Crappy Day

Today has been a pretty crappy day. Equipment which takes forever to order, finally shows up and gets delivered to the wrong place. And they can't move it without putting in a work order and hopefully it'll get done tomorrow! There is such a minimalist attitude at this school...meaning there's no sense of "let's get this done promptly and well so that, as a whole, the campus can be better and more productive." Am I becoming the crotchety, old professor who yells at everyone?

Then I get an email from a student with yet another revision, but not the revisions I had marked last time. How do you teach them that they should try not to waste your time?

And then I read some of these posts about a dumb joke by Chad (the offending post). Dumb jokes aren't hard to find, but those about string theory appear to now be taboo (what has the world come to when I can call Lubos too politically correct?).

And then there's Jacques' comments. He tries to take the high road:

Chad responded that the remark was intended as a harmless bit of levity, and an “attempt to drive traffic (because I almost always get a bump in traffic when I talk about string theory…).” Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a matter between Chad, his readers and his conscience.

And maybe it's just because of the day I've had, but this sounds awfully pompous. He continues, clearly self conscious that someone might think he took a low road:

Ordinarily, I would, therefore, not even bring it up, except that it got me to thinking about the temptations of popularity. I was somewhat taken aback by the response to my recent post about Loop Quantum Gravity. With 150 comments (and still counting), the temptation is, clearly, to write a lot more posts about LQG, and fewer posts about the boring stuff I usually write about.

And by "boring stuff" I assume he's talking about all the blogging/mathml/etc stuff.

For the record, I can see that some people's toes will feel a bit trampled at the joke, but Chad has responded admirably.