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Monday, January 28, 2008

More useless statistics

Today I received my shinystat weekly report. It's amazing how every now and then it gets to surprise me.

Today, I noticed a pretty cool feature: it shows me, regarding hits on the blog coming from search engines, the search keywords that caused Stairway to Geekiness to show up in the results. What took me by surprise is that, for every single month since July 2007, except for October 2007, the #1 search people made and followed to my blog was "copy pasta". No kidding.

When I trace the visits, they all were to a post in June 2007, when I incidentally used the term to talk about an ethically questionable individual from my Institute.

The second most followed search keyword is linux spdif. This one actually makes me happy. Some time ago I made a post about how to make S/PDIF output work under linux, in hopes it would help somebody else. Apparently, it did.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Six more months

I have received an extension in my funding. I am in the process of renewing it until the end of July.

I can't say this is what I've been hoping for. I actually would prefer receiving word about my PhD - I need to be sure it is going to happen. This actually worries me a lot, because that's my only chance of getting to keep working in the academic environment for now. I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I don't get the funding.

I won't say I'm not happy about the renewal - I welcome it with wide open arms. It's just that, although nothing is certain about my PhD yet, I was kind of counting on having a bigger stipend beginning sometime around the middle of this year. I'm finally getting rid of all my financial problems and I wanted to have some more breathing room for using the extra money I would get to start building up my future. This sounds cheesy at best, but I don't really have other way of saying it.

The fact is, I'm almost 27 years old and all I own is in my bedroom (which is not actually mine). This is not even close to where I wanted to be ten years ago.

Come to think of it, ten years ago I was entering my final year in high school, and preparing myself to enter college. My expectations were completely different then. I had a clear path ahead of me, I knew exactly what I wanted. Looking back at the plans I made then I can't help but feel a bit guilty of failing to live up to those expectations. In high school I was a good student, my grades were great and I basically could do anything I wanted. That certainly changed a lot once I got into college. My grades were never the same, I took longer - way longer - than I expected to graduate and I ended up in an area I would never imagine I would have any interest in. Not that I dislike what I do now, mind you, I'm just saying that ten years ago I wouldn't even have considered working with crystallography and applied physics.

I admit I learned a lot in the past ten years. Not only in physics, but as a person as well. Not that it's an unexpected thing, I believe everyone really finishes growing up during this period in their lives. However, I wish I was more mature when I began than I was. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and would have made my life a lot easier. And, although I did graduate, I can't help but feel a bit troubled by the fact that my knowledge of physics is not as extensive as I think it should be. Although I passed all the needed courses during my graduation, I fail to recollect the knowledge I allegedly acquired during those courses, with a few exceptions. Surely I can explain the basics of the inner workings of the atomic nucleus, or how Maxwell's equations give rise to the wave equation of electromagnetic radiation. But I would have serious problems trying to explain those things in detail, or more advanced topics - although I supposedly studied them. Then, of course, all of this rambling might just be completely pointless, since I haven't reviewed those topics in a while and I'm just being neurotic about it - this certainly wouldn't be unheard of.

All in all, I honestly believe everyone asks themselves whether or not their own ten-year-youger-selves would approve of them now. I do have a lot of concerns about my future, and I have no idea where I'm going to be ten years from now, but worrying too much about those concerns will only make them become reality. The best I can do is aim for the best.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Yada, yada, yada

Despite the huge amount of things that happened the past couple weeks, I did not post anything here because, to be honest, I didn't really care. 

Among other things, I've been working a lot. My work is - hopefully - reaching its end.

Anyway, I'm not really in the mood for reporting everything that has happened to me since the beginning of the year. 

I leave you with this piece of crappy translation: