The past weeks I have been dealing with the consequences of my personality disorder - my annoying tendency to get involved in things I find interesting along with the annoying habit of showing up at situations where interesting things are happening.  As a direct consequence most places I show up at these days, I am asked - where's that thing you said you'd do? People with memory... argh!

Its the end of the semester and the mountain of pending work is back breaking, or rather, wrist breaking in my case. RSI is reaching new dimensions and I have been looking around for replacement forearms. If people expect nothing from you, its easy to exceed expectations. Why do I keep forgetting this? Douglas Adams comes to the rescue -

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.

Things other than my mundane bullshit: The other day we had a talk by Gene Spafford who is professor of computer science at Purdue U at the colloquia. He was talking about the The Value in Questioning what you think you Understand. That simple idea has been one of my major causes of pain this semester, it greatly decreased the number of things I did understand and greatly increased the number of pending things I had to do.

Anyway, 'Spaf' said about thinking 'out of the box', "In your case I don't know where the box is, or how large it is, but I'll help you get outside it". Soundness and Consistency. He seemed to be of the view that the large amount of work we do is engineering as opposed to science - this was rather ego satisfying. It was all nicely summed up by Mike Dunn is the now retired Dean of the department - Since we are human instead of trying to 'evolve' computer science - we should be doing 'intelligent design'. That was a fun talk. He also quoted Douglas Adams.

Reality is frequently inaccurate.