Golden Boy

A brief moment of humor (and pain) in the middle of deadline chaos (true story):

8am, Saturday. Productive grad student (aka Golden Boy) sends email: I am derailed because of this blinding pain in my elbow. Need to go to the ER.

    Prof: Ouch!  What's the diagnosis?

Golden Boy: Gave me some painkillers. repetitive stress injury. elbow is inflamed - will x-ray after the inflammation has gone down. can't keep the elbow at an angle -typing with left hand.

    Prof: Ouch!  First ISCA casualty in 10 years! :-)

Golden Boy: not giving up because of this. will continue the expts in the evening. might not happen. but still

    Prof: gasping out his last words... two at a time.. hindi movie style...

Golden Boy: :D ... from phone.

Golden Boy (1 minute later): how do we calculate [...] energy ? kshitij's model ?


Meanwhile, repurcussions around the world...

The Magical Paper Submission

ISCA Deadline

I'm guessing everyone's digging themselves out after the ISCA deadline.  I had promised not to talk about energy drinks and deadlines, so let's just say that our deadline week looked a bit like this :-)... without the funky math of course.

I'm constantly hounding my students to get their writing done early.  Good writing doesn't magically show up 24 hours before the deadline.  While a Results section will undoubtedly see revisions in the last few days, there's no valid excuse for not finishing most other sections well before the deadline.

The graph below shows two examples of how our writing evolved this year... better than in previous years, but still not quite early enough!  We also labored for more than the usual amount to meet the 22-page budget... I guess we got a little spoilt after the 26-page HPCA'12 format.  I am amazed that producing a refined draft one week before the deadline is an impossible task, but producing a refined 22-page document 3 minutes before the deadline is a virtual certainty.  I suppose I can blame Parkinson's Law, not my angelic students :-), for accelerating my aging process...