Gasp. Puff. Wheeze.

Finally got my plane ticket for Technicon. Much more difficult to find anything decent than usual. In fact, we might have passed on Tcon altogether, except its the only time we get to see people from back East, and it'll probably be the last one. At least for a while.

We quickly gave up on flying into Roanoke; prices are astronomical for that. Plus, when you consider that there are no direct flights into Roanoke, it's actually faster to fly into Dulles and drive up. Even so, getting from the west coast to the east coast is not cheap or trivial. Red-eye flight Thursday night. We'll probably crash at my parents' place Friday morning and drive down in the afternoon. Yes, we'll miss the FSM meeting, but Kate really didn't want to miss another day of work.

We're staying at the Microtel. (Actually I'd already booked a room at the Hampton before the deal with Microtel was made; I need to cancel that one). We're staying until Monday, driving back up to NoVa and flying out Monday evening.

I also have a conference in Houston week after next, AND one in Vienna in April. Did I mention I hate flying? Not the actual flying part so much, more the dealing with the airlines and airports, and TSA crap. Lots of tickets to buy, and I just paid off the credit card after last month's car repair. At least I get reimbursed for all these tickets.

LPSC

In a week, I'm off to Houston for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. And it may well be the end of my professional career. I submitted two abstracts and was given two talks (which rarely NEVER happens).

The first abstract I've made little progress on since December thanks to:
1. An upgrade to the cluster, which causes my code to fail.
2. A class I'm teaching that consumes far more of my time than it ought to, preventing me from debugging it properly.
So I have few results to present that were not in the abstract.

The second has been submitted for publication. The problem here is that it's based entirely on 2D models and not 3D (because of the aforementioned computing issues), so it may not be received that well.

My short term employment is not in jeopardy. But my current supervisor (Francis) is happy to keep me for another year (and longer assuming we can continue to grant money). But it is a soft money position, and it's not permanent. I haven't heard back from any of the faculty job searches I applied to (and if I don't soon, I'm probably not going to). If I embarrass myself at this meeting (which I feel is almost certain), I'll have even less of a chance of getting a permanent job. Plus, I'll be embarassing my co-authors. The result is that I feel guilty for not working round the clock to fix these problems, but don't seem to be motivated enough to actually do that, despite the deadlines. I'm sure part of that is that I don't think there's anything I can do to resolve this before the conference. Even if everything were working right now, it still takes a couple weeks for the calculations to run.

I'm enjoying teaching the class, but my time management skills are apparently awful. The appointment is supposed to be for 15 hours a week (with my postdoc being the other 25). But I must be spending 30-40 hours a week on the class, most of which is spent preparing the lessons, and much of it in the evenings. And I haven't been giving another 25 to research. Probably more like 10. When I do have a chance to do research stuffs, diagnosing the code is not what I want to do. When I debug a code, I need to have a large continuous chunk of time to devote to it, something I don't get much these days. An hour at a time is not much use to me.

Despite all this, Francis is still happy with me. The real problem is that if I do get a faculty job, I'll be expected to do this regularly. Teach classes and crank out several publications a year. So maybe it's just as well I haven't received any job offers. I have to learn to multitask better first. I had no trouble with this as a TA, but teaching on my own is a lot more demanding. The last time I taught a class, I wasn't supposed to be doing anything else.

Well, that's enough ranting for now. I should probably be working instead of ranting, but it's so hard to get motivated to work on a Saturday evening.