I may have to clean house

Not my actual house (though it could definitely use it) but this blog! I ran across this article, which also references this article, which taken together seem to indicate that maintaining a blog isn't especially healthy for one's career, whether academic or in industry.

I googled myself and found that, sure enough, this blog has become the #1 result for my name. However, there are other people with my name in the results. I did not, for example, contribute information about Shrek 2 to moviemistakes.com, nor am I a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. I don't have a wife named Brenda, or a son named Jordan, recently a confirmand at Temple Emanuel El in University Heights, Ohio. I'm not an authorized dealer in Annalee collectible dolls. I didn't catch a 13-pound cabezon on a party boat in August, nor have I ever been a noted egyptologist.

I haven't applied for a job anyplace where I wasn't pretty much already known since relatively early in the history of the web, so I have to wonder just how common google searches are in that process. And how do the people doing them know they've found the right person? Clearly some names are so common that web searches would be pointless. Other people have very unusual names for which a search would work quite well. Mine apparently seems rarer than it is.

I'd think it would be very difficult to use web search results in most cases, though blogs might be a different story. People often post enough personal information to their blogs to uniquely identify them -- and certainly I have!

I'm tired

After taking most of the weekend off to sleep, things have gotten hot and heavy again. My two big projects right now are a homework set for scientific computing and a paper for physical oceanography. The homework set is a complete bitch. For the term paper, I chose to summarize some research on sea ice melt in the Antarctic. I never knew sea ice could be such a complicated topic, but after reading about 15 papers on it, I realize that I know nothing.

Why is this news? Paris Hilton edition...

On cnn.com this morning, I learned that Paris Hilton "escaped unharmed" from a car wreck. Surely she must have been pried free of the tangled wreckage using the jaws of life, seconds before the vehicle exploded into a fireball? Nah, she was riding in somebody's Bentley and they rear-ended a truck. It "scratched the hood of the car." So not even a fender-bender. A hood-scratcher. Glad we're up-to-date on that.

It was on the front page of cnn.com, and not even in the "Entertainment" section, but in the "U.S." section. I'm living in a nation of morons.

Next up: Paris' dry-cleaner ruins a really nice sweater. The shocking footage at 11:00.

Bullet dodged

I didn't do particularly well on the exam, but I didn't turn in a blank piece of paper, or otherwise look like an idiot either. It helps that it was a very difficult, lengthy test. I don't know why Dr Math Genius hasn't figured this out, but when professors give tests like that, they lose resolution; it's hard to tell the good students from the dummies when the high grade is around 50%. Not much dynamic range, as we say in the photography biz, which I'm not in.

My nightmare scenario was that it would be a relatively straightforward exam, covering the material I'd studied least. Given my fatigued mental state, that could have made me look really bad.

So the net is that my career is safe, at least until finals. I've already informed Jamba Juice that I'm turning in my smoothie apron.

The other problem with insulated travel mugs...

...turns out to be that they do too good a job. This damn coffee has been sitting here nearly two hours and it's still too hot to do more than slowly sip. I needs me some caffeine! You'd think someone with training in thermodynamics would have a handle on this stuff...

T minus 4.5 hours

I was pretty much toasted mentally by the time I posted last night, and I wound up trying to go to bed around 11:00. The plan was to get a good night's sleep and get up early to start studying again when I was fresh. Unfortunately, as I feared, I wasn't able to sleep. Not at all. I'm not sure if it was the stress or the Mountain Dews, but probably both contributed. I spent most of the time staring at the ceiling, thinking of all the cool stuff I could buy if I went back into software development.

So now I have to finish my studying and take the exam on no sleep. What fun.

Before I got on the bus this morning I bought this cool-looking thermos/travel mug from Starbucks so that I could bring coffee into the library with me. Alas, I can't seem to figure out how to keep the fucker from leaking when I drink out of it. Expensive piece of crap.

17 hours to go

17 hours to go until my numerical methods midterm, and it's not looking great. I've studied all day today, but I can't say it's been especially productive. I can answer basic questions, but this guy isn't going to ask any. The sample questions were just insane. Generally you can expect students to understand a huge amount of material on a surface level, or a smaller amount deeply. This guy wants it all.

He's sort of a freak. He gives a 75-minute lecture, deriving formulas at high speed on the board nonstop the entire time. And completely from memory; he hasn't used the first note yet. It's hard to believe that somebody who knows the material that well can relate to people seeing it for the first time, and in fact he can't. I have to choose during lecture whether to write down what he's saying or try to understand it, because it happens too fast to do both. Usually I start out writing and get behind. So about two-thirds of the way through the class I stop writing and try to understand. But by then it's too late.

One thing I have going for me is that I'm usually reasonably clutch when it comes to math and physics tests. I don't think it's going to help in this case, though, because the derivations are just too long and complicated. If I have to think too much, there won't be time.

My only comfort is that the rest of the class feels the same way. We were discussing it as a group Tuesday before class started. I said "Oh, I know I'm going to fail. I just hope I don't get a zero." Everyone said they felt the same way.

I'm trying to decide how much to sleep tonight. I can try to get a full night's sleep, but that wastes a lot of time. Also, I've had enough caffeine that I may not be able to. There's nothing worse than deciding you need sleep more than studying, only to find yourself lying awake, staring at the ceiling all night. I guesss I need to see how it goes between now and about midnight.

Things are getting hard

I'm sitting here in the health sciences library with my friend Pam trying to finish a set of review question for my numerical methods class that are supposed to be representative of the exam on Thursday. Actually, we're trying to get started. We've had a week to do them, and neither of us has managed to finish even one of them. I'm not sure anyone else in the class has either. Maybe a couple of the applied math majors.

Thursday we won't have a week, and we won't have the book or other references. We'll have an hour, a pencil and a pad of paper.

Pam has had this professor before, and hated him, but had no choice but to take this class. A week or two ago I asked her if he failed people. She said she didn't think there was much chance of failing. But today I asked her again and she added "Oh, well unless you don't have enough points to pass. Then he'd probably fail you." Uh, yeah.

I did have my committee meeting last week, and their take on it was that all graduate students feel overwhelmed at some point. I'm sure that's true, but all of them don't have this guy for numerical methods.