Thursday Mumble

T'is been a while, hasn't it? Long week, longer weekend... so much to do. I've hardly had much time to myself to figure out social issues to comment on here any more. But anyway, here I am once more, and let's see what I have in store?

So by a series of unhappy coincidences, it turns out that there is a non-trivial number of people that I know who are leaving their respective PhD programmes. It's kind of a sad thing to see them go, partly because of the comradeship I had with them as fellow PhD students, partly because they all have that world-weary look about them when they conveyed their final decision to leave the programme. It's quite sad actually, to see people leaving with that ``I'm really sick of this shit'' look about them; sometimes it makes me second guess myself about the choices that I have made in life thus far. But really, at the end of the day, everyone has their own goals in life, and just because some folks have decided that the PhD programme isn't for them doesn't mean that it isn't for me---that kind of thinking is the recipe of disaster. I'm pretty sure that there is a psychological term relating to that line of thought, but I can't seem to recall it for the moment.

This semester has been progressing like a really bad roller coaster ride. Taking courses has never been much of a problem for me, but if we compound that with the need to actually be cognitively attuned to do research, I realised that my ways of maxing out abilities for the classes just don't work that well. There's a difference between doing what is necessary to pass a class and actually having to do deep thought---the first one can be done mostly in a semi-conscious way only because the material is well-structured, which facilitates good absorption, but the second one can only be done in a fully conscious manner. Maintaining higher order thinking abilities is of paramount importance just to survive the PhD programme's research component, and to do that, I cannot be stressed out nor can I be running on little sleep. Talk about a picky situation. But enough of the depressing stuff.

Recently I relented and finally forked out some money to get an iPod Classic (160GiB). No, I have not changed my stance of disliking iTunes immensely due to the way it bowdlerises the music to fit into the ``grand'' architecture of things and how it tries to take over your computer, but I must agree that the build quality of an Apple product is pretty good, though a tad pricey. So why the plonking down of hard cash for this device then? One word: Rockbox. I've been eyeing the Rockbox project for quite a while already, and have planned to get one of 'em hard drive based iPods due to their large capacity. So when the latest release of Rockbox showed better than dismal support for the iPod Classic, I knew it was time to get one, and so I did. I'm really enjoying the much better quality of the music, since I no longer have to downsample anything just to fit them into a smaller capacity device. I might devote a post specially on how to Rockbox the iPod classic a little in the future when I have more time.

Till next time.