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dixie — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:54:20 +0000

I’ve neglected my corner of the blog so long I’m surprised there aren’t colonies of spiders and layers of cobwebs blocking my way in. The sad truth of the past year is that I’ve had nothing I wanted to share with the Internets: grim accounts of thesis writing, power struggles with my PhD advisor and committee members, panic over table formatting in LaTeX, terror in the face of overwhelming evidence of my own incompetence, and the eventual resolution of pretty much everything.

I could have written about the optimal use of 5 Hour Energy for fun and profit, or how to get a snake out of the US and into Ireland (hint: the latter is easier than the former). I could have liveblogged my commencement. I think someone live tweeted my defense. I certainly gave a blistering account of my flight(s) to Dublin over Twitter. But nothing seemed interesting enough to blog, and I certainly didn’t have the wherewithal to report in anything more involved than 140 character chunks. So the blog has heard little from me.

Leaving LA for Dublin presents a new set of blog-friendly circumstances, however: I am unemployed and full of observations. Last night saw my happy Dublin debut, in which I forgot where Cassidy’s was (if indeed I ever knew), met up with people I haven’t seen in quite some time, found myself a game, and had my first decent pint(s) in years. The process of legalizing myself may take a little time, especially if the international banking system fails me and decides to hold my vast riches hostage, but last night assured me I will not want for things to do in the meantime.

I first took it into my head to leave the States when I was 15, and every large decision since then was based at least in part on that goal. While I certainly have new ideas and plans, it’s strange and disorienting to finally be here, clutching two hard-won things, looking out towards new goals that are lovely but lack the timeworn substance of those promises I made to myself so very long ago. Luckily, there’s quite a lot I need to get done. By the time things slow down, the short-term plan should have crystallised appropriately.

Stabs me like a knife

uber — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:05:53 +0000

My colleague’s response to this quote, which is not for the faint-hearted researcher. It contains no profanity, but you might swear after you have read it.

“We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent … ”

– William James, “The Ph.D. Octopus”, 1903

Found on Philip Greenspun’s home page. He’s also the author of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming:

“Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”

Isolation Station

uber — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:43:55 +0000

Life is about to get really tough for me. I’m at the thesis writing phase, and I have a few pieces of code left to run while I write the first bits. My supervisor has given me a deathline, which I shall not pass without having handed the college a nice thesis.

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.

You can tell where he’s doing his post-doc

dixie — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:36:34 +0000

PhD never, ever fails to entertain. The only reason I don’t show every single comic to everyone and say “This is the truest thing I have ever read,” is because I figured it would get dull for y’all pretty quickly.

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.