Happy Birthday Bro!
Happy Birthday lil Brodemio! Happy 19th m8! Ah the celebrations that must be in order this evening, make me wish I were back home to celebrate with the lil’ one! Me bro sounded ever so happy on the phone as I rang him up 00:00 IST. Idiot, he was thinking of giving his birthday a royal heave-ho, and not celebrate at all this year. Glad to see that better judgement prevailed.
The whole concept of sending gifts back to India just makes me realize how crappy online services and follow-through is, in India. Living here in the EU, has changed my perception of how things actually work back home. Have to order weeks in advance, even though the status says – “Delivered next day”; and keep on calling the hotlines to make sure that the delivery actually follows through on the date specified. The fracas this time around, when I tried to send something to my brother via Rediff.com is just testament to that saga. One of the gifts arrived three days in advance and the other two… no sign of them yet! And the one that did arrive, came with no sender information… just some random “mundoo” handing the box over to my paranoid family, who mistook it as a bomb and just decided to throw it away. Great, just great…
The weekend has been spent in blessed indolence. Finally taking a break from the journal article, I spent all of Saturday, just reinstalling Windows Vista (please no comments/brickbats, hey it relaxes me!) and watching a useless movie “Stealth – unter dem Radar” – a cross between “I, Robot” and “Machines gone wild”… did this movie even have a purpose under the heavens? Ach! But the saving grace from Friday night and Saturday was that I managed to talk with the special someone for a long duration on the phone. It was ever so special. In many more ways than one! The preparations for her visit shall take precedence the next week, as it dawns on the twain, that there be just 12 days left! Oh my! : D
Speaking of Vista, I found the culprit for the high usage of CPU resources. It is the Digital_Clock_Ver2.0 gadget! It suffers from a memory leak and can increase the CPU usage to 2-3% constant (on my C2D system). No wonder the CPU is always at 20-30% on my P4m at work. Come Monday, that gadget shall be decimated! Here’s your international moment of Zen…
That’s how my XP used to look before I ditched/jilted it for Vista. Well had managed to get the Gadgets working in XP, thanks to some creative thinking and tweaking. And here’s how my Vista looks now…
“Just more glass, not enough class” – Your international moment of Zen ; )
Tim@13:22
Music: Pete Droge – Under the waves
Journal articles and all that
Phew what a day this has been. How great is it, to sit down, and relax, knowing that the deadline you’d set for yourself this day, has been met, and then some? This was a day replete with fevered writing spells and worry over the short breaks I did manage to squeeze in. Rob had set a deadline for the Development AIOs last Monday, to submit the full sized journal article by 17:00 on the 9th of March. The article (which was not to exceed 5000 words, excluding references) would have to be complete in all regards, as if ready for submission. A tall order indeed – it took me until Wednesday to finalize my mindmap for the same, and then get into a fevered writing pitch.
I am glad to report that as of today, all is back on track, the word count has exceeded the limit set (by around 1500 words), but it shouldn’t be a problem to cut the same down to match the journals we have shortlisted. A minor incident today – there was apparently a plan to hold a peer review session in the ApeCage today, organized by my supervisor. Christian tells me that she was not very pleased that I didn’t show up for the same (due to my staying at home this day – home working). The irony of the fact that I was the one pushing for it, is not lost on me. However, after the debacle at the office yesterday, I felt I really must stay at home and endeavor to get back on track with my schedule. Which I am glad to report, I have.
Met FJB the other day regarding my new responsibilities as the OU Endnote specialist. It turns out, that she knew no more than I did, about what my role shall be. But as the old adage goes, “when in doubt, call on RKP”!
So there ya have it, the reason why I have not been able to keep up with my daily blog updates. It can all mostly be accredited to my attempts to get the article finished, well and truly on time.
In other news, the itinerary for our trip (24th March – 01st April) has been finalized and it looks just superb! We’ve selected from amongst the best hotels in our reach and subject to availability, and have booked the same, along with the tickets for the journey. I am ever so psyched, looking forward to her visit and our eventual trips, talks and enjoying each other’s company. Watch this space for Photo updates from the 24th on. W00t 16 days till she’s here! K
Digo’s birthday is round the corner, though am saddened that he is not more enthused by the prospect. Ah well, hope he shall change his tune as the day approaches!
Tomorrow evening the Development AIOs have planned an outing with the Research AIOs. The only people from the Dev team who are going, are the ones who have already finished (or very nearly so) their journal articles. This basically leaves me out of the loop. I shall unfortunately not be able to join the group for dinner tomorrow at Maastricht. What a shame. But then again, the timing was most inappropriate. Oh well have fun ya guys!
That is all for today, today’s really been OK! Now for some Emiliana Torrini and then to bed!
Tim@21:32
Mandy da Vyaah Balley!
What perfect news indeed to start the day. A childhood friend is getting married! Mandeep, many congratulations bud! ‘Tis news that has made my day indeed, in addition to a certain email I got, and a certain person I talked to this morn.
The paper writing session is back in force again, the going is slow at this point of time, but I shall plough through.
Tim@ 10:26
Writing Session in full force
So I pulled a 12 hour shift at work. Got in at 08:15 AM and left at 08:20 PM. Reason you might ask? The Writing Session… on one hand it is rather good that we have this much pressure to deliver in these two weeks, and on the other, it could’ve been managed better. For instance the lectures, which are ever so informative, could’ve been delivered the previous week. Namesake agrees with me here. It is as if one finds oneself in a party and is ordered to “Have Fun”. That rant aside, I really am getting into the whole spirit of things. The mind-map complete and the laptop all ready once again (thanks Namesake), I was ready to start writing. Though the pace would’ve probably been a lot slower, had Rob not informed us in the presentation this morning, that the first draft is due tomorrow, Friday, 2nd March 2007, at 05:00 PM CET. Eep. For a person who had not written down a word yet on any sort of paper, this particular bit of news set off alarm bells in me noggin’.
Hans followed up Rob’s presentation, with his APACage guidelines. Soon enough his headaches shall be my headaches since I have taken over the EndNote part. It was quite informative, if not all new. But soon after a walk, I got down to the abstract and then spent the whole day from 01:00 PM to 08:20 PM just working on my paper.
Which brings me to now. Rather tired, and just ready to turn in. Will update the Blog for yesterday, tomorrow ; )
Ich liebe dich liebchen!
Tim@ 11:41 PM
ELAPTOPB0RK3D
Ezel Ezel and Ezel. That’s the way to describe ol’ me. I have just recovered from a serious problem, thrust upon me, by yours truly. ARGH, what a pain in the proverbial behind – the IBM Optical drive, I Hate Thee. Yep now you know why this is categorized as a rant.
The whole saga started with my wanting to uninstall Vista after just two days of jousting with it. The “System” process had the CPU spiking 50% and never did the usage go down once below 30%. I thought it was due to Network Discovery Processes in the background. Really had to disable them all, and yet still the performance was b0rky. The inevitable decision (and sorry if ya break out with a sigh), go back to XP.
Argh, grmph. Doing the thing that I hate best, reinstalling Windows. But anyway, back home, I dug out my CDR and deleted the Partition, and the CD started to copy those ubiquituous files onto the Drive. But what’s this? It got stuck at 11% with drivers.cab! Oh no, I exclaimed, I had to get the laptop ready for next morning. But this basically meant, I had to dig out another working XP CD. Which was tough enough a challenge in itself, owing to the fact that I have some 800-900 CDs/DVDs all over the place. Finally found one that was in a relative pristine condition, popped it in, and same error on another file. Ah, could it be the extry RAM I installed? I dug the RAM out, and tried again. No effect. The DVD RAM drive is well and truly b0rk3d.
