Trying to find focus

I sit here at a table in the Reitz Union, which once resided in the corner where I spent much of my free time during undergraduate study.  It is now located near the middle of the Union, as there have been many changes to the place.  However, my reason for being here is eerily similar to what it was many times before.  I am here trying to finish an assignment in hopes of graduating soon.  That is about where the similarities end though.  Now, I am working on my final thesis for my Master's degree, which has taken me far longer than I had ever anticipated.  Well, I guess that's a similarity as well.  But this time instead of scribbling equations on engineering paper in order to finish a homework assignment, I must call on all of the things that I learned in undergrad to write a paper about the things which I studied in graduate school.  The material is all old hat now, and that is not what is causing me issues in finishing it.  The biggest problem is that I am having a terrible time finding focus and being able to write coherently.  I have been struggling with this issue for going on 4 years now, and have only had small windows of focus and in those windows i have written much of my thesis.  I am sitting here now with my thesis about 85% done, with just a few sections left and then editing/defense/etc.  If I can get done with what I hope to do today, I will likely move that total to about 95%, with just a few small sections left and editing.  I feel like I am at the metaphorical brick wall which runners face during a marathon.  Writing this paper has perhaps been the closest thing to a marathon that I have attempted in my life.  However I seem to have taken the path of the hare instead of that of the tortoise.  I have only had short bursts where I have been able to accomplish a large amount of writing, instead of being able to stay focused continually and taken my time, but finish much sooner.  If I can somehow find the proper motivation and finish it soon, and graduate in the summer, perhaps I will be able to get into a Ph.D. program.  If I can do that, I fully intend to begin writing early on and also have a much more specific goal set up.  I believe that I can design and perform a much more specific experiment and accomplish it in a much shorter period of time, resulting in much better results.  With better results, it should also be much easier to analyze them, and in turn write about them.  Though my chances of getting into such a program right now are very small, I have years of experience in a Master's program to draw upon and know what to do (or not do) and how to do it.  In the end, I think I really need to wrap this up so that I can actually get to writing the paper.  I just needed to get some flow going, and hopefully this will provide it for me.

Peace out.

What's this?

Well, it's been years since I last posted a blog here.  I'm kinda bored, sitting in the Reitz Union waiting for DA to get out of a seminar thingy upstairs.  So, what's new with me since my last post?  Well, damn near everything.  Let's see where I should start... I guess the first thing is that I still haven't finished my thesis, so that's not new.  But i'm getting really close (for real).  Next, back in April-ish of 2009 I got my first dog of my own, Cassie.  She's about the most perfect dog I could've ever hoped for.  She's a Dachshund/Corgi mix, also sometimes known as a Dorgi.  She's about the smartest dog I've ever seen and is just plain awesome.  In short, I was lucky to find her. A few months later, I started a job working with the Agronomy department at UF.  I've been there since, though the project I've been working on is winding down, so I'm actively looking for a new job.  I actually applied for one today.  That one is in California, so it'll be interesting to see how that turns out.  Ok, so I've covered a dog and a job.  After about a year of working, I got a second dog.  Yep, this one was a personal rescue from a home that was mistreating it.  I named her Andie (short for Andromeda).  She's a Dachshund/Jack Russell Terrier mix and is just as cute as can be.  She's nearly entirely white, with just a few light brown spots around her nose.  She's as sweet as they come too, always likes to try to give kisses and is generally just a happy dog.  However, she's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Trying to train her anything is just shy of impossible, and takes a lot of work to do.  I've never managed to get her to stay potty trained for more than a few weeks at a time.  I've decided that half of her problem is that she just forgets things, but the other half is that she doesn't understand when to stop drinking.  Often times she'll just start drinking water and keep on going until she gets distracted by something else or runs out of water.  Of course since she only weighs about 14 lbs, she can't hold very much in her little bladder and just goes whenever she wants to.  She has been doing better lately, mostly due to the use of some training treats, but even with those she still has accidents from time to time.  Overall she's a good dog, aside from her potty issues.  Thank god I was able to find a pretty nice steam-vac at the Humane Society Thrift store for $15.

Now for the important news (which warrants a new paragraph).  I'm in love with the most wonderful woman, Daniella.  That's the DA that I referenced in the first paragraph.  We have been friends since well before my previous post, but only started officially dating just over 5 months ago.  Truth be told, we'd been unofficially dating for quite a while before that.  It's amazing just how well we fit with each other.  We both keep saying to ourselves, why didn't we just make this happen earlier, but obviously we can't go back in time and change that.  So, we've decided just to make up for it in the future.  Speaking of the future, she's looking at going to Law school after she graduates, and I'm trying to find a job as mentioned above. Hopefully I'll find that job sooner than later so that she'll be able to apply nearby for law school.  Ideally, we'd both like to stay in Florida, but as anyone can agree who is looking for  a job right now, sometimes you gotta move to the work.  So for both of our sakes, i hope to find something substantial soon, whether it be here, California, or anywhere in between.

Anyway, her lecture thing should be ending fairly soon, and i'd like to be done with this so that I can be ready to take her home after it's done.

first post

I have decided to move my diary here, though I do not expect it to last. In fact, I am finding it difficult to write anything at all. At the moment I am chatting with Sarah via AIM, and it isn't exactly the most exciting conversation of all time. I suppose it would be useless to go into much detail on that. I did speak with one of my professors about building a distillation system today, and I got a few good pointers for it. I am not sure how long it will actually take to fabricate though, and I think that I might switch to a smaller design than the one that I have been looking at. The plans that I found basically produce a lot more than I really want or need, so scaling down would probably be a good idea. I really should be either studying or sleeping, but I don't really feel like it. Instead, I am here writing a new entry in my diary, and trying to use decent punctuation with it. I have been on a bit of an Old 97s music streak for the last 20 or 30 minutes. Its really not that impressive though, since I have only heard maybe 3 or 4 of their songs in that span. An episode of Futurama came on, so I paused the music to watch that, but it is over now. Speaking of over, the last Old 97s song on my playlist just ended and now it is on to Rolling Stones. I think I finally found a decent media player for windows called MediaMonkey. Musikcube had some nice features, but there were a lot of things about the way it searches and shows files that seem anti-intuitive. I suppose I am just spoiled from having AmaroK on linux for so long that I expect something similar on windows. However, this is the best that I have found, and it is still greatly lacking. iTunes offers some of the features that I get from amaroK, but it is very bloated and slow, and very intrusive as far as programs go. I suppose that is the nature of the beast though, for it is an Apple product. Assuming someone may someday be reading this, you're probably wondering about the odd capitalization in the word AmaroK or amaroK, but the K is capitalized on purpose, and it can really be spelled with a capital or lower case A. The reason for the capitalized K is that it was written to be part of the K Desktop Environment, or KDE for linux. Where KDE got the K from, I really don't know, but it was originally meant to be a replacement for CDE or the Common Desktop Environment, so they probably called it the Kommon Desktop Environment at one time. Thats just a guess though. Now back to the real world. I can't wait until Thursday, I get to leave Gainesville for a week. It has been a long time since I have actually gone somewhere out of state for Spring Break. I fly out of Clearwater at like 9 local time, and arrive in St. Louis at 10:15 local time there. Hopefully it won't be too cold when I get there, and I have been contemplating wearing my Hawai'ian shirt for the flight out there. I should be there for about a week, though I haven't actually made rental plans for the drive back, so that will have to wait a bit. Of course, before then I still have to worry about this exam. It is one of two exams for the semester, and I still have 1 homework due in the class. I will have to force myself to spend most of tomorrow evening and Wednesday morning studying. The exam is from 3 to 5 on Wednesday afternoon. I am planning on attending the basketball game on Wednesday evening which starts at 9pm I believe. That should be a good game. We're playing University of Tennessee, which is one of the top ranked teams right now. Though we haven't been playing the best basketball in history lately, it should still be a good and tough game. Thursday itself should be a pretty good day though. I have Advanced Structures lecture early afternoon, and I will probably spend a few hours in the lab. After that, I will drive down to the parents' place in Safety Harbor, and have dad give me a ride to the airport. Then, Spring Break! I can't wait though. It is less than 3 days away now, and still seems so far. We've got a few things planned already, but will have to do most of it once I get there. I'd also like to make time to see my aunt who lives nearby. Once I get back to Florida, I should be able to see some of my other relatives who will be down visiting for their Spring Break. The day back to school is St. Patrick's day, and my family plans to celebrate it on the 16th, which is a Sunday. I should be able to hang around Safety Harbor for that, then get back to Gainesville in time for school to start back. I was thinking earlier that it would make more sense for spring break to be a week later, since it would encompass both St. Patrick's day and the actual beginning of spring. Since then, I have decided that its better when it is, because any longer would just be too much to deal with. I really do need to get away for a while, and I think this will be the perfect opportunity. Another thing that falls during this coming week is that I will become eligible to upgrade my cell phone and sign a new contract for it. I was contemplating just waiting the extra three months and switching over to Verizon, but I realized that even then I won't be able to afford any of the cool phones and the phones that are in my price range really aren't all that great. I guess the KRZR isn't too bad, but it is stuck with the Verizon GUI, which I think is just terrible. For a similar price, AT&T offers the RAZR V3xx, which I have read many great reviews for. I don't really care much for the regular RAZR V3, but the xx model looks much better, and has upgraded versions of the features that the SLVR has. It also offers 3G HSDPA internet access, which could be nice. EDGE is a slow in Gainesville, and the SLVR is getting a bit outdated. That is not to say that it isn't one of the best phones of its time, because it is. It is just getting past its time. I got the thing nearly two years ago, and it was out for almost a year at the time. In the cellular world, it is rare for a phone model to last more than 2 or 3 years. However the model didn't really last, I am convinced that the phones themselves will last forever. And on that note, I think that I will wrap this up and go to bed.