I re-read my last post today, and found it was quite uninspired. I enjoyed my week off, but in my haste to get something posted, it turned out a bit dry.
Well, I just haven’t done much of this sort of writing.
In the 5th grade, we were required to write a page a day in a journal that the teacher or student teacher read (we had only 17 students in the class). We spent about 15 to 30 minutes in the morning on it. Some days I was inspired, but I was a typical 5th grader and usually stared at the blank page for awhile – it wasn’t even a big page, but because of that, it was certainly more than 75% rubbish. I hope to do better than that here.
Now, I can write an e-mail and blather on to my friends for quite awhile. If I were to do the same thing for this, you would probably only hear about my cats (one shown below – just because I can), my apartment, whether or not the skiing will be any good this year, and grumbling about the price of peanut butter.
I do write, fairly regularly, but it is scientific writing, which can be a bit tricky sometimes. I just recently spent about two weeks (not full time) working on a 5 page paper for a workshop’s proceedings. It isn’t hard to fill up the 5 page limit anymore, and I find that I have way more that I would like to say than I can put down. It also requires careful planning to say what is needed in the minimum of space. First and foremost, since this is a going to a more general audience, I must define my terms – including all the Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) that I use to save space. I also have to describe my system in a way that makes sense. Mine has a natural flow – since it processes data in parallel, so it isn’t hard. The hard part comes when I need to describe other things that I didn’t have a part in, that I only use to get the system to work with all the other parts or that provide the data for my system. While I think (I may be kidding myself) that I understand these other systems decently enough, it is hard to put that down on paper, as I never feel expert enough for that. After I have written it all down, you pick at it for a bit and then send it to my colleagues, who may or may not respond. After including their comments (if any) I pick a bit more, and then finally, usually because of a deadline, I submit my paper…once in awhile, sometime later, I get a comment or a question on it from someone who has actually read it.
I think I prefer this blogging to the above.
A la prochain…
