Scattered things...

[pmb]

• I remain skeptical of quite a few things that Hillary Clinton stands for - increased censorship is pretty much always wrong, and she's too willing to roll over and find the "middle ground" between the centrist position and the loony right - but linking the federal minimum wage to the congressional wage is a stroke of genius.
• 12 catches of 5 clubs. And I could count them myself instead of having someone else tell me how many I got. That was most pleasing.
• Conference submission date is May 16th. Work work work. Then I am done with the research project that is turning out to be kind of orthogonal to the research I want to do. Then it's all area exam all the time. Work work work. Then the term is over.
• And this summer I am teaching "Intro to Programming" in Python in a 4-week intensive (7/24-8/16). Using John Zelle's book based on the advice of several people. I am psyched. The rest of the summer is going to be spent biking and hanging out and reading and recovering from a relatively rough year of grad school.

Comments

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

why don't you come work for us, so you can be happy and rich?

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think about it. But I just don't enjoy (or, at least, haven't enjoyed) coding for more than 15ish hours a week. Google wants 40+, just like every other CS job that doesn't involve teaching. And I really like teaching. I am also really bad a at separating work and life and I am unable to cease thinking about work problems after I go home. Even if the problems are not, in themselves, particularly interesting. Thus, I need work where I can think about only the stuff I really want to think about and hopefully teach as well.

And if I want to teach smart students who want to learn and not just be a warden, then I need a PhD so that I can teach at the college level. But every now and then I consider either joining Google or starting my own Web2.0 this-or-that. But Paul Graham's most recent essay contained a quote that keeps haunting me:

By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

But Paul Graham's most recent essay ...
 should be read as
And Paul Graham's most recent essay ...

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I doubt I code for more than 15 hours a week Not much more, at least. Meetings, email, non-code problem solving (playing with data), reviewing other people's code all take up the rest of the time.

But at this point, Google does not qualify for Paul Graham's compression, I think, since its not a startup level of work.