem that serious should have produced some pretty clear signs when our team first noticed something was wrong with the drive. You'd expect noise, for one thing (like clicking or grinding), because the physical damage would screw up the motion of the drive arm. Yet to my knowledge, the problem was first detected via an error message. I really wonder whether the original data recovery place damaged the drive while working with it and never told us. But, again, I've been uninvolved in the process (unfortunately, none of the people who have been involved know much about technology, so it's hard to say exactly what the chain of events was). There's not really much point in bringing it up though I think...the hard drive has been hanging over everyone's heads for so long that nobody wants to talk about it. Also, if the first company actually did damage it, it would be awkward since the lab manager insisted on going with them immediately when the project managers wanted to wait and consider it.
But yeah the total demoralization of the project manager is troubling. I think it's partly due to burnout from this project, but she also tends to be somewhat pessimisstic so I think she's taking it especially hard. Well, also, this was the first major project she was in charge of, and it's kind of going down in flames at this point, so that has to be difficult (but in fairness, there were some poor decisions made by our project team along the way, so this can't all be blamed on bad luck or the partner organization, although quite a bit can). But I guess I'm just like...yes the project is a mess, but there's a lot of that which can't be changed by us in any way. The hard drive is gone, it doesn't matter now what SHOULD have been done about it at the start, because we can't go back and redo it. The Fall recruitment is out of our hands, it'll happen or it won't and that's that. The project is almost out of money, so the HR/budgeting/everything else person at the office will have to look at the budget and just see what's feasible and what isn't and decide that. So my feeling is...it's better to focus on what we have to do next and not on all the things that are wrong that we can't fix.
Like at the end of the day, I am just not that upset or worried about this project. We have the Spring data, we've analyzed it, we can draw some conclusions from that regardless of whatever other data we do or don't get. If the Fall and next Spring data collection never materialize, well, it's not the end of the world. In general, this is not the end of the world. Of course it's easier for me to say that since I only got put on this project full-time recently (prior to this I was just helping out as needed because there were so few staff for the project), and none of the things that have happened have been caused by me or even influenced by me at all. So the problems are not my fault, which of course makes them easier to deal with. And my salary isn't paid for by that project either. But seriously, the lab manager isn't going to just fire people, there are new grants in planning and everyone is going to get paid and have a job and etc. I see no reason to believe that it won't all be fine long-term, so for now we might as well just do our jobs and focus on that and let go of the things we can't change.
And I say this as a chronic ruminator (or more accurately, that's WHY I say it). Years of obssessing over mistakes both real and imagined have given me some practice in shifting my thoughts away from rumination and towards productive ends (or just something cheerful). You can't wallow in rumination or you just get more and more miserable. But project manager has been in this state for months now so unless things miraculously improve I can't see her feeling better any time soon...
Meanwhile I continue to code baseball videos...one can only hope that eventually we'll be able to do something useful with the data, considering how much time it's going to take to get it into useable shape. And I also continue to run That One Analysis, because I STILL haven't reproduced the original result. I've gotten something with similar group sizes but different means, something with similar means but different group sizes...the number of constrained terms has increased and I'm wondering whether I actually constrained this much originally. I may need to go back to the drawing board and play around with only constrained class 1...it's a mystery, basically...if I really can't work it out by the time I need to print the poster, I'll just use one of the existing versions, since for purposes of this poster I don't need the exact original analysis (this poster is about the data cleaning, not the analysis results themselves).
At least it's a long weekend for Labor Day! That's a nice break from the endless baseball lol.
It's been ultra-humid all week, but finally today it rained really heavily, so hopefully the weather will be nicer tomorrow. At least it's not as hot (although the humidity is worse really).
I'm super happy with Pokemon Go thus far (although, oddly, I've caught the most Pokemon while just hanging around my house. My university's campus has comparatively few for whatever reason). I need to visit the local park sometime, since there's supposed to be more Pokemon in parks. Could be neat!
Still coding baseball videos at work. I also got recruited today to explain the state of the project data to the lab manager. No idea why the project manager didn't do it; I'd guess either lack of desire to deliver more bad news or lack of time/interest to understand my explanation of the data (although it was pretty simple, since basically there's nothing to find due to ultraskew). Naturally the meeting derailed at the end into a long explanation of some past, unrelated study because that's how the lab manager generally does meetings.
The project manager is still miserable over the project (and told the other project manager that she almost wished the lab manager had just fired them when the project started to go wrong because dealing with it is worse). She told me she just doesn't know what to do. Which I find puzzling, because there's very little that we CAN do: the partner organization is in charge of recruitment for the Fall, so if they get the sample we'll collect the data, and if they don't (it's quite likely, based on past behavior, that they won't), then there'll be no data to collect. We can't do a thing about that. All we need to do is collect data to replace the data that was lost when the hard drive broke.
As I side note, I still wonder what exactly happened there (I haven't been involved in that so I haven't seen any of the relevant emails or been in the meetings, just head the project manager talk about it). When they sent it to the first data recovery place, supposedly it was a software problem. But now the second data recovery place has come back and said the entire drive is badly physically damaged, like it's totally scratched and ruined. Which raises a lot of questions, because a mechanical problem that serious should have produced some pretty clear signs when our team first noticed something was wrong with the drive. You'd expect noise, for one thing (like clicking or grinding), because the physical damage would screw up the motion of the drive arm. Yet to my knowledge, the problem was first detected via an error message. I really wonder whether the original data recovery place damaged the drive while working with it and never told us. But, again, I've been uninvolved in the process (unfortunately, none of the people who have been involved know much about technology, so it's hard to say exactly what the chain of events was). There's not really much point in bringing it up though I think...the hard drive has been hanging over everyone's heads for so long that nobody wants to talk about it. Also, if the first company actually did damage it, it would be awkward since the lab manager insisted on going with them immediately when the project managers wanted to wait and consider it.
But yeah the total demoralization of the project manager is troubling. I think it's partly due to burnout from this project, but she also tends to be somewhat pessimisstic so I think she's taking it especially hard. Well, also, this was the first major project she was in charge of, and it's kind of going down in flames at this point, so that has to be difficult (but in fairness, there were some poor decisions made by our project team along the way, so this can't all be blamed on bad luck or the partner organization, although quite a bit can). But I guess I'm just like...yes the project is a mess, but there's a lot of that which can't be changed by us in any way. The hard drive is gone, it doesn't matter now what SHOULD have been done about it at the start, because we can't go back and redo it. The Fall recruitment is out of our hands, it'll happen or it won't and that's that. The project is almost out of money, so the HR/budgeting/everything else person at the office will have to look at the budget and just see what's feasible and what isn't and decide that. So my feeling is...it's better to focus on what we have to do next and not on all the things that are wrong that we can't fix.
Like at the end of the day, I am just not that upset or worried about this project. We have the Spring data, we've analyzed it, we can draw some conclusions from that regardless of whatever other data we do or don't get. If the Fall and next Spring data collection never materialize, well, it's not the end of the world. In general, this is not the end of the world. Of course it's easier for me to say that since I only got put on this project full-time recently (prior to this I was just helping out as needed because there were so few staff for the project), and none of the things that have happened have been caused by me or even influenced by me at all. So the problems are not my fault, which of course makes them easier to deal with. And my salary isn't paid for by that project either. But seriously, the lab manager isn't going to just fire people, there are new grants in planning and everyone is going to get paid and have a job and etc. I see no reason to believe that it won't all be fine long-term, so for now we might as well just do our jobs and focus on that and let go of the things we can't change.
And I say this as a chronic ruminator (or more accurately, that's WHY I say it). Years of obssessing over mistakes both real and imagined have given me some practice in shifting my thoughts away from rumination and towards productive ends (or just something cheerful). You can't wallow in rumination or you just get more and more miserable. But project manager has been in this state for months now so unless things miraculously improve I can't see her feeling better any time soon...
Meanwhile I continue to code baseball videos...one can only hope that eventually we'll be able to do something useful with the data, considering how much time it's going to take to get it into useable shape. And I also continue to run That One Analysis, because I STILL haven't reproduced the original result. I've gotten something with similar group sizes but different means, something with similar means but different group sizes...the number of constrained terms has increased and I'm wondering whether I actually constrained this much originally. I may need to go back to the drawing board and play around with only constrained class 1...it's a mystery, basically...if I really can't work it out by the time I need to print the poster, I'll just use one of the existing versions, since for purposes of this poster I don't need the exact original analysis (this poster is about the data cleaning, not the analysis results themselves).
At least it's a long weekend for Labor Day! That's a nice break from the endless baseball lol.