Soft, Strong and...

Incredibly Long

My weekend was long-ety long - and not just because of the extra hour of sleep that people convince themselves that they are getting. The long weekend started (as they always seem to for me) on Thursday, with getting ready for my interview at CCLRC. Having left myself no choice but to wear a suit I was up early agonising over which tie to wear with my "trendy" lilac shirt. There were only four to choose from, but it still seemed to give me trouble.

I THINK that the interview itself went better than I was expecting, but I will have to wait a couple of weeks to see how well it really went. I got back to Manchester at around 7pm only to make my way home, change, pack some clothes and leave for the train station to go up to Steve's to help put with some stuff for the schools. The next couple of days were pretty intense and sctually gave me a headache from staring at a computer screen for two solid days. I don't think that has ever happened before.

After leaving Steve's feeling pretty drained, I got back to Manchester in time to go to Irina's birthday party where there was a SingStar extravaganza that lasted until almost 6 AM - including the extra hour that we had "gained". There are pictures of all the fun and games for anyone interested.

Needless to say, all of this left me feeling pretty fragile for all of Sunday and even some of today. Today is a new day though.. the physics admissions interviews started up and I got to restart my job of picking people up from the train station and doing a brief intro to Manchester and all of its goodness. Add to that that I found out that there is a new version of SingStar and things don't seem too bad.

Thesis progress over this period of time actually fell to an amazing low, but I promised that I would try and get some done tonight... I don't think it's going to happen though. After spending over an hour on the phone to Vijay and then writing this it's getting to the point where I am having trouble staying awake. I hope I will be forgiven for not getting any done tonight. I am hopefully going to be handing in my notice of submission form tomorrow, which really should kick-start the thesis work since it will give me a hard deadline to work towards.

Totally Lame Excuse

Well... The last couple of weeks seem to have slipped by without even a thought for my blog. I had such good intentions as well. My only defense is that I have been too busy/distracted by other things to write anything interesting.

So after the evil sore throat from hell, I was visited by a rather interesting stomach thingy that also inflicted itself upon Marta. Being the stubborn stupid person that I am, I refused to go to the doctors, since it was only giving me alternating hunger pangs and loss of appetite. I thought that the two evened out and that (as always) I would have to wait for an appointment so long that it would have sorted itself out anyway. I was right.

I have also been away from Manchester for the (long) weekend, due to the festival of Diwali. I'm not particularly religious, but these things are always a good excuse to have a good time with family so I do actually look forward to them in a way. The trip to London included the now mandatory visit to the Trocadero Centre in order for me to have a go on the arcade version of Drummania. Sadly, it was not switched on when we arrived (having walked through possibly the worst rain I have ever walked through) and I was not pleased. Me, Anu and Vijay managed to entertain ourselves with Time Crisis 3, Out Run SP2 and the arcade version of Mario Kart though, so it wasn't all bad. We rounded off our adventure with a few rides each on a mechanical bull! Here are some videos in the stupid 3gp format that most phones use:

http://www.hep.man.ac.uk/u/shiv/family/bulls/

We also managed to get to a restaurant called Ikkyusan in China-Town that runs an all-you-can eat sushi deal for £14-ish on certain days. The price includes other foods (Pad Thai, mmmmm) but the sushi is the star of the show and is actually pretty good, even if some people think it's slimy. I will be going there again sometime soon, I'm sure.

While I was in London,somebody tried to break into my house AGAIN. Not cool. They were trying to get in through a window, while Marta was in the house, and didn't seem at all deterred even after seeing her. It's all very worrying and quite upsetting, but luckily nobody was hurt and nothing got taken. It still makes me a sad panda....

I came back to Manchester to find that I have a job interview tomorrow! It's all a bit scary but hopefully all will be well. I was supposed to be going out shopping for interview-clothes today, but I managed to put it off so much that I decided that I had run out of time. I will have to make do with wearing on of my suits, which should be okay - it's hard to look bad in a suit really - but I really wanted to use this opportunity to make myself buy some things I have needed for a long, long time. I hate shopping for clothes, probably because I am (and also the reason for me being) so rubbish at it. It's a circular problem that I will break one day.

Yesterday was also the PhD viva for the Dr. FormerlyKnown as Sarah. Minor corrections aside, she is now no longer "one of us" and may soon start talking about students in a very unflattering way. Seeing someone else get through it all is really encouraging for me and kind of motivating, but I also have a feeling of dread that grows every time I talk to someone about how their viva went and what questions they were asked. I guess I will get to my own ordeal in due course. For now though, WELL DONE SARAH!

Speaking of which, the thesis - almost forgot about that for a second! - has grown by a few pages since last contact, and not because I just added some figures either. The pace has been far from blistering over the past week or so, but it's hardly surprising all the distractions that have been coming my way lately. The interview tomorrow and plans for Friday and the rest of the weekend mean that this will have been an extremely lean week when it comes to writing... Next week is when the real work begins. Honest.

Final thing - I promised Sarah Dr. Dyer that I would post an image of one fo the extra characters from an anime called Yakitate!! Japan for her - here is Brad Kidd in all his glory:

I hate being ill!

I am sure if it has something to do with travelling on (dirty?) trains all the time, but I am ill again. Not good.

I don't feel too flu-y or cold-y, but my throat is absolutely killing me and I am really tired. This has put a serious dent in my writing over the past couple of days - i.e. I have done next to nothing - which is really annoying. I have gone out this morning and bought some blacksips - like lemsip, but blackcurrent - to see if that will help with the horrendous itchyness in my throat.

Perhaps now is the time to use the fallback plan of putting in most of my diagrams and screenshots - sure to bulk up the page count and has to be done at some point.

The Cliffhanger

Looks like the daily updates went down the pan.... The only real excuse I have is that I have actually been getting some writing (and other things) done so I haven't felt the need to tell myself off in public quite so much.

I am now up to 59 pages, which is not a monumental increase since Monday, but the past few missed-blog days have seen me get to grips with my first figure, table and bibliograpy entry. So lots of new LaTeX strings to my bow as well as a page-count increase. Not too shabby. Now the trick is to see if I can continue the reasonable pace into the next week and beyond.

The tension, I am sure, is killing oh so many people (AK and VJ probably) so I will keep you (i.e. them) updated.

Twenty Pages!

Horray for me! My thesis is now roughly twenty pages longer than it was this morning, which is pretty good going, in anyone's book. Most of it came from using a sty file from Sarah that puts all of the formatting as it should be according to University regulations and also adds some empty (for now) pages for a glossary, acknowledgements and other things. There was some real work though - I added a few pages about the Firefox extension part of my work and it felt good to get some actual words down rather than just writing in bullet points of what I will write later.

I am currently on 52 pages (including the empty ones) without any diagrams or screenshots of the bits of software I have worked on, which is pretty reasonable considering the fact that there are a couple of chapters I haven't even started on yet. I found a thesis in our group's library that is less than 100 pages and mostly diagrams. Not sure if I should be concentrating on quantity rather than quality, but at this point any measure which makes me think I might have a chance of finishing this before Christmas is a good thing. Ideally I will be finished before December the 8th so I can treat myself to a Wii.... how cool that would be!

Forward Planning

The weekend has been somewhat unproductive... not entirely surprising considering all the work I did during the week. I was sure to need some time to relax.

Saturday brought an interesting change from the norm - Matloob from Cambridge was in town visiting family and such, but managed to find some time to fit me in as well. After showing him the amazing awesomeness that is Drummania, we hung out for a while and went to watch Crank later on that day. On the whole I thought that the film was quite enjoyable but it was completely unwatchable for me due to the shakey first-person and third-person camera overload. For some reason watching such things (like Blair Witch Project or the first scene from Saving Private Ryan) makes me feel very, very nauseous. The same happens when playing certain games (mainly FPSs) on my PC. It's more than a bit annoying since it makes me feel that I am missing out on a lot of good films and a whole genre (and more) of video games. Ah well, nobody's perfect.

Saturday also saw the beginning of a third member in the household - Juhan is moving in. Which meant I had to move all of my junk stuff from the spare/guest room to make space for his mountain of things. Just moving my things up a flight of stairs reminded me how much I hate moving... I do not envy Juhan at all, especially since he is going to be cramming his entire flat into the smallest room in the house.

Today I was at my ickle sister's house yet again, making final repairs to her PC and installing Ubunutu.Hooray for Linux! I am sure that she only wants it because she found out it has a program that tests your hiragana knowledge. That and the awesome effect of a 3D desktop environment, complete with wobbly windows. Didn't manage to get the wobbly stuff in place before I had to leave to catch the last train (where I am right now) back to Manchester. I did manage to get her non-Microsoft Remote working with Windows Media Centre though, so she is now able to be even lazier and control her PC without having to lean towards it from her bed. Her PC is so much better than mine... I have no idea how that happened.

Anyway, that's my exciting weekend, which I am sure thousands of people will now feel compelled to comment on. I am really quite tired now - I am having trouble keeping my eyes open and the gentle swaying of the train is having a non-trivial effect on me as well.. I got up at 5.45 this morning so I could watch the Chinese Grand Prix and it is now well after midnight. Marta said I should just record it, but she doesn't understand that you just HAVE to watch it live. Especially now that things are so close at the front end of both championships.

I forsee this tiring weekend, especially today, having a knock-on effect in terms of tomorrow's thesis productivity. At least I will have an excuse for being asleep when I should be at work. If you were to look at it carefully, you might even start to think that this whole weekend was engineered by me to get a decent excuse for yet ANOTHER day of low productivity. But that would be far to clever for me to think of - I never plan that far ahead.