So, the first month of sabbatical is gone! What did I do with my time?

  • Attended the 225th AAS meeting. That was pretty fun; I haven’t been to a winter AAS meeting since I started working at Western so I got to see a lot of old friends. I helped with a Software Carpentry workshop and Tweeted a lot.

  • Moved to my new sabbatical office in Western’s Computer Science Department. Besides being less-findable by the usual suspects, I hope this will allow me to start some new collaborations. So far I have mostly been keeping quiet and not knocking on doors, but this will change soon.

  • Dealt with a few remaining issues from last term’s teaching: this usually happens in the fall term as people who miss the final exam (e.g. due to illness) are usually not better before the end of the exam period!

  • Caught up with my colleagues at the Faculty of Science’s Pedagogical Reading Group. Yes, I’m on sabbatical and supposed to be focused on research, but some reflection on teaching is a nice change of pace.

  • Attended an “Introduction to Geographic Information Systems” workshop (see this post) and started to look into wther adapting GIS tools for astronomy is worth the effort.

  • Came up with an idea for a grant proposal under the NSERC CREATE program. Not feeling quite Open-Science enough to discuss it in detail before submission though.

  • Decided not to write a Gemini Large Program proposal; couldn’t think of the killer idea in time to submit the Letter of Intent (due yesterday).

  • Did quite a bit of stuff on GitHub: check out that contributions graph! Actually it is pretty funny to see how my contribution activity anti-correlates with busy teaching times.

  • Organized a location for the next meeting of the CFHT Scientific Advisory Council: it’s going to be at the David Dunlap Observatory which should be fun.

Unfortunately “submitted paper” is not anywhere in that list. Will keep trying.