sometimes i'm without my pens or paper -- say, while on a 10 minute bus ride -- and then a research idea occurs to me. these modern times, however, have their conveniences.
i'd then send a text message to "myself" (that is, my university email) and then i no longer have the responsibility to remember.
for the record, i've missed my stop before, pondering an idea that i was afraid to lose.
for citations, i hate purely numerical indexing. [17] tells me nothing, except to flip to the last page and look at the references.
on the other hand, [HaKi98] gives a year and suggests the authors, at which point i can guess the paper.
this is a trifle, of course, but when you're leafing through 4-5 different papers, several trifles become one medium-sized annoyance.
the older i get, the more i appreciate brief explanations/intuitions in papers, as to clarify theorems and proofs.
when writing a paper, it's easy to over-polish the exposition. such inclinations amount to encrypting what you would like to say, and it means that your readers will only spend more time decrypting what you really meant.
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