Talking over Writing

Another week has flown by in my quest for the diploma. It would be nice to get this week back, as it wasn't as productive as I would have liked. The primary reason was that I was scheduled to give two talks this week - on Wednesday and Friday. There is some cross-over in the audiences, but as the two were at very different locations (hospital 10 miles from campus and in department building on campus), I planned on just giving the same talk twice. As I am still working on being a confident public speaker, I spend a lot of time putting my slides together, and rehearsing them. By the time my presentation comes around, I can go through the talk slide by slide in my head. That helps when I want to practice in the shower. :) But, that means I'm working less on other things. I looked at these talks as defense-practice talks, which means I'll save time later in a lot of the prep...but that'll be saving time after dissertation completion which I won't need as much as I do now. So, Wednesday comes along and I know my stuff like the back of my hand. And, a blizzard of snow also blows into town. From talking to people on Tuesday, I knew that attendance would be down on Wed, as some would just go to the easier-to-attend Friday talk. I left twice as early Wednesday morning, but still was stuck in barely moving traffic for the first 25 minutes of drive time. With my arrival on time being questionable, I gave the center a call to make sure the talk wasn't getting canceled (or to know before I got too far). It sounded like the roads around the hospital were terrible, and I was going to ring back with my progress in 10 minutes as my route was clearing up as traffic spread out. Before I could call back, the organizer called me and said that they were canceling the talk. Apparently there was very little attendance at the investigator meeting prior to my talk, and the roads were still terrible. Luckily, I got the call before making it to the interstate, and didn't have too much trouble turning around and just going home to work for the day. But, it stuck turning around after already spending about an hour driving that morning, and having prepared early for the talk that day. Oh well.

The talk yesterday went smoothly. I think I rocked my stuff pretty well. The audience was mainly students with only a couple of professors and several post-docs. I only got one softball question. I was told that I explained everything well by several, but I still would have liked more questions. The two professors that usually grill students weren't there - one is on my committee and just saw most of my material two weeks prior.

Time to return to full-time number crunching and text writing. In my last experiment, last week, the results were less than stellar. I showed a clear difference between methods A and B, but method A results were no where near the phenomenal results from the first 3 experiments. With 5 total experiments in the bag and deadlines fast approaching, I really want to be done with experiments. My advisor, though is hedging on the need for another experiment, which is annoying. "Let's see if we have significance on the results" and "work on this figure and the paper" then we'll talk next week. Gah! I can put the results together in different ways to either show significance or not. And, another experiment has a risk of not working which just makes things more complicated. I know that my method works, but there are sometimes complications in the model that can't be prevented - in the two less-than-stellar experiments, the results can be explained. But, it just gets more difficult and obscures the good results by adding more experiments. And, working on that specific figure is difficult as some of the data inputs weren't collected in initial experiments when the objectives weren't aligned as they are now. Nothing like shifting over time - let's try this, this time - then pooling results from across experiments together.

Guess I need to stop complaining and buckle down for several hours of work on this cold Saturday. It is times like this that I wish I didn't have to drive an hour to see my girlfriend later today - seeing her is good, but I'd like to get that hour to do more productive things than sit in my car.