it's been two weeks on the job and I'm already feeling great about it. my research is, as my current favourite description puts it, "slightly more intelligent than pure randomness" race condition detection on kernels, being implemented as a simics module, hopefully to be used in 410. the infrastructure paralysis that i was most worried about has ( Read more... )

two springs ago, i learned the value of keeping a to-do list to stay on top of my responsibilities. until i started keeping my homeworks and chores in a text file (incidentally, one that prints every time i open a new terminal), i always had to wrack my memory to make sure i wasn't, say, forgetting anything i had to do that day. this works great if ( Read more... )

a central tenet of the good work habits i tried to develop over last year is that you must keep your mental workspace clean in order to make progress on anything that matters. this means not letting little chores bounce around undone in your head while trying to focus - get them done first, or failing that, write them down. but also in the fall i ( Read more... )

just in case i secretly didn't believe the phenomenon where you're worse at keeping up with work when there's less of it, it's come to test my mettle in person.

the problem is basically that i think i'm in control of the stuff i have to do (and so don't need to do it right now), but i'm not on top of it (and so i'm not allowed to do the gratifying ( Read more... )

desired weekday morning routine ( Read more... )

the big disadvantage of being a pure idealist is that it leaves you with no facilities for bailing on something when it turns out to need a superhuman amount of effort.

and sometimes there are also things that you could follow through on, but it would leave you much happier to save your breath and take a more practical shortcut. it's interesting, ( Read more... )

last year ended with me feeling like my mind was messy and cluttered all the time (as well as my chores and work), so i resolved to fix it. this has been a major success, mostly. i got way better at staying on top of work and chores, and learned how to figure out various little tricks for making it easier to make myself do things that i want to do.

( Read more... )

well, I am done with all the requirements of cmu's SCS BS program. just like everything else for the past few months, I still haven't felt the big "I'm done", thanks both to the couple other things I have left for this break and also to the fact that I'll still take classes part-time next semester. anyway, on to the traditional retrospective.

1. 21-373 ( Read more... )

i... can't do it, for some reason ( Read more... )

the first three weeks of class have flown by, and with them the various chores that i've been pretty good about doing to make myself feel at home. i'm not quite done yet, but i'm feeling settled in remarkably quickly. there's been a stricter routine than in past times which is really helping - determined adherence to the todo-list and a friends- ( Read more... )