4 hours and a half and 1.5 litres of tea later I finally managed to go through the last 9 reports I had left to mark. It is over!!
(after 120 of them I can say I will not miss them… š )
Recent Posts
Spring is getting here!…
Indeed it is, even though in a windy and overcast day like today it seems hard to visualise that. And with Spring we have the unavoidable Spring cleans, it is also a good time to perform a situation check on how things are going and try to improve them if necessary.
Last time Iāve written a āproperā (ie, long) post was basically at the end of my Christmas holidays (that was back in January…). Since then the days have been getting progressively longer and milder (I cannot use the word āwarmā, that one is reserved to Portuguese weather!) and the term is basically finishing! Iāve finished my lab classes, even though I still have a sizeable pile of lab reports to mark š .
My lab work has been progressing well, I now have good results to communicate, with a couple of publications being prepared at the moment. Thesis-wise things have been stationary as Iāve been finding it difficult to juggle lab work+classes+marking+a bit of personal time, adding anything else to that mix would blow things up, I guess.
And with regards to that ābit of personal timeā, Iāve been trying to make the most of the outdoor conditions, because even if it is not āwarmā (but mild) one can still enjoy oneself and do some nice things. Iāve been doing a lot of sculling lately (as it was probably evident from some pictures Iāve posted here not too long ago…), having finally sorted out the lightweight sculling single which was being refurbished before I left for my Christmas break (and what a great boat it is!…).
I also managed to convince some of my lab colleagues to join me in a 10k race which will be taking place in Whitstable over the May bank holiday. Given that two of them were not regularly doing sports we had to take it really easy in the beginning, but weāve already managed to do 10k in ~1h with no stops, hence it is starting to look good!
In February we also had a nice day trip to Belgium. While the weather wasnāt as spectacular as the same time in the previous year when we went down to Boulogne-sur-Mer it was still decent enough to allow us to visit Brugges and buy a lot of fantastic Belgium beer!
And now Iām looking forward to a couple of days at home. The weather forecast looks very promising – but to be honest anything usual for Porto at this time of the year would be better than what Iām currently looking at outside my window – the sky is absolutely white, the trees are moving like crazy and one just does not want to leave the house at all (I donāt intend to do it… and I have plenty of things to keep me busy here anyway!)
OK, breakās over. Letās get back to work!…
The volcano!
I got a new baking mould the other day – quite handy as it is perfectly circular (hence easier to clean than my other one which has a column in the middle). The cake grew in an interesting shape, though!
Today I was sculling with drag setting 10 on my boat!
Battling the current whilst heading upstream back to the boathouse I came across a few streams of vegetation which got caught in the fin of my boat. It looks insignificant but it does create a big wash behind it – and big wash = large drag. š
In the summer it is going to be worse as the river level will drop quite significantly…
(and yes, the boat needs new tape round the edges. Considering it was green (literally) after almost 2 years outside it is not faring too badly anyway!)
On trail mixes…
This is a remnant of my trip to America last October – I’ve been having this quite regularly but it is still far from empty! This particular mix (spicy tex mex) was one of the most “civilised” ones, with mostly nuts and seeds – but I have seen similarly sized jars with everything including sweets and MM’s in it! For someone who is only used to see seeds, dry fruit and eventually some sugared bits of fruit in it that was a bit of a revelation š
All up-to-date now!
This weekend I finally updated my laptop to Fedora 21. Initially I was thinking about doing a complete clean install but ultimately the usual lethal combination of laziness and too much to do forced me into upgrading it directly using fedup. Well, it did what it had to do (upgrading about 3500 packages, took it about an hour or so including the downloads on the internet connection I have at home) and it all went smoothly without any dramas.
The only annoyance I found (but I had seen it before when I did the clean install of F21 on the Dell) was that Nautilus didn’t have a mimetype association with .lyx files (hence LyX would not even appear on the “Open With…” list, even though I could launch it from the application list). Editing ~/.config/mimeapps.list sorted the problem quickly, though. š
Speed-wise it is more or less the same thing as before (I can’t expect any miracles out of a 2010 Core 2 Duo laptop running on an Intel graphics card, right? š ), but GNOME is definitely more stable. And some of the things that were giving me a lot of grief before, such as file sharing and navigating through Windows shares are working seamlessly (I even managed to stream content directly to my Raspberry Pi using rygel without having to configure it (other than activating the “Media Share” option in gnome-shell settings). Brilliant work!
Not to mention the updated apps – I am very happy with the latest version of Inkscape, which includes snapping corners and measuring tools! And the inclusion of California, the official GNOME Shell calendar, in the main repositories was also great (I’m getting a bit fed up of the sluggishness of Evolution when it comes to the rest of the PIM apps – e-mail is mostly fine, not to mention it being the only Linux client which can deal with my university’s Exchange server!…).
Well done guys, things are looking great for GNOME! (and Fedora, too…)
I “fixed” the computer!
I got a new toy quite recently – a (new-ish, for my standards) Dell workstation which will allow me to leave the ThinkPad at home! (at 2-2.5 kg it is still a bit of a heavy beast, especially when I’m already carrying lunch+gym gear on a heavyish (~20 kg) commuter bike!)
All was not well, though. Even though it came with no operating system it still featured the horrid “Designed for Windows Vista” sticker on its pretty front. No more, though – it has been replaced with a “Powered by Fedora Linux” one!
(I should definitely print it in colour, though)
Installed Fedora 21 with the latest GNOME and it is running very smoothly (even with only 2 GB of RAM – 4 more on the way!). One of the major grudges I was having was related to connecting to Windows shares on the network (both the central School’s server and other workstations on the network) – the latest version actually works properly! I can see all the file servers directly from Nautilus, and the whole experience seems a lot more enjoyable, now.
I now need to do the same on my laptop… if only I could get some time to do it, though! š
So, yeah…
… I’m back in the island. (I definitely should commit myself to improve the diversity of my blog post titles! š ) Actually, I’ve been back for a while now (couple of weeks) but things have been hectic (predictably…) and sitting here for 10 mins writing a blog post requires the right state of mind (I’m ditching my 10k-erg session for this, BTW… š ).
Definitely missing Porto and everybody there, even though I have already bought my Easter flights and I should be back in a couple of months. It gets better as time goes by, but it always feels like I’m leaving everything there in “suspended animation” from my part, only to realise whenever I return that it wasn’t the case at all.
Anyway, enough with the sentimentalisms – progress, moving on. I finally finished my first batch of ~60-70 lab reports I had to mark (great Xmas present, I should say), went furtherĀ regarding a few publications and experimental work we’ve been doing but I am no closer with regards to knowing what I want to do next. (well, I need to finishĀ my PhD dissertation, but I knew that already š )
We had snow for a morning here – hooray! I’m still mesmerised with the sight of falling snow (being a southerner I had never seen snow falling until I came to the UK – in Porto it snows every 20-odd years or so), and the ground looked so white and pristine afterwards. Unfortunately the weather is still too warm (tell that to the people back home! š ) for the snow to settle, and by the time I went home there was no more of it.
Apart from that, things have been quiet, just a succession of days where work is followed by a lovely bike commute homeĀ (even with these cold, dark days!). After spending 3 weeks home with my family I find it quite relaxing to have my own sorting out to do and my own meals to prepare – I would have found the sheer thought of that absolutely daunting three years ago!
Right, all done for now. Let’s see if I will be able to update this more frequently over the coming weeks, probably with smaller (and less introspective) posts. Although this has been one of those ‘politician-style’ promises…
S Silvestre do Porto 2014!
And it is done, yet another S Silvestre! This year I wasĀ quite fortunate to have been able to train with the guys from my home club for a week and a half before the actual race, which was good fun (and we have a lot of big climbs on the banks of the river to practise our hill running!).
I ended up with pretty much the same time as last year (around 43:30 for 10k) which wasn’t stellar, and to be absolutely honest I think I was overly conservative with my effort – the first climb went on OK, but after it I let myself fall behind a bit. Furthermore, running downhillĀ is not one of my best skills, hence I kept being overtaken there š
Still, it was a nice race to finish the year properly, with the bonus of a post-race meal at our local Pizza Hut – featuring an obscene amount of pizza which made the race feel like piece of cake compared to finishing that very last slice!
Wrapping up the year!…
So, here we are, 2014 almost over (indeed it is 2015 already in some parts of the globe!) and I have yet to write my year wrapping-up post in here. Since I have better things to do than to be here on the computer let’s get started! š
2014 was good to me, broadly speaking – looking back, I had some fun, visited a few places, ran a few races, and progressed in my work. Definitely not a bad year, and I dare say it might have been one of the quietest and most relaxed I’ve had so far (and yes, I am a PhD student, I should be stressed!). I reckon this is the calm before the storm… as 2015 creeps in, I can already see this is going to be a year of decisions – I have to start looking beyond my thesis and my PhD as I’m due to submit my thesis at the end of this coming year, and I have to write the aforementioned thesis, too.
Where am I going to go? What am I going to be working on, 1 1/2 years from now? Those are very legitimate and interesting questions, to which I have no answer at the moment, unfortunately. I’m hoping that by this coming Summer I already have some of the answers.
SoĀ yes, 2014 was a piece of cake compared to what is coming!… š To sum it up, a terrific 2015 to all of my readers, may this coming year bring you plenty of great accomplishments!
Page 5 of 27