Avril Lavigne-ish.

I think you can see part of my carpet right there. And there appears to be a speck of something on the lady's boob. Meh.

Anyways. I modelled this one on this picture of Avril Lavigne, my favourite singer who should seriously consider growing up one of these days. The playing-a-teenager was fun for a while, but I've been over it since time immemorial. Thank heavens she's planning her next album already.

It's not a complete success as a painting, but close enough. I'm surprised I had the patience to try and make the clothing resemble real clothing, remotely at least. I'm amazed I was able to use green and blue and - horror of horrors - violet! Those have got to be the most depressing colours I know. Especially green and blue together, makes you want to go kill yourself.

I'm getting kind of excited about my poster presentation at QITL-3 in Helsinki on June 2nd, 2008. Beginning at 17:20. Not that I'm advertising or anything, since Amoena is the only reader I have. Oh, and they put my name and the non-final title of my presentation on the site, looky here. I was a little shocked over seeing this - I thought there would be dozens more presenters, but I'm actually one of only a handful! Panic panic!

It made me think, am I one of the lucky few who got chosen, or were there in fact only about five more to consider in addition to those chosen?? I'm inclined to think they didn't get that many abstracts overall, as mine was such a mess. They were just interested in seeing what I had to say, messiness aside.

Gah. My abstract went through a complete revision, as I realised there's no way in hell I can discuss well enough everything that I had planned. My title had to be modified as well, albeit slightly. I'm hoping no one will notice and be mad. I feel like such a rookie now. Oh, the shame.

This is the first time I've worked with Powerpoint. It's even easier than I thought. I had to create these two slides with which I should introduce myself and my topic. Haven't quite figured out yet how to express my main points without giving it all away.

I mean, it could be something like 'what factors can be found to affect the said variation?', which isn't saying anything at all and would not excite anybody's intrest. But I like the idea of formulating it as a question.

Perhaps something like 'do these factors affect the said variation? Stay tuned for my data', from which you can already guess that they do in fact affect it... And I'm not entirely convinced people will come to see the poster just to see loads of tables that are quite hard to take in, even for myself. However, it is quantitative investigations in theoretical linguistics, so I suppose everyone will be just psyched about numbers and figures and fancy-looking tables.

But for my actual presentation, I'll have to create a poster. I'm thinking I'll just print out a bunch of A4 sheets, boringly in black and white. Maybe I could draw some flowers or something for decorative purposes. Or a horsie. Wouldn't that be swell.