Submit Early, Don't Be Late for the Birthday Party! | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2007.02.15
In mid-February, I was able to participate in my lab's ski trip and thoroughly enjoyed a moment of skiing. This year's warm winter has been unusual, and although the locals said the snowfall was only about one-tenth of a normal year, it snowed quite a bit on the first day. On the morning of the second day, the weather was beautiful, and I was able to ski very comfortably. However, most people were snowboarding, and there were only a few of us "skiers" who could control the four edges of the old-style skis. Every year, skiing itself feels more and more like a test of my physical fitness, but the joy of skiing freely is special at any age.
Now, speaking of major blunders, there is one I remember well. It was my eldest son's third birthday party. At the time, I was in my third year working at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University), a mecca for distributed systems research, where I was researching and developing an OS called ARTS (Advanced Real-Time Operating System) with the ART Group. On an x86-based machine, the system development was progressing well, and we had completed the world's first Real-Time Synchronization Primitives and Real-Time IPC with Priority Inheritance functionality. That day was the day I had just finished writing a paper and was working on its final submission.
My plan was to go to the FedEx office downtown first thing in the morning to submit my paper and then leisurely join the birthday party starting at noon. However, I was doing the final proofreading with M-kun from the lab and processing the final manuscript for submission with Scribe (a document processing program that predates TeX), but no matter how I tried to arrange the figures, the manuscript wouldn't fit within the specified page limit. Normally, I should have revised and shortened the text itself, but instead, I ended up processing it over and over again, using Scribe to tighten the line spacing and the gap between the two columns. Time flew by in an instant. By the time I finished proofreading and submitted it to FedEx, it was already past 1:00 p.m. I remembered hearing that after the meal, everyone was going to the gym to play on the trampoline and other things, so I headed straight to the gym from downtown.
Thinking I had to apologize to the families of the friends who had come, I rushed to the gym, only to find that no one from my family was there. So, I went home, assuming they had returned, but the house was empty as well.
As I was sitting at home, dejected and filled with self-reproach, my wife and eldest son returned, explaining, "After the gym, we all went to a friend's house for tea." What a relief.
Submit early, and don't be late for birthday parties!
(Date Published: 2007/02/15)