TITLE: Busy with a Move...
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 27, 2006 6:41 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I haven't had a chance to write in over a week,
but a busy week it has been. My
last post
foreshadowed the move of my department office to
a new home, in an old building on campus that has
been renovated into an "innovative teaching and
technology center". That name actually sets a
higher standard than the building can live up to,
but it will be a good home for us.
Last week, we began moving the department office to
its new home, to make space for a computer lab. I
suppose that we didn't technically have to move the
department head's office yet, because the old office
isn't need for something else yet. but anyone who has
ever been at a university knows that heads, deans,
and the like depend on their administrative staff
too much to be separated from them. In this era of
continuous electronic communication, I could probably
survive better than most administrators from the past,
but it would make an already challenging job all the
more difficult to be two buildings away from the
department secretary. So I moved, too, if only the
working set of my office for now.
Not that I didn't have good reason to want to move.
The university's provost, after taking a tour of the
new building during construction, made a point of
telling me that my office may have the best view on
campus. Here is a digital snapshot looking out my
window toward the southwest on a recent sunny day:
Here's a lower-quality picture of the view toward
the northwest. The campanille serves as nice reference
point:
I don't have the highest-quality digital camera, but
I've done the best I can to reproduce my view. The
glare off my windows makes it tough to get good shots
from all angles. But, quoting
Sidra
from
Seinfeld,
I can say that these images "are real, and they are
spectacular". Either karma is looking out
for me, or I have simply lucked into one of the best
offices on campus. I should probably be nervous that
my provost, my dean, and nearly every other administrator
on campus know about my office and view, but I've been
too busy withe the business of the department to worry.
Of course, the construction in the rest of the building
is still being completed, and there are warts to fix.
For example: When I came into the office last Friday
morning, the temperature in my office was 63 degrees
Fahrenheit; this morning, it was 83
degrees Fahrenheit. After over eleven hours with the
windows open and the door open to permit circulation
through the department office, I have the temp down to
78 degrees. But I'm sure that this is the sort of kink
we can work out over the next few months. (Let's hope
so. With windows and western exposure, the summer could
proved quite warm otherwise!)
Computer science happens for me these days only in fits
and spurts, mostly short ones when I decide to find
time to read by downgrading some other task's priority.
This summer is my next real chance to do real computing.
I've been learning a lot this year, but I hope to put
that learning to good use in the future by managing
times and tasks more carefully.
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