My research supervisor told me that my only mission is to turn in a good thesis at the end of two years. Okay, and do well in my courses. That's all he's asking for. =)

It helps that I actually enjoy looking for funding and thinking of useful projects, but if push comes to shove, I should focus on something I can write and finish than just on something that's well-funded.

I'm not even writing a Ph.D. dissertation, just a master's thesis. Master's theses are much shorter than Ph.D. dissertations. I can get away without inventing a whole new field, for example. =)

Thanks to Luis Fernandes for the tip!

He showed me the cool toys they get to play around with in their lab. A spherical display, a motion capture set, a huge video wall, a framed display that can tell who's touching it... Wow. Good stuff. If we had those things in Ateneo, everyone would be thrilled.

He gave me plenty of tips on possible research papers, like customization behaviors of novices or an exploration of different planning syles. I _really_ want to write papers about Planner! We're doing all sorts of cool stuff there, and I'd love to do a literature review so that I can convince those academics that either (a) we have some cool new ideas, or (b) the ideas they already have are actually quite useful in real life. =)

It was also a refreshing, eye-opening encounter with the world outside the blogosphere. I was surprised to find out that he wasn't hooked into the entire blogs / aggregators thing, and even more surprised to hear that many people think blogs are just for exhibitionist self-expression. ;) He gets his news from conferences! I _so_ have to get him addicted to blog aggregators (http://www.bloglines.com rocks!) and social bookmarking (http://del.icio.us rocks!), so that he can get even fresher news.

Among other things, we talked about:

- Dvorak. Yes, we both use that weird keyboard layout.

- The Philippines. (His wife is from Batangas.)

- Emacs. Free software. Coding. (Fun!)

- Mail. I told him about my funky mail setup and showed him adaptive

scoring in Gnus.

- <b>Personal information management and personal productivity.</b> I showed him how I plan my day. Also talked about the Covey books. He's planning to buy David Allen's Getting Things Done, too.

Total: ~ 4 hours, mostly talking about Planner and Emacs. =)