Moving on

Today I was able to finish all my drawings that I've been working on the past couple weeks.  It's wonderful to have this job done and now it's time to move on to other tasks.  After finishing the prints around midday I spent some time with our lab technician because it was his last day and some of his responsibilities (specifically keeping our group's web content update) have fallen to me.  At the tail end of the day I spent time setting up my thesis files and directories as my first step towards starting finishing my dissertation.

Flurry of activity

Today was full of lots of small jobs.  And unfortunately I took them as they came and did my best to keep my head above water.  I did get a lot of work done, but the method is not sustainable (especially after the talk yesterday about time management).

Over the course of the day I ran another long time drift experiment.  In addition, I shipped out some glass tubing to a shop in town that will cut and grind these to length and continued cleaning up my stack of blue prints.  In the afternoon I spent a couple hours on a grant proposal both alone and in discussion with my supervisor.

More of the same

Today I continued with my work from yesterday.  Specifically I looked at the data collected during my recent long time drift experiment where I was looking at the stability of an instrument.  The results are very interesting and have spurred me on to other meaningful and necessary tasks.  At the end of the day I attended another postgraduate seminar, this one was on time and task management.  The talk was well put together, thought provoking and I even came away with a couple practical tip I'll look into on the weekend.

Various things

Today I started experiments to look at the long time stability of certain measurements.  It's easy to set-up the instrument and start collecting data, but then it's a long acquisition.  In the mean time I looked in detail at my results from last week.  Figuring what information is present and what I need to follow up on.  I spent a short amount of time in SolidWorks updating parts and prints.  Also I made contact with a shop outside of the school that I'll use for some glass work.  At the end of the day I attended another postgraduate seminar in our school (last week's "How to Find a Post-Doc Position" was in the same series).  This talk was given by my supervisor and discussed the typesetting tool LaTeX which I have been using for the past three years, but I still wanted to attend to pick-up on some of the less technical aspects (history, pros, cons, etc.).

Good start

Today was a great start to the week.  I started the morning by discussing my data from last week with my supervisor.  I was able to bring him up to speed and share my plans for future work.  Being on the same page we had a nice discussion and we're on the same page for moving forward.  Afterwards I took down my experiment from last week, cleaned the cell and loaded a new sample as part of preparations for tomorrow.  This was all I finished in the morning and in the afternoon I was off campus to volunteer.

Week in advace: 25-31 January

This week I need to look at the data from my recent experiments.  From a quick look last Saturday I have some a couple things I'd like to look into with my techniques.  I was trying a new type of measurement and there might be some improvements I can make to the process.  From my perspective my thesis is all about developing new methods and ironing out any wrinkles is certainly part of the process. Also this week I will finish my prints and finish sourcing material for my latest parts.

Week in review: 18-24 January

After a late night in the lab yesterday, I went back in this afternoon to run another experiment.  In the end I was able to run a successful experiment.  This was one of my goals for the week and I am pleased to tick this off the list.  The second job this week was to finish a suite of blueprints.  I still need to go back through the prints to clean up tolerances but most of the parts are now laid out.  I probably need another day to a day and a half to finish this job, but for the most part this is all desk work.  The design has been refined with a number of sets of eyes on it, including our machine shop, so I am happy to move forward once we have the material.