Greg and Kat's blog

As many of you know, Amanda has left Computing Science. Amanda was the manager of the recruitment, advising, and promotions team (and other stuff). Since I’m the undergrad director, and interested in recruiting, we always worked closely together.

She has moved on, and is now the Manager of International Recruitment and Partnerships. Good job. Leaves us with a big hole to fill. Unfortunately, it also causes a lot of work for me.

First of all, somebody has to lead the team while the position is vacant. This is one of those situations where I looked to the left, looked to the right, and realized everybody was looking at me. Annoyingly, I am unique in that (1) I know all the parts of our admissions/recruiting activities, (2) as undergrad director, I can do the strategic decision making, (3) I don’t want the job, so I’ll happily give up all of the responsibilities when a replacement is hired, and (4) it can be argued that I have the time to actually do it.

So, I suddenly find myself the unofficial supervisor of something like eight people. Fortunately, the team is pretty good, and doesn’t actually need much guidance. I’m hoping that their “supervision” will consist primarily of occasionally asking “is everything going okay?” and making sure nobody else meddles with the team dynamic.

Of course, we have to hire a replacement. Since I’m the one that dealt most closely with the position, I’m doing a bunch of legwork on that. The job description has to be revised, and the job’s pay grade reevaluated. HR is resistant to upping the pay grade for some reason, but we really need to bump the pay to get decent applicants. All of this is very bureaucratic and a little painful.

Basically, if I never have to talk to HR again, I’ll be fine with that. Overall, it’s probably good experience for me. Amanda still owes me, and revenge will be mine.

I’m feeling a little directionless today. I have a bunch of possible blog topics queued up, but none of them are really calling out to me. So, I’m going to tell some six word stories that summarize things.

Not teaching causes lack of structure.

Lack of structure causes low productivity.

Teaching students is addictive: in withdrawal.

I don’t care about HR issues.

Two day weekends are too short.

I find the Superbowl fundamentally uninteresting.

Could live with wife any time.

Subject: Re: WANT

So, Eugene is eyeballing a digital SLR, specifically Canon’s recently-announced Digital Rebel XSi. I have the old Digital Rebel XT, and the model in between is the Rebel XTi.

There are a few differences through the product line. There’s a nice feature comparison of the XTi and the XSi to look at.

Sadly, I’m going to give Eugene the advice of his prototypical photography nerd and say that blowing money on the new body isn’t worth it. If it was me, I’d get the XTi body on sale and save a couple of hundred bucks.

The only feature that I see on the XSi that I would personally pay more than a few bucks extra for is the 3″ LCD. The display on my XT is 1.8″ and I find it a bit small (and thus the review image small and not as useful as it could be). But the XTi has a 2.5″ display, so I don’t think the XSi is worth much on top of that.

The mirror-up functionality might be nice, but I suspect it’s more of a gimmick: I can’t imagine using it very much. The spot metering is a little confusing for me: I think the thing my XT does is called spot metering; I can’t imagine they dropped it for the XTi.

The simple fact of digital photography is that the metering isn’t usually all that critical: you have immediate feedback on the levels because of the display. If the metering was off, adjust and take another shot. I think I end up flipping to manual exposure more often than most: in a difficult situation, decide what exposure should be, set it, take shots, adjusting a little as necessary.

Yes, my advice is to spend on glass. I’m quite happy with my Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8, and I just ordered a 30mm f/1.4 for even lower-light goodness.

For the love of god, don’t use the kit lens. Would you buy a $500 graphics card and hook up an old 14″ CRT to it? I took a couple of quick comparison shots with my Sigma zoom and an old Canon kit zoom I have last night. I didn’t have time to get much useful stuff, so I can’t really post comparisons. Maybe I can do something once my prime 30mm comes.

My initial thoughts after last night: my Sigma zoom isn’t appreciably clearer than the kit lens (but a prime lens might be). The colour for the Sigma lens was noticeably better (with the same exposure, lighting, white balance, etc).