Preparing for the Trip, Part 1
The week before my trip was a bit odd. My top priority was to finish the computer model of the organism that I was going to present at the conference, but this kept getting postponed for various reasons.
Monday was spent preparing for the other grad student in our lab to take care of my cultures -- since our undergrad had moved on, it was up to me to make media, and aside from that pouring things into tubes can take a lot longer than one might expect. Monday is my usual culture transfer day as well, so that also took up time, although the cultures for this particular Monday were not that time-consuming. I also got an e-mail from my supervisor that morning with the paper that we had had accepted with minor revisions and some suggested changes. I had hoped to get to that then but other lab things got in the way... oh well.
Tuesday I got down to the revisions. These amounted to reading through three or four papers very carefully and adding a paragraph or two to the paper about them, as well as clarifying some other details. My supervisor thought that the work should only take two or three hours. Sadly, my supervisor was way off. Midway through I moved to another lab, the construction in our own making work difficult, and in anticipation of the casual soccer game organised by members of the other lab. I worked through said soccer game. I also worked through the trivia competition that I had planned on going to that evening. I wound up the last person to leave the lab, at a quarter to midnight, when Microsoft Word crashed on me. I had been saving at least every half-hour, so it could have been worse, I suppose. However, there were still half an hour's worth of changes to account for, and the autosave file was sufficiently corrupted as to be unreadable by Word. I wound up using Apple's TextEdit program instead, which I prefer to Word anyway, but which does not allow change-tracking, and lost all of the records for that in the original file, as well as the comments I had added to explain some of my less-obvious or unrequested changes. I was determined not to retire until the work was finished, though, so I went home and worked there until it was done -- at about 1:30. Blech.
Monday was spent preparing for the other grad student in our lab to take care of my cultures -- since our undergrad had moved on, it was up to me to make media, and aside from that pouring things into tubes can take a lot longer than one might expect. Monday is my usual culture transfer day as well, so that also took up time, although the cultures for this particular Monday were not that time-consuming. I also got an e-mail from my supervisor that morning with the paper that we had had accepted with minor revisions and some suggested changes. I had hoped to get to that then but other lab things got in the way... oh well.
Tuesday I got down to the revisions. These amounted to reading through three or four papers very carefully and adding a paragraph or two to the paper about them, as well as clarifying some other details. My supervisor thought that the work should only take two or three hours. Sadly, my supervisor was way off. Midway through I moved to another lab, the construction in our own making work difficult, and in anticipation of the casual soccer game organised by members of the other lab. I worked through said soccer game. I also worked through the trivia competition that I had planned on going to that evening. I wound up the last person to leave the lab, at a quarter to midnight, when Microsoft Word crashed on me. I had been saving at least every half-hour, so it could have been worse, I suppose. However, there were still half an hour's worth of changes to account for, and the autosave file was sufficiently corrupted as to be unreadable by Word. I wound up using Apple's TextEdit program instead, which I prefer to Word anyway, but which does not allow change-tracking, and lost all of the records for that in the original file, as well as the comments I had added to explain some of my less-obvious or unrequested changes. I was determined not to retire until the work was finished, though, so I went home and worked there until it was done -- at about 1:30. Blech.