Am I hot or not? ... not.
You may recall me being very happy that our heater was fixed on 14 Oct. Well, less than a week later, it broke again. You may recall me being very happy that our heater was fixed on 2 Nov. Well, less than a week later, it broke again.
I'll give them 2 days to fix it, and then I'm writing a formal letter to the head of accommodation to remind them that their legal "residence contract" specifies that it is the university's obligation as a landlord to "ensure that there is kept in good repair and proper working order any installations provided by the University for space heating" and "provide gas and electricity". I haven't had any problems with electricity, but the latter is just there in case they try to argue that the heater is just fine; the problem was in the gas intake to the heater.
Other than that, things are fine. I was at the lab on Sat until 11pm, and on Sunday until 9pm. It's really feeling like home! I'm doing a pilot survey of rhythm grading, and it's really exciting watching the answers trickle in. I had 5 responses within an hour of the initial request, and 9 at the end of the first 20 hours.
Once the pilot survey is done, I'll make a better one (more specific questions, informed by the results of the pilot survey) and ask for help here. I think it might be bad experimental practice to re-use pilot survey people in the real survey (I'll check with our psych person), so I'm not looking for more people to do the first survey.
For teaching, we're doing ripple counters this week. Should be fun! It took me an hour to get through the lab... I misread the lab sheet's "connect the output of each flip-flop to the clock of the next flip-flop" as "connection the output... to the input of the next flip-flop", and ended up adding a bunch of needless logic gates to make it count properly. When I finally checked the lab sheet again, because I couldn't believe it was this complicated without more explanation, I noticed my mistake and easily finished it off.
We're going to London next week. Ok, not actually London; I think it's Milton Keynes. If that's pronounced "milton keens". Apparently we fly down to London, then take a coach for an hour to this place. In my Canadian mind, anywhere reachable within an hour's drive of a place is that place. So we're going to London.
(hmm, I guess that means that Glasgow is Edinburgh. Umm. I think most people in both cities wouldn't like that!)
Yes, there were dark mutterings in the lab about the travel arrangements... apparently they were brough about because it needed to be booked during the summer, and one can't book train tickets more than 3 months in advance.
Anyway, it should be a fun little jaunt. Or a little jaunt, at least. Apparently the place we're going to has "concrete cows", which sound like they're either highly awesome or highly non-awesome.
Kind-of like being hot or not!