Just a short post tonight.  Today, my friend Kshipra, who I've know for 9 years now both at Duke and Stanford, passed her PhD defense.  It was good to see her pass and I'm excited for what the future holds for her.  Since we started grad school at the same time, there's a part of me that thinks I should be finishing soon too.  Logically I know that systems PhDs take longer than theory ones (like Kshipra's), but still, the competitive side of me likes to think of things as races.  Turning off that competitive side of me is harder than I would like to admit.

Today was a pretty standard day and I'll make this short because I have a meeting with my advisor early tomorrow morning and it's already past 2am.  I managed to get into work at a reasonable hour to get some experiments running for a class project that I'm working on (trying to get our programming system to run in the cloud). I then messed around with numerical methods for a while.  Gave a brief presentation with in class about the status of our project.  Ended up having dinner with my friend Eric where we had a good conversation about what we want to do with our futures (we both started our PhDs at the same time and now work with the same advisor).  Even after talking to him, things still seem very fuzzy to me.  I spent the rest of the night working on numerics and finished the day implementing an iterative Jacobi solver while watching the movie Finding Neverland (a movie that happened across my mind after coming across something about the movie Hook last week that reminded me of something from my past that I don't want to get into here).  The movie was as good as I remembered, and even better my solver worked by the end.  I biked home in the dark and dropped the DVD for the movie in the mail, so Netflix can send me my next disk by Friday.  Got home at 2am and here I am.  Time to go to sleep again (I hope)...

Today was an interesting day, although not really.  I woke up rather late as usual and watched the end of the Indy 500.  I then went to work for a few hours and fixed a few bugs.  Around 3pm I made my weekly call home to let Mom and Dad know that I was alive, which then digressed into a conversation about what jobs I might consider taking and ultimately what lifestyle changes I might consider enacting post grad school to live a more "normal" life.  I'm still not convinced that that is the right answer.  I feel like I'm selling on my potential if I take a big corporate job rather than doing true science with my coding abilities.  I'll get into that more in a later post.

I went running for the first time in a few days.  Did a little 6 mile out and back trail in Portola Valley to the top of Alpine road.  I ran decently fast considering I haven't been running much.  It's always surprising how fast I can run on a trail when I just let me mind go.  I managed to scare a few hikers along the way who weren't anticipating a human body traveling around 10 mph to be approaching on a single track trail.  For some perverse reason, I get enjoyment out of that: knowing that I'm an unusual phenomenon on the trails of the world.

Upon arriving home I watched the Miami Heat destroy the Indiana Pacers in the third game of the NBA eastern conference finals, while cooking fish, rice, and steamed broccoli for dinner.  It was yummy but the game wasn't much for entertainment.  I biked back to work as the sun was setting.  I could feel the air warming up just a touch.  The war between summer and the cold waters of the Pacific was heating up.  Back at work I fixed a few more bugs, and then spent some time reading about numerical methods, trying to fill in the holes left in my undergrad degree in math.  Biking home at 1:30am, I was flying.  There was a waning moon on the rise, and the night was cool, all of which contributed to my speed.  Not a single car passed me.

Almost five years after I initially "finished" this blog when I arrived in California, I've learned many things about myself and the world around me.  In the hopes of dealing with a bunch of things that I've been ignoring I'm going to just start chronicling the mundane details of my day-to-day life in the hopes that some patterns might emerge.  We'll see what happens.

I haven't been sleeping well recently.  At night I can't fall asleep.  There's no conscious thoughts that are really causing it.  I'm not dwelling on any ideas, but my brain is still active well into the night.  It's unclear to me why.  When I wake up in the morning I feel tired.  As the cobwebs clear, eventually my brain gets enticed back into the world of engineering where the problems are always interesting and on my way I go.  The day passes rapidly.  As long as I have code to write, I'm never bored.  Time is constantly slipping through my fingers.  And then, without warning it's time to sleep again, and my brain just isn't ready.

Tonight for the first night in a long while I didn't code and just let my brain peruse the internet, which happened to drop me back here in my old blog.  I read the sad tale of Oscar Wilde (I'm reading The Picture of Dorian Grey (sleeplessness initiated before I started reading this in case you thought it might be the cause (note as a programmer I properly nest my parenthesis (and yet I hate lisp http://xkcd.com/297/ )))) and marveled at how much impact he had in such a short lifetime.  In the process I enjoyed listening to Random Access Memories, the new Daft Punk album released today.  I tried letting myself dream a little bit about where I might choose to work on the future.  It's fair to say that grad school is starting to drag upon my soul.  Not to say that I don't enjoy my project, but I'm ready to work on something new.  There's only so much complexity that, I at least, can maintain in my mind, and if all of that complexity is concentrated around ideas, the rest of my live divulges into simplicity.  We'll see what tomorrow brings.