• Some Magic with Merlin

    When I was preparing for my thesis committee meeting earlier this year, one of the things I did was prepare a project timeline. In order to do that, I spent ages testing out project management software again, because working with FastTrack Scheduler was so frustrating and unrewarding. After a lengthy but rushed evaluation of several products, I ended up going with a relatively new product called Merlin from a German company. While Merlin isn’t perfect, it at least wasn’t frustrating to use and its import/export facilities meant that I could overcome some of its reporting deficiencies through the judicious application of other applications.

    Read the rest of this entry »

     
  • Of iPods, Infrastructure, and Intermission

    Today was my first day back at the University after an extended absence. I filled it in by doing mostly administrative things. Let there be iPods, bibliography software, and printing everywhere!

    Read the rest of this entry »

     
  • Balancing Intermission & Other Tasks

    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.

     
-->