Thesis writing. Thankfully, I am not long under that particular burden. It really feels like having a heavy sack on your back. Each day you take a brick out of the bag and put it on the ground. The pile of bricks gets higher, but the weight doesn’t seem any lighter. The bag is with you all the time, you never get a break and you always feel like you should be writing or working — even when you’re out for a break after a lot of progress. The rub is, that I almost felt as bad when I was making progress because I felt the need to keep going more.

My status now is that I am awaiting a date for my viva voce. It should really have happened by now, but this process has been nothing but missed deadlines and remorseful “should-a’s”, “would-a’s” and “could-a’s”. I’m working, and at a job I really like, so it’s less of a burden.

But back to writing, apart from my incredibly insightful tweets, I am writing a lot. Proposals, papers and status documents take up a surprising portion of my days. It’s shocking how little technical time there can be in an ostensibly technical job. I can see how people get frustrated. It seems that you have to write constantly as an academic, that you have to sell constantly as a member of a startup, and have constant meetings if you’re in a big company. Communication is 90% of most jobs that I have seen, and technology is only 10%.

I’m sure that there are skunk-works labs out there where people can really spend their days with their text-editor of choice, not a care in the world other than compiler errors and ensuring the coffee supply is plentiful. It sounds nice, but I am sure even secret facilities have status updates, even if they are punctuated by mad laughter. In fact, the evil-HR departments probably impose a minimum mania level on their reports.

“Dr. Malevoface, this quater you have used fourteen percent of your allocation of manic laughter, but we have yet to hear you exclaim that the mainstream scientists who shun you are ‘fools’, nor have you submitted the mandator Gantt chart detailing how you will ‘show them all that the monkeysaurus is the ultimate doomsday weapon’. This is unacceptable, I will be forwarding a memo of concern to all nineteen of your line managers.”

Not much to add to this :)

It’s interesting to read this paper on eye tracking: Measuring the Task-Evoked Pupillary Response with a Remote Eye Tracker. Klinger et al seem to have discovered that mental arithmetic could be vanishing.

There is a common argument that the only area of human endeavour which has had the least benefit of technology is education. I often wonder if that’s because we don’t necessarily want to save time or make education easier; the goal of teaching is as much teaching people how to learn as it is teaching them the content that they are learning.

To put it in the vernacular, I hope you will join me in a “Woot! Gratz!”.

Life will be changing for me soon. This has been my mantra for the last few months as I work through the thesis and my job. It’s going slowly, and, yes, I am annoyed that I have not finished in a more timely fashion, but I will finish.

There’s a whole world of stuff I want to broaden my research into. We’re coming into an age where some of the stuff I have been interested in since my final year work in Engineering is coming to a head. We saw some of the applications of having GPS-equipped, always-online devices, and I can’t wait to see how it all pans out.

We’re still probably a year to three years from the full experience, but when it comes life should be improved.

When I watch an old movie, I am always struck by how things like mobile phones change the drama. It’s a lot harder to isolate people when they can just ring anyone, anywhere.

This spoof of 24 is a good example of where we are now: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1788161

I think that in the next generation of kids, getting lost will be like that – a truly exceptional state which happens only when you combine several unlikely events. Consider someone who, for their entire lives has been able to hit the maps button on a 3g phone and get their location and a route anywhere.

The Blair Witch will be an odd movie for the children of the 2010s.

To: CCE postdoc and graduates
Subject: Crocodile heads

If you are expecting a package of croc heads
please see [this guy] (x1234) in the
Chemistry Stockroom ([this place]).

There was insufficient information on the
package to determine the addressee.

THANK YOU,
Anne

Dixie: Do you envision me finishing this calendar year?
WAG: No, I don’t think so. It’s not impossible, and certainly by this time next year you should be gone or leaving. But probably not this calendar year.

I’m considering plan Ω.

In the interim I have made a brave step out into the internets. Apparently, in addition to serving stolen movies and tv shows, the internet can be used for commerce – auctions, in fact. I had been aware of this fact, but had never before taken the leap.

I’m not a big person for deals, I prefer to just get things that I want, and I am reasonably happy to pay the asking price. It’s not a big thrill for me to get a lot of money off, in fact a protracted negotiation takes a lot of the fun out of it for me.

In any case, the first auction that I bid on was a new pair of noise-cancelling earbuds, the Sennheiser CX 400s. I have to say I am extremely pleased. I am not used to the eBay way – I prefer the way online merchants send you extensive messages informing you of the location of your packages. Instead I got no word from my kind internet merchant until the ‘phones arrived this morning. Still, all’s well that ends well.

The earphones themselves are excellent – they eliminate almost all noise, and I am sure with additional fiddling I could totally eliminate the outside world. This is the perfect time for doing so, as I have to write the most important document of my life over the next few months.

The bass response is excellent in the CX 400s, and I find that they make me want to keep turning the volume up because the sound is so nice – a dangerous habit. Still, this combined with listening to Ikimono Gakari should keep me on the non-violent side of insane.

Dixie: So, there’s this GPCR conference in Ireland this May. If you’re interested in having a group presence there, I could do it, and it would give me a chance to network with people across the pond. Which would be really great, since I intend to work there once I’m done here.
WAG: You’re welcome to go if you’d like, but I’m not paying for it.
Dixie: (After learning the cost of the flight, accommodation and registration) That’s more than a month’s pay. Did you know there’s a recession, and that the dollar continues to lose value against the euro?
WAG: Sorry.

Time passes. We submit an abstract to the conference anyway.

WAG: Our abstract was accepted to that conference in Ireland. I’ll be at a meeting in Portugal, but the timing works out so I’ll be able to fly up to Ireland for a day to present our poster. I’ll be driving to the venue from Dublin. I’ve never been. Is there anything I should see?
Dixie: I guess you could stop in and chat with my husband.**

The cartoon version is here.

*Only mildly embellished for the purpose of story; the actual words are lost to time. My responses were considerably more tactful.
**Okay, I did manage to make the will save to reply with something other than the bitter, snarky reply that sprang to mind. I think I actually mumbled something about the Ring of Kerry and remembering to drive on the left.

Today I break the streak, not because Jorge has perfectly and succinctly expressed a universal truth about postgrad life, but because he decided to do a comic on a very specific situation happening right here, right now. You can see it here.

There are no fewer than three separate construction projects happening right now, and at least one of them is taking up multiple locations (actual construction site plus staging area). The fences started appearing before Christmas and have been slowly extending their reach across my entire life. No path has been untouched. Every time I need to walk somewhere other than home, I find a new barrier and must devise a different way of getting there.

A few weeks ago, I tried to get to the Chem Engineering building and had to take an academic version of an Indiana Jones route, forging new paths through buildings I’d never been in and hallways long forgotten by all except the skittish postgrads who inhabited them and hadn’t seen the light of day in some time. When I tried again a week later, a new barrier had appeared, preventing access to the building I’d previously trailblazed through.

It’s gotten to the point where I don’t visit other buildings anymore, as it’s too much trouble. Before I read that PhD comic, I’d thought it was just my building that had been effectively ghettoized. I was wrong. Everyone is irritated, and we’re all jumping fences to get where we need to go.