As I’ve said before, one of the biggest lies about academia is that you have your summers off. You don’t. But I’ve finished all my teaching for this academic year. So I’ve got two months ahead where there should be no student interruptions except for setting repeat papers in August.
Recently I’ve had two papers accepted for publication (and there’s one in submission):
- Stapleton G., Delaney A. Towards Overcoming Deficiencies in Constraint Diagrams . Accepted for VLHCC2007, Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA, September 2007.
- Delaney A., Stapleton G. On the Descriptional Complexity of a Diagrammatic Notation. Accepted for VLC07, Visual Languages and Computing, San Francisco, USA, September 2007.
- Another paper has been submitted to VLL, which is a workshop of VLHCC, with partial reference Delaney A., Stapleton G. Spider Diagrams of Order.
So the plan for the summer is to :
- Turn the papers into a thesis chapter.
- Finish another technical thesis chapter.
- Get my registration (finally) transferred to University of Brighton.
- Finish the integration of Eclipse and scratchbox-PPC for deployment in our labs.
- Write the technical content for our new Computer Games degree.
- Rewrite my Computer Graphics Algorithms course as I want to take it in a different direction.
- Turn a thesis chapter into a possible journal paper.
- Go to GUADEC and have a good time.
So when I said that you don’t get a summer off in academia, I’m not moaning. I could probably get away with not doing most of the above list but then I’d (a) not get my Ph.D. finished and (b) not be providing the best teaching I can to my students. Both of which are important to me.
Basically I have two months of heavily self-directed tasks ahead of me. Which is just as good as a summer off, because I work on what I want to.