my department at iitB, like a few other departments, is a fringe-place in an institute for sciences and engineering. in iitM, this fringe-ness was experienced also in the forms of turf-wars, general nonchalance and disregard, effeminization, and the like.
here in iitB, my department's 'technological' wings are non-existent, except for a few services which run a room-booking portal, mailing lists, and a website. 1)
perhaps because “i try to do shiny stuff,” and because of my “lack of commitment to writing,” i have tried doing stuff that would not pass as 'work' in the department. this means that i spend time working with some web-dev, using cli tools to get boring stuff done, running various things on a raspi, maintaining (duh) this website and so on.2)
this also means i 'waste' time on stuff like creating resource-websites—which used to be on txti :(—, figuring out the options and flags on pandoc, trying to work through the mess of styles and templates on MS word, endless tinkering with zotero/markdown/beamer and the like. oh, also, trying to understand how stuff works.
it feels nice to learn about these things too. suits my apathy.