June 8, 2003

Well the big secret is out and it ain't the news that I wanted. In 2004, I may well be working at "OSU". Which is not "Ohio State University" or "Oregon State University" but "Oh Sh%t, Unemployed".

See, Helen fought off 300 competitors for this plum New Media job at WSU, Vancouver, Washington (i.e. the OTHER side of the country). I asked her to wait a year but she said that the humanities market is the worst it has been for 60 years. So her career choice is real clear.

So rather than not be married, I started chasing jobs over there. Which means I'll be stepping down from the research chair gig come December 31, 2003.

(Note to my grad students- fear not. Your degree is in no danger, only my piggy bank. Next year, I'll still be adjunct to WVU, perhaps sans wage and sans Morgantown, and there's funds for y'all till Dec 2004. But excuse me, I have to get back to my amateur theatrics.)

Talk about bad timing to hunt for work over there! The local universities there are in a severe funding crisis and most universities have battened down the hatches waiting for the storm to pass.

There was one opening I really, really wanted: EECS at Oregon State University. Would have meant a killer commute for either me or Helen (OSU is 2 hour south of WSU, when the traffic is good). But its a pretty campus and the folks there were real nice. Hosted me up a storm- good eating, good talk. One of them (Bruce D'Ambrosio) even offered me a Bayesian explanation for funnel theory- something I plan to chase up. And the omens seemed real good: the first pub I walked into was playing an Australian band (The Whitlams) on CD so I thought "this town is ready for some Ozzie blood!".

But it was not to be. They've got good SE and machine learning folks there and I did a big sales pitch as the man who could bridge AI and SE. Which turns out was the wrong thing to do- they wanted a straight SE guy.

Oh well. I didn't want that job anyway, because of rationalization. That department is so rationalization. Helen said it, and its true, that rationalization. And, after all, rationalization.

Also, Corvallis a really, really dangerous place to live. It hosts both a nuclear reactor and a tsunami generator. Think of the Tom Clancy film that might inspire- the tense final scene as our hero desperately fights to stop the bad guys unleashing a wall of water that would flatten the atomic pile and kill all the local stoners with radiation ("which would be like, a total downer man").

So its a good thing I did not get a research-focused faculty job in a friendly and vibrant school on a beautiful campus in a lovely area. Exit sobbing.

So, time for plan B. Next year I'm gonna be Helen's cabana boy. Dress code: speedos, body oil, no knowledge of English, and a huge pole (to clean the pool).

On a more serious note, the "thanks, but no thanks" from Corvallis, it really we got me thinking. If SE can't handle AI methods, then it must be time to change SE. If only someone who knew AI and SE could write a book that bridges the two fields. Someone with a lot of free time next year maybe?