Study; examinations; research

I found myself thinking back to my full-time education. While attending King's College, Cambridge, at the examinable subjects I worked far less than many of my colleagues and eventually got a lower second in my finals. I actually pick up technical things quite quickly and easily -- in NatSci 1A I got into the habit of actually listening to lectures instead of frantically transcribing them, then in our college bar afterward helping people to understand the material -- and it is more from that than actual detailed study that I even managed to pass.

Certainly not now having a doctorate has been disabling career-wise. For many years for the US Department of Defense I was successfully playing a leading role in advanced research. I found that I enjoyed it and was good at it. However, in looking for that kind of position elsewhere, between not being able to talk about the most interesting work and not on paper being obviously good at it, I wasn't an appealing candidate. There were small glimmers: for example, at Vecna one of the research team noticed that I was very good at helping him to write research grant proposals, but he had little authority to actually task me with that.

Some background would help: ( I got sick of examinations and stopped studying )

( but learned other useful things )

( and wouldn't have liked a postdoc career anyway )

One might reasonably respond to the above: Well, that's nice, even if I believe that you're good at getting difficult technical things done, you couldn't bring yourself to study for examinations, now you can't get to do interesting research work and even if you did then other aspects of your job would annoy you too much, so where does that leave you? I have thoughts on that but not for this entry.

US taxes

I have now drafted our 2015 income tax return for the IRS. There were a few small changes for this year:

1. Because of the refund that (again with the help of my Congressional Representative) I had finally obtained from the IRS I had to include on Schedule B the interest they'd paid me.


2. I appeared to have earned less in 2015 than in 2014 which probably means that the pound weakened against the dollar. For converting my various GBP amounts to USD I use the monthly averages from the Federal Reserve's G.5 data.


3. I didn't exclude my whole University of Dundee salary as foreign earned income because I could be considered to have earned a small portion of it while in the US on business: I had attended and presented at the BioImage Informatics conference at NIST.


4. I developed more confusion about my pre-tax payslip adjustments in the University of Dundee's calculation of my total pay from my basic pay: for instance, as I should count the extra income they paid me as arrears for a backdated raise, does that mean I don't have to count the money they deduct for my staff parking pass and some kind of pensions adjustment?

At least my UK taxes are easy at the moment. My most awkward year was when I was receiving non-PAYE employment income from a UK source, consulting income from the US, and was a director of a limited company, and even that wasn't too bad.

Henry resurrected

One of the first things I bought upon moving to Scotland was Numatic's iconic Henry vacuum cleaner with the extra Airo Brush add-on (complete with an additional smiling face) whose air-driven whirling brush is excellent for picking up the cat hair deposited by Pippin. Unfortunately, recently the whirling stopped, the rotary brush's motion having become rather stiff.

The fix puzzled me a little. A metal rod exposed from the end of the brush cylinder fits into a small black plastic receptacle at the side. This seemed to be the cause of the issue but it wasn't obviously obstructed or damaged and oil didn't help. I enlarged the receptacle using a flathead screwdriver and now the brush again whirls, albeit with a new whistling noise that makes me wonder if I accidentally reassembled it so as to reverse some piece of the mechanism or otherwise cause it to take not quite its original form. Still, overall a success.