Week in advance: 7-13 December

Today I had a quick few hours in the lab and I was able to make great progress with my programming.  My work over the last week made it much easier for me to troubleshoot my system.  As a result I've addressed two serious issues that prevented me from conducting experiments.  Now this has taken seven days to accomplish which I was not planning a week ago.  Interestingly, today I came across a philosophy that fits my situation appropriately.  On forum today I noticed one contributor's signature block quoted Hofstadter's Law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. — Douglas Hofstadter

Needless to say I was grinning like a fool as I read the quote.  Having the past year of my life embody the sentiment.  While it's nice to know my experiences are not unique to myself, in the coming weeks I do need to make sure my time and milestones are tracking appropriately.

Week in review: 30 November-6 December

I am pleased with my progress this week, although by the latter part of the week my work took a small side track.  Looking back at what I accomplished and the value of this week's projects, in the context of my thesis project, I believe the time was wisely invested.  Just like so many aspects of postgraduate study, details plan a crucial role.  Either the details of literature/background material, methodology/experimental design, analysis or communication.  Unfortunately there's no way to predict for all nuances that one will encounter and that's why everything seems to take 3 times longer than expected.  While my progress this week (and every week) is slow, it is steady and moving in the right direction.  At this point the clock is ticking, but I have plenty of time to carry out thoughtful and thorough research.

Something new

One of the coolest parts of studying is working with and around other students.  By no means am I an expert on my subject area, but I am starting to be quite familiar with the concepts, papers, people and methods that are central to my work.  Today I spent most of the morning discussing ideas and troubleshooting another student's experimental set-up and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to explore about a different field.  While there was some overlap between this student's project and research I've done in the past I walked away having genuinely learn something new.  Also, revisiting some ideas from my past that I hadn't given much thought to over the past couple years illustrated how my understanding of general principles has changed (I hope improved) over time.

Later in the day I focused on the programming from yesterday.  I finished the day discussing with my supervisor, for an hour, a grant application that is in the early stages of development.

Catch-up

As I mentioned yesterday, I am travelling through a rabbit hole of work with the goal of debugging my experiments.  Before I can focus on my experimental set-up, I am determined to improve the methods behind the scenes.  It's a mentally challenging job because even though you're making progress, in the back of your mind you know you're not even to the "important" or "hard" work. 

That said, today was a fun day and although I still need to focus on the experiments and collecting data, I am very pleased with my progress today.  So what kind of work was it?  Programming.  Pure code.  Specifically Python code on two levels, a user interface (using the PySide Python bindings for Qt development) and a back-end to give the UI functionality.  Additionally I worked on the code that sits on my instrument, which is currently compiled using through the Arduino IDE.

It's just me

As I mentioned yesterday, I have one of my new methods functioning in a minimum working example mode.  To start the day, I played with some parameters, however, the results were garbage.  As such I dove into my code and set-up.  Sure enough I found a couple pesky bugs in the system.  Now I am at a cross roads, I could either take my one working example and move on or I can get hung up with trying to sort out the details of my system.  My work to date shows that the methodology is sound and the physics "works".  It's only the engineering (in this case software) that prevents me from widely applying the technique as this time.  My simple example is enough for the paper draft I am working on, but do I want to spend time working on the "bigger" picture.  Well not only do I want to have a little look at my code, to see if I can sort out this issues now, but I've also taken another step backwards by re-working my interface software that I need to debug the method programming.  So in typical fashion I am taking on extra work (moving backwards) when I am being encouraged to move along.  To be fair, I've given myself a limit of a couple days to indulge my interest, before I force myself to patch things up and move on for the time being.

Ramping back up

Today was a great day in the lab, although being my first day back after a short break I was moving a bit slow.  That in mind I did continue running experiments from last week and I collected a data set which could be used for publication.  Right now I am just interested in demonstrating the proof of concept for a new method so the exact parameters are not as important as illustrating the technique.  Now that I have a minimum working example, I'll play around tomorrow for my own benefit, but then I hope to move on to other experiments.

As I said, I was a little slow to get into work today, so tomorrow I hope to hit the ground running first thing.

Impromptu

On a whim I took the morning off of work.  Mondays are always short due to volunteering in the afternoon, so I decided to just take the whole day.  Actually for months now my wife and I have talked about working from home or just taking Monday mornings off, but in the past my schedule never allowed for such a luxury.  We'll have to see if the trend continues.

By the way, the day was wonderful, but due to a guilty conscience, I had to compromise with a "2" for today's rating.