My only reaction was looking at them with raised eyebrows, and indicating that all I heard was ‘blablabla’. No way was I going to show these idiots that I would really like to hit them and yell at them, saying that maybe they should start working in an environment where this is thought to be hilarious (albeit about males, then, I suppose). If this gets back to woman / girls who are less self-assured, it’s easy to think: see? I’m not worthwhile and I’ll never be, because that’s the kind of jokes they make about woman in science. And then people wonder why I rarely join lunch when I know this combination of colleagues is around. So therefore, sometimes my colleagues are truly dolts who exhibit no sensibility whatsoever.

Along the way though, it’s become pretty clear which tools have been indispensable and which computer programs have made my life easier every day. For one thing, I couldn’t live without music to write too, so a good music program is a must. I also love the fact that I have a widescreen, although having an extra screen would be even more awesome. A water-cooker, for making tea, which is always comforting when I’m stuck again. Word probably counts as well, since I seriously didn’t want to learn Latex (or any other word processing program). My external hard-drive to back up everything so I could just as easily work from home. Endnote, to manage all those references!

Then there are PhotoShop, because the latest version of SPSS is capable of giving my pretty figures and graphs, but it just doesn’t do everything yet. So, obviously, SPSS has been a necessity for some analysis. Matlab hasn’t figured heavily in the last month, but it has over the last years, so there you go. Then there were some university-specific programs which use Thurstone’s Fifth law, so thank you Mr. Thurstone for coming up with that law! Last but very much not least though, M-plus. If I go on a lyrical description of all the ways M-plus has made my life easier, people will probably think I have shares, but I don’t. Seriously though, if you ever need to run a factor analysis, do structural equation modelling or linear regression? Run and get M-plus. M-plus has made my day a lot over the last month.

Anway, to help myself find motivation and some accountability, a list of all the things that need doing:

- processing comments on journal article

- turn journal article into chapter 4

- write introduction & theoretical background for chapter 6, then mesh it together with the methods and the results

- write chapter 2, based on articles

- write chapter 3, based on other articles

- write chapter 1, a.k.a introduction to the whole thesis

By that time I should have received feedback on a number of things, so I’m sure I’ll be able to add those to the list.

Also, it’s strange how getting a new PC can be a boost and a downer. Boost because, hello pretty, and you’re so shiny and pretty and fast! Downer, because, hello, everything still needs to get its own place and my iTunes ratings don’t transfer, and lots of the artwork seems to have gotten lost in the process.

The grant proposal is already at its third version, and today I’ll finish that too. It’ll get send once more to the prospective boss, and maybe one current supervisor. Still need a nice, catchy title in 5 words or less. And a good summary / abstract. Tomorrow I plan to look at the online submission process, and check to make sure that I have all the recommendations etc. lined up.

Monday I can thus write the method section for the last experiment, and make sure the last data are in put in the database.

The discussion and conclusion of the journal article have been somewhat written, but it turned out that bits of the results were missing, so I’ve been fixing that first. If I continue work on it today it could be finished enough to send to supervisors, and internal company reviewers.

Chapter: will start on that as soon as the article has gone off to reviewers, but will wait to send chapter to supervisors until the feedback and comments on the article have been processed.

Method section: haven’t looked at it yet, but at least I made pictures of the experimental set-up.

Experiment: FINISHED! 100 people in 4 weeks, with sessions lasting around 100 minutes. Next time I’ll come up with an experiment that doesn’t last so long and doesn’t require so many people! (After which I reviewed my grant proposal and failed that intention quite completely – although the time should be split up into different sessions. Experience tells me this is not necessarily better, but it will be different.)

Important stuff that should be written:

- Discussion and conclusion journal article

- Grant proposal for post-doc (version 1 done, and received feedback)

- Chapter for thesis based on aforementioned journal article

- Method section for chapter based on this last experiment

Happiness is a boyfriend who has dinner ready by the time I make it home when I’m tired from sitting in the lab a whole day, switching between 3 screens to make sure everything is going alright.

Happiness is finding a new connection, a potential new friend, among the participants. Somebody who’s also working on their PhD, and could probably use some support and has funny experiences to exchange.

Happiness is having friends who can make you laugh, despite the fact that you’re nervous and tired and cranky and worried. Who can give you a new outlook on things, and remind you that, at the end of the day, this is also something you will get through.

Happiness is knowing that there’s an opportunity for sleeping in on the weekend!

Less than 4 months before my funding is up. Scary. 3 more weeks before this experiment will be finished. Also scary, the last experiment I might run in a while. Until I find a post-doc, that is. In which case I need to get my butt in a chair, and write the proposal draft this weekend. This post is meant to remind me of that bit. There’s more to life than data-entering and exploration, even while running a massive experiment.

On the other hand are signs that things are falling into place. A cooperation, a proposal for a post-doc. Good research results, only one more experiment to go before the final writing up. Right now, plenty of energy, but it’s possible that that’s because there’s another deadline tonight, for one more paper.

It’s relatively easy to talk myself down. It’s a lot more difficult to be motivated, but having my energy back after a serious cold helps a lot!

Anyway, life was weird lately. Two master students graduated. I’[m very happy for both of them, although with one it’s more happiness that they finally finished enough to be able to graduate. It’s a bit of melancholy time as well, especially since I just my first email saying: hey, you’re leaving Company soon! Here’s a list of things you should make sure you’ve done. There’s still a talk with my manager scheduled in a week and a half, where we need to discuss an extension. Which I could really use, if only for the facilities (I mean, come on, giving up my laptop now?!), but also for the money. Because about two weeks ago Mr FAW and I decided to get married soon in a couple of months. This means regular freak-outs about money and random yelling of ‘Oh My God, We’re Getting Married’! By both of us, I might add. It’s given us a whole new topic to talk about, but there’s a system. We have a date, and witnesses, and a checklist. Checklists are very very important at this stage on my PhD, and if I don’t get a checklist I get very unhappy and uncoordinated. Somehow, checklists manage to make me work. The things one learns about oneself when doing a PhD…

There was also no vacation involved, except for the part where I got sick for about a week. Nothing major but it took a while to get back on my feet. However, there was one weekend where I got to use my live action role-playing sword and hit loads of people. It’s an awesome way to get rid of all that extra frustration and energy that had been storing up, and probably even better than stress-management coaching.

But the structure will be discussed a week and a half from now, with the whole committee together so I had better get my act together.

My other research is panning out as well, albeit not was fast as hoped. First there were technical difficulties, and do I ever not like programmers who think their mission in life is to fill their hours, rather than getting a good product and a satisfied client! Next there are participant difficulties, mostly in terms of getting enough participants rather than anything else. Especially when you are going to do something like exploratory factor analysis or principal components analysis it’s important to have enough people give answers, otherwise there’s not enough data to see patterns in the first place. And yet, even knowing that, I think I wouldn’t have changed my current experiment.

*eyeroll* I told him flat-out he was talking bullshit and wandered out of the coffeecorner, because there was no way I was gonna get pulled into a long drawn-out discussion where he would barely listen to my arguments because he’s made up his mind.

Still, can I detract that effort from their final grade? Or should I let that depend on how well the final version of their thesis is? I find this a difficult position to be in, really. Although,  at least now I’ve been through it, so maybe I’ll be able to handle this better in the future.

I’ve never met somebody who hasn’t had issues with software (even Mac users, yes :P).
As Scott Berkun so aptly states:

If you look deeper, you’ll find that when people say “this sucks” they mean one or more of the following:
* This doesn’t do what I need
* I can’t figure out how to do what I need
* This is unnecessarily frustrating and complex
* This breaks all the time
* It’s so ugly I want to vomit just so I have something prettier to look at
* It doesn’t map to my understanding of the universe
* I’m thinking about the tool, instead of my work

Unfortunately, people who create something are also very sensitive about it (well, yes, I did recently get my teaching evaluations, why do you ask?). This is the part where it’s sometimes more useful to let anybody but the creator do the user-testing. When testers can only express their frustration through “This sucks” and “I hate the way it works” it can be very helpful to have a translator at hand. So, contact your friendly user-experience expert and ask them to help you out here, because apparently the feedback is so bad that all you can do is become defensive.
While this isn’t really the reason I started in Human-Computer Interaction, I do have to say it’s one of the more challenging and satisfying aspects of the ‘job’.

Tomorrow we have another meeting with all of us (i.e. both supervisors and promoter), and then I’d like this article to be on the agenda. Well, it’s up to me to make the agenda, so what do I want to discuss?
- my dataset, which generates errors and I don’t know what do to about them (prolly will make an appointment with one supervisor to figure it out)
- my online questionnaire, which is finally finished and now needs to be sent to several mailing lists. Do they (granted, mostly promoter) approve of the set-up, and what kind of announcement/begging test are they in favour of?
- the article I’m still writing on, mostly discussing the 3D figure, and the implications for my research (which are quite positive)
- the article that should have been written ages ago, but is being held up by the analysis of the giant dataset.
- the rest of my planning, which involves one more experiment somewhere in september and writing everything up (should I start filling in forms, or is it too early?)

Of course, there’s a multidimensional challenge: interpreting data is never easy, but having non-orthogonal axes in 2D or more Ds is an especially tricky one. Let’s hope 3 dimensions (or 2,5) are sufficient, because it’s a wee bit hard to have 3D figures in an article.

I’d like to submit this to the journal by the end of august, and I’m starting to think it’s a realistic deadline.

CBR’s “girl-power” is well represented by our two high-profile invited
guest speakers:
- Professor Susan Craw, Director of the Research Institute for
Innovation, DEsign And Sustainability (IDEAS) at the Robert Gordon
University, and
- Professor Edwina L. Rissland from the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Obviously, it isn’t enough that there are high-profile guest speakers. Their status as “girls” has to be emphasized and accentuated. One has to wonder why… Taking a quick look at the previous conferences, apparently there have been female speakers before, although the invited speakers have never been only “women”. Hmpf.

Sometimes what is bothering me means I have to be ok with not being liked by everybody. Or, yes, I did look stupid, but other people say and do stupid things too. And if I didn’t make mistakes, I would be unable to learn from them. So it’s not so much about trying to achieve perfection, but about moving on, learning from mistakes and others’ mistakes. There are also a couple of slogans hanging around on post-it, for those reasons (from the last lecture, Randy Pausch):

Brick walls are there for a reason.
They let us prove how badly we want things.

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.

There’s also some serious thinking going on about the future. My PhD contract/funding runs out, and I need to find another job. So, what do I want to do with my life? I would like to see whether I can make it in academia, instead of on the cusp of academia and industry (as I am now). I want influence on educational programs (or program, to start with), especially in psychology and/or human-technology interaction. I want to be able to teach in those fields as well, and preferably on a college/university level. Last but not least, I would also like to be able to do some research in the field. As a child, I wanted to make a real difference in how education was organized and done, not only on a high-level, but also on a low-level, standing before the class, interacting with students kind of thing. I wanted to be a minister of education. I still do, come to think of it.

Since post-doc grants are usually given out for research, it would be logical to start from there, and see what I can get done. Preferably a post-doc away from the country I’m in now, to learn How Things Are Done at other universities. So, while my slogan reminds me that the experience I will get is probably not what I wanted, it will still be experience, and I will come out as a (probably) different person. Getting a grant or a post-doc is my second brick wall at the moment. The first brick wall is getting the last experiments set up, and this PhD thesis all written out. For now, that’s what’s keeping me moving.

The drive was well worth it, and so FAW has spend quite some time walking around, admiring buildings and views, listening to classical concerts FAWpapa picked and visiting several museums. The musea offered splendid displays of fabric, glassware, drawings/paintings and timekeeping machines.

However, the weather was a bit more splendid than expected, and therefore FAW needed different walking shoes quite urgently:

North Face Sidney

They are so comfortable, as if I’m walking barefeet on little pillows. Definitely worth the investment, and while not particularly elegant, still pretty.

After all this walking around and admiring, I’m ready and recharged to pick up where I left off.