It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

They came from all sides with tricky questions, but I managed to answer most of them.
I did fuck-up on some VERY basic questions, which everyone ought to know.
I passed I passed.

Moving on to the next (self imposed) challenge.

After the exam I met up with Bro and we discussed the wretched state of the education system. As usual I started to theorize about possible projects I could undertake to help the situation. It is clear that Universities are becoming more and more like CEGEPS where you are taught practical skills for the workplace. That is no good. Where it the real eduction? Can you get a real eduction from a website? Part of the problem of mass-education is that it is tough to test people’s skills. How easy is it to memorize some words and pass a multiple choice exam? How many TAs does it take to read essay-style questions for a 300 person class? The whole paradigm shift from master-apprentice to education_provider-paying_customer for education is very weird…

At some point Bro interrupted me and told me that I had three separate ideas and should not mix them all into one, but rather choose one of the below and make it into a solid project:

1. Self Quiz: A system where you receive rich questions that are meant to judge whether you know something or not. How do you get quality questions? How do you test people’s knowledge at a non-superficial level? Can you test people’s aptitude for synthesis?
2. University overlay: An online community which mirrors the progress of your Bachelors degree. Requires an @mail.mcgill.ca address to register. The website does not have educational content that tells you what to think. Rather, in keeping with the Socratic method, it only poses questions. If you are a 2nd year student you should know this and that. If you are a MSc student you should know these things. Think of taking everything that is common to all university curricula and and putting it on the web so students can guide their studies.
3. McGill GAME: An online game where you earn credits for reading books. You get experience points, pass levels and achieve virtual titles such as “scholar”, “доцент” and “learned person”.

He is right…. just cause my brain mixes things well doesn’t mean they mix well in reality.

Cheque cet toune malade:

Feeling good. Large coffee, croissants and a brownie waiting for me.
Last two hours of revision and then … quiz time !

No.
You only need to be stressed if you are not on top of your game.
I own this academic world. Sure I don’t know it all, sure I don’t even know half of it, but at the age of 27 I know what I have and what I don’t have.

We’ll see how it goes down tomorrow… right now with 2 beers and 200ml of wine in me — I think it is going to be all right

https://home.mcgill.ca/gps/students/services/businesscards/

The sunshine is out and the air is so crisp outside. No humidity and a nice strong breeze that keeps you from overheating.
Walking around campus with my shoulders straight and looking to do some practical work done today before it is time to go to wing chun.

How much can I get done in 2h?
And a few hours tonight?
Tomorrow?

I feel good today. This weekend I made some right choices: got up early for wing chun, chillen in the sun at parc du Portugal, swimming pool with Jianing, tower party, after party with guitarists, relaxing rainy sleep, more swimming pool and Sunday relaxation.

Good reset from the brain hum and over-rationalization that was going on in my head. What is the point of analyzing everything? Fuck thought and planning. We do the intuitive thing now ;)

Next on the menu is this:

Schedule of the exam:
Thursday, August 27, Room 320
1. 9:00-9:40 Xi Chen
2. 9:45-10:25 Barthelemy Dagenais
3. 10:35-11:15 Christopher Dragert
4. 11:20-12:00 Jorda Frank
5. 2:00-2:40 Glenn Hickey
6. 2:45-3:25 James Wanger
7. 3:35-4:15 Nurudeen Lameed
8. 4:20-5:00 Ladan Mahabadi

Friday, August 28, Room 320
9. 9:00-9:40, John Paul Lobos
10. 9:45-10:25 Anqi Xu
11. 10:35-11:15 Raphael Mannadiar
12. 11:20-12:00 Amir Hossein Rabbani
13. 2:00-2:40 Amin Ranjbar
14. 2:45-3:25 Ivan Savov
15. 3:35-4:15 Omar Fawzi

The exam committee is formed by 4 PhD committee members and the supervisor(s).
Each committee member has about 6 minutes for questioning in the 1st round
(co-supervisors share 6 minutes). Further questions are asked in the 2nd round.

Good luck,
Chair of the PhD Committee

Guess it is time to hit the book(s) !

No seriously google chrome sucks dicks. When it first came out it had the memory signature of an anemic mosquito. Finally I had a solution to evil Firefox which was taking up all my RAM. Now though chrome is doing the same thing!

It is gmail’s fault really — what kind of web-app requires 75M of RAM?

I know what the solution is — buy a new laptop ;) (or get more than 368MB of RAM)

One of the applications of network coding is p2p file distribution. Microsoft has a project called Avalanche that is supposed to be very good at that… so good that it is even better than bit-torrent. Of course Bram Cohen doesn’t think so and he points out that all they have to show for their work is some simulated tests.

I don’t know. Certainly there are problems with avalanche right now, but I like the idea of network coding being used for file sharing. There are some people even thinking about live streaming using network coding.

We have to just wait and see what happens in that segment of the market ;)

The last couple of days I haven’t been very productive. I have read enough about network coding to start the literature review, but I feel like the knowledge isn’t all well connected yet and settled inside my head. So long as I feel that, it will be difficult to sit down and produce 12 pages of literature review.

This is not good because time is running out and if I don’t bouge mon cul the whole vacation idea will evaporate. No seriously…

What is bugging me the most is that the procrastination impulses are so obvious and powerful. Sometimes I can manage my digressions and my lack of motivation — you force yourself to focus and then it works. But these days it isn’t happening like that. As if opening the text editor to actually write something blocks my thinking and I think about what else I can do.

This got me thinking about a way to do personal time management. Suppose you had a number of tasks to do which you can organize into work flows. The idea is that as soon as you don’t feel like working on something, you can switch to another thread and keep doing useful stuff instead of going on the internet and reading other people’s bullshit ideas.

What is important is to keep the number of threads finite (like 3-4 per month). This ensures you have enough positive feedback of accomplishment from each thread and also there is a chance that you will finish the work.

The key is variety. You need to have a boring administrative tasks thread and a advanced science thread and a learning new stuff thread and maybe a creative writing thread?
Well I can tell you I need to work on it because otherwise I start to go all over the place…. and if I know one thing is that we have finite amount of energy which we need to channel into something tangible.

Now open TeXnicCenter and get to it!

I like my comments more like:
# this is a comment
and % this is another one

I modified a bit the comment plugin for this purpose.