Ceaseless Student

Wow. I have a lot of work to do. I just finished taking data for a circuits lab (2 hours starting at 2 AM). Now I think I’ll go do some Meta. Soooo much work. Most of it’s Meta in a variety of incarnations, butt he other subjects are pinging me pretty good too.

Today I learned a little bit about how misunderstandings make people angry. So for our communications paper in Meta, I’m doing the organizing. A few days ago, I sent out the general structure of the paper and assigned work to the four other people working on this in pairs. Now here’s the fun part. A and B are working together; C and D are working together. A thinks my structure is one thing, but C thinks it’s something else. Both groups get some sort of a start and then realize… well it’s not going to work. The paper will not work if the pairs are doing things with a different structure (they’re both doing case studies). So I met with A and C. We talked. And talked. And eventually we reached some manner of compromise.

Then I had a standard rice party and, unfortunately, all of Meta came. I say unfortunately only because of the way things played out. Neither A nor C had talked to their partners since they’d reached a compromise. So, when the topic came up, B and D had different views on the structure of the paper. Things got a little bit heated and the rest of Meta was sort of firefighting. It was good times.

The moral: discuss things. An e-mail can (evidently) be interpreted in different ways. Discussion allows for feedback and we all know that feedback is good.

(Random quip about miscommunication in the communications module; teehee)

In other news, I think I’ll be moving my blog to Wordpress soonish. The rss feed from Wordpress doesn’t butcher my formatting… yummy.