Left hanging

Last time I was out in Amherst, I met with Keith (my advisor for grad school), we brainstormed all sorts of ideas, I got all charged up about stuff, and then he mentioned that I wouldn't be able to start stuff until August. Ok, this is fine, and I get various formal-looking emails and letters from the Forest Service about how I am an "emergency hire", with a start date of August 4th. Woot. Keith sends me an email saying that I am starting on 8/4, he won't be in the office, but there is plenty for me to do. Ok, this is fine, so, I show up. It takes almost four hours to fill out all the necessary paperwork (remind me not to work for the feds again), and then I'm stumped. His office manager and I check with various other people in the lab, to see if Keith had said anything about me helping them out, nope. Well, I guess I'll go home. Not going to sit around twiddling my thumbs, but I don't particularly like being left hanging...

Anyway, today when I went in he was there, so we were able to set some things straight and now I have a huge pile o' papers to plow through. Its a good thing I find this stuff interesting, or I might be less happy at having to read all these pages. But since Keith will be out early next week, I'm basically on a literature-review-vacation (you know, one of those vacations where you have to do some work, but, not really that much) until next wednesday. Woot!

In all my free time, I've been working on the Boston College Law School map. Its basically at the point where I'd say its done, now, it still has a bit of a cartoon-ish feel, but it is functional. I sent out some orienteering peeps on it the other day, and nobody complained too much about things being wrong. More importantly, my GPS track lined up properly with all the important bits and pieces. Yay! The one hitch is that I mapped it using ISOM (International standards of orienteering mapping) instead of ISSOM (for sprints, that's the other S), which means its fairly useless except as a park-o map or a training map. That said, its too small to really use it for anything other than a park-o or training anyway. So I'll remain proud of this little map of my backyard.