Tired, sick?

It was a great day and my work is progressing, but I worry I might be getting sick.  Not much else to say at the moment.  Time for rest and hopefully I'll be able to carry on tomorrow.

Code

Today was a solid day of programming as I worked to up date my user interface software.  I am making solid progress and hope to finish up in the next day or so.  I also received my latest batch of parts back from the machine shop.  Not much else to say.  Still making progress, still moving forward.

Positive energy

I am feeling a certain buzz from today as I continue to make progress at school.  First up, I've finished updating a crucial section of the hardware documentation, next I wrapped up helping another student prepare for his upcoming defense, I've moved on to a new programming task and overall I feel very positive about my current situation.

Things are coming together nicely for my trip overseas and I can see how I'll be able to wrap up my lab work over the next month.  Exciting times!

How many days?

Back to work this morning... to start my day I took care of the backlog of emails, paperwork and arrangements for my conference trip in August.  Later in the day I spent time preparing bits and pieces for my trip later this month (making cables, 3d printing parts, etc).  I also spent a touch of time adding to my documentation files.  I ended the day helping another student who is finishing their work in advance of his PhD exam next week.

Looking at the calendar, I have just over 10 days before I head off overseas again.  Things are looking good, but the days are flying.  I think it'll be a long weekend in the lab, but we'll see how things work out.

Day away

With school closed due to a public holiday, I took the day off.  Back to work tomorrow...

Week in advance: 31 May-6 June

Continuing on from yesterday's "cliff-hanger" of a post where I purposed two options, I've decided on a third choice.  I will continue with my writing/documentation of my hardware and software, but I'll also continue to use and test my instruments and programming.  In two weeks when I head overseas again not only do I want others to know how to use these devices (i.e. have a proper user's manual), but I also want the hardware to work.  The next two weeks and my time in Montana will most likely be the end of experimental work portion of my PhD.  This notion works well with my expectation to submit my thesis at the end of September.  However, I need to shake out any new or remaining bugs so that my time abroad can go smoothly.

In the coming week I will simultaneous tackle small pieces of the help documents while setting up and running tests with the actual hardware.

Week in review: 24-30 May

This week has not gone as expected.  This week I exposed a mountain of work that I, previously, had greatly underestimated.  Last Sunday I stated my goal was to move on from my current programming tasks by today, but even with an extra afternoon today, I am still far from completing this task.  It's my own fault to find myself in my current situation and main for one reason, poor planning.  Making things up as you go along is bad news, especially when you're months from submitting you PhD thesis.  The problem came when I desired to update my documentation for the communication protocol I use for controlling my custom built hardware.  This isn't a bad idea as I frequently refer to my previous notes and I had recently made some significant changes.  Also, next month I'll be headed overseas to a lab where I plan to hand off copies of my instruments to other researchers.  For their benefit, decent documentation is welcome.  After cleaning up this portion of my user manual, I got a wild idea to update all my documentation.  This is a good idea, because it's been nearly a year since I wrote the original documents and much has changed, however, this is a bad idea, because it's been nearly a year since I wrote the original documents and much has changed.  At this point, I have the option to continue with my task, which will make it easier for other to reproduce my work and take advantage of the hardware I've developed.  Or I can fall back to preparing/writing my thesis.