Adventures in Being Incredibly Busy

Unlike my tireless sister Laura, I am not a workaholic. I always make time to relax and take it easy. Perhaps this explains why I am on my seventh year of graduate school! No, seriously, I think that it reflects the fact that I am more of a "Type B" personality.

My mother used to say, somewhat derisively, that I would never die of overwork. At the time, I took it as an insult, but now I see it as a positive aspect of my personality. I mean, who really wants to die of overwork? I'd rather die of "overplay." I hope that when my time comes, I go out of this world having a good time.

Another tendency I have is to talk and talk (or write and write) without ever getting to the point. Since I'm going all philosophical today, why does there have to be a point, anyhow? Maybe I just keep going for the sake of going, because I'm enjoying it or something. But really, I am digressing, because the point of today's installment is that I am incredibly busy.

My weekly meeting with my advisor ran over the hour allocated to it, because of the number of topics we had to talk about. First, we went over the thesis chapter I had given him for review. Every iteration I give to him is returned with a generous helping of red marks throughout. He likes to explain what he's marking, so that I will learn to write better. I definitely appreciate his constructive criticism.

Then, we talked about the performance evaluation runs I have been doing, and why some of them have been weird. He gave me some suggestions on how to follow through with that. After that we moved on to comparing the performance of my optimization method to some brute force methods. I still need to tie up some loose ends on that. And we ended on the 3-D implementation of the objective function, and how to find a good integration tool to perform the integral relatively accurately and cheaply. That is my biggest remaining project: implement the objective function in three dimensions, and add yet another layer of parallelism. This is what I am going to be working on the most between now and May.

Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed about having so much to do. But then I take a couple of deep breaths and remind myself that I can get it done, one step at a time.