soooo tired. I’m excited about all my classes and projects. And my schedule looks like it will work.

Until the notices for seminars and meeting job candidates start rolling in. And the extra work to keep nursing our less and less likely econ paper along. Then I start wondering how I will get enough work hours, let alone enough downtime. Cross your fingers for quick hiring decisions from both depts!

Off to go make bread and consider reading more functional analysis. (Also: I think I love both my Functional Analysis and Bayesian books. mmm. readable texts.)

“3. Within six months of successful completion of the written exam and/or oral follow-up, the student must give an oral research proposal before the advisory committee. The purpose of this presentation is to determine the feasibility of the student’s proposed thesis topic. The research proposal is open to the public and must be advertised at least two weeks prior to the presentation. The student will be provided a detailed summary of the committee’s assessment and recommendations. At the discretion of the advisory committee, a student may be asked to give a subsequent oral proposal at a later date.” – graduate handbook

SIX MONTHS. I had a faint scary memory of six WEEKS. Six months is incredibly doable. Comps in March – I can definitely have a proposal together by Sept.

WOOT!

and then at least my geeky schedule won’t be self-imposed.

I’m down to the last day of notes from EDA – then it’s time to make sure I can still do all the problems from the homeworks and tests. The math stat problems I’ve been doing have been going surprisingly smoothly. There’s one chapter where I definitely need to bone up on the theorems, and a couple of tricky standard problems I need to memorize the tricks from, but overall I have the warm feeling of having actually learned the subject.

Researchwise I’ve got some nice simulation code set up and figured out how to run it on the server. And a list of papers to collect and read. But first I need to dig into my algorithms and see why they’re performing so badly

It looks like I’m going to be entering my first judo tournament next weekend. It’s surprisingly pricey, but eh – it’s at my local club so I couldn’t ask for a less scary first tournament.

Things you need:

• XO laptop!
• >= 2GB SD Card (I used a 16 GB card from Transcend – no issues.)
• >= 300MB USB stick
• a bittorrent client

1. Get a Developer Key – this takes at least a day (for no apparent reason) so do it first.
2. Get the Sugar install totally up to date. Including the applications. I tried to not do the apps first time around and I suspect this is why I was having some necessary unix commands not found. This totally doesn’t work if sfdisk is hiding.  If you accidentally close the “update apps” bar on startup, it’s in the new Sugar control panel (one of the options under your center icon.)
3. Follow the directions. (This includes downloading a torrent of the starter ubuntu files.) If things go pear shaped in the middle, rebooting and starting over seemed to work ok for me. I got as far as “Make the partition table” and had to start over because the silly thing wouldn’t unmount the SD card. It was scary, but it did work out ok.

The directions on the forum are really good. I think the only thing that killed me was the lack of explanation that you really need to update Sugar first. (They hint that part of this is getting the SD support up to date, which seems pretty important.)
 

Presents and food and hanging out together all day. Perfect!

Then my tummy tried to kill me for a day. Evil tummy. Evil tummy kept me from the Christmas ham. Evil.

Uhm. But I ran simulations for research and only got a tiny bit behind on my study schedule.

So yeah, school’s been out for a week. I did NOTHING last weekend, and it was very nice.
Ok, I did find a thumbprint cookie recipe that I’m very happy with (still using that Solo raspberry filling for everything! Did not roll in nuts) They come out like a nice soft shortbread, and the filling jazzes them up a bit. Weird internet tip – use a (closed) chapstick to create the dents.

I should be working on flowcharts to send my advisor (first round of results with known algorithms not performing as well as expected) flowcharts are not nearly as fast to make as she had implied and I had hoped.

I’ve also started studying for my comps, which while kind of overwhelmingly big, is the same kind of structured studying I’ve been doing for the last few years for prelims, so at least I know the drill.

We have a tree, we have stockings, I made gingerbread and the above mentioned thumbprints, and even found holiday stations on Pandora to listen to while wrapping presents. Christmas is not stressing me out too much for a change.

Does anyone have any traditional Christmas baking ideas?

1. Add one tiny section to my Cont. Modeling writeup
2. Revise/Edit my econ paper (Revise is so much easier than write, isn’t it?)
3. Do .. stuff for my research so I have something to say when I talk to KK next week

Somehow, it feels like not that much.

My econ pres was yesterday, and I’m so glad it’s over and I didn’t have an extra weekend to fret about it.

I seem to be pretty non-sick during the day, but as soon as I lay down, the evil snot invades the sinuses. Nyquil keeps it at bay, but only for ~ 4 hour blocks, so I have to get up at 3 am and take more Nyquil.
I’ve now missed 2 full weeks of judo.

Yesterday was our first real snow, and therefore the first snow shoveling. I survived that, so I guess I’m not doing so bad.

I just wanted to cheer about having completed the first draft of my econ paper.

I’ve been sick since last Sunday. Blech.

New recipes for this Thanksgiving:

Soft Ginger Cookies – switch margarine for butter.

Much Fancier than Stovetop Stuffing – made a half recipe. Started with the sausage and used its fat and only small amounts of butter to do the rest of the sauteing.

Really happy with how both of them came out.

I think I’ll finish my coffee before I take Alkaseltzer.

Thanksgiving/Fall Break week
“dead” week (I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard them say that here.)
finals week

While I still have plenty that needs to get done, at least I know what I’m down to.

Today (and at least one day next week) it’s time to do simulations for my research. Now that I know that they’re meant to be simulations, this piece makes way more sense!

But the biggie is my econ paper/presentation. The paper is maybe 1/3 done, but I haven’t started the presentation – and I present one week from Thanksgiving, so I don’t get that extra weekend. Hopefully I can reuse a lot of my midsemester presentation and the tables for the paper.

There’s one last class for Continuous Modeling – and I told the teacher I’d make her a list of places I’ve seen concepts from it already (2 direct references (3 if you could a scifi novel) and 2 “this was a great refresher for”s so far) which I’d like to do sooner rather than later so I don’t forget.

The first pie of the season happened last Saturday. It was a Hypocrite Pie, which N had been talking up. I want “plain” apple for Thanksgiving, so I thought I’d start with that one. We tried draining the apples, but they still overpowered the custard and rose to the top. I’m not sure if I’m making it right, but it’s consistently yummy. (and first pie crust of the season came out great!)