Preparing yesterday's 2005 budget negotiations has really had the best of me. I had to write a long document trying to argue why my department needed money, and then I had to sort out a fairly chaotic 2004 budget to see what we have so far been using our money for. I wasn't created to make shrewd Excel sheet calculations, so it has really felt like hard manual labour doing this exercise which, including salaries, amounts to some million kroner (Danish currency). Knowing that I'm actually also negotiating on behalf on someone else (the new head - it has all along been the idea that I should "hold the fort" as interim HoD just until the end of this year) hasn't made the process easier; but it is at least a comfort that it will be a very long time, if ever again, before I have to go through a similar exercise. Apart from the fact that being a modern researcher do require the ability to outline budgets, everytime you want to apply for external funding. People who believe that academics are people sitting isolated in their offices, doing nothing while idly spending "state money" haven't got a clue.

I miss my research. But at least today I got to talk to Troels' students. Here are this year's slides on The Aesthetics of Interactivity.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 22:03