Some shameful facts about myself
- In 2003, I predicted that it would take decades before videoconferencing became cheap enough for home users.
- I do not know my own telephone number or postal code, though I have lived for many years in the same house (and we own it). I do not know my office number. I do not know my social insurance number.
- For the longest time, I thought that getting a Ph.D. was sufficient to get decent jobs, if not within academia, at least in industry. (That’s wrong.)
- Once I file anything in a folder or inside a desk, I am certain never to find it again. Anything not directly on my desk is lost forever. I am not kidding. That is why I run a paperless office.
- I once thought that computing the Hamming distance took quadratic time.
- I can no longer understand my older research papers such as “Fourier analysis of 2-point Hermite interpolatory subdivision schemes” and “A family of 4-point dyadic multistep subdivison schemes”. I cannot even understand the abstract of these papers. I could not prove I wrote them.
- I lost all the electronic copies of my Ph.D. thesis the same day I sent the second revised version to the printer. Though I had backups, I overwrote all the backups with an empty file, by accident. Had they requested a second round of revisions, I would have had to retype my thesis.
- My wife is much smarter than I am. If she did not manage our money, I would probably put all my savings in a checking account or I might forget where the money is.
- I am somewhat of a diva: I guard my schedule against intrusions as if time spent on my research was very important. I am convinced that my research matters.
Montreal, Canada 
Follow on
I lost the electronic version of my PhD thesis somewhere along the way. Just as well. Nobody would want to read it anyway.
Fortunately, I do have an electronic version of my undergraduate thesis. A few people have found it useful.
Comment by John — 12/6/2009 @ 21:47
That’s an interesting list. Oddly, I remember every phone number i’ve ever had (about a dozen now). I do not regard this as a good use of neurons.
Comment by Mike — 12/6/2009 @ 22:08
LOL
Comment by david — 12/6/2009 @ 22:38
“Schemas d’interpolation et ondelettes” I assume? Proquest has digitized it and it’s in their Proquest Dissertions & Theses database.
I can send you a copy if UQAM doesn’t subscribe. Assuming you actually still want an electronic copy
Comment by John Dupuis — 12/6/2009 @ 22:49
I can very much related to the research papers problem.
I don’t have any old published research papers, ‘though I have a bunch of posts, academic papers and unfinished articles from back when I was a mathematician.
If I try really really hard I can usually understand them. But it’s hard to believe that I wrote them.
Comment by David R. MacIver — 13/6/2009 @ 4:03
Heh, that reminds me of that incident where I predicted loudly and for all to hear that the Berlin Wall would never fall in my own lifetime.
Comment by Sylvie Noel — 13/6/2009 @ 6:31
Oh dear,
I can identify with a few of those, especially the phone number one.
I’m ashamed to say that I once thought I had invented n-grams. My advisor said nothing to me when I told him all about my ground-breaking discovery. He just pulled out a load of papers dating way back and gave them to me. Lesson learnt: always do the research first
I lose everything, apparently it’s quite usual for information retrieval people to lose all their information constantly.
Comment by CJ — 14/6/2009 @ 2:31
Thank you. I had an awful morning – till now!
Marcel
Comment by Anonymous — 15/6/2009 @ 3:50
Plusieurs des éléments de cette liste me font penser à moi… J’ai par exemple toujours une copie de ma thèse, mais je ne retrouve plus mon mémoire et je ne sais même pas ce qui a pu arriver au fichier!!!
Par contre, je ne comprend pas comment tu arrive à garder le contrôle sur ton agenda. Peux-tu SVP nous dire comment tu y arrives? Ça fait maintenant 5 ans que je travaille à l’UQAC et ça me semble impossible. Il y a toujours un comité ou une réunion…
Comment by Patrick Giroux — 15/6/2009 @ 13:22