And the good news keeps on coming

In the past week:

Wednesday:

Interviewed by the CBC, which aired at 6:15ish on Thursday. Very positive interview. It felt a bit fluffy to me, given the sort of issues I get tossed through the Geek Feminism crew, but a nice positive interview is exactly what we needed to kick off the Celebration. John apparently recorded it, so I may have an mp3 of the interview shortly.

Thursday:

The Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering at Carleton was a total success. We've got some really excellent researchers who are also excellent speakers: I was actually fully engaged for all but the last presentation, and didn't find my mind wandering at all. Pretty impressive, given that I was exhausted and had a lot of thesis related stuff on my mind otherwise! I'll probably write about the individual talks later.

Friday:

I defended my thesis proposal.

Note that this wasn't the final thesis defense for my PhD -- that will be harder. The proposal is the negotiation of the roadmap I need to finish, and is actually pretty friendly as far as defenses go. Basically, I propose 12+ things, they say how about these four, and we agree on what I need to do to finish. In my case, I've got a user study that I'm super excited about running, and a lot of tying up of loose ends for publication-worthy results. It went from a nearly insurmountable seeming pile of things to something I can actually finish this fall.

Later on Friday:

GSoC proposals closed, and we've got really excellent students applying to work with us. Ranking them is going to be incredibly hard!

Later still on Friday:

Rock band party, giant chocolate soccer ball, and... okay, the broccoli rum was a bad idea. ;) But it was nice to kick back and celebrate for the evening! I then took the weekend off and more or less did whatever I felt like: gaming with friends, a long photo walk, pleasant yardwork to get out in the sun, and some of the tidying that gets put off while I'm working hard.

Sunday very late (or Monday early morning...)

My latest paper got accepted! I'll be heading down to California (the bay area) at the end of May to present, and the plan is to stay a few weeks 'till the beginning of June. This is a web security paper with some observations that motivated my thesis work and hopefully will motivate others. I'll probably have digital copies up shortly.

The plan for this week is similarly awesome, but much less busy in that some of this can overflow to next week if need be:

• Today, I go to see Jane Goodall speak as part of the writer's festival.
  
• I'm working on another paper that's due Friday.
  
• There's a cool symposium going on over at uOttawa on Biology in the Media - Fascinating Science on the Front Page, but I'm not sure I'll manage to get out for that.
  
• There's an interesting security talk on Thursday that I should really RSVP for and go to see.
  
• I get to read and make initial evaluations of my potential GSoC students.
  
• Need to set up my own GSoC dev environment -- I scraped together some hardware so I can have a dedicated machine, and I'm absurdly excited about getting it running.
  
• Photos photos photos: I've got several hundred event photos that I need to cut down to a manageable number and put online.
  
• Need to register for the conference and plan my trip!
  
• And probably a bunch of stuff I've forgotten, since in my head this week is mostly about the first two items on the list.