There's not enough bitching

[Dracos]

Ouch :(

[Anastasia]

Double ouch. Cars, the money pit.

[Rukatin]

It so fucking frustrating too.  I don't want to rely on my parents to give me rides to work on constantly borrow their cars. I was even starting to look at schools so I could get a better paying job than the one I have.

[Anastasia]

Woke up in screaming pain from sleeping on my lower back wrong. Again. I need a new mattress.

[Yuthirin]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASTRESS

I think about you as a person, writing this, and feel a great deal of sympathy for you.
I think about your avatar saying this, and think it's freaking hilarious.

I'm so conflicted.

Legit made me laugh, thanks Jason.

[Yuthirin]

Woke up in screaming pain from sleeping on my lower back wrong. Again. I need a new mattress.

Uhhhhhhhh did it feel like you were being stabbed? Like right in the small of your back, offset from your spine? Cuz if so, that's a kidney stone dude. Especially if it won't go away.

[Merc]

Woke up in screaming pain from sleeping on my lower back wrong. Again. I need a new mattress.

Uhhhhhhhh did it feel like you were being stabbed? Like right in the small of your back, offset from your spine? Cuz if so, that's a kidney stone dude. Especially if it won't go away.

That, or there's a pea underneath the mattress.

[Anastasia]

Nah, it's not that. One aspect of my pain problems is that sometimes part of my body just goes crazy. It's more muscular than anything else. Like back around Election Day, one my hamstrings went bad for a few weeks. Getting up was absolute agony, though it wasn't so bad once I loosened it up.  In this case it's a mix of my bed being bad hitting one of those flare ups on my side.

[Kaldrak]

First major step towards ultimately losing my health insurance got voted through today.

Think I'm going to go lay down.

[Dracos]

:(

[Arakawa]

Aand my graduate school research experience will end this September. Time to climb out of the radioactive ashes of academic pipe dreams and find a job and social life.

*trepidation*

It's not that the past two years have been bad, on paper, but somehow they have managed to be far more painful than the prior four years.

[Anastasia]

Didn't work out? Tough break man, but at least you have a degree and a career lined up. (I hope.)

[Arakawa]

Degree yes, career lined up is half-and-half. I'll definitely find some job, question is -- will I find a better job than what I had before, or was the two years spent on this just a pointless detour? I did learn useful stuff by-the-by and expand my horizons about cloud computing issues, which would have significantly increased the range of things I could have done at Previous Workplace (turning it into a much much better job for me). Previous Workplace was not at all a bad place, especially when I contrast it to nonsensical academic goals/politics. Though it's not clear if they are willing/able to have me back at this point. Old team lead would be delighted but is not the final decider on it.

By and large, grad school was definitely a "how the sausage gets made" experience. The trajectory was rather in line with the first year of this guy's epic PhD quest: http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf The difference is that the professor was far less of a slave driver and I was pulling my weight from Day 1 instead of being relegated to busy-work (when that guy was told "get our extravagantly buggy software to run on 100 kernel drivers!"... *shudder*). The project was still bollocks though and they were still trying to brute force their way past an exponential-scale problem, almost exactly like the KLEE project in PhD Grind. (We were even working on a related problem area as the KLEE guys!) Then I came up with their breakthrough idea, which the supervisor had a different student to use as the centerpiece of his PhD proposal presentation. That succeeded in pissing me off.

_{(Incidentally, my breakthrough idea didn't make the project stop being bollocks, only made it feasible enough to write a paper about. Not to use in the real world.)}

For the second year I was splitting my time between the professor's bollocks project, and my own project (which I will defend my thesis on and release as open source this fall), but which I had almost no support on. Such huge huge values disconnect, such misjudgment on my part of what I was getting into.

Anyways, that's my rant.

[Anastasia]

Damn.

Daaaaamn.

I thought basic, entry level college was bad enough for stupid stuff, but there you go.

[Dracos]

I basically abandoned grad school midway.  Still got the degree but decided I preferred work politics to school ones.  And the pay.  Pay was better than theory.  It sounds like you got screwed, but screwed for two years rather than five or seven.

Hopefully you get your footing again and move onwards.