Master

I defended my masters last friday.

Everything was absolutely great. In fact I was quite worried because I had a sore throat since the day before, and so there was a chance that I wouldn't have a voice to use in my presentation. However, even though my throat didn't get all better I was able to do it without any further problems.

Also, I'm glad to say that the presentation itself was absolutely flawless. The examining comitee had a few points to make about the dissertation itself, but they were all minor. There were also lots of comments and general questions about stuff related to the work. All in all, however, there were more compliments than any other thing. I was very proud, and so was my advisor.

On a particular note, one of the members of the comitee knew my father from childhood. He made a "statement", so to speak, at the end , in which he expressed personal satisfaction with my defense, since he was involved in my decision to major in Physics.

It almost made me cry, because he remembered my dad in a way that is most cherished by me. But it also made me very happy, because I will never forget that.

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Not... screwed?

Ok, I may have overreacted in my last post. Turns out, I'm not as screwed as I thought I was. Electron density mapping is a very complicated thing to do, and my advisor decided to leave it out of the work for now.

But she did want to do it when we first talked about it... oh well.

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Learn less, do more

I don't really have an idea for this post. I suppose this time of the year it should be about evaluating the year, pondering good and bad things that happened.

I made a lot of progress with my work. Not the amount I would consider ideal, though - I've procrastinated an awful lot this year. I'm also running late with my dissertation - I should have it almost complete by now if I had really begun writing it several months ago, like I was telling myself over and over.

I also made a lot of mistakes. I do not complain about them, though, because I tend to see mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow. But I really wish I could "learn" a bit less in 2008...

I failed (again) to begin some serious running. I also failed to get my driver's license.

However, despite this year's less than satisfying progress, I am satisfied with other things I accomplished this year. The first and foremost is swimming. I finally overcame years and years of apathy and learned how to swim with a minimal level of decency.

All in all, I don't think 2007 has been too kind to me. I had a LOT of problems with banks. I procrastinated too much. I failed to exercise my discipline.

Looking at the bright side, when I look back there's a lot of good results to gather, and it actually looks like I've been produtive this year. I just wish I were more efficient.

For 2008, there's a lot to be done. For starters, my dissertation and defense, which I want to happen before April. I need to get a PhD going, after that. I want to get my driver's license. I also want to be able to show my friends how much I appreciate them.

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Spooky

My advisor has just scared the shit out of me. She sent me an email asking me to write an abstract for a meeting I didn't remember about. 

The good thing is, I did know about it and I did make my registration. And I did send my abstract - exactly the one my advisor asked me to write. Actually, I'm not sure why my advisor asked me to do that, I think she's probably under some stress and didn't remember us submitting it more than a month ago. Actually, it was even a troublesome submission. 

I sent her my answer, telling her that we have already made the registration and submitted the abstract. This actually makes me feel a bit odd, since usually it's me who doesn't remember stuff.

Actually, I've been feeling a lot more confident about my work. In part, it's because my advisor has been praising my work recently. But it's also because I'm much more self-assured about things I have to know and do. I am feeling a bit guilty, however, mostly because I haven't done a lot of productive work in the past few weeks. I do have to work on my dissertation - I have been claiming to be writing for some time now. It's time I make it true.

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Jinxed

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm jinxed somehow.

Now seriously, I don't know what happens that something always goes wrong for me. Maybe I'm doing something the wrong way, or perhaps I'm failing to notice some obvious detail that makes everything go out of control.

The fact is, Murphy's Law seems to be stronger around me lately. A lot of things that shouldn't go wrong to terribly wrong.

This is not a kind of generic post - it's actually about something that happened to me very recently, although I'm keeping that to myself.

But what really bugs me is that, although everything is going to be alright, I'm still feeling a bit nervous about the whole thing. Something is out of place.

Besides that, there's a lot of things going on. Not only there are new and exciting experiments to run, but now I'm going to do some programming, too (electronic density maps, your time is about to come!). Also, I finally began to understand a lot of things about my work, and all of a sudden everything started to make much more sense.

There's nothing like following references...

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Today is THE day.

Hello everyone.

After a long, long, long while I've logged in to blogger once again to write another post. It's been a while, although there is no good reason whatsoever for me to have taken so long to do this.

There's a lot of things I want to write about, but unfortunately they will have to wait. Right now I'm making measurements that comprise almost all the data I need for the work in my masters degree. After this, I will be left only with some data analysis and writing my d**********n.

I only hope that the worst problems that could have appeared already did so. The ones I faced earlier this morning trying to set up the experiment were already almost unrecoverable... all I want right now is to have a long, nice day of productive work, without any further problems.

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