phd

drained

Aug 3rd

I feel drained.

There’s the deadline. The extension to the deadline. The paper. The second paper. The paper you are writing in parallel to the other two. Other people’s papers. Other people’s papers that you are trying to beat to the punch. Old papers that you want to get a handle on, but seem like you never will have the time to. Future papers that are pending. Papers that are pending, but appear dead. Trying to revive dead papers.

The experiment. The results. The meaning of experiment and the experiment’s results. Follow-up experiments. Comprehensive validation experiments for the results. The code that underlies it all. Waiting on that code to run. Making that code faster. New experiments. Novel extensions to the experiments. Writing, summarizing and explaining the experiments. The theory of the experiment. Writing the paper about the experiments. Rewriting. Proof-reading. Going through 10 drafts of the same paper until you are sick of it.

Then there’s the lab. The small bits and pieces of mundane lab life that you involve yourself in. Maintaining things within the lab that at some point you became responsible for. Remembering tiny nuggets of related information that somehow only you became privy to. Retaining and producing them at the opportune moment.

At some point, you go back home.

You bask in not having to think of things such as papers and experiments. (thanks.. of course.. to a certain Mrs., who is awesome)

(Unless there’s a deadline. In which case, that’s all you think about)

Then you remember all the other things you have to remember.

At some point, the random thought about whether there is a point in the day when you will not look at a screen of some kind. They seem to be everywhere. The computer. The TV. The PSP. The phone. The laptop. Then you shrug and decide you have to live with such wonderings in the world you are in.

Then you try to keep up with what is happening in the world around. In different spheres of the world around you. In your own personal world. In your interests.

Then you go to bed. Planning what to do the next day. Trying to note down things you remember you have not done that day.

You try to get up the next day, full of zest and life, completely not drained at all.

Such is life.

And I really want to do this for the rest of mine.

Didn’t see that coming.

felt, mood, out of it, phd

clubbing together a month’s worth of everything into one big gigantic post

Dec 22nd

Posted by SEV in staying.general

1 comment

This is the 4th attempt I’m making at trying for a halfway decent beginning to a post. Have I really been reduced to saying such banalities? I can’t quite believe it. When I look at my front page, most of my recent posts are about movies. Reviews, basically. Most of my recent posts have also ended with a sign-off saying that I will have a proper update soon. This post, by virtue of being an “update”, doesn’t count as a proper post either. I have notes here, there and everywhere galore… none of which I have really expanded on. Hell, when I was going through my drafts I realized that I had a started a post last winter which I never got round to finishing.

I’m not happy with that start either, but its a start.

Read On… »

After a while of working on research topics with no apparent end in sight, I had the one-two punch of back-to-back deadlines. My first reminded me of the good old days of last year when I spent every waking moment on work. A lot of my moments were spent awake… to the extent I had a major first-year-PhD flashback when I pulled an all-nighter so as to somehow, anyhow get the paper in shape (it didn’t quite succeed, but anyway). The result of my next deadline was here for all to see… meaning I’m on track with what I expected to finish by now. The missus might say otherwise, but she doesn’t really count. She’s supposed to keep the pressure on, I’m supposed to fool around and ensure she has something to do

It is a gratifying feeling to receive recognition for what you have done. It is gratifying to realize that hell, you really have learnt some things during the course of your degree so far. It is beyond awesome to live well up to the expectations that you had set for yourself for a particular goal. Enough back-patting, all of this just means I have so much more expected of me in the time to come. There are caveats to everything you do. After all this back-to-back work, it is hard to fall back into a normal groove. Sleep doesn’t come easy, your body craves being completely spent when it hits the bed. Sleeping the sleep of the “mentally dead” is a pleasure that you shouldn’t get used to.

In a not-so-shocking update, my laptop actually failed on me 12 hours before my big day. I’m not even kidding. It says a lot that the failure didn’t make the slightest difference to my prep, but I had my revenge. I ripped it apart within the hour of finishing the proposal I then spent a week modding it with copper and putting it back together. Happy realizations struck: (1) HP laptop architecture could not be worse, (2) I need to blog a long post about how to do what I did, (3) I should have done this ripping-apart 6 months ago. As it is, the damage appears to be too extensive despite my best efforts. I have to bake the motherboard next. You read it right. Bake. The. Motherboard.

For the first time in 4 years, I have no machine to call my own. And it sucks. Sucks. I have a machine which I could borrow so that I’m not completely bereft, but it feels like something is missing nonetheless. I’m looking forward to building a new machine from scratch, if nothing else the HP rip-apart showed me that I really miss that side of engineering. Plugging, modding, figuring out how things go together – the whole shebang. How much I rely on the cloud can be seen in how little I needed to set up on this borrowed machine. On the flip side there are some things I distinctly feel unable to do, and I’m really getting into the mood to do them (photography updating, for example). The heart wants what it can’t quite have, I guess. But then maybe I’ll end up doing it all online, and really move into the cloud. Sounds like a pipe-dream to me.

I have way too many feeds in my Reader. It took me concentrated effort to catch up with a lot of it after the weeks of work, and that was despite at least checking the basic news feeds once a day. Man! I did not see this happening when I started with RSS a long long long time ago. As the missus asked, why not just mark a bunch of them as read? Or better yet, remove ones that I’m not really “reading”. I’ve done this. I honestly believe that I need to keep up 227 subscriptions on a constant basis. I need help.

This post doesn’t even begin to start on some interesting techie things I have thought about. Will I ever concretize that stuff?

And this theme fuckin’ rocks. That is all.

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dissertatio propositio

Dec 11th

Posted by SEV in staying.general

7 comments

Completed.

‘Nuff said.

What remains now (for the proposal form, NOT the final dissertation):

sign baby sign

Think the missus will be enthu?

phd

reason #32423+2

Aug 10th

Posted by SEV in staying.aside

7 comments

…about the not-doing-a-PhD bit.

While I work on the much more elaborate post that has had roughly 4 words added to it per day since Wednesday, the only thought that continues to resonate after seeing this article is:

You’re fuckin’ kidding me right?

p.s. reason #32423+1 (= 32424) was when Akshay Kumar got a PhD. Just FYI.

p.p.s. Alternate title for this post could also have been ‘non-post #945353466′. Just so you know.

phd

deja vu

Feb 6th

Posted by SEV in staying.general

4 comments

No matter what I get done, somehow the mystical art of paper writing continues to elude. Completely.

And I never manage to get done with my paper more than a day before the conference. Even that has almost never happened.

p.s. It is now the day before the conference and I’m still not done with my paper.

p.p.s. Just FYI, this conference is in Orlando. Yep, bang in the middle of Disney. I’ll get up, go out, look at Disneyworld, and then go back in to watch people talk about medical imaging. Man, this is so the reason I’m doing a PhD.

phd