Time's a-wasting

The end is almost upon me. It really feels that way. Exactly one week left, so in a sense everything I do here from now on is the last time. Today: last spin class (probably). Tomorrow: last Beyond Monopoly! evening. Saturday: last parkrun and body pump, last laundromat visit. Sunday: last chance to go for a bike tour. And so on, and so forth; I can see the whole week full of last things laid out in front of me. Frightening and saddening.

On the professional front I am trying on the one hand to initiate some things that I omitted to do in the months before, on the other to finish up some of the things I did start. (Still trying to have it all...) Neither has been very successful. On the initiating front, I am certainly expected to come home with new research contacts useful in acquiring new project funding. The European Union is putting a lot of money into research-like projects, and since the Dutch government has about the worst record in Europe in spending money on university-level expenditure we are increasingly dependent on such sources. (I say research-like because there is a different jargon in project land, with magic words like "applied research" and "validation" which are not really the investigation of new ideas but the application of existing ideas to practical problems.)

Richard Paige is very good at project acquisition, and so I went to have a little chat with him on Tuesday. Lesson learned: he started his road to success by partnering up with other research groups within the department. That is certainly something I could try at Twente more than I have so far. To name just one example: I learned that at our Human-Media-Interaction group in Twente there is a researcher that actually contributes to the development of the Epsilon tool maintained in York. This means that he is actually doing stuff that is right up my street, or at least the street I want to be. I'll talk to him!

A major challenge for me in this context (and I am using challenge here in the newspeak sense to refer to a problem) is that I have never been good at selling myself, in the sense of claiming to be able to solve other people's problems with the stuff I know, if I am not sure that I can actually do so. In any potential project there are many "but-if"s and "maybe"s that you have to ignore or sweep under the rug to get off the ground (how's that for a metaphor), and that feels like a dishonesty (euphemism for lie) that I am simply very bad at committing.

As regards finishing things that I started: there are actually many loose threads, but one that I particularly want to tie up is the programming job that I have set myself to, which I already spent a post on last week in deep under. This is still far from finished, unfortunately, and it is starting to feel a bit like throwing good time after bad, with the same type of arguments. If I stop this now, it will be about three weeks wasted. Yes, but if you continue it will be even more time wasted. Yes, but I've come so far, I don't want to give up now. What, you want to give up a week from now instead?

I'm also still trying to get a collaboration off the ground with Chris Poskitt and Mike Dodds, together again with Richard. Marrying bidirectional transformation (Richard) to graph transformation (me) and graph-based assertional reasoning (Mike and Chris). We were supposed to have a meeting about that today for which I should have prepared something, but instead I was programming all Wednesday, with a knot in my stomach because I knew I was probably spending my time unwisely. Then the meeting was cancelled, or rather delayed until next week, instantly unknotting me. Not to fall into the same trap again, I intend to start my preparations for this tonight; and look at me, I am writing a blog post! The first one in three days, high time, but a clearer case of procrastination you will not easily find. After this I urgently need to go shopping.