This, dear reader, is going to be the first in a continuous series of ranty posts. It's been an... exciting week for me.Here's the chronology:
Apr 29, 11am:The first inkling I had, was a fleeting comment from C.C. about his having to go down to Putrajaya on 7 May to present a ScienceFund project he's involved in. I thought his project was picked on by random, because that's what happened to another researcher before. Then he told me it's actually because MOSTI is requesting all the 1st cycle projects (ending May '08) to this evaluation/presentation workshop, so that they can decide whether they'll release the last payment.
O_O
What about
my project on the multilingual dictionary then? Haven't heard anything. But I suppose all correspondences would've gone to Dr C's mailbox and she's on extended medical leave...
C.C. checked against the list of projects he had and told me my project wasn't listed. So it doesn't concern me then...
Apr 29, 1.15pm:Back from lunch, and found a note on my table from Mr T. Well well weeeeell, whaddaya know. There's a
second list of projects circulated
just this morning and my project's slotted for 7 May, too. Talk about short notice.
It's all a bit spooky though, since I just finished all the programming and put the servlets online last week, and was actually going to update Dr T and Mr T via e-mail anyway.
After a quick discussion with Mr T, he went into doc compilation overdrive mode (harrassing Bendahari and RCMO for the respective docs, photocopying whatever docs and receipts he has on hand etc), and I went into PowerPoint overdrive mode. The best part is that many academics are on leave one day or another this week, since Labour Day is this Thursday, and – wait for it – almost all USM clerical staff are attending a seminar this week!
At least we didn't have to rush up on the technical development stuff. Also, Dr T will be around Cyberjaya/Putrajaya on 7 May (he'll be at a seminar in Port Dickson until 6 May) to present the project, so I won't have to travel down. Although Sara commented that if I went down nobody'd dare ask too many questions on seeing my bump...
Apr 29, 6pm:MOSTI just won't disappoint – Dr T e-mailed to say that there's been a
THIRD list and now one of his projects (in 2nd cycle) is also slotted for presentation, also on 7 May!
Apr 30:Got most of the slides in order by last night, so today it was mainly checking over them and help brief H.H. and C.K. for Dr T's project.
Holiday tomorrow – don't care, am going to kick back and relax.
May 2:It wasn't until late evening when the financial details came in, so I incorporated those at night. Also got together a bunch of documents to be printed out in hard copy first thing on Monday. Apparently there was also some RSVP slip (e-mailed out today) that had to be returned to MOSTI by... today. Eugh. Hopefully Dr T saw it; anyway I SMS'ed him to check his inbox in case he didn't.
May 3, around noon:Dr T called in the morning – apparently he's already in Port Dickson since yesterday! Quickly called Mr T who's back at the office to continue all the photocopying. We'd have to send the RSVP on Dr C and Dr T's behalf; and hopefully it'd land in the right inbox since apparently we need to RSVP to different people for different panels...
Suddenly remembered that I'd better check with C.C. that he's sticking around in Putrajaya long enough to be in time to pass the projects to Dr T! More SMS frenzy. Turns out that they have the first slot 9.00–9.30am and plans to fly back to Penang by noon! More SMS frenzy to Dr T to see if he can make it to Putrajaya in the early morning.
Then decided to forget all about it as Dr T couldn't respond just yet (he's at the seminar remember?). Went to RedBox to semi-celebrate husband's birthday, semi-release stress (both of us needed a break), before heading to the World Music Festival (will blog that later!
) in the evening...
May 3, 7pm:Was at the Botanical Gardens for the World Music Festival when C.C. sent an SMS saying that Dr T has arranged for him and H.H. to stay overnight at Dr T's place on 7 May – so no problem for him to hand over the docs to Dr T then!
Ah bliss.
But little was I to know...
May 4, 11am:Got a call from Dr T asking me to install my system on C.C. or H.H.'s laptop, just in case there's no internet connection at the workshop venue. And we all know how very true that can be.
Yikes. I've never tried installing it, especially PostgreSQL with all that huge amount of data, on Windoze before!
May 5:Stupid. Windoze. Wouldn't.
Print. To the lab printer! Eventually I had to delete the printer, restart Windoze, add the printer again, for it to work. Bah. Well by noon I finally managed to print whatever docs I needed. Finalised the presentation slides and docs with Mr T in the afternoon, and he carried off the docs for binding/compilation.
I had to switch tracks a while and get rushing on a
LaTeX typesetting job due the next morning, or today midnight... (more on that in another post.) Then spent the whole evening trying to work out the system installation/config/setup details on Windoze, till midnight. I'm getting worried. Them conceptual vectors data are really huge and seem to take a looooong while to load into the database.
May 6:Sudden Attack of Visiting Researchers (more about that in a later post) in the mid-morning rather threw all of us off-balance. It was after lunch when I could start trying to set up the system on C.C.'s laptop. To my surprise it took less time than I expected – a bit over 2 hours. However PostgreSQL just managed to start up once: it refused to start again after I shut it down, so that I could show C.C. how to launch everything. As we were all damned tired I told C.C. and Dr T to use the demo video I created with
CamStudio. The sense tagger can't run locally off the laptop anyway if the internet's inaccessible since it relies on our FDG server.
I hit home after burning the presentation slides and video onto a CD and passed everything to H.H. and C.C. I'm beat.
May 7:So this is the day – but I slept in late anyway. Too, too tired. But I still made it to the lab relatively early (10am) to make sure that the server was still running. In the meantime Dr T called to confirm a few points in the slides; then C.C. called to tell me that while they do have Internet access there, the firewall blocks all requests to ports other than 80 (HTTP), both ingoing and outgoing.
Huh?! How stupid can that be?? They've probably just voided out all Apache Tomcat-based applications, and then some.
C.C. also appeared to have found what's wrong with the PostgreSQL installation; apparently I made a typo in postgres.conf! Once that's corrected, everything's running as expected – well except for the sense tagger, since it sends requests to port 8080 on the FDG server – and that's blocked. Meh. Luckily we still have the video.
In the afternoon C.C. SMS-ed back to say that they've finished all the presentations and the panels seemed satisfied. What a relief! (Although for some reason, the MOSTI people requested to bring back all the docs for my project with them.)
And now to bed! And
now to bed!!!
Also a couple of not-so-trivial table formatting, but luckily the trusty LaTeX Companion book was ever helpful. In the end what proved to be my downfall were typos. With the deadline fast approaching we went absolutely frantic with the to-and-fro e-mailing and SMS-ing. These keep turning up till 11.59pm on Monday night, when I just couldn't hold my eyes open nor my head up anymore, and had to call it a night. Luckily my client didn't come across any more typos after that, and he submitted the paper in the morning.
Me, crazy? Sure, why'd you think I name this blog what it is now?
