Work update

It’s been a while since I posted anything resembling an update on the state of my work (if I’ve ever in fact done so) so here goes.

Things have recently been going very well. I managed to get my code all working and running some time ago which had the wonderful consequence that I could move on from debugging to something a little more interesting. Plots. There is certainly still some debugging going on as I continue to make changes to the code in order to allow me to look at various other things but it’s nice to be able to feel like I’m actually moving forward rather than just banging my head against the wall which is very much the position I was in for pretty much the entire first half of the year.

I’m also having weekly meetings with my adviser Jim and with a post-doc Deb (short for Debabrata), which are useful for several reasons. First of all it’s good to have a weekly deadline to meet. I have to prepare some plots and be able to say what I’ve done or haven’t done and so on. It’s also good to have some people to bounce ideas off, of course. A major problem in my work has been having to work more or less by myself all this time. It will be very useful having Deb working on these things as well just so that I can go talk to him when I’m frustrated with code or root or some other thing as well as to talk about the actual physics. This may be particularly important since I suspect Jim is likely to be very busy now that he’s taking over as director of the lab. He is going to try to be around a fair bit but I think that his responsibilities may end up taking a fair bit of his time. I guess we’ll see how things work out.

I also talked to Jim about whether I should be thinking about beginning to write some of my thesis now just so I’m not putting that off forever. It would probably be a good idea, in part because I haven’t really thought about physics in a really long time; high voltage systems and coding don’t really count. However, at the moment things are going very well with the actual data analysis and so I think I’m going to continue with that until it starts to slow down. Then I’ll do a literature search and start trying to remember the physics behind what I’m supposedly studying. And then I may start writing the introduction for this thesis.

So for now, things are look pretty good and like they’re coming along pretty nicely.

Up next, an update on where things stand with gaming… a much more interesting topic.