The Sticky Wicket

This is a story of a girl. A girl who had met the boy, fell in love, was asked, accepted, and made the plans - only to be told 4 years later that it had been a good ride. This is the story of a heartbreak. And the possible rebuilding of Rome from the ashes.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

The Sound of Ultimate Suffering

What am I doing right now? Eating a bowl of plain white rice, with an enormous slab of butter and a glass of white wine for supper. After 6pm.

Warning bells would be going of for my family and DCS. White wine? But you don’t drink white wine. Carbohydrates? After noon? WHITE rice, at all? REAL butter? Who are you and what have you done with Kc? What dominant paradigm has shifted and dumped us all into this crazy alternate universe?!?!!?

Things happen in threes, right?
1= DCS
2= Bump
3= Thesis

Why is the thesis on the list, when you distinctly remember reading that I had finished the major portion of data analysis? Well, it goes like this: Now would be the appropriate time to tell me that my math for the entire matrix I have done needs to be different. yay!

"And that to do your math differently you need to access this info of KF's that, oh look she didn't do -so that needs to be done before you can get these different numbers to use to REDO all the matrix."

REDO the Matrix, you mean that ungodly uncomfortable and unwieldy data analysis I have spent the last year and a half doing? Work on frameworks? No way, now would be the time to do more of f&$%*@$ing KF's work to go back and redo my work, which he should have told me in the first place to do. Which by the way never came up in any of the meetings along the way where I queried if it was being done correctly, as I didn't want to find out at the end (oh wait kind of like I am) that something was wrong, and like I have asked for the past three meetings over the last 6 months about being able to compare the data that wasn't comparable....

"What do you mean you used this data and not that."

Well, Mr. Major Professor, you gave me the database and said - go to work. I used exactly what you gave me to do.

"Hmmm...well let me show you this other stuff. and I have maps and keys and stuff somewhere. and oh look it isn't here, so do this digitizing map crap data first."

Am I ever going to get out of here?

"No"
Dude, you are really killing my done with the matrix high.

And so if you here the sound of Ultimate Suffering, it is I. Hurry – Gather Inigo and Fezzik and come rescue me before I shove my face into the blender.

1 Comments:

At 11:08 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry about that KC, This data entry can be a bitch, and they've got no one else to do it so it falls to the lowly grad student who is yolked to the land as it were. See if you can rescue anything from your prior analysis, and ask around about that. Get a 2nd and 3rd opinion on what you did and what may have went wrong.

There are several programs out there now that should be able to create and crunch matricies fairly easily, once they are created. Remember not to long ago this stuff was 'cranked out' by hand! But the software now is a whole lot better, ask around and see if you can get a sample of some. What are you using? SAS does have bunches of 'trouble shooters' if necessary, but these consultants cost money. Not much mind you, but it may be worth it to visit with one in your area.

Your advisor was probably distracted by his/her mundane life, kids, gf/bf/spouse/family and forgot to follow up with some of his suspicions. It's not a fatal flaw, it can be corrected, and possbily in time to make it out in good order. This is stuff you can fix with some work, Unlike some of the crap DCS throws at you. Thats' the difference. Cheers & Good Luck, 'VJ'

 

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