{"id":2471,"date":"2012-06-11T02:54:41","date_gmt":"2012-06-11T07:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=2471"},"modified":"2012-06-11T02:55:19","modified_gmt":"2012-06-11T07:55:19","slug":"this-was-not-what-i-wanted-to-do-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/this-was-not-what-i-wanted-to-do-today\/","title":{"rendered":"This was not what I wanted to do today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I thought it would be really interesting today to get back to looking at SAS Enterprise Miner, especially the text mining. \u00a0I thought it would be cool to take another look at Statistica. I also thought it would be cool to finish a blog post I started on power analysis for mixed models. And I thought it would be fun to write something on propensity scores and logistic regression. I really wanted to get back to the game I was writing in javascript, which is working but nowhere near as cool as I want.<\/p>\n<p>I have been struggling NOT to take a new contract that I know would be really cool and interesting \u00a0because I know I am booked 110% already. I have had the offer in my in-box for days and I would LOVE to do it but &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>This is all very odd because I went into business with the sole intent of doing cool and interesting stuff. A funny thing happened, though.<\/p>\n<p>The business started to grow. So I hired a part-time person to do data entry, travel reports, typing, filing and other stuff. It grew some more. So I hired a developer. And two consultants to do research. Two graphic designers to do graphic design stuff. A consultant to do translation. A project manager.<\/p>\n<p>So, instead of any of that, here is what I did this weekend:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Spent 11 hours working on a contract that is paying me money so that I can pay all of those people. It was interesting enough but not as much as the other stuff I wanted to do.<\/li>\n<li>Had a meeting on research that needs to be done.<\/li>\n<li>Wrote a memo to someone else about other research that needs to be done.<\/li>\n<li>Had a meeting about purchasing decisions.<\/li>\n<li>Read a book on javascript (okay, I wanted to do that).<\/li>\n<li>Called someone about work that was behind schedule<\/li>\n<li>Checked into a possibility for funding, forwarded it to someone for discussion tomorrow<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Um, did I mention this is the weekend?<\/p>\n<p>I got into this same position many years ago. I was teaching college full time and running a consulting company on the side, with ten people working for me. Eventually, it got to the point that my assistants were passing me up in technical skills because I was spending so much of my time in meetings while they did all of the fun stuff.<\/p>\n<p>It sounds like I&#8217;m complaining but I&#8217;m not really. I also went to The Grove and had a lovely lunch at a French restaurant, bought The Spoiled One clothes for the new school year at Abercrombie &amp; Fitch and Nordstrom&#8217;s, assisted by what appear to be Stepford Salespeople.<\/p>\n<p>My second daughter, The Perfect Jennifer, who is a middle school history teacher, was with us and commented,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not comfortable at The Grove. It is full of people with money, shopping.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I pointed out to her that we, in fact, were shopping at The Grove. So, there are pay-offs to not always doing exactly what you want.<\/p>\n<p>Still, tomorrow, after I send off a few memos and make a few phone calls, and before my last meeting, I&#8217;m going to make sure I get some programming done. Because, if I don&#8217;t get to do SOME of the fun and interesting stuff, what&#8217;s the point, really?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought it would be really interesting today to get back to looking at SAS Enterprise Miner, especially the text mining. \u00a0I thought it would be cool to take another look at Statistica. I also thought it would be cool to finish a blog post I started on power analysis for mixed models. And I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings","category-the-julia-group"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2473,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471\/revisions\/2473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}