The media noise pollution

The media marked is in constant change, which is especially true for the news papers. News on paper is in steady declined compared to online news, even in a country like Norway with a strong tradition for reading papers. There are several good things about news online, like up-to-date news, live coverage, the use of sound and video, etc, etc.

However, I've seen some use of adverstising I'm not very keen on. As a general rule, I feel strongly that advertising and news should be clearly separated. I was just browsing different pages on e24.no, when I suddenly relized I was reading an ad. Take a look at it, it is marked at the top, but it's really easy to miss if you're just browsing.

I couldn't remember clicking on any ads, so I vent back to investigate further. On the right hand side of the webpage, there is a column. This column contains both ads and news articles. Check out the example on the left: How easy is it to spot that the top one is an ad and the bottom one is an e24.no produced news article? It may be legally valid, but ethically, I think it crosses the border to unacceptable.

Deja vu all over again aftermath

Still stuck with the undesirable time frames for my lectures this semester despite a few more attempts to improve the odds of filling the seats. What's new however, is that the administration asshat never updated the course info on the central university web pages, resulting in quite a few emails from students that showed up to an empty classroom, wondering why I didn't show up. Now; it should be mentioned that had these students checked out the course page on it's learning, they'd have seen the message I posted a while ago with the new updated schedule, but the admin guy still absolutely sucks.

Amateur crap like that really should be beneath the institution of higher learning I'm a tenured faculty member of.

Deja vu all over again

Well now; it wouldn't be January if I wasn't struggling with the powers that be at the administration trying to wrangle up decent lecture facilities for the Spring semester. See e.g. my post from last year. Every freakin' year since I started here, I've gone through the same process:

1. Submit a list of requirements for teaching facilities the preceding semester, including expected number of students and if there are any timeframes that absolutely and legitimately don't work.
2. Check timetables for the course and realize that I've been given ungodly hours in a room with room for like 6 students, no projector, no blackboard and probably no electricity.
3. Contact the central admin in charge and point out that I've been given insufficient facilities, both with respect to seating capacity and amenities - like blackboard, projector and - I don't know; walls?
4. Get a reply saying that they have not registered any such requirements; they've still operating with the 1995 (or so) numbers, and the problem must obviously be on my end. Still, the dude in charge graciously agrees to look into the situation, however I must be warned that the time tables have been all but set in stone at this point.
5. After a few rounds back and forth and a lot of diplomacy on my part, I end up with adequate teaching facilities.
6. Repeat ad infinitum

This year - or rather before Christmas -I started the process early, hoping to get a smoother ride duringthe whole administrative debacle. As an added complication, I have just started my paternity leave, which leaves some days of the week inaccessible to teaching in order for my wife and I both to get the work-week puzzle to work out.

As I pleaded with the commaf*cking bastard in charge of room allocation, I argued that I was on partial paternity leave throughout the semester.

End result after going through a few cycles of non-usable facilities: I now teach Thursdays from 5-7 PM and Fridays from 3-4 PM.

That's gonna put lots of asses in the seats. Prime time, babee.

A lesson in sucktitude

Two days ago, we got an email from the Department Head strongly encouraging us to register for a two-lecture deal on ergonomics and stress management. The first lecture - ergonomics at computer workstations, took place yesterday, scheduled for 90 minutes.

Two minutes after I entered the lecture hall is when I started sensing that something was wrong. First of all, I was the only academic staff member from the department present. The Department Head, although present in the very same building, was nowhere to be seen. When the lecture started, I really sensed some serious suctual overtones happening. The physiotherapist in charge started by stating that she was very happy to have the opportunity to give this lecture in English, seeing as how she really needed the practice.

No freakin' kiddin'

She then went on to say that this course was really supposed to have happened earlier, but she was on sick leave due to - you guessed it - back problems and repetitive stress injuries to her shoulders and wrist. Despite her claim of having 20 years of experience as a physiotherapist, she also needed a cheat sheet to give the definition of physiotherapy. So right off the bat this was like taking "how to win friends and influence people" lessons from the two douchebags currently incarcerated in Kongo. Or taking ethics lessons from Sudbø.

In what appeared to be four months but which turned out to be only 95 minutes we then were equipped with shocking new revelations such as "Adjust your chair to a position that's right for you", "take frequent breaks to avoid repetitive strain", "don't have reflections from lighting coming off of your computer screen" and so on.

The maximum sucktitude was saved for last, however, when the physiotherapist had all the participants partake in an impromptu (for us at least) aerobic exercise session to the elevator and supermarket classic "Vem Vet" by the introspective Swedish diary-reciter Lisa Ekdahl. Following this, the instructor even had the nerve to plug her upcoming set of recommended exercises accompanied by a CD comprised of her own selection of what she referred to as "modern music".

That's a cool 95 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Sic transit gloria mundi

Like 'Cube says, it was a good day. Got a good nights sleep, got to work early, got started on preparing new course in applied nanotech. A paper is gonna get submitted to a very good journal today.

Then some kind of clusterf*ck happened.

We're probably not gonna get a new kitchen installed until over New Year's. I was supposed to have a phoner with a prospective grad student, but I never got anything but his voice mail. And the crowning achievement of the day - the Department Head sent me an email informing me that he'd volunteered me as the department's ombud for equal status/equal rights representative at the faculty.

I am now the Crown Prince of Political Correctness and Grand Wizard of Soul-Draining Meetings.

I sense some serious sucktual overtones happening here.

To quote Linda Eide in the last episode of Norske Attraksjoner - "Negative tankar"

If this sucks even half as much as I think it does, I'm going to seriously contemplate my chosen profession.

How charming...

I just saw this article in BA, where a young, pregnant mother out walking was attacked by a
cyclist, because "she didn't get out of the way quick enough". The dude even hit the side of the baby stroller.

There are so many things wrong with this, here are some of the thoughts that I reacted on:

• You never hit a stroller with a baby in.
• You never attack a pregnant lady. No matter what's done.
• On the photo, you can clearly see that this was on the sidewalk. According to Norwegian traffic regulations, cyclist have a duty to give way to pedestrian on sidewalk.

But most of all: You gotta be a real a**hole to do something like that. I can't help being really annoyed when I read something like this.

A Tale That Wasn't Right

Not only a great song from the first of Helloween's trilogy of "Keeper.." albums, but also somewhat descriptive of my writing this entry. To quote Dante Hicks, I'm not even supposed to be here today. I was supposed to be in Sweden, pressing the flesh of some people I have tons of respect for, giving my award acceptance speech and concomitantly giving a 45 minute lecture on my research. I was also going to be given a plaque and a substantial amount of money. The speech was ready, as was the talk. I've even got a new suit, new shoes and - my new haircut.

Then yesterday after lunch, I got a high fever and a wicked pounding in my sinus cavities, plus an assortment of other, flu-related symptoms. A short conversation with my GP later, I was instructed not to go anywhere, and I had to make a very difficult phone call to the award committee, telling them that I was gonna be a no-show. Luckily there is one more awardee, but still. I'll still get the award and the money, and I might even get to go to Gothenburg to give my acceptance speech and subsequent talk, but it won't be the same.

On the plus side, I won't have to be away from my wife and newborn son for an extended trip.

There is something bery Alanis-like about me being knocked out by a viral infection, considering that a substantial amount of my talk was going to be on the use of viral transport peptides for targeting of diseased cells in nanomedicine. Hemagglutinin sure kicked my ass this time.

What am I thinking - of course I'm talking about tiny robots with small laser guns who cruise around in the bloodstream fighting viral infections in between changing the color of my threads to reflect my mood and enhancing the muscle tone in my biceps.

Lesson of the day

Don't answer the office phone until you know who's calling. You might find yourself "volunteering" for administrative tasks, for giving talks to visiting dignitaries who could care less about what you do, or end up on Newton.

42" long

How difficult is it to find a new suit?

Very, as it turns out. Especially if you actually care about how it looks and more importantly; how you look wearing it. From my perspective, off-the-rack suits come in three varieties; hobbit, stick-figure douche and Michael Moore.

Sadly (or not really), I don't fit in either category. For some reason, suit manufacturers assume that if you are bigger than average, then your body shape must be a solid A on top of two toothpicks.

The search continues....

Stood up like the president of the chess club....

...at the high school prom.

Last week some door-to-door people came and asked whether we were interested in a chatregarding how we could save energy in our home by means of inter alia an air-to-air heat pump. We set up a meeting for today - first at 6 PM, and then we immediately rescheduled it for noon so as to better suit Viktor's schedule.

The energy consultants in question are energirådgiverne, a daughter company of Eneas Energy AS.

At noon today, nobody showed. At about 12:30, I was plenty pissed, but we figured that there might be the possibility of the airhead who wrote down the schedule having forgotten to make a note of the schedule change from 6 PM to noon.

6 PM came and went, and nobody showed up. Not even a phone call.

Considering that these asshats came to ask us to take time out of our day to meet with them, and that they're actually peddling products, this is pretty shoddy salesmanship.

We're probably gonna buy a heat pump, but I'll go out of my way to make good and damned sure that we don't make the purchase via energirådgiverne or any company affiliated with them.

...and the hump-backed gargoyle they rode in on.

Web page blues some more

In May, I wrote about how every faculty member had to create his/her own professional web page by June 15th. This directive came from higher up, and it was not presented as a voluntary activity.

Like a schnuck I did what I was asked and delivered well before the deadline, just to be sure that it'd get done before our son was born.

Well; two weeks after the deadline, the results are in with regards to percentage complete at the different departments. The two departments with highest completion rate ranked at ~70%. In contrast, "my" department pimp-strolled in with a 16% rate of completion, which means that only myself and six other schnucks among the scientific and administrative staff actually bothered to follow up on the directive. And my department was not the one with the lowest completion rate either.

What's worse is that the beureaucratic instance who issued the order only had a completion rate of 42% - less than half of the staff followed through on their own directive.

It's a miracle that other faculty members haven't taken my lunch money yet. Or it could be because not a single soul actually bothers to look for or even less read these official web pages and thus nobody knows. At any rate, I sure got well doinked with my pants on.

Basic internet use FAIL part II

...so...by now people have gone from complaining about the resulting spam to (mostly) doling out advice on how not to spam themselves. Get this; a bunch of people with doctorates and a presumed IQ above 70 send out what they believe to be private emails filled with good advice for the ones who accidentally spam the entire list.

Invariably the email goes something like this: "Hey, NN. I do not have a particular need to be informed that you wish to be removed from the mailing list. If you want off the list, simply hit the "Reply" button instead of the "Reply all" button and type in your request to be removed from said list. That way we don't all get hit with your email.

..and then they're probably confused as hell about why their supposedly private email is sent to everyone on the mailing list. Brutal lack of understanding how a mailing list works.

That's it; I'm writing down each and every single blowhard who does this on my personal $hit list.

Basic internet use FAIL

Let's say - hypothetically speaking of course - that you worked at a university and someone from within the system included you on a weekly mailing list that you found to be annoying and desperately wanted out of. Would you: a) Hit the "Reply" button and write a message expressing your wish to get off said mailing list in more or less polite terms or would you b) Send an email to the clearly listed person responsible for the list with the same message.

Bonus: If you opted for what was behind door a), would you also follow that up by hitting the "Reply" button at least once more complaining about all the spam mail you kept getting because of this mailing list? If so, you could be one of my esteemed colleagues, many of whom hold professorates within math, physics and information technology and thus ought to be familiar with the basics of email software.

Oh, and:

It's about that time

....people like me are scrambling to write up grant applications. The worst part by far is the budget process - at least that's what sucks the most according to me. Making the numbers compatible between the faculty and department spreadsheet templates and those of the research council, with every rounding discrepancy from origins unknown coming back to haunt you when you least expect it - that's what really irks me. Last Spring I had an meltdown unrequested fission surplus of rare proportions during the budget process. This year it's been much less turbulent, thanks in no small part to the department's support person, but still my blood pressure rises to uncomfortable levels when I'm doing the numberjuggling.

I don't know why, but I've got zero patience with budget work - which goes a long way towards explaining why I'm not an beancounter numbercruncher commaf*cker accountant. I've got plenty of patience in other areas - perhaps not that many, but still: I can play the same scale in different tempos and time signatures for hours on end without tiring. I can work on the same sentence in a paper until I've got it just right. I can spend countless hours analyzing data, and I've got no problem putting in long hours of data collection whenever I've got the time.

Making budgets however.....

Friday frustrations...

Warning: Friday blow-out below

Some days I really get reminded why I hate my job, and (surprise, surprise) it often includes the IT-deparment or some other function that's not a part of my department.

I really started yesterday when I was typing out a validation report in our laboratory information management system (LIMS). Tried to save the document, and the freaking disk was full. Since this is a protected system, I can't save the document offline, so I really got it in my shorts. The great thing is that I had the same experience just a month ago (which is basically the last time I used the system). The IT department then claimed they've allocated waste storage space for us and had calculations the showed that this would last for years. Apparently those calculations were less solid then Wilhelm's feeble attempts on the guitar quiz scores. So now I'm stuck with a document I've invested time and effort in, which can't be saved and will disapear if the computer shuts down. And any further work in the LIMS system is out of the question. Great. I have four documents in there to update, and the deadline is Easter.

Well, being the ideal employee and diligent worker I am, I made myself busy and checked if everything was OK in the routine lab. I've asked the same IT department for back-up space for instrument data two months ago, starting with 35 GB and then 20 GB more per year. The IT-department made space available on the network, but I had forgot to transfer the data. Checking the disk, I found it had 28 GB free space on it. For storing 35 GB of data. Epic math skills fail again!

In addition, I'm mowing my instrumentation to a new lab after Easter. But there is yet no gas, the power supply capacity not up to instrument spec.'s, there is no cooling and the ventilation doesn't work, all which is needed to run my instruments. I've been asked to focus on the positive sides of the new facilities, and I figured that at least it got walls and a door. For now, I'm doing my best to focus on that part.

TGIF!

Whut in the name of tarnation?

You better believe it's Monday today. I should've seen the writing on the wall when it turned out that the coffee machine was out of order as I rolled into work. That and other small kinds of mishaps flat out pale, however, compared to the horror of having to talk to the Norwegian equivalent of the INS due to some bureaucratic snafu with regards to the imminent arrival of a visiting professor. At least his arrival was imminent prior to the aforementioned snafu. Dude is supposed to arrive here Thursday night, and he applied for his VISA in January, where the duration as well as the starting date of his stay were specified and backed up by the invitation letter. Today he got static from the embassy, telling him that his contact person at the host university had to contact UDI on his behalf in order for the VISA to be issued.

As luck would have it, I am that contact person. Which entailed getting all the information together and calling their "hotline". The first time I called, I was on hold for about ten minutes before some fluke in the system - or an operator - hung up on me. Game over, back to scratch. Their phone service is one of the more sensory-depriving experiences I've been exposed to. Aside from the "Press 1 for English menu" option, and the interruption by some low-budget automated "All our operators are busy at the moment. Please hold." every ~2 minutes, there is absolute silence. No Sixties classics, no 90's elevator music - flat out silence. And the automated douchebag asking you to hold offers no information on the expected time you have to wait, or even the (probably staggering) number of people ahead of you.

The 'Gitmo people ain't got nuthin' on the INS. The first couple of times you call, you quit after ten-max fifteen minutes. At some point you figure out that you don't call these servants of absolute evil for fun, and that the only way to hopefully accomplish your bidness is to bite the bullet and endure the hellish holding period. By the time you actually get to talk to some carbon-based life form (as far as I know anyways), you're so deeply engulfed in Stockholm syndrome/have the Eye of Sauron on you that you forget the fact that you were on hold for - in my case - 40 minutes before you got to talk to anyone.

So was the situation resolved? That's a big, fat no - the person on the line told me that this type of application normally took three months to process, and that she could try to speed it up but she couldn't promise anything.

Funfact: When you apply for these things, you have to get the starting/arrival date approved before they even start to look further at the application. The application was submitted and pre-approved exactly TWO months prior to the arrival date. I don't know precisely who screwed up, but we're left holding the bag. One thing's for sure; the INS people need less meth and more math.

Saturday trials and tribulations

Saturday, we ventured into downtown Trondheim, lured by the nice weather and the hopes of the slack-jawed yokels with backpacks and cowbells local sports fans being up at Granåsen hooting and hollering on the occasion of the World Cup in something related to skis.

No such luck. Downtown was packed to the extent that we had to give up finding a parking spot following two hipster chicks and one elderly couple totally snagging parking spots we'd been waiting for. Following that, my anger and blood pressure spiked to levels which suggested that we'd get the hell out of the downtown area. On the way home, a skinny inbred douchenozzle hotshot NASCAR driver flipped me the bird because I was only doing 80 in a 70 zone, some 500 meters before his exit.

So my question is this: Beside the World Cup; what exactly was the deal on this particular Saturday that caused all the people who normally have seat reservations on the short bus to throw out their medication, get in their cars and re-inact scenes from "Dukes of Hazzard" in the Trondheim region?

Ad spots: How low can you go?

I gotta stop drinking Coca-Cola Zero and Coca-Cola Light (not that I drink a lot of soft drinks, but still) - there's no way I can sink money into a company that green-lights the kind of commercials and ad spots you see for Coca-Cola Zero (targeted towards a male demographic) and Light (targeted towards a female demographic). Especially the Zero commercials are the worst cases of lowest common denominator, insulting to both genders, crap commercials I've ever seen on network television in Norway. It might even be pushing the infernal "Axe" ad spots down from the top position.

In case you haven't seen it, it deals with a "morning after a one-night stand" scenario at the girl's place, where the parents come knockin' on the door right after the girl hits the shower. The situation appears dire for the boy, but then he takes a sip of a Coca-Cola Zero he finds in the fridge, and immediately, a SWAT-team breaks in through the window and airlifts the "hero" out with a helicopter. Just before the boy lifts off from the window sill, the girl emerges from the shower, and as he gestures that he'll call her, she enthusiastically approves. As the boy is lifted away from the window, the apartment blows up from an explosion.

Way to deal with a grown-up situation. On a side note, it's somewhat odd that the girl has a Zero in her fridge, seeing as how the entire premise is based on Zero being a boys-only soft drink. Why would she have it in her fridge? There are three scenarios which resonate with the overall premise: 1) the girl is cheating on her boyfriend (as was suggested by my wife), 2) there was an exchange of money for services provided, or 3) that this describes something right out of Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like A Lady" and thus more "bromantic" than the commercial lets on at first.

Coca-Cola Light is for girls and Coca-Cola Zero is for boys......when was it decided that the consumers were so lazy-ass, howl-at-the-moon stupid that this was a reasonable market segmentation? Especially considering that the hook in the Zero commercials entail adult situations and thus targets demographics above the age of consent?


...and speaking of dumb-ass ads; in Dagbladet's "Magasinet" on Saturday, the inside cover featured a two-page ad from Norsk Sykepleierforbund (The Norwegian Nurses Organization), where they point to the unfortunate fact that women make 85 cent on the dollar compared to men. The punchline in the ad: "Eller må vi bli menn for å få rettferdig lønn" (Or do we have to become men in order to earn the wages we derserve?") You can see the ad and read more about it here. So on one hand the nurses point to the bogus fact that professions traditionally held by women are not as well paid as men with a comparable education (in years), but on the other hand they more than suggest that if they switched genders yet remained within the same profession, they'd make more. Congratulations on confusing the issues and looking downright moronic when there are legitimate grievances which should be resolved.

Vacation is DEFINITELY over

It's always quite the adjustment to return to work after a break, but this is taking it a bit too far. Since I returned I've (i) written a report on various pedagogic activities which was due at noon today and came with a four-hour deadline, (ii) been summoned to a meeting later this afternoon, (iii) got a "Dear John" letter from a journal regarding a manuscript we submitted in freakin' September, and (iv) being forced to deal with the central administration about the extremely deficient lecture hall I've been allocated for my main course this semester.

If this was a Running Wild tune, it'd be titled "Riding The $hitstorm".

What can be so deficient about a lecture hall, you may ask. Well; for one thing, it can be too small for the projected class size, and it can lack features such as a projector and a decent blackboard. The lecture hall I've been allocated lacks both these things. I had the exact same problem last year, despite having provided the central administration with all the numbers and stuff they needed well within the timeline they specified. As to why I'm left holding the bag yet again, I'm at a loss.

Oh; and one more unfavorable factoid about the lecture hall; it's scheduled to be completely renovated and sanitized for asbestos starting March 1st, and so from that date it will not be accessible. Slightly inconveniencing when taking into account that the course lasts the entire semester. So in summary, the room is too damn small, it's got Jack and $hit in the way of amenities (and Jack just left town), AND it's not accessible after March 1st due to renovation.

Outstanding. It's a good thing lecture hall allocation is done via a centralized database managed by competent staffers, or us subject teachers would be screwed with our oants on by scheduling conflicts and insufficient conditions.

Since I need new facilities, I can't even announce a timetable for lectures. Excellent.

Thanks for nuthin', CDON

...so a good while ago I ordered the latest Yngwie Malmsteen release from CDON.com. Specifically, I pre-ordered it, so that I'd get my grubby little hands on the latest Malmsteen Miracle as soon as possible. At the same time I pre-ordered the latest Edguy release - Tinnitus Sanctus. 'Cause why waste time?

Anyhoo; the weeks flew by, and eventually I got the Edguy album - which was released well after Yngwie's latest masterpiece - but there was no sign of "Perpetual Flame".

Major bummer.

Logging on to CDON.com didn't help much - the order history did not provide any specifics, and the only way to get a hold of any customer service was to use their online form - and that didn't get me no answers.

Fast forward until today, and I log onto CDON.com to check if there's been any progress. And check it out; the cyberlosers have now cancelled my order AND removed "Perpetual Flame" from their catalogue. Did I get as much as an email informing me of this fact? Hell no. Did they even bother answer my request using their online contact form thingy? Hell no once more.

This coming week it'll be roughly two months since "Perpetual Flame" was released. I sure didn't pre-order the album for the purpose of being jerked around only to have to purchase it elsewhere.

F*ck CDON and the gargoyle they rode in on! Not cool - no es frigido!