Category: Personal

Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.

Working like a dog

For the last couple of years my working schedule has been pretty much stable. It was sporadic and random in a sense that I was working a lot of night shifts that I had to compensate with a lot of weekends shifts, while managing to screw in some regular office hours, but it was stable. I was getting from one week to another with five nine hour periods on average. Sometimes I was getting a bit more, sometimes – slightly less.

Today and yesterday are different though. I finished yesterday’s night shift at 7:00am and went home. I had a light breakfast and went to bed. Two hours later I woke up and went back to the office for an important meeting. The meeting was supposed to take two hours, but it continued for three and a half instead. When it finished I had a choice of either going home and getting more sleep before my tonight’s night shift or staying in the office and registering for one regular office hours day. With almost four hours of the full working day behind my back already, I decided to stay and work.

About five hours later I released myself and went home to get some rest. I was exhausted already, but couldn’t sleep well for some reason. My mind was working on something without letting me know what it actually was. I’ll find out eventually. Anyway, four hours passed and I went back to the office for the night shift. And here I am.

Calculations for the HR office: for the period between Thursday, September 29th 23:00 and Saturday 1st 8:00 (the total of 33 hours) I am registered for 3 working shifts 9 hours each (the total of 27 hours). Not bad, eh…

Yet another bug closed

Yet another bug that I submitted to Red Hat Bugzilla got fixed. This time it took more than a year – from 21 May 2004 until 12 September 2005 – but a workaround was found much earlier and could be easily applied.

P.S.: I was stupid enough not to notice that the bug was closed and add another comment today. Nuthead!

The teaching fun is back

I’ve always enjoyed teaching. There is something in it that makes me feel good. I don’t know what is that though. Maybe I feel the satisfaction from the process. Maybe it is easier to see the results. Maybe it’s all the communications envolved. Or maybe I like well defined goals.

Anyway, it seems that I will be enjoying whatever is that I am enjoying so much about it again. This time though it is teaching on steroids. Instead of single students, I will have a whole group of about 10 people. I will give them a 12-hour course (3 hours a week for one month) on effective data mining. It’s just a fancy title for a bunch of common knowledge though.

The course will include a brief overview of search engines, detailed coverage of Google, and a bunch of new tools and services such as RSS, Atom, blogosphere, Bloglines, Delicious, Technorati, Flickr, and stuff like that. I don’t yet have course notes or anything for that matter except for course outline, but I hope I will develop all I need during the next week and a half. The course will start from the beginning of October and I think I have plenty of time to do everything properly.

In the meantime, if you have any links that you might think I will find useful, let me know via comments.

Irony in science or a bad example of Post Hoc

While reading through this excellent website I came across an article about Post Hoc logical fallacy. To freshen your memory, this article describes Post Hoc fallacy as follows:

A Post Hoc is a fallacy with the following form:

1. A occurs before B.
2. Therefore A is the cause of B.

There are also a few examples that help to understand this fallacy. Among these examples there is this one:

Bill purchases a new PowerMac and it works fine for months. He then buys and installs a new piece of software. The next time he starts up his Mac, it freezes. Bill concludes that the software must be the cause of the freeze.

I couldn’t help the smile. In the scope of logic as a science this example perfectly illustrates the point. But in the scope of computer science this quote would be a good example of the opposite. In other words, if you computer worked fine for months and than you installed a new piece of software on it, and it started to freeze – chances are that the software is the cause of problem.

Ironical, isn’t it?