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2012-02-19: Day +69.

Spent a fair amount of the day writing my blog on monkeybars with IntelliJ. I like to get these things as readable and sensible as possible. My sweetheart helped tons — as usual.

I actually had her do the same when I wrote my Master's Thesis (1Mb PDF), and it showed. (If you like, compare to my 1981 Thesis from the UofA.)

Struggled to get cucumber working with testing Swing - more on that in a couple of days.

Templar's WATCH OUT!

Yesterday was day +32.

So, more than a month of being 55. I thought of doing a retrospective of how the first month was, but I don't really feel like it. Maybe later.

I had quite a good day. I started of with doing a review of an upcoming course I am helping with at the end of the month. It felt like a real accomplishment, as opposed to all those soft airy-fairy management accomplishments I normally have to satisfy myself with. :)

In the afternoon, I made it up to the U. Started off hearing Jonathan Gallagher's talk on Left-Additive Turing Categories, which was a run-up to his thesis defence next thursday. GOOD LUCK JONATHAN!

After, I had a chat with my prof, talked some more about getting the LQPL program going and set up for people and he gave me a paper, "From Reversible to Irreversible Computations" to start looking at. Then, I did some actual Test Driven Development in Haskell for LQPL and the work day was done.

My sweetie and I had a lovely supper and then off home.

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...

A decision or two

Day +1.

I did a couple of little things and with my wife, one big thing today for the Ph.D..

The little things:

• Downloaded the paper "Relative Frobenius Algebras are Groupoids" (PDF)
• Started work on my three month research plan for the first quarter of 2012.

Frobenius Algebras are somewhat important to my research as they correspond to bases for quantum computation. This particular paper seems, from the abstract, to have a fair bit of relevance as they characterize "groupoids as special dagger Frobenius algebras in the category of sets and relations". Should be interesting. (Side note - Safari wanted to correct groupoids to groupies).

The Three month plan will likely take a few more days (work tomorrow and Thursday...). At the moment, I'm concentrating on the overall goals for the three months and filling in the affected background.

The big thing though, is really big. We're staying put for the next year. We seriously considered moving for a variety of reasons. Looking at available houses, how much they cost and how much you get seems to have cured us of that, at least for the next year. Likely to be on the table again later next year. The important part is — stability now for the next year.

The Half-Way Point

Today, I have turned 55.

So, as this blog is titled Angst in the 50's, we're half-way through.

This next year promises to be quite busy. I will be focussing in on getting the work for my Ph.D. rolling, with a goal of having my thesis done by my next birthday. That should keep me busy.

So, how the heck am I going to do that? A few major things:

• Quit working full-time at the end of March and completely at the end of April.
• Focus, focus, focus.
• Create plans and follow through with them.

My first thing between now and year end is to flesh out the plans for the first quarter of 2012. My work will not be as demanding as it was through 2011, so some time during those months will be dedicated to two things:

• health and fitness
• research

Health, of course, is very important so that I actually have the stamina to do the work of the Ph.D.. Research, of course, is the end product.

Focus is something that has been sorely lacking over the last few months. My work has been far too demanding to allow for a suitable balance of these items. To help with that, I'm going to take a stab at doing something every day that contributes to my Ph.D. and moves me closer to my goal. Part of that will be doing a blog-a-day from now until then. It could be on any of my three blogspots (This one, the fitness one or the research/tech one)