Happy Birthday Mom!
What a joyous day indeed, happy birthday dearest Mom! Oh how the celebrations must be at home, and it is on occasions as these, that I miss home ever so dearly. Talked to dad this morning and also to my brother, and found out that a celebration is indeed in the offing. Nagi’s and the Innie’s have been cordially invited and shall be attending. Ah I can almost see it, the rushed activities at home, as they prepare the banquet, not to mention the sweetmeats and Arti’s favorite “Misthi”. I do hope though, that they go that extra mile and make the pudding that Mom was ever so famous for! It was a regular at all the bashes she hosted. That would indeed be, just the best birthday gift. Any pix from the bash, I shall put up here! Happy Birthday my dearest mother!
In the NL however, it is Paper Writing Day II. I have started with another mind-map and am altering the same on the basis of a few suggestions made by the supervisors. A very handy tool this Freemind, and I really love the ease with which one can move betwitxt the maps. I long however, to start with the actual process of writing – Mind-maps are fun and all, but cannot really compare to the joy of writing a paper. In related news, I have discovered I relate best to Enya whilst in a creative zone. Afer Ventus (literally translated from Latin to “African Wind”) is the song that plays right now, and it is just so soothing. Anyways, back to work!
Tim@10:54
So I am done with the Mindmap , and it has been approved. Ok it took some time. But it is ready! For yo reference peeps here you goes!
Tim@14:54
PS: Ich liebe dich mademoiselle!
Apecage Paper Writing Session, Day I
The first day is currently underway. Rob is presenting a general orientation talk regarding paper writing and the science of technology development. Have found and am using this remarkable mindmapping software Freemind, good for whatever ails you.
Update @ 13:29 – Apparently the articles need to be complete by the end of these two weeks, and taking into account the various journal stipulations, the minimum word limit will be 4000 words. That makes it nearly 400 words/day. Doable I think.
Long live Marco K., bless his cotton socks
So goes the common refrain. Ever since yesterday of course. The gracious gentleman let me at his unused piece of RAM, bumping the memory of my Thinkpad to 1,5 Gib! Good enough for… hold your breaths à VISTA! And that was my project for the Friday night. Yippee I know, lame, but well, need to recharge my batteries for the week ahead. I will have some important meetings and indeed some paper writing to do. So, a quiet weekend is just what the doctor ordered.
Being the proud father of a brand new spanking oven, I was rather enthused to try out my baking skills. Looked up a few recipes and decided it was best to keep it kosher… i.e. frozen pizzas and premade/mixed cookie/cake dough. Chicken! AH is a delight for people like me! It was ever so nice buying stuff I can bake instead of having to grill both sides up! Spent a wee too much I am afraid.
But back to the Lappie, I decided to sleep a wee bit before trying to rock the lappie’s Kasbah! That “wee” bit of a nap turned into a full-blown sleepgasm, as I awoke nay four hours later, at midnight. Cussing myself, I started the installation. What is weird is that the laptop managed a higher performance index than my server. Blah, 4.1 compared to 3.something. Everything went well, and soon I found myself installing Office 2007 and Adobe 8 from the server, whilst watching a dreadful C grade movie on Premiere “Manticore” starring that guy from Star Trek Voyager – Chakotay… Not having satiated my appetite for dreadful C grade movies, I switched on “House of the Dead II” on Premiere Direkt. A yawn fest, in spite of the gore. But all said and done, these movies did pull me through the yawn-inducing process of getting the OS up and running.
Vista on the laptop, ever so fast and ever so responsive, with all eye-candy turned on. Indeed, long live Macro, bless his cotton sox!
The evening promises to be quite fun, as the namesake and I plan a trip to Maastricht for the “Flanders” gig at the local Irish pub there. Add to that the novelty of having Guinness in another city, makes this evening, an event to look forward to!
Tim@14:21
W00t Sez I
So I am told that I am rather too formal in my email communication. Wha? Me formal? Ach nein! But then I took a double-take when I reread some of the emails I have sent of late, and needless to say, I sat there looking at words flow past, words like “Nay”, “Nary”, “Betwitxt”, “Twain” and the like … that’s not how normal people talk! Really must rehash my writing skills. Or not.
Daniel our LD guy dropped another piece of news in me lap this morn. Apparently I am also the DSpace output tracking guy at the OU as of today. That is SOME added responsibility in addition to the IMS Global work, and my regular PhD work. So people, in case you have any EndNote queries, and/or need some DSpace info, Tim’s your uncle.
Tim@12:00
Update @ 27.02 – Since then I have received quite some feedback regarding this particular post of mine. The most vociferous was that of the Namesakes’. Worry not Namesake of common feather, the parlance shall remain as such. Tally ho!
Back at work!
And indeed back to Vista – just had to try it out on my new machine. And am glad to report an Experience Index of 5.7! Vista feels rather quick, and works really fast, without any performance tweaks etc. I have installed the x86 version, foregoing the 64 bit for the time being (due to the lack of driver/app support for that platform).
Each day brings new revelations about the new setup, for instance Realtek HD Audio panel pops up as soon as one plugs in a connector, allowing one to correctly identify and setup the device. I am rather impressed by this feature. In addition, I noticed that the native resolution of the TFTs works fine, without my having to tweak the DPI setting (as was always the case with the older setup). So, I am operating at 1680×1050 for both TFTs with 96 DPI. The new GFX card can handle it all, without any shadows or pixel discoloration. I cannot emphasize enough how pleased I am with this.
Earlier this day the need arose, to connect via VPN to the OU mail server. The solution couldn’t be straightforward owing to the fact that I rely on the 24×7 availability of my local network for file server access. I cannot afford to disconnect either computer from the local network to access the OU VPN. I hit upon the alternate solution almost immediately. The answer – Virtual PC. With perfect support on Vista, this solution would indeed work well from within the Vista environs, once the Virtual Machine gets its own IP (not NAT). As of this moment, I am installing XP in a Virtual Space on my server machine.
Back to the real world, an intensely busy week looms ahead next week, for which I will have to prepare well in advance. It seems the three working days remaining this week, shall be spent bringing my affairs to order, and collecting literature/resources for the weeks ahead. On a related note, I am pleased to report that the first proposal review was rather glowing in its evaluation, and the reviewer has recommended that the proposal be accepted “as-is” without any alterations/modifications! What an honor. Though I must admit that I personally was not very pleased with the lack of cohesion and the structure of the same, so I have spent the past two days, correcting, updating and altering the proposal to bring it more in tune with my personal expectations of such a document. Let’s see what the Supervisors think.
And with those thoughts, I head back to work… Updates on the VPC setup a bit later.
