Fortunately I lost my voice a few weeks ago. I let my supervisor know about it over the phone, who responded with “I don’t want to hear that voice for an hour tomorrow”, which meant I got reprieve from presenting at the Graduate Research Conference.

Unfortunately I used that extra time for more important things like sleeping, and went down to Melbourne for today’s GRC as unprepared as I was three weeks ago.

But I had a good time. One of my examiners took an issue with something I said within the first minute I was talking and we spent the whole time talking about that. And it was a very interesting discussion - about the Technorati authority algorithm and its imposition on communities of interest. I will be making a paper on it in a few weeks, after I wake up. If someone reminds me I’ll be on it soon. I’m excited about doing it, but like everything else in my life, if I stop thinking about it for fifteen seconds something else surfaces to emergency level and I forget all about it.

My supervisor is thinking of offering a seminar to us postgrads about how to swim through oceans of data without drowning, how to organise and filter data. Should be good, except that he’s just like me. So I have to call him every fourteen seconds to remind him.