At one point this past term, I came up with a list of movie-related trivia questions that I wanted to spring on my students during their midterm. I think my co-instructor talked me out of it. So intead, I asked them the questions during class. Shockingly, nobody was able to answer any of the questions. Come on! Don't you people ever watch movies? Or are they too busy making out / eating / text messaging? Kids today.

Obviously, I'm curious to know whether these truly are the most difficult trivia questions ever devised by man, or whether my students are simply ignorant of the important things in life. So I present them herewith. Feel free to email me with answers, or to tell me how many you knew.

All the questions are about company names in movies that relate to computers in some way.

1. In Tron, what company did Flynn work for before he was fired?
2. What company did Thomas Anderson (Neo) work for in The Matrix?
3. What company did Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible) work for in The Incredibles?
4. In the Terminator movies, what company created the artificial intelligence Skynet that eventually initiated Judgement Day?
5. What company sponsors Lightning McQueen in Cars?

Okay, I'm embarrassed to admit that I had to look up the answers to two of these questions (numbers 2 and 5) when I came up with them. To me, that feels like cheating at solitaire; surely, the best trivia questions are the ones you know off the top of your head that nobody else can find, not even with Google. And no, "what colour underwear am I wearing?" doesn't count in this context.

Enjoy.

Regarding my previous post, yes, those two weeks were rather busy. It's now a quiet weekend night, I've managed to catch up on sleep, I'm not quite ready to start reading about the destruction of the hidden kingdom of Gondolin, and so it's a fine time to catch up here. Allow me to try and collect the random work-related threads that are spinning around in my mind.

The "big paper I submitted at the start of the year" was accepted (hurray!). A second paper I submitted to the same conference was rejected, unsurprisingly. I think the ideas in that paper are really lovely, but I admit that it needs some additional work.

The "paper or four" I had intended to submit a week later ended up being just one paper, which I think has a good chance of getting in to the venue to which it was submitted. Certainly it's a topic that has raised eyebrows and generated lots of fun discussion on campus. As for the other three potential papers: one was already accepted (see above), and one needs more work (also see above). Alas, I ended up abandoning the final submission, after working on it non-stop, with less than an hour to go before the deadline. I was on the right track, but the paper simply wasn't coming together. That's okay -- it's appropriate for a short journal submission to a particular journal in my area.

The interesting topic for speculation, as always, is whether I'm on track for a tenure application this year. My plan at the start of the year was to get one paper into the big conference (success), and one into the upcoming smaller conference (I'll know next month). Combined with my teaching and service records, that seemed like a decent package.

But is it really enough? I'm no longer sure. Standards in my department have been shifting recently. In some ways, they're shifting unpredictably; moreover, the parts that can be predicted are somewhat ominous. There are conceivable destinations for my changing department in which I'm no longer the kind of Associate Professor they want. In that case, well, it'll be a sad and difficult transition, but with time and soul-searching they may find a way to carry on without me. Heh. Anyway, my best strategy for now is simply to keep doing what I'm doing. That's a plan I can get behind.

I'm not teaching again until September. I wish I had all the time between now and then purely for research, but I'm moderately busy with other matters until the end of May. First, I've got to wrap up the course I'm teaching, which involves creating, proctoring, and marking a final exam. Then I've got five papers to review over the next four weeks. After that, it's our yearly high school outreach program, followed immediately by conference travel. Later in the summer, I'll be gearing up for teaching a first-year course for the first time as a professor (I taught one as a grad student). As always, I can just hope that the research happens, whether it supports a tenure application this year or next year. Whatever. "Keep doing what I'm doing" -- that's my motto.