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Sabbatical-Sequester

I’ve had a sabbatical from here of late. Well without checking, since August. I’ve been hard at work, sometimes. Once I did feel a little guilty when my monthly bursary came in, “What would the taxpayer think if they knew I wasn’t productive for even 50% of the past month, let alone a week?” then I realised it’s me who’s made a significant sacrifice. Saying that, I’ve definitely felt a lull in motivation over the past eight or so months, which one couldn’t combat in the real world by refusing to cogitate or even do mundane tasks in it. Whilst working towards my MPhil to PhD transfer, of course- doubting my own critical thought or even self-worth. Lets get it right, I’ve been depressed. Trouble was I didn’t realise I was depressed until I’d been depressed for a significant portion of the time spent. Despite me knowing the signs. I guess I wasn’t spending long enough with anyone (or the right people) in order for them to ask (wallflower side affect?) “What’s up?” but fortunately Christmas came around and it was only then, when taking a week off from working, or trying; that my brain farted out to myself. “You’re depressed!” Identifying a cause is simple, I’m…

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Slight relief

After 3 drafts of my proposal, due tomorrow on the 6 month marker of my Ph.D study and referred to internally as the Registration milestone I have some minor amendments to make this evening and I am good to go! I will though have to find out who my ancillary supervisors are and meet them and also pass my proposal to another professor, who may or may not end up as an ancillary. So I expect to make a few more changes after based on their feedback but at this point I am relieved as my Director of Studies has donned his Panama hat (Del Monte style) in regards to my proposal and even passed compliment on my progress, a 100 fold! Which either means I am better than better or I was nothing but a wandering fart when I started, I’ll opt for the former. The premise of my research then is to create the processes needed to manage on-demand failover and dynamic rejuvenation within a system-of-systems (SoS). It has several goals including:- i) Replace multiple failover points with on-demand instances of systems based on their last known good configuration and ii) gracefully terminate and restart services and systems based…

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Boom you’re a researcher!

Today’s been a bit of a brain fart day in the halls of academia so I’ve decided to end the week commenting on my Experience of the Week… Yesterday I presented my research to date at an internal symposium. I was pretty relaxed about it up until the first person presented their work, (At 9.30am on Wednesday.) and then I had to sit through 20+ presentations before delivering my own the following day. The nerves began to build more and more after each confident presentation that I witnessed. Just leaving me to question if the work I am to present is going to be any good, let alone interesting to the audience. At the end of the first day I was asked if I had picked up any tips. All I had learned was that the aircon gets in the way if you restrain your natural speaking voice. Also I hadn’t even timed the presentation, nor had I rehearsed it. I crashed out that night and as I slept I presume the left side of my brain was getting a kicking from the right side of my brain because when I got up in the morning at seven I began…