A morning at the museum

I had to go to the Museum for a work meeting yesterday. I stopped by at a cafe on Gertrude Street called Grumpy and the Dreaded One's Little Cafe of Awesome. True to it's name, the cafe was awesome and there was a lady with dreads behind the counter. And after my companion received his coffee, we realised that the bloke who brought out his drink is, indeed, a grump.

Spiders and how not to quit your job

A couple of interesting social media lessons for me this week.

The first concerns a Facebook post I made, in which I posted a picture of a big, hairy huntsman spider. Pretty innocuous right? Well, not if you have both biologist and non-biologist friends on Facebook. The reaction of the non-biologists was naturally quite predictable. Most people do not like spiders. The problem was that one of my Facebook friends happens to be a spider expert and took offence to the commentary and started writing comments about the people who wrote the anti-spider posts. Lesson 1: No more spider posts on Facebook.

The second concerns the resignation of a colleague, who told our boss that she would be resigning to take up a new position overseas. She initially wanted to keep things under wraps until she had the opportunity to inform her grad students. Once that had happened, I guess she posted something about her new job on social media (Twitter?). Well, the boss saw the post and had a dummy spit accusing her of undermining his reputation by making her resignation public before he had the opportunity to formally tell the rest of our Department. Lesson 2: Your boss probably follows you on Twitter.

My new toy

I have a new laptop. Yay.

My last one is starting to fail me and I am too technologically incompetent to rectify the things that I'm sure can otherwise be easily fixed or updated.

Broken wifi and problems with accessing various websites (including those associated with my work) has led me to my brand new Macbook Pro.

The scary thing is that I'm beginning to worry that the new laptop might be a bit overly fancy for me. For example, what the heck is a thunderbolt port and will I be able to figure out how to connect my computer to the lecture theatre screens at work before the start of second semester? Oh, and how do I use my fancy trackpad?

I'm worried I might have simply traded one set of technological incompetencies for another.

I took my new toy out of the box last night but haven't actually switched it on yet.

In the meantime, I'm typing this on my old computer in the bedroom connected to a very long ethernet cable.

On hands and knees

Don't get the wrong idea.

I've spent a week stuck in my apartment because of a nasty gout flare up. At its worst, I was having to crawl on my hands and knees to get to and from the bathroom.

The week in bed did allow me to catch up on a lot of movies and I kinda went crazy watching queer movies (I exhausted half of our download limit for the month). Three stand outs for me were Freefall, Strangers by the Lake, and Weekend. 

I also watched an interesting documentary called Do I Sound Gay? The latter was particularly surprising because I didn't expected to see my old (American) boss and colleague in the documentary.

My old boss is most definitely not gay (though he does have a very strong lisp). He also happens to be (along with his wonderful wife) one of the very first people I ever came out to, but that's another story.

Anyhow, it turns out that my former boss is the documentary filmmaker's cousin and made a cameo in the film. I emailed him to let him know that I saw him in a doco and he said that if he knew he was going to be an international star, he would have made a bit more effort to comb his hair on the day of the filming.