Academia

I’ve had the fairly bizarre experience this week of attending the CCGrid 05 conference at city hall. This is my first conference and by all means a first introduction to my peers outside of the group involved with the PASOA project I am working upon. I think the most interesting thing is how normal each of them actually are – I was expecting them all to have some sort of superiority complex for some reason. One thing I’ve learnt in academia thus far is that the further you move up the rungs of its ladder, the more respect you obtain and the more at ease I feel talking to people about, well, anything – most of the topics which come up are rarely to do with your work (or maybe I lead the conversation this way).

I always seem to get stressed about events like this in my academic calendar and the fact that I was busy Sunday with Church, lunch, afters, helping people move and then having to go into Uni late to collect stuff in prep for the 6:30 start on Monday means I must of got all of 4 hours sleep. I had so much stuff doing my head in it was stupid and had to resort to sleeping on my back (an extremely rare occurence, I usually wake in this state), which achieved nothing. This became a bit obvious on monday when asked the content of the 1 hour’s worth talks I’d just attended in the afternoon – for which I wasn’t able to give an answer.

In the evening, I had the exciting experience of attending my first fashion show (not actually mine, a fair trade one attended by me, organised by the Matthias’s) which for some reason made me think about hollyoaks and neighbours, who always used to be having them when I was back home. It was great, aside from the fact I was so tired by now I almost fell asleep in the dark and Rob and I looked like prats in front of an audience trying to find the edge of steps we needed to descend because we’d got there a little late. Housegroup this evening was on a similar tip, I struggled from falling over a couple of times whilst in ‘worship’. I’d best go to bed.