neonleonb

I haven't posted in nearly a month. But this has been the month of most of my job search, and I now have job offers. I need to choose, but I have some awfully good options. I have nearly 2 weeks to decide.

I'm at home in Tennessee, where it's awfully cold (in the teens) and snowing lightly. I've missed it, and it's good to have some snow again.

Vacation time is nearly over, though. I may be still at home, but even here it's time to get cracking on my thesis. Though I have job offers, before  I can start, I've gotta finish what I'm doing now.

I have a scheduled on-site job interviews with [X] in early December, and I've got interest from [Y] and [Z], though visiting details with them need to be finalized.

The opportunities look pretty good, but I have two caveats. First, I'd still like to hear from [W], since working with robots would be pretty awesome. Second, it feels weird to have the limitless potential I've had ahead of me my whole life finally collapse.

It used to be I could do anything: be president, cure cancer, whatever. But now that I've arrived at the part of my life where I actually go do the things I'd planned to do, I have to pick only a single thing. Oh, sure, I've been narrowing down the possibilities for a decade, but it's never come down to picking exactly 1 thing to do. It's starting to look like I won't be the amazing cancer-curing president, but instead a guy with a job. Now the trick is to see the potential growing out of that one choice, passing through that needle's eye and expanding again.

[Edit: redacted company names]

I have now sent my resume to 5 different companies, including Willow Garage. I will do more, but it's a start.

God freaking dammit. I have had a series of hassles in getting a GSI (a.k.a. teaching assistant) position. First, they mistook my preference for TAing the undergrad AI class as a demand, so they weren't going to give me any work. Just yesterday, though, they found a graphics class for me to TA. However, today, they sent me the forms for it and I found it was a 10-hour position. That means I'd be paid half as much.

I could live off my savings for a semester, and maybe the reduced work would help me finish my thesis, but I'd really rather not go there. I mean, I'd even checked in midway through the summer to make sure they knew I was requesting a 20-hour position, and they said "oh, yes, we know." And now they screw it up. Dammit, this is really annoying, especially with class starting on Wednesday.

I've got a paper published in ICML 2008! You already know that, because I was already excited about going to Finland. But the final revision of the paper is finally complete and submitted to the conference, so I've put it up on my website, which you can see here. Yes, that means that my guinea pigs are now recorded for posterity in an academic conference.

I had to give a presentation about some of my research on Friday. I didn't have that much time to prepare for it, since I'm busy, but I knew the topic quite well, since I've been busy revising the conference paper about it. I thought the presentation went all right, but my advisor said my presentation was "very good"! W00t!

Also, Megan attended, so by now she's met most of the people I know at school. I imagine it fleshes out the stories I tell.

Do you remember how you were taught to write in grade school? I was taught two main strategies: outlining and free writing. In free writing, you would write whatever came to your head, and then later you would rearrange and edit the stuff into something that's readable. In outlining, you would first conceive of the entire structure, and then go and add the content.

I find that when I actually write, I do something in the middle. I start with some ideas of the structure, and I write some content, which may or may not relate directly. But then I just go back and forth, so that I improve the structure at the same time as I create the content. Now that I think of it that way, it seems obvious: it's hard to structure a complicated set of thoughts without content, and it's hard to see how to say those thoughts without structure, so of course I write that way. But is that how everyone does it?

So, my first poll ever:Poll #956667 Writing_style
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3

What style of writing do you use?

If other, what?