That feeling in which you realize that your University’s IT is actively blocking Apple’s Migration Assistant or its backdoor monitoring is preventing the app from opening.*
* The same IT that will let older machines upgrade to Sequoia but not the new machine they just bought for you.
Finished an R&R (Revise and Resubmit) on a paper with a co-author, a full day early. Enjoying a bourbon before firing up the submission website. I’ll have it in before the pizza arrives.
Rarely does it work out that I go into a weekend with such a relaxed work-state.
New MacBook Pro Day, M3 Pro Edition
I got my first new laptop since fall of 2019. I ordered the last MacbookPro on an Intel chip when I arrived at ASU. It was—is—a wonderful machine and still serviceable. But every 4–5 years, my university authorizes faculty to order new machines. I held off for a year but finally pulled the trigger over the summer. After two months of waiting my new MacBook Pro arrived.
The new machine is a 14inch, M3 Pro, 32GB Ram, and other misc bells and whistles. It’s overkill for 99.99 percent of my workload, but for that other 0.01, the extra power and bandwidth will make it worth it. Mostly the few times a year I run large regressions or other data science style work. For what I do right now, I could have gotten an M2 or even less RAM. But since this has to be my work machine for the next 4 to 5 years, I opted to get a little more than I need so I can remain current with whatever new stuff comes up. I figured this was an especially true rule of thumb with the advent of AI. My buddy from grad school already wants me to start playing with Ollama.
Of course, the irony of it arriving today is that I have a hard deadline on an article with a co-author, and I’m taking my oldest camping this weekend with Cub Scouts. Thus, other than a few basic things (email, iCloud, password manager), all the fun stuff of setting up the new laptop will have to wait until next week.
Classes start this week, students are all moved in. The gym was full. I caught a glimpse of the swim team getting ready for practice.
Beating my head against my dataset, year-old R code, and reviewer comments… then I discover that my research assistant and I solved the problem in a half-finished mini-project. A big three week problem just became a small-to-moderate one week problem.
🎥 Turning the Tables on AI, iA Writer.
I like the idea of getting the AI to ask the writer questions for clarity; I suspect many of my students will find that useful too.
Your periodic reminder not write and edit your own wikipedia page. It’s just bad form.
Been a while since I’ve had an afternoon coffee and just read. (In this case, to prep for my class tomorrow.) ☕️ 📚
Finally got approval from my work to buy Omnifocus 4. Tomorrow will be a very good day in the office.
Got a paper submitted. I think I spent more time formatting to the journal’s house style than I did writing the thing. But it’s off. A Christmas miracle.
Formatting LaTeX tables into Excel, by hand, because ::checks notes:: the journal submissions guidelines want everything in MS Word and each figure or table in a separate file of its own.
It’s about be my third cup of coffee—and we had two cups of tea to break up the coffee.
Not every day that you get to have dinner with Consuls General from two foreign nations. 🤙🏽
One of my students emailed to tell me he read the Declaration of Independence this morning. My work here is done. God bless, America! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
While writing my narrative letter of the previous year for my annual review, and I gotta admit, adding that a student of mine is a Rhodes Scholar still feels “like wow, he did that. Boss move.”
In welcome news for academe, eLife is ending accept/reject decisions. Here’s hoping more of this follows.
“At this point we can all agree that Angelo is a piece of shit.”
—a student paper on Measure for Measure
Always something a little endearing when all the late assignments on the final paper are from the best students who fret and stress about every last minute detail and miss the deadline by 5-10 minutes. Average students (and below) just turn in “what they got.”
And with that, I’m done teaching for 2022—grading final papers notwithstanding.
About this time of the semester, the illusion of safety collapses for students who haven’t been coming to class. Suddenly, without warning, final papers are due. Never mind that they’ve been on the syllabus and Canvas since the start of the term. 🎓📑