I Have No Life

The title of this post is actually quite misleading: I've been having a pretty good time the past couple of days, now that classes are done. The whole grad group bailed at 3:30 on Friday to drink beer and celebrate the end of term. I went to a cookout on Saturday evening, and will be hanging out with Dan and Daniel tonight. However, it was my reaction to what I did yesterday:

On Sunday, I voluntarily spent most of the day at a work-related conference: the ASTM Symposium on Heat-Air-Moisture Transport: Measurements on Building Materials. Nothing like watching PowerPoint presentations at 9 PM on a Sunday night to make you feel like a loser.



Now, you might think that my work career is not terribly exciting, given that I watch walls dry and stuff like that. But if my work were limited to "measurement of building materials" alone (as opposed to being only one component of my work, mixed with crawling through ducts, climbing around on roofs installing sensors, and telling builders, "You do it that way and you will get sued"), I would have killed myself with pinking shears long ago. But the conference covered things I ought to know more about and be current on. The presentations were a mixed bag: some good, some pointless, some painful. Some presentations got into the painful math that I will not use: the place where my field intersects partial differential equations is not where I want to be. One particularly badly-done presentation reminded me of a line from a web comic I read: "Oh no.... it's a train wreck. And the train is on fire. And it is also filled with kittens."

The underlying problem is that this was a conference by ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials): they create standards (e.g., "D168-94(2000) Standard Test Method for Coke Residue of Creosote"). The job of creating and editing standards is intrinsically tedious and minutae-oriented. One of my colleagues from a large manufacturing company, despite being an ASTM member, is a really cool person: I refer to her as 'the lovely and brilliant Dr. W.'--she did MIT undergrad in the mid-70's, got her PhD at CalTech, and does competitive ballroom dancing in her spare time. She is the editor of a standard, and she has to deal with comments like, "The ASTM style manual states that units should be stated without a hyphen blah blah." To this, she commented to me, "Somebody really needs to get those guys laid."

Some of the personalities (or lack thereof) that I ran into at the conference reminded me of that online writeup of how your favorite Lucky Charms marshmallow shape reflects your sex life ("Amazing new study shows that your favorite Lucky Charms marshmallow bit shape determines what you're like in bed!"). The final category was: Those little oat bits that aren't marshmallows at all: If you prefer the little oat bits, you probably don't like sex anyway and don't need to read this article.

Well, at least the day wasn't a total writeoff: I wandered around Chinatown in the rain, got some coconut buns, and had a big bowl of noodle soup with BBQ pork.

But the biggest failure of the evening was not getting contact information of the cute woman that I chatted with at the conference. FYI, it was lack of effort, not a case of getting shot down. Well, at least I actually talked to her, which is above par for me.