Zis Is Cursed, Zat Is Cursed

Spring has definitely started in Toronto—it’s 23 degrees outside (yes, Celsius), and the sky is that slightly dusty blue that I always associate with hot dogs, frisbees, and sunburn. It helps put this week’s rejections in perspective:

• NSERC turned down a proposal to study the usefulness of integrated IM, configurable ticketing, and continuous documentation in web-based software project portals.
• ITCDF (an internal program at U of T) turned down a proposal to see whether short screencasts (including ones contributed by students themselves) could take the place of conventional help pages.

Coming on top of NSERC’s rejection of my Discovery grant (which would have looked at the impact of reverse test oracles on uptake of test-driven development) and Google’s rejection of a proposal similar to the IM/ticketing/docs one I sent to NSERC, it’s making me wonder if I’ve been hexed. I know there’s a lot of randomness in academic grant review procedures, but being 0 for 4 (or 5, if you count the initial submission of the big NSERC proposal) definitely hints at a pattern.

Oh well—it’s still a sunny day out there, and in a couple of hours I get to go home and tickle my daughter’s feet…