A Sense of Accomplishment...
It's been not quite 36 hours since I got back from Cornell. I didn't intend it to be the case when I agreed to give a colloquium there back in November, but the talk was basically an upstate dress rehearsal for my first job talk of the season coming up this Wednesday at Brookhaven.
When I started writing the talk 10 days ago, I had brief pretension of using the fact that I lost the source files for last year's talk as a jumping off point to re-write the introductory and concluding bits. Half an hour of thinking about how else I might approach things convinced me that, if I was gonna take that approach, I was about 2 weeks too late. In the end, this year's version is probably 60-70% identical to last year's model. The first dozen slides where I sort of set up the narrative that I want to follow for the rest of the talk are damned near identical to what I showed last year. It's still a pretty good story for setting up what I do, so you gotta go with what works.
The Cornell talk was a little awkward since I wasn't allowed to actually talk about the Google stuff, which basically kills my ending. It's all build, build, build and then a slide talking about how I can't talk about what I've been doing for the last 6 months. I encouraged people to boo when I got to that slide, but no one took me up on the offer. Luckily, I've gotta dispensation to talk about the project for job talks so long as I don't use the project title, so things should be a little less anti-climactic on Wednesday. Other than that, people seemed to respond pretty positively to the talk and I only went a little long on time, so I'm pleased on that front.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn't note that the biggest feeling of success during the two day trip might well have been when I correctly completely the "Tougher" soduko in the in-flight magazine on my fourth and final attempt (flew through Philly on the way there and back). Not that the folks in Cornell weren't interesting and gracious hosts or anything, just that I was getting aggravated by that damned thing by the end of Friday...
When I started writing the talk 10 days ago, I had brief pretension of using the fact that I lost the source files for last year's talk as a jumping off point to re-write the introductory and concluding bits. Half an hour of thinking about how else I might approach things convinced me that, if I was gonna take that approach, I was about 2 weeks too late. In the end, this year's version is probably 60-70% identical to last year's model. The first dozen slides where I sort of set up the narrative that I want to follow for the rest of the talk are damned near identical to what I showed last year. It's still a pretty good story for setting up what I do, so you gotta go with what works.
The Cornell talk was a little awkward since I wasn't allowed to actually talk about the Google stuff, which basically kills my ending. It's all build, build, build and then a slide talking about how I can't talk about what I've been doing for the last 6 months. I encouraged people to boo when I got to that slide, but no one took me up on the offer. Luckily, I've gotta dispensation to talk about the project for job talks so long as I don't use the project title, so things should be a little less anti-climactic on Wednesday. Other than that, people seemed to respond pretty positively to the talk and I only went a little long on time, so I'm pleased on that front.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn't note that the biggest feeling of success during the two day trip might well have been when I correctly completely the "Tougher" soduko in the in-flight magazine on my fourth and final attempt (flew through Philly on the way there and back). Not that the folks in Cornell weren't interesting and gracious hosts or anything, just that I was getting aggravated by that damned thing by the end of Friday...