Tea Selection Improves - Film at Eleven

Hey - I just realized that old jokey cliché from the 70's is obsolete on a couple of levels. The term 'film' is very dated, especially in the context of television news. The 'at eleven' part is also passé given 24 hour news station moment-to-moment feeding frenzies.

I'm happy to say that we've been without cable for a good 7 years now - wow! That sure added up fast!

Well K is back from her bizTrip to Germany and brought me a small selection of suitably British teas from Heathrow on her way through, so I'll enjoy me some tea that was sitting in England this time yesterday... well, a couple hours earlier perhaps.

Today is the submission day for the big research thing that we're doing. I'll be interested to see the email this morning as Europe has been up for a few hours of critiquing. I see the Americans waking up too, as those fade-in-fade-out Outlook announcements appear briefly on the corner of my screen. I avert my eyes to avoid the brain activity that would be launched upon seeing anything specific.

I see I also have a 3hr block of time for training on a tool that looks like a page or two of pull-down lists. As well, we had a session on the tool yesterday introducing the background, and including a brief look at the tool. Why someone would follow that up with a 3hr block of time for 'training' I don't know.

Anyway, I like to write every day, and blogging gives me some more narrative practice than technical writing does. But the future looking research work has a bit of a sense of futility behind it. At this point in my career, I've done a couple of decades of exploring and postulating in science, and one tends to think as one writes - the deadwood in the decision making towers would never sign up to something that involves risk, vision and lofty goals. And of course, they never do.

Most innovation comes from one to three people who are given (or take) a bit of time to chase something down that is intriguing. And it doesn't happen in Academia either. And usually, if asked later, they will tell the story about some element they were exploring that if their bosses had found out about what they were working on, it would have been quashed.

I've got a few of those projects in mind - but currently lack the confirmed longevity to launch them. I'll continue to bide my time for now.