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Random Saturday stuff
Feb. 7th, 2009 05:18 pmSaturdays never seem to work out for me. They're so full of promise, all this free time (I make Jen watch Miriam all day), but I don't end up doing anything, fun or productive. Maybe I have a natural inclination towards Shabbat, but it's frustrating. This afternoon it's particularly bad; normally once I get out of the house I'm OK, but today, not really. Oh well, I'm feeling like some social interaction, so I might as well write here. :)
WHERE I AM: I'm sitting at Chik-Fil-A, which is really close to being an ideal place for me to hang out when I want to work: the food is relatively healthy (no trans fat and they have some nice salads), they have free Wifi and this restaurant even has a corner booth with an outlet right next to it. It only has two flaws that I can see: 1) no free refills on soda, and 2) it gets WAY too busy at lunch during the week, which is when I normally have "off"-- even at 1pm the place is jammed. Right now it's pretty empty, though. I had started to go to some Jack-in-the-Boxes-- the newer ones have Wifi-- but then I saw their nutritional information. Geez, it's gotta be the worst major chain for nutrition that I've seen. I can't believe that a major chain can get away with having 10 grams of trans-fat in their french fries in 2009. That's the good thing about McDonald's-- it's such a focus for criticism that they can't get away with crap like this. Ack, it just pisses me off, because JitB is so convenient otherwise.
I really wish I could work at home. I keep thinking that if I could fix up my office just so, then I would feel productive there. It's not the noise or anything; I just feel really antsy there. Maybe a restaurant works for me because it limits what I can do: I'm stuck in a booth, can't walk around, etc. It helps that I can put my feet up; the desk I have has a stupid cross-brace which keeps me from propping my feet up. I'm thinking of replacing it with a simple table, just four legs and lots of space underneath. I keep meaning to get to the thrift stores to look for one. It needs to be stable and should have a smooth surface for writing (not that I write, so maybe that's not a big deal).
WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING: Last weekend I submitted my network paper to Physical Review Letters, but they quickly rejected it as being not significant enough for PRL. My collaborator then suggested Physical Review E, which is a decent journal, and probably what I would have chosen if I had been publishing it myself. However, earlier in the collaboration, he was telling me that he thought the paper might be published in Nature, Science, or PNAS...big-name journals, bigger than PRL. I wondered if something had happened since then to change his mind, so I carefully broached the subject last night, and that apparently convinced him that we should aim for PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). There are three ways you can get published in PNAS: be a member of the Academy (not bloody likely), get an Academy member to sponsor your paper, or submit the paper cold, which requires one to suggest five qualified referees and three members of the Editorial Board and three other people whose role I've forgotten. My co-author thinks we should go the second route and contact Brian Skyrms at UC-Irvine, who has written a paper on networks. I should be doing that, but it's very intimidating. It's one thing to submit a paper to a top journal and cross your fingers, it's another to try to sweet-talk an Academy member. I guess I'm always too worried about bothering people, particularly people whom I think are important and who would see me as an insignificant nuisance. Hmm, maybe not just them; come to think of it, I have a hard time asking friends to have dinner unless there's an obvious reason to do so (visiting town, e.g.)
I'm also working on the revisions on my bus paper, which are due in March (thanks to an extension). I got really good referee comments-- one guy gave me line-by-line corrections. While I've been doing spot corrections, I really need to deal with the paper holistically, and I've avoided doing that. I also need to do a more extensive literature review, which means time in SMU's library.
OK, I think that's enough for now.
WHERE I AM: I'm sitting at Chik-Fil-A, which is really close to being an ideal place for me to hang out when I want to work: the food is relatively healthy (no trans fat and they have some nice salads), they have free Wifi and this restaurant even has a corner booth with an outlet right next to it. It only has two flaws that I can see: 1) no free refills on soda, and 2) it gets WAY too busy at lunch during the week, which is when I normally have "off"-- even at 1pm the place is jammed. Right now it's pretty empty, though. I had started to go to some Jack-in-the-Boxes-- the newer ones have Wifi-- but then I saw their nutritional information. Geez, it's gotta be the worst major chain for nutrition that I've seen. I can't believe that a major chain can get away with having 10 grams of trans-fat in their french fries in 2009. That's the good thing about McDonald's-- it's such a focus for criticism that they can't get away with crap like this. Ack, it just pisses me off, because JitB is so convenient otherwise.
I really wish I could work at home. I keep thinking that if I could fix up my office just so, then I would feel productive there. It's not the noise or anything; I just feel really antsy there. Maybe a restaurant works for me because it limits what I can do: I'm stuck in a booth, can't walk around, etc. It helps that I can put my feet up; the desk I have has a stupid cross-brace which keeps me from propping my feet up. I'm thinking of replacing it with a simple table, just four legs and lots of space underneath. I keep meaning to get to the thrift stores to look for one. It needs to be stable and should have a smooth surface for writing (not that I write, so maybe that's not a big deal).
WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING: Last weekend I submitted my network paper to Physical Review Letters, but they quickly rejected it as being not significant enough for PRL. My collaborator then suggested Physical Review E, which is a decent journal, and probably what I would have chosen if I had been publishing it myself. However, earlier in the collaboration, he was telling me that he thought the paper might be published in Nature, Science, or PNAS...big-name journals, bigger than PRL. I wondered if something had happened since then to change his mind, so I carefully broached the subject last night, and that apparently convinced him that we should aim for PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). There are three ways you can get published in PNAS: be a member of the Academy (not bloody likely), get an Academy member to sponsor your paper, or submit the paper cold, which requires one to suggest five qualified referees and three members of the Editorial Board and three other people whose role I've forgotten. My co-author thinks we should go the second route and contact Brian Skyrms at UC-Irvine, who has written a paper on networks. I should be doing that, but it's very intimidating. It's one thing to submit a paper to a top journal and cross your fingers, it's another to try to sweet-talk an Academy member. I guess I'm always too worried about bothering people, particularly people whom I think are important and who would see me as an insignificant nuisance. Hmm, maybe not just them; come to think of it, I have a hard time asking friends to have dinner unless there's an obvious reason to do so (visiting town, e.g.)
I'm also working on the revisions on my bus paper, which are due in March (thanks to an extension). I got really good referee comments-- one guy gave me line-by-line corrections. While I've been doing spot corrections, I really need to deal with the paper holistically, and I've avoided doing that. I also need to do a more extensive literature review, which means time in SMU's library.
OK, I think that's enough for now.
