Well the students are back at Sheffield and the rain has arrived. Students return effects my work in strange ways. Instead of working flat out on interesting research projects which have taken most of the summer (maybe the oviduct study will turn up again). Anyway there is a bounced paper, don’t know why yet and another one being written which I may well need to review. I am also getting better at instructing people on how to keep tabs of their analysis. Meanwhile trying to keep tabs of the advice I give. There is one person who I am taking slowly through defining the question. I am not sure yet what we will get out of it, so I am not sure whether my advice last time was good or not. Well it is good in that it is a next step, but it might not be the right one and what will be needed is a refinement of the question and a different analysis. Meanwhile in the time spare I have I am reading “Why Women Don’t Ask”.
It really is quite a thorough exploration of sociological issues around how women interact within situations. It deals with not only the fact that women tend not to engage in negotiation and when they do to under estimate what they can get, but also the ways that women might be “punished” if they are too aggressive a negotiator. Its not a simple case that women just need to learn to negotiate but that they need to learn how to negotiate in ways that are available for a women and that some aspects of society also need to change.
On the home front I have been upgrading technology wise. I got a new desktop computer largely for writing up my PhD and am starting to feel I have got it set up how I want it although it is periodically not running one piece of software I need to use. I am not overly concerned about this as that piece of software should upgrade in the next three months and I am pretty sure my computer will handle the new version better. I also realised I was being bothered by the fact that I did not have easy access to my diary. I could take my small laptop with me but that takes so long to start up that for setting dates when at church or such I just don’t use it. So I decided to investigate. Work tends to favour people using an Iphone, but I am not the safest of Apple users and anyway I quite like to be odd ball. Instead I went for an Android phone. I only did this when I discovered that SyncML is available for Android. I actually got away with a lower priced phone than I thought I would and it is now working. It took some time to setup but in the end I got it working. I do not recommend upgrading this early in a contract, but I was beginning to realise that it was partly about keeping myself relatively sane and this would niggle me.
Thesis wise things are progressing fairly smoothly. The week after next is a challenge as I need to go to prayer meeting then onto the local medical centre to try and set up a meeting with someone there to discuss neighbourhood needs. I have written a letter, I think phoned twice and decided that in order to get an interview I would need to actually go and visit them.
Equally unsuccessful has my attempts to talk to Zen about setting up a website. They rand me twice, but both times I was either rushing out for a meeting or in one. I think I will need to set up a new query. If only they would let me send something longer than they do I could give them contact times.
My Writers Group is Reading and launching their third collection of work. For those who are interested there is more information about the reading at the venue and or from the Off the Shelf site. Please let me know if you are interested in a copy of the collection (price wil be somewhere around £5, although I may well pay it) and Morag if you could let me know how many you intend to loose this time!
Otherwise this week I am off to Birmingham on Wednesday. The department told me that everyone had moved to new offices. I was sceptical about this, as my supervisors office is not in the main lot of departmental offices and although the new offices are on the Edgebaston campus they are still a way away from the main facilities and I did not think central admin would want that for my supervisor. Now to do some reading for tonight worship.
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