Weekly Status Update #4: Ook! Ook?

It’s about that time of the week again: weekly status update time! I’m starting to look forward to writing these status updates now and already get started on them quite early in the week. Good times! In this round:  programming sucks (also for people that are not me), goodbyes, feeling loved, simplification, bullet journals and Sigh.

• This past week I spent a lot of time implementing a complex (for me anyway) graph matching algorithm. I am not the type of person that enjoys programming just for the fuck of it (I’ve decided f-bombs are ok) as a hobby. No matter how hard I wish I was, it is just not enjoyable for me and I see it more as a necessary evil. A means to an end and not an end in itself. Luckily so far I’ve mainly had the pleasure of single-player programming on my own prototypes. I’ve never given much thought to what it would be like to work as a programmer in bigger software projects used in real life, but this article convinced me that I don’t want to find out: Programming Sucks! And I quote:

This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans – Peter Welch

• It feels a bit like I’ve said goodbye to awesome people that used to work in our research group a bit too often lately. A PhD contract here ‘only’ lasts four years, a post-doc even shorter than that and since most don’t seem to want to stay in academia, leaving the group is not  like some exotic rare event. Still, it is painful to say goodbye and I can only hope for an influx of new cool people. It also sucks to be one of ‘the elders’ by now. In our whole group, there are only two people that have been here longer than me.
• It’s not all bad… For instance: last week in the EWI elevator, I was really feeling loved. No, it’s not like that! A very kind person I didn’t meet before thanked me for my my tutorial on how to remote Desktop.  That’s right, someone read it and it was useful to him! This is really significant to me, because if one of my blog posts ends up helping only one person, it is already well worth it for me.
• So I tried taking my own advice of my presentation last week (that really felt like talking about a weird personal fetish to your coworkers btw) and not invest so much time in different systems and techniques at the cost of productivity. I’ve been gradually reducing the amount of productivity systems and tools I use daily. First up, I went to the Inn with my HabitRPG character (I didn’t want to delete my character, but I’m not going back unless it turns out it was fulfilling some purpose my other systems can’t manage). I got the best armor and all pets (except quest ones) and logging in to check off tasks and dailies was beginning to feel like a chore to me.

  

  Next squeeky wheel to get the kick was my 3-Minute Journal. Seriously, I already have a journal in Evernote… I am pretty sure my life isn’t so extravagant it needs two journals to fully encompass my rich daily life experiences 😉

• Trying out new productivity systems is like crack to me though, so when I found out about Bullet Journal, I really wanted to try it. You know what? I won’t! I did adjust my lab journal a bit to be more bullet journal-style and that will have to be enough.  Right, so my three tasks a day are now checkboxes, events are bullet points and notes are * items. I’ll just have to deal with it.

That’s about it for this week, I hope you had a nice one too and I’ll leave you with this inspirational piece of art. Sigh is an avant-garde metal band all the way from Japan. Not only is their latest album insanely awesome, but the beautiful lady on saxophone/vocals, Dr. Mikannibal, also has a PhD in Physics!