tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

Yesterday I performed by Exit seminar in return for $2000. Not a bad deal really, but quite necessary given my current fiscal situation, which is tight at best. My presentation, a 40 minute summary of my major findings, was well received. The 20 minutes worth of questions were pretty straight-forward to handle, which was a bit of a relief. In fact, I managed to avoid any stats questions - partly because I didn’t really give them enough ammo, saying simply, “I’ve done the stats and they’re all correct, so you don’t have to worry about that“. It’s funny, when you’ve got a graph up on the projector you want people to realise all the work that went into make it, “I spent 6 months bent over a microscope from 5am to 8pm, just so those error bars would be smaller, damn it!”. Well, that’s what I would’ve said if I’d actually done that.

Last night my friends helped me celebrate, heading to the pub, eating, drinking and being merry. I think it’s been one of the best things about being based in Townsville - the people. I mean, we’ve got a great group of people up here who look out for each other, instead of protecting their patch, under-cutting each other and generally being unpleasant. Unfortunately, you don’t get that sort of atmosphere everywhere, especially, it seems, in the U.S. Kiki’s found the same thing in Germany - the fickle nature of the underfunded. Although, they’re not that underfunded if they have electronic curtains! Like Helge said, at some point in your life you have to decide between friends and electronic curtains. I think there’s something in that - I know I made my choice long ago.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 2:07 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.