JARD

Day +31.

Just Another Regular Day.

Meetings, Bloody Meetings all day long at work.

Yesterday, though, I forgot to mention I had the first meeting of the year with my thesis supervisor. Nice to get back to it. He concurred with my three month plans in general, although we will talk about a few mods (of course! That is why he is my thesis supervisor! ) One thing he is considering getting me involved in is a message passing language that is founded on linear logic. Could be quite cool. We also talked about some possible extensions and improvement to LQPL, although those are likely to be longer term. The biggest mod, which actually requires an update to the plan, is that he thinks it would be best to handle the coproduct case at the same time as the product case in inverse categories. One without the other is like peanut butter without jam. It just doesn't leave you satisfied.

That's actually quite cool as I really prefer to have something complete (hmmm - perfectionism perhaps?) before saying it is ready to go.

Well — off to write more HUnit tests!

The Year After Next Year

Day +18.

First, a small update successfully made to LQPL. It now logs the state of the Quantum Machine after loading a program. Definitely going to get further in January than I originally thought.

At work today, I went through and booked time each week for weekly planning and a separate time for a weekly self-review. Very exciting stuff since I only had three months to worry about!

My sweetie and I had a great talk tonight about life post-Ph.D.. We got ourselves down to a few choices:

• Move to Vancouver for a year — work on art and apps;
• Move to Montréal for a year, upstairs from her parents — work on art and apps;
• Move to Montréal for a year, downstairs — travel and enjoy each other;
• Go back to work for some time and then decide.

Good stuff, Dissapointing stuff

Day +5.


The good stuff was that I finalized the first draft of my three month plan this morning. I tell you, working with LaTeX is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The ability to actually control exactly what you will see in the final copy is so nice. Using Git for the versioning management with a SubVersion backend worked perfectly as well. Nice stuff.

The disappointing stuff was that we got some upsetting news in the afternoon. It took up a lot of energy through the rest of the day, which is not how I wanted to spend our time on a Saturday. Ah well, we'll just have to figure it out.

Small stuff – I love the way that OSX Lion allows you to type accented characters.(Hold the key down, choice appear, type the number of the one you want.)

Other stuff – I felt horrid first thing in the morning. Damn Flu!

I'm going to wait a week or so before publishing the three month plan, just to let it sink in.

Plan Progress

Day +4.

I felt much better this morning, although not completely well. One of the most interesting things for me about this flu is that I don't feel depressed. Nice change from the usual when I am under the weather.

I spent most of the AM completing a small iOS app for my sweetheart. She has to learn those wonderful US measures like cup, pint and fluid ounce for some chef trying. Being raised in a metric worl makes that somewhat challenging, so I whipped up a converter for her iPhone and iPad. At the same time it gave me a chance to practice good use of the DRY principle as I abstracted the various view controller functions into reusable classes.

After that, I managed to flesh out the January plans of my Q1 plans. Currently fitness, updates to LQPL and some background reading are on the block.

I'm finding the planning quite difficult. It has been so long since I accomplished anything significant on my research, I'm just not sure what I can get done in a month, especially while still working. To counteract that, hopefully, I'm going to spend a bit more time on detailing it out, just to see what is realistic.

Finally, I will be getting all the three month goals to SMART status. (Specific, Measurable, Acheivable, Realistic, Trackable). I'm curious to see if using JIRA can help with a couple of those...

Visibly Happy

Day +2.

Back to work today, 6:30 to 4:30.

I made a bit of progress in the Q1 plans, finishing off the daily regimen plan for January through March. I'll post these plans once I'm a little further on. Progress, even though it is small!

A notable event was that two separate people commented that I am visibly happier these days. That is nice. Very nice. I know a lot of it is due to the upcoming year and being able to dedicate time to research. I also think the decision from the long weekend (staying where we are) and just having time off made a difference today.

The other notable event is that I seem to have come down with a cold. Runny nose, slight body aches and extra tiredness. Blech! Many people believe Colds equate to some sort of confusion in life. The only confusion I can think of was related to whether or not we were moving, so getting a cold after the decision seems somewhat wrong :).