Tagged: gradlife

Another long day


As the quarter comes to and end, the effective duration of the days tends to infinity! :-D

For the first time in the quarter I didn’t read a paper properly for Alex’s class. Actually I completely forgot about the paper yesterday and it came to my head just as I tucking into bed late last night. Then today morning I got help up due to various things and reached school at around noon.

Even after that I wasn’t able to concentrate on the paper, because I started playing around with Apache 2 and then ended up wasting a lot of time trying to setup PHP and Perl with it! Sheesh!!!

Anyways, now that thats out of the way, I can atleast focus on the more important things. I’m finally beginning to get a hang of what direction should things take for the project for Alex’s class. Basically we’re trying to validate Modelnet, but at the same time I’m also hoping to develop some tools and scripts which will prove to be useful later on as well.

I’ve to do a lot of work for the bio project as well, but somehow it just isn’t happening. Even Pavel doesn’t know the answer to most of my questions. The algorithm is still unfinished, I have no data sets to test it on, I don’t know how to validate it. Basically, its a gloomy picture. The only good thing is that hopefully I won’t have to make a terribly long presentation on it!

Off to bed for now

The evil of procastrination


I guess without doubt the greatest evil that a grad student is faced with is procastrination. I mean, here I am, with a week to go for the quarter, and struggling with both my courses. Where I should have been comfortably making presentations and reports. Not that I couldn’t have, but just that I haven’t. All due to procastrination. Not that I have anyone else but me to blame, but the temptation to wile away time doing useless things is just irresistible.

I’ve decided that today I will try to finish as much of the bio project as possible, and I will leave it at that. Because I really need to get working on the presentation, as well as finish work for other project. Besides, the bio class is just a breadth course, and so long as Pavel is not complaining, I don’t have much to lose. Anyways, we’ll see how it goes. I also booked my tickets for home today. So thats a good thing. But somehow I’m not feeling so good about is as I should be. I guess its just the end quarter slump effect. Hopefully in two weeks I will be jumping around happily and shopping and preparing for the trip home :)

busy bee…


The last few days were quite busy, and happening to say the least. I spent the weekend coding the SFS assignment for the distributed systems class. Actually it didn’t turn out to be all that hard. I mean sure it was difficult, but most of the difficulty was because I procastrinated for so long! :-D The assignment itself was quite straight forward, barring a few issues. And in the end, it was really cool to see the code actually running. And then I could brag around (say what, I made a distributed file system, beat that!)

This was on Monday. I had the DS mid-term coming up on tuesday, but for the past week I had been having this incredible urge to move over to Debian that I just couldn’t stand it any more and I thought, what the hell, its only going to take a few hours at most. Although it didn’t turn out to be quite that way, I did make the move to Debian that day itself, and I’m really glad that I did. Within a few hours I was up and running with all the customizations I had earlier (including my own custom compiled kernel!). I’m really loving Debian!

Tuesday morning was frantic study for the mid-term. The mid-term was really cute, though I messed up one easy question. But it was open notes, and you could work it out if you listened in the class and/or read the papers thoroughly. And the questions were precise, there were no “there-is-no-right-or-wrong” type of questions in this paper! But now I have a lot of catching up to do. Research has taken a back seat, and so has the computational biology project. I hope to fire back on both of them starting tomorrow. High hopes I know, but we’ll soon find out. Right now I’m worried about what I’m going to say in the meetings tomorrow….