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.
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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