i’ve been buckling down to build the financial system for work–as a proxy for my masters project. eventually i’ll stop programming, i’m thinking by cob thursday, and spend next weekend producing some draft writeup of what i did so that i can get it to marchionini by monday, march 29.
i’m really trying to get it to a functional system so that phill (my boss) can produce some reports detailing the first and second quarters of the new project (Measure, Phase II). as i see it, this whole master’s project writeup is merely incidental.
looking back i can see this has plagued me before: in january when i first identified the problem, in february when i explained in some detail what the heck i mean by a negative expense, and most recently in may when i enlisted the cognitive muscle of my dad.
at work i’m usually responsible for defining problems and finding solutions. if i come up with a bad solution, it could mean there’s a better solution, or it could mean something’s wrong with the problem (or it could mean that i’m being dumb). it’s really difficult to determine whether there’s a better solution that i don’t see, or whether i could reconstrue the problem, which would thus allow for a more elegant solution.
an aside: my emphasis on elegance as a value can be traced back to chip gerfen, who would urge us in phonology to find the most elegant solution to a linguistics problem. given two possible solutions, he would say the more elegant one is most likely right.
time to redefine a problem in life? i’ve really been hatin’ on my masters program lately. mostly because of this masters paper rigamarole. i just don’t want to jump through the hoops i have to jump through to do it. but rather than angsting over what to do, i could just leave sils and poof! masters paper problems disappear.
i’ve been slowly migrating the content of measure’s website to a database. it’s a funny process, i’m kind of letting the database and php code grow evolutionarily. there are a lot of special cases, and it’s hard to grok them all upfront. i haven’t bothered to worry about ER diagrams or anything yet. it’s nice not to worry sometimes, to just proceed and see what happens and make small decisions on the fly.
bothering me lately (and apparently i’m not alone):
i have to write a masters paper. in fact apparently today i’m supposed to be signing up for classes. for my LAST semester of classes EVER. but i have to have a masters paper/project advisor and the relationship i have with the professor i feel the closest to is at best contentious.
the project i work for was awarded a $70 million dollar cooperative agreement from USAID for continued monitoring and evaluation activities over the next five years. i’m told that this is the single largest sponsored research grant at UNC. and it means i have a job beyond december–which is pretty darn cool.
i also found out that my PIMS partner in crime, Catherine, will be moving to baltimore to work for the JHPIEGO project at the end of the month–which is pretty sad.
My second trip to Tanzania completes my three country, six trip tour of the world. How splendidly symmetrical. Though the pictures below tell a story of continuous jaunts along the Indian Ocean, flirting with the flora and the fauna, I actually spent most of my time sitting in front of a laptop (the screenshots from which I will gladly spare you).
flying over mount kilimanjaro (the tallest mountain in africa)
