Thursday

I read somewhere that Thursdays are the least productive day of the week....Actually, I think it was my boss at the knob factory I worked at as a teenager.

Productivity,
9-9:30 email, read, talk to Jesse
9:30-12:30 Article (last figure)
12:30-2 Talk about forced vortex vibrations with lunch
2-3 Administrative details
3-5:30 Article
Hours 8.5, usefulness 5.5 = 65%.

I guess he was right.

Jour de productivite and basketball

I had a great day today. I was very productive, made a lot of progress on my paper, helped out a friend, and played basketball. Yes I included basketball in my list of things that went well today. Normally I am really crappy at it and lack the necessary skills. Today I felt good made %50 or so of my shots and blocked a few people, I even got a couple of rebounds. I wonder what will happen tomorrow. The weather has been so nice, it just makes me happier to get up in the morning. I wonder how people must feel living in Florida?

Productivity:
9-9:30 email and reading
9:30-9:45 talk w/ Jesse
9:45 - 12 Article (figures)
12-12:15 lunch break
12:15-3 Article (figures)
3-3:25 email walk break
3:30 - 5:00 Article (figures etc.)
At work 8 hours, useful work 6.5 hours = 81% efficiency (a lot more than I can say for my car).

Getting back to work

Today was pretty productive. I didn't really start wasting time until the last half hour of the day. The only bad part was that I would have preferred to work on my paper this afternoon, but opted to work on some homework instead, while I had the chance to work with others. I am going to Thom's again tonight to play mandolin, and I hope tomorrow is also filled with productive time. The paper content is complete in my head, but still needs to be put into the paper. Then I think I will spend some time refining the last section, whatever I have done tomorrow is all I will do for the rest of the week. Then it is on to more experiments and an attempt to assess the reality of the accelerometers.

Productivity:
8:20-9 walk train walk
9-10 Organize and clean-up from friday and file transfers to allow me to use both computers.
10-10:30 got hot chocolate and talked to Jesse and Jordan
10:30 - 12 worked on paper.
12 - 4:00 ate lunch while I worked on the quasi 1-D solution for viscous flow in a diffuser using the interacting boundary layer theory!
4-5 talked and wasted some time.
5-5:30 printed out a schedule for the rest of the week (didn't finish)
5:30-6:20 walk train walk
total hours 10hours away from home, 5.5 hours of useful work!

Messy day

I wasn't very productive about getting work done today, but I did make our home feel a little more cozy. I spent the day at home putting out little fires that started over the weekend, like the fish that was dying, and a room that was out of control cluttered and dirty. I spent most of the day repairing a closet that had fallen apart and was raining plaster because the owner had never thought that it should be painted. I spackled, cleaned, and painted most of the day away. It was actually nice to slow down a little bit and have some long conversations with Julie. It has been a long time since something else was taking both of our attention away from one another. With that out of the way I should be much more productive this week.

Here are the totals.
Late start to the day 8:30 showered and got ready by 9.
90min going to store and buying supplies for fish and printer.
90min sitting down answering email and getting lunch ready for kids.
120min spackling closet and preping for paint.
120min painting closet and cleaning up.
90min barbequeing and making dinner.
90min putting clothes in new closet.

Sweeterade

I don't know exactly why when you put mentos in diet coke carbon dioxide is released so violently, but I sure like to watch it. This weekend we ate a lot of candy, so we found lots of things to do with it when we were bored of eating it. It seems like the reaction is really only sensitive to the outer layer of the mentos, because the reaction only lasts for a few moments and then the mentos continue to dissolve and the coke tastes like there is still a lot of combination left. I will have to do a more conclusive study this summer. We also talked about ninjas. I knew so little about ninjas before. Now I find them very fascinating and I think I am getting pumped up about them. I'll bet that ninjas know a lot about how diet coke reacts with mentos! I haven't laughed so hard in a long time, thanks Jake and Reagan!

Falcon on campus (a while ago)

I have been meaning to put this picture up for a while. A couple of months ago this falcon was in Killian Court at MIT and I took a bunch of pictures of it. Thanks to Jesse for calling me when he saw it. Interestingly, it was trying to eat squirrels!

Productivity report:
45min Walk train walk
10min Get a donut.
210min Article figures
70min Learned about energy methods for determining drag, power, and dissipation in viscous flows
90min Lab meeting (learned all about red algae and correlations for their growth)
60min Error analysis of a flapping foil

in at 9 out at 5:30. More work at home I can feel it! You know those days - sometimes weeks - where you just can't seem to accomplish the thing you set out to do even though you can't stop working on it, it is always on your mind, and you have been banging away at it for 30+hours? Well I had one of those weeks! I am sure next week will be better.

Crayola doesn't make a color for your eyes!

Tonight was a lot of fun. I met with Thom and Judy to play mandolin, guitar, banjo, and ukulele. In the process we spent most of the time listening to music. I really liked the song "Crayola doesn't make a color for your eyes." by Kristin Andreassen. It is a really great song and Thom said that in concert a lot of the percussion is made by hand jiving! Anyway check out the song you can hear it here. If you really like it you can vote for it to win the John Lennon songwriting contest.

Productivity, I ate 1960 calories.
30min - Walk train walk
120min - Journal article and force plots
30min - Discussion with labmates
45min - Listened to a talk on relaxing grid methods and information based modeling.
45min - Discussed weather with friends while eating lemon bars.
225min - Journal article and force plots

In at 9am out at 5:30pm.

Blogging

Ok sometimes I think blogging is really lame. It is difficult to find a subject to write about and when I do it just comes out like a pile of crap. Most of the blogs worth reading have a subject, mine is absolutely random. Most of the blogs worth reading are interesting and thought provoking. I would put more time into one subject, but that would take time away from my work and family, and so now I know why my blog is lame... I have too many excuses. However, I did make a commitment to write here each day this week. So I have a new plan. I am going to use this blog as a way to try and increase my productivity by openly admitting how much time I wasted and how productive I was. So here is my productivity analysis for today. Oh and I am going to keep posting a picture a day because I like to.

I ate 2400 calories today, walked 30 minutes, but I may go for a run this evening.
At work from 9:00 to 5:00pm

45min- Walk train walk
120min- Process PIV results and back-ups
60min- Plan trip to Keypoint Hotel and Plane tickets (Thanks Momi)
30min- Lunch
30min- Journal article figures.
70min- Techniques to solve for the wake of a separated flow using Newton's Method
30min- Tea with friends
90min- Hele-Shaw (sp?) viscous fingering solutions
30min- Walking and Talking with Brenden and Alex
45min- Walk train walk
60min- Work on journal article

There you go, my first day publicly announcing how unproductive I am. Actually, it was a pretty good day. I really think this will keep me motivated. I mean my adviser might actually read this! Yikes, I hope that if she does she will go easy on me.

Balance

How do you balance a career and a family? So far I just plow through and hope they are in balance. I take breaks whenever possible and try to spend time with the family. However, usually by that time I have bills or something else I have left behind piled up on my desk and so the day is gone and I haven't done much with them. I mention it because I wonder if I am becoming the kind of person I want to be. Family. I am home more often than a lot of people. It isn't that I am not around, it is just that perhaps I could be more when I am there. I am going to try to think about ways to become a better family member this week.

Productivity

Being productive isn't always easy. Lately, I feel like I am busier than I have ever been, but I also feel like I have very little to show for it. Perhaps it is because I am always "almost" finished with the paper I am working on. I am actually doing real solid work and slowly adding it to the final product, so I know it will get done eventually, but the process grows tiring.

I love the scent of new ideas. My brother in law wrote a little article on his blog today about how writing each day for strict amount of time at a particular part of the day can make ideas come faster. I want that type of idea flow. He also mentioned that using a paper and pencil or pen for his first and second drafts has really helped him solidify his drafting skills. I would agree. Lately I have been trying to keep a better lab notebook, and it has helped me bring my ideas and thoughts out and into document format a lot more often.

Now if I could just balance everything. Here it is 11pm and I still have four things unfinished I planned on doing today... Perhaps tomorrow.

Another update

The sad part about writing so little not so often is that when I sit down to write an entry I don't like the look of this webpage any more and I want to start over with everything. However, I am going to resist that temptation and stick to making a post here everyday about something interesting that is related to my work, so that my three readers can see a little more about what I do.

Last week I spent most of the week determining the lift and drag coeffecients for my spinning spheres. It sounds easy I know, but in reality it takes 1.2 hours per run to determine this using the computational power of a G4 powerbook. This data is helping to finish polishing the story of my research, which now not only has shape but is starting to be polished. I just hope the shape is similar to a sphere, since that is the topic of my research! You're right my puns are lame, but 30Rock is very funny don't you think?

I thought this guys work was worth looking at. I really like these representations, and it turns out a lot of his other photos are pretty cool too. www.chrisjordan.com I didn't realize that 2.3 million people were incarcerated last year, did you?

Update

I am writing my thesis proposal, working on my thesis, and yes planning the next set of experiments related to my thesis. I am busy and should be doing some work, but just wanted to let you know that although I am terrible at keeping a daily journal, writing regularly in a blog, and keeping track of all the events of my life, I do have some things I do on a daily basis. I shower, eat, walk to and from school, read, pray, and even have been writing a portion of my thesis or thesis proposal each day. How do I do it you ask? How do I manage to do 6 things on a daily basis? Although, it may not seem easy, it actually is, I am just really good at making it look hard. Take my hair for instance, I am letting it grow, mainly because of a bet with Julie, but also because I can look so much more desheveled now. And everyone knows that those that look deshevled must be important, busy, or crazy...all reasons to leave me alone and let me work on my thesis. It also seems to keep my new found purpose (graduation) on my mind. Let me explain. A few months back I needed a haircut. Julie said that I didn't have to cut it and that I could let it grow until I graduated if I liked. Wasn't that nice of her to give me permission? Anyway, one joke led to another, and then a bet that I would have to cut it before I graduated. So far I haven't. Though, it is starting to annoy me. It falls in my face more often now, and that can be annoying. I find myself blowing it out of the way, which probably looks kind of funny to some people. That is part of the reason it keeps the thesis on my mind, it actually rests on top of my mind. A big hairy mop, collecting my brain waves, thoughts, etc, but always there oozing a reminder that I must keep working to finish, sometimes it even talks to me. "Don't get distracted, get back to work or I might fall in your face...aha I told you I would fall in your face!" I may need a psychiatrist after graduation...I might need one now, aside from that it just goes to show you that there is a reason many grad students having long hair...I just don't think its so that they have an imaginary friend nagging them all the time.

If I do end up getting a haircut maybe I will try not showering next. It seems to keep some of the same distractions at bay.

Tired!

Everyone I talked to today seemed tired, myself included.  I don't know why but it just seemed like the day dragged on and I wasn't on top of my game.  This weekend Julie and I watched a movie called 'Proof' with Gwenyth Paltrow.  I liked it but can't remember why.  I think one of the points it was trying to make was that if you take care of crazy people you love, you might become crazy yourself...and that geniuses are typically crazy as well.  Since I hang out with scientists and engineers a lot, I have to say that in general none of us are crazy.  Perhaps a little over zealous about our work and work habits.  Not as social as some people, yes, and maybe even selfish, but not crazy.  Having had personal experience with some people diagnosed as crazy, I must say that I have asked myself on more than one occasion if I am crazy.  My answer is always no but is biased so I typically poll the people I meet and get to know.  So far 17% say I am on drugs, 23% say I am normal, %33 say I am weird, and only 27% say I should be in a mental institution. Of those polled and replied that I am crazy 29% were relatives or crazy or both. See I am normal.

Me and President Hockfield

Monday we had the grand opening of the basement in Building 5. The basement is where I reside and over the course of the last 9 months there have been some serious renovations across the hall, which luckily have helped improve our side of the hall as well. Thanks to a generous donation from Mr. and Mrs. Pappalardo the labs across the hall will be dedicated to nanotechnology. We will continue to do fluid dynamics on this side of the hall but let me take a second to welcome the really really really ridiculously small people accross the hall. If you don't think that is humorous then this joke will also bore you at the ribbon cutting speach President Susan Hockfield (first woman president of MIT) said "I know you don't like to call this the basement, you prefer to call it the 'ground floor'...pause and laughter... I've been getting a lot of calls from people with offices upstairs that are upset and are requesting offices also on the 'ground floor'." Followed by more laughter. You have to realize that in a place this nerdy, any sort of joke is well rewarded. Anyway, as you may know our lab takes a lot of pictures and such for our experiments and things. Since I had a camera around my neck I was asked by our Department Head Rohan Abeyaratne to take a bunch of pictures of the event, with the stipulation that he would arrange for me to get my picture taken with President Hockfield. So here it is, this picture was taken by Prof. Slocum, and I think it is the best picture of the whole bunch...I am not going to post the other pictures unless I get some requests. Oh, and I got to meet the past president of Northrop Grumman, Joe Gavin. What a great guy, he was hilarious, intriguing, and had some really great stories about MIT and the space industry. He was in charge of the Lunar Lander project! Can you imagine? It was surprisingly fun.

Some answers to a bibliography solution

I was so happy that two people commented on my last entry!  Two people I believe are not members of my immediate family!  Anyway, I am sorry to respond to their responses so slowly, and am happy to report that their advice was fantastic.  I now have a great bibliography system.  I am using bibdesk and have found some hidden features that are making it easier to keep my bibilography organized in one place. 
When entering the different fields I never took advantage of the url or local url feature.  These links allow me to either download the article and then link it to the local url on my hard drive or to link directly to the url on the web.  This is great if I have an old article that I have scanned, I can put it in a folder entitled papers, but link it to the local url link in bibdesk and the next time I look up that article It will appear with just a click of the mouse.  The url link is used to link a file from the internet to bibdesk.  This is a great way to keep track of all my articles that I want to leave online.  For now I am kind of anal and am downloading pdf versions of all the articles I find, and printing them, and filing them. As I use the system more and more I realize that filing them is almost pointless.  The advantage to downloading the article is that I can have it with me at all time. So when I don't have access to the internet or to my schools subscription to a certain journal, I can still keep researching. My system is beginning to feel complete and neat, and that makes me say "sweet". Ok that was lame, but so annoying that I had to leave it in this entry.

Last time I was complaining that there wasn't a great way to comment or put notes in the articles I read because I can't put figures I like or equations I want to input.  It is still true that I cannot do this in the annote section of bibdesk.  Serkan commented that I should use Equation Services, which I downloaded and am very pleased with.  Unfortuneately, bibdesk won't take advantage of this feature, but DevonThink does allow me to use this feature.  The great thing is that I can either take notes in DevonThink (which is the easiest way to take notes) and when I do a full size review I can just go straight to LaTex and make a document there if need be.  When I am done I can link it to the bibiliography file in bibdesk by adding a general category for all files called MyNotes (see picture at top of this entry).  I made the category MyNotes a local url and voila, I put the file I wrote while in DevonThink in the MyNotes section of the bibliography, and the next time I look at the entry the notes are there and they are retrieved ready for me to read and look at! This system also allows me to be lazy with how I file the document. If I use DevonThink it does all the work for me and files it automatically. If I use LaTex I can just put it in a folder near "Papers" entitled "notes" and bibdesk will make the appropriate link for me, making later retrieval easy.

There are two things that I think would make good improvements. One would be for the bibdesk group to add the ability to add pictures, graphics, etc. and equations from equation editors like equation services directly into the annote section or any section for that matter. Bibdesk already utilizes latex editing when the preview is used to look at a specific entry or entries. It would be great to have the annote section work similarly. When you wanted to view it in its final form it could utilize the latex compilers. When you entered the text you could just enter your equations as you would normally do in latex. Bibdesk allows me to do this for all the fields like author, title, etc. but it would be useful to do the same in the annote section and have a way to view the annote section after it is compiled. The second improvement would be a way to automatically backup my bibliography and figure out a slick way to check my bibliography on the other computer I use to see which version of my biliography is the most recent, a sort of syncing function. This would allow me to be lazier about copying my files from one computer to the next and ensure that one article I read on Monday on my laptop, then another article I catalogued on Tuesday on my desktop would all be in the bibliography on Thursday when I start writing.

However, I want to be clear that I am very grateful for bibdesk. It is a great program and working very well for my needs. I have tried Endnote and refworks, and found that bibdesk was much better on all accounts than the other programs. The addition of Equation Services is a small thing and not having this functionality doesn't distract from the usefulness of bibdesk. The anonymous comment helped me to look back at the bibdesk website for hidden functionality, which was very pleasing and fairly straightforward to find. As far as searching goes, it seems bibdesk has a good search tool, but it is important to click on the magnifying glass to ensure that I was searching in the right category or in "all entries".

What do you use?

To start I thought you might like to see the most recent MIT Hack entitled "Caltech Cannon Hack".  I read in the paper today that a while ago Caltech stole this cannon from a prep school near Caltech, and that in response to some prank Caltech played at this time last year, MIT students decided to bring this huge thing out east.  They must have really thought this through.  It must have cost a bit of money too.  Anyway, have a look for yourself here.
I also wanted to know what any of you who read this do once you have read an article you are going to put in your biblography.  Since there are only 2 of you that read this blog that use bibliographies, I guess I may never get a response but I was curious.  I use bibdesk for the mac, but once I have read the article and made my notes I don't know what to use to jot the notes I made into, scan a pdf?  The notes section of bibdesk seems the easiest place to retrieve my notes but I use equations and figures a lot and it won't take those fields.  It also has a poor search tool.  So I was thinking DevonThink but they have poor support for equations as well...ideas are welcome.

Another week of mediocraty

It seems no matter how hard I work, my research takes a back seat.  This week I am going to get up extra early (5 am) and go straight to school.  I want to see if I get more done.  I want to see if my focus can return to my research.  If it can then I might have a chance to graduate before my kids enter college.  

I guess I spend a lot of my time thinking about things that aren't directly related to my research.  The rest of my time is spent helping others actually.  I spend a lot of the week working on the laboratory, homeworks, and answering peoples questions in the lab.  Perhaps if I come in early enough I can avoid getting caught up in all of that and get something done.  Lets see how it goes...I will try to report back in a few days...now I just need to get an alarm clock that will get me up, without excuses.  Steve Pavlina says that I should have a no arguing policy about waking up.  When I hear the alarm I should stretch and wake up and not even allow myself to discuss my options.  Otherwise I will argue myself back into bed.  Honestly I want to go back to bed, even now, but I should be working.  So tomorrow I begin the battle with myself and discipline. I will let you know who wins.

New Mandolin

My mom sent me new mandolin on Friday!  It sounds funny but it is the nicest gift she ever gave me I think...next to life...I don't mean to belittle life, but this thing is awesome!  It has an amplifier so I can bother the kids and neighbors with my playing.  She also sent a tuner, which makes tuning 8 strings a lot easier.  I have been playing the fiddle for a couple of months now and maybe she just thought I sounded crappy... or maybe Julie begged her to change my instrument!hahaha, actully I am pretty sure she just wanted to give me something nice.  I am really please and have already learned a couple of songs.  Nothing to fancy, and I am not really that good (of course), but I am having a lot of fun.  I hope that I can take lessons soon.  I don't really even know if I am playing it right. Anyway it was just the thing I needed.  I have been a little down lately.  Research seems to be taking a backseat these days and I don't like that because it means I am no closer to graduation and no closer to solutions.  Hopefully with the second half of the semester coming up I will gain some momentum and get in a grove...being a TA isn't as easy as I thought it would be, but I am enjoying it.

Posting from a widget

I am posting from a new macintosh widget that posts blog entries to blogspot.com.  Once again the ease of using a free blogging tool is awesome.  I am very excited about this tool.  Perhaps I will be able to blog more often.  For those of you who don't know what a widget is: a widget is a sort of small application that runs on an alternate window.  When I am working under normal conditions on my desktop or whatever I click on f12 and a transparent window appears over my work.  On the window are a couple of very small at a glance applications for instance: a calendar at a glance, a clock, a calculator, a conversion tool, the weather, a dictionary.  I can use them and then return to my work with just one button click.  They look cool and track small pieces of information all day.  I like them and so do many Mac users.  If you use windows you are out of luck, but you probably have some excuse why you are still using a PC and probably don't feel bad.  Let us all strive to be more productive.  I hope this helps me do so.

T-Minus ? To graduation

I don't really know how long it is going to take for me to graduate. I read this article today and some of the comments. It was an interesting article about the need for schools to help doctoral students graduate sooner. The average time it takes to graduate from a BS to PhD is 7.6 years, on the rise over the past 30 years! How can I shorten that time frame? I will definitely have to move faster than I am now!

The study sites a couple of suggestions, but overall I see a problem that isn't mentioned, as it applies to science related PhD's. Many scientific disciplines have become so complex that students must learn much more before they can make a contribution. Students must understand everything about the past before they can look into the future. This requires time and therefore makes PhD completion times rise. Although many students have a head start over students 30 years ago (many high school students can take calculus, whereas 30 years ago it was only taught in college) the distance to make a contribution is increasing rapidly. Scientific discovery has become very competitive and complex. Discovering new and interesting contributions to ones discipline is often more difficult than in the past because so much must be learned and studied before one can attempt to formulate anything new.

I can't be sure that this is the reason why people don't graduate sooner. Perhaps it is the comforts of grad school that keep people here (free pizza, exhaustive dead ends, late nights, and a decline in social life). Aren't those three great reasons to go to graduate school? Perhaps it's an aversion to moving on to something outside of the academy. At some point people tire of it. That is when they either decide to leave or get serious about finishing. And that brings me back to...Well me. Honestly, I am not always this self centered but I have one goal as of late... And that is to get my PhD as quickly as possible. Oh sure I probably have 3 more years... But that doesn't change my goal. I am told that if I write my goals down they will happen a lot sooner. So there you are I wrote them down and maybe I can help move the time to graduate statistic back to 7.599 years!

Once again I think that if you want to graduate sooner it is really up to you. Are you asking the right questions? Are you reading and writing each day? Are you taking courses that will lead you to a solution? Have you found a good mentor? Are you meeting regularly with your advisor? In almost everyway it is up to the graduate student to graduate. So how can we shorten the timeframe? I will be on the look out for solutions. I am getting tired of reading about the problem. I know what the problem is, I have the problem, I am the problem. So lets find some solutions, proactive solutions. Solutions I can actually DO something about.