On a happier note, but still on recommendations

I would like to offer a few words in praise of the sheer wondrous awesomeness of the windowed envelope.

I have written many hundreds of letters of recommendation over my career. Although a sizeable number are now electronic, many are still in paper. For years I had an extra step in printing out recs in the form of printing out (or worse, adding labels to or hand-addressing envelopes). But here at CASBS, they have a ready supply of windowed envelopes. Print out the letter, fold it right, put it in the the address displaying, and you’ve saved some labor. It may sound small but when the number of letters starts to add up, this single step is a major boon to my quality of life. Apparently, this is not a common practice, since many of my own recommenders asked for one or another way to get the address onto the envelope. All those PhDs, including mine, and nobody figured it out until now. This is so revolutionary that I will make it my personal mission to make sure there are window envelopes in AHCS when I return next year.

If you write a lot of recommendations like I do, then it is with great enthusiasm that I recommend the windowed envelope to you. I support it wholeheartedly and without reservation.

Incredible

It’s hardcore recommendation season and I’ve been spending a little time each afternoon working on a recommendation as I line up the templates for the year (or send out the fellowship recs, which are usually due first).

Today was my first attempt to engage with SSHRC’s new online interface. They have, happily, trashed the ludicrous EAMS system for online recommendations. But the system that they have replaced it is, apparently, even more ridiculous because it is completely unstable and unrelated to their other systems. SSHRC must have my full contact information and disciplinary expertise like 3 times now, and yet the recommendation form for postdocs asks me to submit it again. It also has a link that goes nowhere entitled “download your form.” Which is unrelated to “click here to fill out your recommendation.” Anyway, I start filling in my information for the gazillionth time and then the form freezes up. Then the ENTIRE SITE APPEARS TO GO DOWN, then I call the SSHRC office in Ottawa and am informed that their voice mailbox is full and I cannot leave a message.

So let’s review.

1. SSHRC is Canada’s most important granting agency for the humanities and social sciences. Late September and October are its crunch times for applications.
2. For 3 years it has not been able to find anyone in Canada who is competent to design or implement a web-based application system.
3. The current system take recommenders to a page with nonsense links and asks for information SSHRC has collected dozens of times before.
3. The system appears unable to accommodate the level of traffic at 3pmPT/6pm ET on a Friday afternoon two weeks before the deadline.
4. There is no way to reach anyone at SSHRC to tell them their system is down.

This does not inspire confidence. I don’t know what kind of money they’ve paid people to do this but I’m sure I or countless other people could give them a proper web interface for the price of a course release one term, which as to be tens of thousands less than they’ve spent already. Someone else will have handle server-side architecture, but really, it’s not that difficult.

A tale of two parks

I promise this will not become a football blog. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll have little else to say on football for awhile.

As part of our Good Times Program, we’ve been taking in some major league sports.

On Monday, we went and saw the evening football game in San Francisco (vs the New Orleans Saints). The game was very entertaining, and it was a true spectacle of Americana. From the pregame tailgating, to the bumper-to-bumper traffic through a neighborhood that had clearly suffered the “economic benefit” of a stadium, to the pregame pyrotechnics and fighter planes flying overhead during the national anthem (sung by Boyz II Men), it was all there. But Candlestick Park? You couldn’t pay me to ever go there again. Carrie and I simultaneously sunburned and freezing and it was as if the entire stadium’s design was an afterthought–after a lot of people got paid. It’s simultaneously hotter and colder than the outside, and full of empty spaces that could be put to better use, from the giant gaps beneath the stands to the weird configuration of seats around the field.

This is in stark contrast to AT&T Park, where we saw a Giants game last Tuesday. Yes, there was a cold breeze but it was nothing compared to Candlestick. Good food, good views, smart design and public transit easily accessible to and from the game. I guess I do like modern stadia better. I’d still vote against public funds for one, though.

—

More soon about our re-entry to the US.

Current burrito count: 6.

Brief NFL TV Post

This is our first year without the NFL Sunday Ticket (where you can watch any game you want) since possibly the 20th century. The place we’re renting has cable, not satellite. The cable company offers an alternative–the “NFL Red Zone” channel where they switch from game to game as things get exciting. There appear to be no commercials and you move from play to play instead of watching all the standing around that’s normally part of an NFL TV broadcast. Carrie and I have watched about 10 minutes of it and our capsule review is as follows:

Either it’s completely awesome, or we’re going to throw up.