Ugh. I have a conference all this week, just under 25 miles away; i.e., close enough that I'm expected to commute. This may not sound so horrible, but in my case it means going from one side of a major metropolitan area to the other, with all the traffic that entails. Yesterday it took me about 45 or 50 minutes to get to the conference hotel, and twice that long to get home that evening, due in large part to the fact that one of the major arteries I've been using to get there in the morning is limited to vehicles with 2 or more people in the evening. By the time I got home I was so well and truly sick of cars that when my husband proposed going out for dinner, I snapped that I did not want to spend one more minute in a car! I don't know how people make that kind of commute twice a day for years; I'd end up in an asylum, jail, or a morgue.
Two more days of this, then I can go back to accomplishing something. This is one of those conferences your supervisors decide they need to send someone to and I'm that "someone". A couple of the presentations were actually interesting, but there are an awful lot of "tool salesmen" - folks there to talk about this new software tool their company, consortium, or what-have-you has developed or is developing. Some of these sound interesting, until they move from a few crumbs about what it can do to the ontologies, algorithms and logarithms of its operation, the success and failure rates of the testing iterations, and so on. I'm not an engineer or other techie - I don't care about your precious tool's "deep structure" or how many iterations you went through to get it to market. Just tell me what it can do for me, how it can help me do my job better or faster.
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