Ubuntu Blog

No, I am not in Iraq December 5, 2006

Indeed, there have been rumours that I have been sent to Iraq in a comment posted on this blog, but that is not true.

The past two months were spent trying to meet deadlines.

I failed. Now the hill is the same but the climb is steeper. I am talking about my Ph.D. of course. Signing up for a Ph.D. is a gamble of sorts, with many variables. The odds are stacked against me, and it all came to head on Friday. Friday being the deadline for submitting the intent to graduate form. I haven’t submitted it, which means I won’t be graduating next semester. Needless to say I was feeling beat on Friday. Now I am feeling much better, in a Nietzsche-esque fashion. Bring it on, I’ll take it 🙂

To get back to Ubuntu – you might have noticed the paucity of the regular tips that I used to post around here. My work in the recent past has forced me to use Windows, in order to use a vendor tool that works only with Windows. So that’s where I’ve been hanging out. I haven’t been triaging bugs, or posting to the fridge either.

I had put everything else on hold, and dedicated myself to the most important task at hand. That did not work so great. There is no quantitative (or qualitative?) way to measure my performance when I:

• a) do only One Thing as opposed to
• b) when I dedicate myself to A Few Things

I have been thinking that there has to be a few things you do that reward you in the short term to keep you happy and satisfied with life in general. When you are happy, you might do a better job at everything, not just the few things that give you satisfaction. All theories, I know.

Another reason why I stopped blogging here was because in the beginning, I had decided that I would not be a regurgitator of well-known facts or news. As the standards rose, there was very little that passed the filter. I wouldn’t have written this post, but today, over coffee, I decided to resume writing here, and to get over the block, decided to write my mind. To all the readers who have found this blog useful, or read it regularly and write me encouraging comments — Thank you.