2000-09-21 - 02:22:21

Hmmm, well it was a pretty slow day.

At work I've been updating our "new" web page. This past Spring one of my jobs was to edit and compile my office's annual report. Thankfully I learned a lot from the process, and to be honest, I enjoy technical writing so much more than engineering (which I love more than programming). Also I think it is a great PR document.

My goal is to get the reputation of my group higher ... I want people asking us for opinions and I want more talented people to work for us. One of the people I went to grad school with will be starting with us on Oct. 16. She is an incredible engineer ... we lucked out.

In fact, they originally wanted her long before me. But I'm cool with that. Fate is a very funny thing.

Right time, right place, you can score a job, or find a friend in somebody you never knew. I don't let fate things bother me.

So I've been programming at work in HTML. The issue is my connection and PC at work is so much better than at home, that this system is dumpy. Which means I want to write less.

I can't wait for our web page to go public, then I can show my friends and family what it is that I really do. Redwood is about the only person who knows. I want to bring my these and show it to others.

I once explained the entire thing to a few friends. Some of them seemed to understand, others didn't.

I still need to take Chapter 5 from my thesis and turn it into a technical paper. I can be published ... I know my research from grad school is unique, based on good science, and it is a system that is useful for engineering in general.

But I got burned out in grad school (which is part of the reason I left, the other half was family pressures to make money). Grad school, science in general was too political. People would only support their friend's research. Any other idea was discarded because it competed for attention.

I got to read and edit a few journal of hydrology articles before they were printed. Some of them were bad, but most good. My advisor helped me, but he said sometimes reviewers would slam something because they didn't understand it and assumed they should. He said students make great editors, because many of them weren't as arrogant and would ask lots of questions and make the authors rewrite their papers. The end result for science being an idea improved instead of lost.

I so much hope my ideas at work do the same. I see so many great uses for our model and want to eventually see about finding some way to estimate model accuracy in a very defined method. Essentially we need more probabilistic descriptions and need to move away from set values and forecasts. It is unrealistic to model "real values". Computers are only guessing, so we should deal with more abstract things.

The problem is most people don't understand how "trends" and probabilities are actually more useful in at least long term decision making.

Now when I got home tonight (I'll be getting home earlier ... my boss's boss told us all NO MORE OVERTIME ... which sucks that was my CD money) I ran to Pure Beauty. I bought the Special Effects hair dye. Tomorrow I'll dye my hair blue again, so I'll talk about that then.

I should have studied tonight, but instead I fixed a broken train. Yup, I love tinkering with small tools and fixing things. I wonder if I like small things because I can see things and the finer details.

Then I studied some more too. But frankly I am tired when I get home around 6 PM. In large part I blame this on the heat.

Well, I'll see what tomorrow stores.

-=-

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