E1n1verse

I met with my supervisor briefly this afternoon. Given that I’d just been gone for another 6-month period, his first serious question was whether I wished to continue with my Ph.D. or whether I needed an “easy way out.” I assured him that I still wanted to finish my Ph.D. and that I didn’t need an “easy way out.” That question once again settled, we then proceeded on to the practicalities of actually doing a Ph.D. With my recent long absence, he was all in favour of me applying to extend my last batch of intermission to cover the fall and spring terms. He suggested I write another letter to Phil Husbands, asking for intermission due to work.
As always, the issue of my health and medication was included. I assured him that my health had been good of late. He thought I looked a lot healthier, too. My medication usage, I had to relate, was not completely perfect, but it was a lot better. I explained how I was trying to balance my life a lot better, taking weekends off and suchlike. I have been aided in this quest by a dynamic to-do-list manager called LifeBalance. I showed him my desired versus actual pie chart and today’s to do list and explained how it was time- and place-sensitive. By trying to do things only in the time slots allocated for them and relaxing outside of work/research hours, my health has improved and I’m not quite as stressed.

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Today was my first day back at the University since leaving for a three-week trip to Canada at the beginning of last October. I’ve been a student at the University of Sussex since, I think, the fall of 1996. Yes, I’ve been a Ph.D. student now for 8 years. While, that doesn’t beat the record of Dr. Robert Runte, a celebrated perpetual student in my personal circle of friends, it’s certainly getting up there.
The last time I went away for an extended period of time, I came back to discover my desk was now occupied by someone else. Space is always at a premium here, even though the IDEAs Lab is fortunate to have their very own space fairy. This time, however, I only needed to shove aside a few piles of electronics gizmos. My “new” office is shared with the lab equipment manager, who made good use of my empty desk space.

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As part of goal to improve my networking and reach out to the community, I had a task to start a research-oriented blog. I set up the software all the way back in September, before I suddenly had to return to Canada on a business trip, but since I haven’t yet returned, I hadn’t really invested much time in my Ph.D. in general or in that task. I remedied that somewhat today by spending the bulk of the day tweaking the look and feel of the two blogs I have and then adding some back-dated content to this one.

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Intermission:
Yesterday both Livingstone and I had mail from Linda saying that my application for intermission had been sent off to the powers that be at the end of August. By then we already knew as a letter had arrived that day. Intermission has been granted. My maximum period of registration is now January 9th, 2006. It sounds like a long time away, but it’s not really. I basically have two years to get myself out of the door, unless I can get an extension.
CSRP Technical Reports:
I had mail from Celia today. I’ve been assigned my own CSRP number of 565. I need to pick up a form to attach to the hardcopy of my paper. Before I do that, I need to some tweaking and Livingstone would like to review it before it goes. Once that’s all done, I can send it off to Frank Shipman at Texas A&M who has agreed to provide some external support for me thanks to the evangelizing of Jim Rosenberg.
Life Balance:
I spent part of the afternoon purchasing and configuring LifeBalance for my Macintosh. The thery is that it helps you to more easily balance the different aspects in your life. It does this in several ways. One of the ways is by displaying a visual pie graph of how you spent your time versus how you would like to be spending it. It also allows you to define places, hours, and projects and I believe you can then use it in a mode which encourages you to work on the appropriate thing at the appropriate time and optimize your time usage.
Wireless Working:
Met with Kelvin Pope of Computing Services today to see why we couldn’t get my internal AirPort card on the network. It turned out that it was a MAC address issue. I had somehow twice obtained the wrong MAC address for my laptop, which is why it wasn’t getting an IP address. This is now all solved.

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Played around a little more with MATAB, although I didn’t really get very far. I was trying to figure out how to use dlmread to import my data files properly into MATLAB automatically. It didn’t really seem to want to fly somehow.
I spent some time trying to figure out how to automate my MATLAB work. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to import the tab-delimited data files that my programs had produced using the dlmread command which should put it into a matrix. I can do it via the clipboard but not anyway else at the moment. Reviewing various MATLAB tutorials on the web, looking for hints, I realized that I need to review my understanding and knowledge of matrices again, so I’ve added this to my list of things to be done.
Assuming that my methodology is correct, which it might not be, I can now map one MDS cluttering onto another using the Procrustes in MATLAB. I need to figure out now how to get a single measure of how different the two are from that. I’m at least further along than before, so that’s promising.

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I met with my supervisor briefly at lunch today. We quickly reviewed my intermission status and I reported on my previous week’s efforts. I, of course, had to relate my “D’oh” moment about the X applications running on my Mac and then discussed running it off of rsunx versus locally. He wants to be kept informed on my progress in obtaining a license. There’s a possibility that the department might be able to buy/subsidize a license and I should let him know if money needs to change hands.

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