Just another Friday night.
Didn't post last week because it was Thanksgiving weekend. But this week it's back to the usual routine.
Although not quite usual, because tomorrow our winter data collection starts. We're meeting at the lab at 7am, which is...early. I'll be with the first team that's heading back around 11:30 though, which is better than the original plan, which was for the entire team to be there from 7am to 8pm. And that's LEAVING around 8pm, meaning I probably wouldn't have been leaving the lab until around 9. So it's not as bad, although it's still super early. Also I again am annoyed that project manager didn't feel a need to let the team know about the plan until around 4pm today. These are not my usual work hours so it's helpful for me to actually know in advance where I need to be and when, because, you know, I need to PLAN for it. Of course the other project members in the lab probably knew earlier because they are in the relevant meetings and I am not. Sometimes I feel like project manager takes me for granted a little...or at least assumes that I am free to go anywhere she needs 100% of the time. And for the last year this has generally been true, I've gone on random data collections at odd times, but I still want to know IN ADVANCE about these things so I can actually have some kind of schedule in my life. When you're expected to be able to drop everything and run off at any time, you can't really plan for anything. She's just lucky I don't have much of a social life so I'm generally around whenever I'm summoned.
I'm also on data collection on Sunday, from 10am to 4-ish (meaning, again, probably getting back around 5, since we have to travel to and from the site). So I'm getting basically nothing done this weekend. I bought groceries and finally got around to sweeping the kitchen floor today though, so at least a few things got done. And we're going to be doing this next weekend too most likely...and who knows how many others, because God forbid the project manager bother to give me even a vague idea of the plan. And we'll be doing the post-intervention data collection at some point too, and again I have NO idea when we're planning to do that...January? February?
The worst part of this is the likelihood that we won't actually get enough data. We still have very few coaches consented so once again we're going to be showing up to games and trying to consent on the spot. The one good thing is that apparently about twelve basketball games take place over the course of the day in a given gym, so we have more chances to get coaches (in baseball, the games were all on weeknights and took until it got dark, so only one was played on a given day at a given location). But given our poor rate of on-the-spot consents back in the summer, we may very well have the same problem now and get too little data to be useful out of all this. The waste of time and money is disheartening, but what can one do...I'm not the one making the decisions here.
I finished writing the syntax to get the summer data into analyzable shape this week, so I suppose next week we can start analyzing it, assuming the project co-manager has finalized all the data files. I don't have high hopes that we'll find anything, and even if we do it won't be meaningful, because we have a sample of 25. Low power, minimal generalizability. But, I must analyze it.
Working on this project has really started to get me down...I think in part because of the futility (all evidence thus far suggests that our measures are just kind of bad, so when we don't find anything, it's hard to say WHY since it might be measurement problems), and also in part because I'm not really treated as a member of the project team. I'm just this sort of periphery person who codes and analyzes the data and shows up for data collection, but I know nothing about what's actually going on in the project and have minimal contact with the other project members (I share an office with project manager, but even when I ask her how things on the project are going she doesn't say much). So I don't really get that team feeling, you know? Even on a pretty hopeless project, when you have a bond with your team you can still keep your spirits up. It's also demoralizing because the project has just been such a mess from the start and the project manager just kind of hates the project at this point and seems very focused on her job search.
Project manager finally looked at the poster draft I gave her two and a half months ago (we need to present it next weekend) because our collaborators emailed to ask her about the progress. She mainly added a bunch of headers that look cluttered to me (in several places she's made a header for a SINGLE BULLET of text...at that point, what does the header really add?), changed some of the text to suggest that our study focuses on and draws conclusions about topics it has nothing to do with, and formatted the various text areas so that they awkwardly mash into each other rather than having them more neatly arranged. My taste in poster design is very different from hers. I pretty much expected this though, because I had to work with her on creating documents for my previous project and I really did not like her writing style. My feeling is that the purpose of a technical document is to communicate information, so it should be written as clearly and simply as possible. Her writing is like...a stereotypical academic I guess I would put it? It's very clunky and awkward and reads like someone trying to sound really smart. She sometimes talks like that in meetings with partner orgs so I guess this is an overall style thing? She doesn't normally talk like that, only during meetings with outside collaborators. She also has two bad habits: claiming that we concluded or know things that we don't, and misusing words. This is like in a document we collabed on, where I wrote the initial draft and had, as is my wont, used 'that is' and 'for example' rather than i.e. and e.g. I feel that using plain language creates a more user-friendly document. She decided to edit all of these to i.e., and I then had to explain that i.e. means 'that is' and you should use e.g. when you want to use latin abbrieviations for 'for example'. This is why I'm generally in favor of just using normal language, the same way you would talk: you're much more likely to say what you actually meant. She also had a tendency to slather documents in 'thus'. She would just start sentences with 'thus' when they were not extensions or explanations of previous sentences but merely knew information. She also has a tendency to say vague things to pacify collaborators rather than address the question or issue they're bringing up, which annoyed me on the last project because I was the one actually doing the analyses, so I had to actually ADDRESS those issues, and we scheduled meetings specifically to do things like that. Having now worked with her for the better part of two years, I can say that her working style doesn't really suit me.
You might think I'm simply whiny or picky, but I actually really enjoy working with BOTH of the project managers (and the person who's basically the second-in-command, actually) on the other project I work on. They're very organized and transparent. Well, I suppose the more time one spends working, the more one learns what one prefers in a work environment.
Other than work...not much is up. It's already almost dark by the time I leave work, and now I'll be working on weekends as well, so there's not that much to do other than work, really...I won NaNo. I ended up writing weird bits and pieces of things, mostly ReEragon backstory (there's about 100 years worth of backstory, since Galbatorix's rebellion takes place 100 years ago and several of the characters were alive back then). I continue to get stuck on writing half of ReEldest (or I guess like a third, since there's also the end of the story that I have never even drafted at all yet), because the part with the elves is SO BORING. The elves are the most boring characters. See, that's because I tried to keep at least somewhat to the canon portrayal where they're all mysterious and wise and shit, and that's boring as all get out. Give me characters who are flailing around being incompetent and getting sassed by dwarves and talking horses, that's much more my thing. This is why the best part of the Ellesmera section is Murtagh flailing around being angsty and crying all over Arya's rose garden, that's hilarious. Well to me anyway. (there is actually a scene where he freaks out at her rose garden planned. It's not AS funny in context, since it reminded him of his mother, who loved gardening and also was murdered by her husband. Murtagh's had a pretty sad life.)
I'm still working on it though! I'm in the process of reading through the previous drafts now that they're all organized. I probably need to go back and read ReEragon at some point but I kind of don't want to because I just know I'll see tons of things that I think aren't good now. I tend to have one of two reactions to my old writing: either I feel great affection for it even though it's not that great, or I hate it and judge it really harshly. But yeah I'm trying to hammer out an outline. There is basically an outline for the Varden's journey to Surda, because that has more action (and is more hilarious since all the characters suck at being detectives and yet are trying to discover the traitors in their midst), but I don't quite have one yet for Ellesmera. There just...isn't a lot to DO there. I mean hell I reread the actual Eldest and friggin' nothing happens in that book! Eragon faffs about going on awkward dates with Arya, getting beaten up by Vanir, and complaining about shit. So it kind of has to be created whole-cloth...I'm also struggling to portray the elves because they are the villains of the story, but they can't be cackling supervillains or Eragon just looks like a complete idiot for not realizing there's a problem here. Ultimately my greatest challenge is that I am a mediocre writer! But I shall do my best.
Hilariously, I have never written a second draft of the goofy out-of-story part because I loved the first (incomplete) draft so much. It's SO GREAT, you guys. The characters become trapped in a Legend of Zelda patiche and fight a mysterious enemy disguised as Christopher Paolini. And Eragon decides that he's had enough of being ignored by Arya and now wants to switch love interests to Durza, because no one else is available, and Durza is like, someone plz halp, because most of his interactions with Eragon up to that point involve being punched in the face. Eragon is actually much more fun to right as a complete incompetent asshole, oddly...
And that's about it. It's so dark and cold lately that I don't really feel like doing anything...I just huddle under a blanket and idle my time away on the internet. I haven't even been playing video games lately. Well, winter is always a difficult time for me...at least it's only a few weeks until the lab closes for winter break. I'll be at home for a couple weeks so I'll probably spend a lot of time with my nephew, since my parents take care of him during the week (my brother and his wife can't afford childcare). They're actually looking to move house at the moment because they live in a tiny, crappy house. The only condo they found that they can hope to afford is actually within walking distance of my parents' house, which is like...I realize they need somewhere close enough to their workplaces and they don't have a lot of options because housing is expensive in the area, but that seems kind of sad to me in a way? I can't really picture myself being content to never get farther from home than a twenty-minute walk. It's odd, but of all the people my age in my extended family, I live the farthest from home (my father's family lives within like a half-hour drive, and we're not close to my mother's family at all so I don't know about them). And I only live like a four-hour drive from home! But at this point they really HAVE to find a new place because my nephew will be crawling soon, and there's no room for him to move around at their place. It's so cluttered too, it's really not safe for a child. Hell, it's not safe for them either, it's like one huge fire hazard.
It will probably be a quiet week. It's supposed to be below freezing quite a few nights and there's a chance of snow towards the end of the week, so I doubt I'll be out and about much.
Although not quite usual, because tomorrow our winter data collection starts. We're meeting at the lab at 7am, which is...early. I'll be with the first team that's heading back around 11:30 though, which is better than the original plan, which was for the entire team to be there from 7am to 8pm. And that's LEAVING around 8pm, meaning I probably wouldn't have been leaving the lab until around 9. So it's not as bad, although it's still super early. Also I again am annoyed that project manager didn't feel a need to let the team know about the plan until around 4pm today. These are not my usual work hours so it's helpful for me to actually know in advance where I need to be and when, because, you know, I need to PLAN for it. Of course the other project members in the lab probably knew earlier because they are in the relevant meetings and I am not. Sometimes I feel like project manager takes me for granted a little...or at least assumes that I am free to go anywhere she needs 100% of the time. And for the last year this has generally been true, I've gone on random data collections at odd times, but I still want to know IN ADVANCE about these things so I can actually have some kind of schedule in my life. When you're expected to be able to drop everything and run off at any time, you can't really plan for anything. She's just lucky I don't have much of a social life so I'm generally around whenever I'm summoned.
I'm also on data collection on Sunday, from 10am to 4-ish (meaning, again, probably getting back around 5, since we have to travel to and from the site). So I'm getting basically nothing done this weekend. I bought groceries and finally got around to sweeping the kitchen floor today though, so at least a few things got done. And we're going to be doing this next weekend too most likely...and who knows how many others, because God forbid the project manager bother to give me even a vague idea of the plan. And we'll be doing the post-intervention data collection at some point too, and again I have NO idea when we're planning to do that...January? February?
The worst part of this is the likelihood that we won't actually get enough data. We still have very few coaches consented so once again we're going to be showing up to games and trying to consent on the spot. The one good thing is that apparently about twelve basketball games take place over the course of the day in a given gym, so we have more chances to get coaches (in baseball, the games were all on weeknights and took until it got dark, so only one was played on a given day at a given location). But given our poor rate of on-the-spot consents back in the summer, we may very well have the same problem now and get too little data to be useful out of all this. The waste of time and money is disheartening, but what can one do...I'm not the one making the decisions here.
I finished writing the syntax to get the summer data into analyzable shape this week, so I suppose next week we can start analyzing it, assuming the project co-manager has finalized all the data files. I don't have high hopes that we'll find anything, and even if we do it won't be meaningful, because we have a sample of 25. Low power, minimal generalizability. But, I must analyze it.
Working on this project has really started to get me down...I think in part because of the futility (all evidence thus far suggests that our measures are just kind of bad, so when we don't find anything, it's hard to say WHY since it might be measurement problems), and also in part because I'm not really treated as a member of the project team. I'm just this sort of periphery person who codes and analyzes the data and shows up for data collection, but I know nothing about what's actually going on in the project and have minimal contact with the other project members (I share an office with project manager, but even when I ask her how things on the project are going she doesn't say much). So I don't really get that team feeling, you know? Even on a pretty hopeless project, when you have a bond with your team you can still keep your spirits up. It's also demoralizing because the project has just been such a mess from the start and the project manager just kind of hates the project at this point and seems very focused on her job search.
Project manager finally looked at the poster draft I gave her two and a half months ago (we need to present it next weekend) because our collaborators emailed to ask her about the progress. She mainly added a bunch of headers that look cluttered to me (in several places she's made a header for a SINGLE BULLET of text...at that point, what does the header really add?), changed some of the text to suggest that our study focuses on and draws conclusions about topics it has nothing to do with, and formatted the various text areas so that they awkwardly mash into each other rather than having them more neatly arranged. My taste in poster design is very different from hers. I pretty much expected this though, because I had to work with her on creating documents for my previous project and I really did not like her writing style. My feeling is that the purpose of a technical document is to communicate information, so it should be written as clearly and simply as possible. Her writing is like...a stereotypical academic I guess I would put it? It's very clunky and awkward and reads like someone trying to sound really smart. She sometimes talks like that in meetings with partner orgs so I guess this is an overall style thing? She doesn't normally talk like that, only during meetings with outside collaborators. She also has two bad habits: claiming that we concluded or know things that we don't, and misusing words. This is like in a document we collabed on, where I wrote the initial draft and had, as is my wont, used 'that is' and 'for example' rather than i.e. and e.g. I feel that using plain language creates a more user-friendly document. She decided to edit all of these to i.e., and I then had to explain that i.e. means 'that is' and you should use e.g. when you want to use latin abbrieviations for 'for example'. This is why I'm generally in favor of just using normal language, the same way you would talk: you're much more likely to say what you actually meant. She also had a tendency to slather documents in 'thus'. She would just start sentences with 'thus' when they were not extensions or explanations of previous sentences but merely knew information. She also has a tendency to say vague things to pacify collaborators rather than address the question or issue they're bringing up, which annoyed me on the last project because I was the one actually doing the analyses, so I had to actually ADDRESS those issues, and we scheduled meetings specifically to do things like that. Having now worked with her for the better part of two years, I can say that her working style doesn't really suit me.
You might think I'm simply whiny or picky, but I actually really enjoy working with BOTH of the project managers (and the person who's basically the second-in-command, actually) on the other project I work on. They're very organized and transparent. Well, I suppose the more time one spends working, the more one learns what one prefers in a work environment.
Other than work...not much is up. It's already almost dark by the time I leave work, and now I'll be working on weekends as well, so there's not that much to do other than work, really...I won NaNo. I ended up writing weird bits and pieces of things, mostly ReEragon backstory (there's about 100 years worth of backstory, since Galbatorix's rebellion takes place 100 years ago and several of the characters were alive back then). I continue to get stuck on writing half of ReEldest (or I guess like a third, since there's also the end of the story that I have never even drafted at all yet), because the part with the elves is SO BORING. The elves are the most boring characters. See, that's because I tried to keep at least somewhat to the canon portrayal where they're all mysterious and wise and shit, and that's boring as all get out. Give me characters who are flailing around being incompetent and getting sassed by dwarves and talking horses, that's much more my thing. This is why the best part of the Ellesmera section is Murtagh flailing around being angsty and crying all over Arya's rose garden, that's hilarious. Well to me anyway. (there is actually a scene where he freaks out at her rose garden planned. It's not AS funny in context, since it reminded him of his mother, who loved gardening and also was murdered by her husband. Murtagh's had a pretty sad life.)
I'm still working on it though! I'm in the process of reading through the previous drafts now that they're all organized. I probably need to go back and read ReEragon at some point but I kind of don't want to because I just know I'll see tons of things that I think aren't good now. I tend to have one of two reactions to my old writing: either I feel great affection for it even though it's not that great, or I hate it and judge it really harshly. But yeah I'm trying to hammer out an outline. There is basically an outline for the Varden's journey to Surda, because that has more action (and is more hilarious since all the characters suck at being detectives and yet are trying to discover the traitors in their midst), but I don't quite have one yet for Ellesmera. There just...isn't a lot to DO there. I mean hell I reread the actual Eldest and friggin' nothing happens in that book! Eragon faffs about going on awkward dates with Arya, getting beaten up by Vanir, and complaining about shit. So it kind of has to be created whole-cloth...I'm also struggling to portray the elves because they are the villains of the story, but they can't be cackling supervillains or Eragon just looks like a complete idiot for not realizing there's a problem here. Ultimately my greatest challenge is that I am a mediocre writer! But I shall do my best.
Hilariously, I have never written a second draft of the goofy out-of-story part because I loved the first (incomplete) draft so much. It's SO GREAT, you guys. The characters become trapped in a Legend of Zelda patiche and fight a mysterious enemy disguised as Christopher Paolini. And Eragon decides that he's had enough of being ignored by Arya and now wants to switch love interests to Durza, because no one else is available, and Durza is like, someone plz halp, because most of his interactions with Eragon up to that point involve being punched in the face. Eragon is actually much more fun to right as a complete incompetent asshole, oddly...
And that's about it. It's so dark and cold lately that I don't really feel like doing anything...I just huddle under a blanket and idle my time away on the internet. I haven't even been playing video games lately. Well, winter is always a difficult time for me...at least it's only a few weeks until the lab closes for winter break. I'll be at home for a couple weeks so I'll probably spend a lot of time with my nephew, since my parents take care of him during the week (my brother and his wife can't afford childcare). They're actually looking to move house at the moment because they live in a tiny, crappy house. The only condo they found that they can hope to afford is actually within walking distance of my parents' house, which is like...I realize they need somewhere close enough to their workplaces and they don't have a lot of options because housing is expensive in the area, but that seems kind of sad to me in a way? I can't really picture myself being content to never get farther from home than a twenty-minute walk. It's odd, but of all the people my age in my extended family, I live the farthest from home (my father's family lives within like a half-hour drive, and we're not close to my mother's family at all so I don't know about them). And I only live like a four-hour drive from home! But at this point they really HAVE to find a new place because my nephew will be crawling soon, and there's no room for him to move around at their place. It's so cluttered too, it's really not safe for a child. Hell, it's not safe for them either, it's like one huge fire hazard.
It will probably be a quiet week. It's supposed to be below freezing quite a few nights and there's a chance of snow towards the end of the week, so I doubt I'll be out and about much.