Blessed by the Potato

Well, abstract submission season is in full swing, and it looks like it’s going to be a busy summer for me, with conferences in Toronto (may), Victoria (may), San Diego (june), and Chicago (july august). At least nothing is scheduled for the other side of an ocean, or August the fall (yet). I wonder if I’ll get to stay in a hotel while in Toronto, or if they’ll make me commute (though, do I want to stay in a hotel with someone else, when I could just take the subway and sleep in my own bed?).

Right now I’m deep in the depths of rewriting fatigue. There’s a fine art to submitting the same stuff to different conferences, in rewording things to focus on different aspects of a multidisciplinary project to appeal to the audience of each conference. One, for instance, might be frequented by biologists, and so that aspect of the project should be played up, with a minimal mention of the whole MRI thing. The other one may be a conference just about MRIs, so the biology stuff serves as a background for all the cool things we’re doing with our MRI system. And of course, each one has different word counts, so sometimes things need to be exquisitely trimmed down to just the most succinct of summaries, while other times a more liberal vernacular can be applied. There’s a surprisingly large chasm of difference between a half-page 12-point font abstract, and a full-page 9-point one.

The hardest part to tweak for each is of course, the introduction, since it’s usually completely different for each submission, rather than simply (heavily) tweaked. I’m killing myself on that at the moment, just completely drawing a blank as to how to write the one I’m working on at the moment. It doesn’t help, of course, that I’ve turned my brain to mush with image analysis recently, and the increasingly psychotic effects of sleep deprivation.

So one country pretty much unilaterally changed the way we implement the dubious daylight savings time system.

Yes, the Americans broke time.

The effects were felt this Halloween as it didn’t get dark until a full hour after it usually did, so we didn’t get any really cute, really little kids (who are usually tuckered out and ready for bed by 7:30, when our first trick-or-treater came around this year). Of course, this was also our first Halloween in this house, so we couldn’t say for sure that the screwy change in when it gets dark was responsible for that, or if it’s just a characteristic of the neighbourhood.

I like daylight savings time — that is, summer time. If it didn’t screw with Halloween, I wouldn’t mind it running late. Since I’m not much of a morning person, I much prefer to have daylight in the afternoon. I dislike waking up in the dark, and imagine most people do too, but I also dislike being stuck at work until after dark. The few times I do wake up early in the winter, an hour here or there often wouldn’t make a difference: it’s dark. The energy saving rationale, while hard to ascertain for certain, doesn’t seem to hold water any more. Air conditioning use accounts for way more energy than lighting in the summer, and while heating/cooling is closer to neutral in the fall (so lighting might be a factor), it’s also a period of very low energy demand in general for that reason. So, there isn’t as much of a benefit to screwing with schedules this year to save energy in the fall, since that’s one of the few times of the year when most of the generating is baseline (hydroelectric, nuclear, etc).

And I hate the return to “standard time” (odd that it’s named that, since the majority of the year falls under DST). The extra hour one night in the fall, ok, I like that. And it’s a much easier shift to work into the sleep schedule. But I just don’t like it getting dark so early!

Maybe Saskatchewan has it right after all: year-long DST.

I’ve been having a problem with my VCR lately that I just can’t figure out how to fix. (Aside for those who don’t know: a VCR is like an ancient PVR that can hold up to 6 hours of analog video on a removable magnetic cassette medium.) It’s getting a little old now, having served my time shifting needs very well for what must be over a decade now. The problem is basically that the sound on some channels is wrong. There are a few with video but no audio, and a few with video but the wrong audio. Most notably, CBC has the audio of 680 news (which is, actually, an interesting way to pick up 680 News out here in London). I only have basic cable, which translates into something like 8 watchable channels (sure, I get the weather network, two news channels, a TV guide channel, and a few others that I just never watch, but only about 8 that might ever have shows I’d want to tape). Of those, 3 have no sound. Fortunately, I’ve found work-arounds for every show I care to tape, thanks to the networks often airing the same show on another channel, but if anyone has any idea of what might be wrong or if I’ll be able to fix it (or vice-versa, if this is a sign of more failures to come), I’d like to hear it.

In a related note, I’m also open to any suggestions for the next step. With x-mas coming up, a DVD recorder/VCR/PVR might be a good gift idea for the ‘rents, so if anyone has an implementation they like, feel free to mention it. At the moment I’m still leaning towards getting another VCR: it’s cheap, it’s familiar, we have a huge VHS library, and I don’t really plan on switching to digital cable in the near future.