Forecast

1. Three out of six days showing on my weather widget have it hotter in Cambridge than at home in The South. Have I recently mentioned that I'm living somewhere with no air conditioning? This summer has been a perfect storm of making me have no regrets that I will not be back here next summer.


2. Talk tomorrow. Haven't practiced it. Need to write notes of all the things that are not on the slides and that I need to say. Made horrible hybrid slides instead of a good handout. In the ideal world, I would have no slides and would demo what the software is doing. Instead I've made slides that will do double-duty both as visuals during the talk and as a handout for afterwards. We'll call this one partly prepared with a mix of good and bad ideas and a chance of disaster.


3. Tuesday: Gloom approaching. Conference call for work (my real job in The South). My boss has added one of those passive-aggressive agenda items in which I need to justify what I've been doing. One advantage of a conference call is that I can have copious notes including pre-written talking points in front of me, and no one will know how scripted my responses are.


4. Five day forecast: In terms of the summer job here in Cambridge, we shift gears from what we've been doing for the better part of the past four weeks. All sorts of deadlines approach. All sorts of patterns need to be broken. People need to get things done before all hell breaks loose.


5. Ten day forecast: 100% chance of crying.


6. Two week forecast: We have a mixed system moving in with a return of cooler indoor temperatures because I assume that the hotel in Pittsburgh will have air conditioning, which I dearly miss. Also there is another talk, not yet prepared because the libraries that I need to run the code are not installed and the person who sent an email saying that he was planning on installing them "tomorrow" on July 1 emailed the group the other day saying that in order to install these libraries some other libraries need to be installed before that and that someone else needs to install these other libraries. May need to entirely reframe the talk and rewrite all the code so that it will work with what is currently installed on the machine. I optimistically hope to do this all today or tomorrow, as there is a 100% chance of all hell breaking loose. And soon.