Academia is a mold and he [a certain professor] is the stuff that gets formed and pops out looking good, and I'm the excess stuff that squirts out the edges and is discarded.

I had a pseudo epiphany on this topic the other day. Metaphor: research topics are wild horses and there are a range of researchers. The first to arrive are the naturalists, who observe from a distance, analyze, and speculate. The next group are the cowboys, who hop on the horse and tame it and make it do fancy tricks. When the horse is worn-out and dies, hordes of bone-cleaners come in and feed off every bit of sinew and suck out hte marrow until nothing is left but a pile of bones.

TinyOS is Berkeley's main course, and every once in a while they throw down a scrap for the rest of us to fight over.

For all of you Debian fans: apt-get the-hell-out-of-grad-school