Patronization Corporation

I've got a call this morning with my 'supervisor' for an update I guess. His supervisors have shut down our little, successful centre of oceanographic research, mostly out of a combined sense of ingratiating their buddies in their own location, and protecting their existing empires through sacrifice of the 'foreigners' - in this case us.

So given that that was announced two months ago, and our deliverables are essentially cancelled, an update call is a bit much. I guess it's out of a sense of trying to 'be there for us' perhaps, or provide some perceived support. The richest part of this is when he usually asks "can I talk to group xyz for you and put in a good word?" Well, group xyz is located at our facility and we deal with them on a regular basis. You have just arrived on the scene due to a power play move by some executives in another country, you reside and work in another country, and your role is pretty much unknown to group xyz. So, how exactly would your call do something for us?

Oh well - I know he's well meaning, and at least outwardly he appears to have supported our continued existence. It's nice that we have a long lead-time to our decimation, but I think letting us go quietly is the best game.

I'm building a vast and flashy archive of the prime project I was managing. I know that there's pretty much no chance that anyone will make use of any of this, but there's some value in revisiting all this work, and creating some order around it.

Just putting it all together would be a wasted effort, but building it into a big stand alone web-site of oceanographic goodness at least keeps me learning new tidbits about HTML and CSS stuff, and maintaining those that I already knew.

That's the key thing with web technologies, I recognize at this advanced stage of my career. Learning any given software skill isn't so much of a challenge as is keeping the skill current. With a couple of years away from it, you're pretty much learning it all from scratch again... although the Unix interactions I learned 15 years ago are still programmed into my fingers, which seem to remember obscure commands even when my brain has lost the memory.

Mac OSX which I use at home is nice that way, in that with the underlying unix-like shell, I can pop open a window and poke and prod around keeping it all in my memory.

Meanwhile I'm almost two weeks away from my sideline project and I'm going to have to worry about remembering how that works again if I don't buckle down and get back onto it. These are the turning points at which self-driven research projects die. A bit of apathy and you get buried enough that you never go back. I have a few of those around home that are 10years old and sitting there mocking me. "Hey buddy! Remember 68HC11 programming? huh? Think you're going to pick that up again sometime?"

Researchinator grumbles at the passing years...