Bryce Johnson e-mailed me to ask me why I hadn't signed up for Enterprise Camp. I sent my regrets and explained that I was in the Philippines. Oh, to be able to be in two places at the same time! But it's nice being missed...

E-Mail from Bryce Johnson

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I should've tried dialing into the IBM conference center last night to confirm that our landline could connect to it. Had to go for Plan B: make an expensive roaming cellphone call for 30 minutes... Ouch!

All in the line of duty...

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I felt tired this morning. Things weren't working smoothly. It turns out that the Philippines is probably not part of the toll-free area for by my research manager's call-in number. I found a workable but expensive solution for the moment: a roaming call off my Canadian-based cellphone. 30 minutes is going to be a whopper on my phone bill, but it's all part of the job.

Not only that, I couldn't log onto IBM's virtual private network. When I tried rebuilding the module, I started getting kernel version mismatches. I don't think I mistyped my password the first few times, and that password worked just two days ago. I may need Stephen's help sorting that out remotely, or I can ask IBM Philippines to see what we can do about getting on the network.

My thesis threatens to stretch even longer unless we can figure out how to cut it down to size. Fortunately, the people I'm working with are old hands at managing risk.

So yeah, I was in a bit of a funk. But I kept working anyway. The main thing on my plate is my talk tomorrow, for which I have prepared a few things - business cards, feedback forms, etc. Fairly mechanical, which was good, because I felt out of sorts. Now I'm feeling a little better. Water helps.

Now I'll make the slides. After that, I'll revise and rehearse my talk. It's only 30 minutes, and the challenge is really choosing from all the material that I could put into it.

When I'm done with the talk, I'll clean up the minutes for this morning's meeting and send them. I should probably have written them all down earlier, but I was feeling stressed about the business cards because that had been on my TODO list for the past few days without much progress. Now they're done!

The minutes might be a bit difficult to reconstruct. It was hard to deal with my cellphone and the computer keyboard. Next time, I'm taking paper notes.

Things are going to be okay.

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... sometimes even more so.

I'm beginning to hate the stress I feel about this thesis. The best way to deal with it is not to fight a long, protracted war. Nor is it to give up and walk away. No, the best thing to do is to finish it as quickly as possible so that I can get on with the rest of my life.

Let's make that happen.

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The Internet is still crawling. Takes me back to the days of BBSing, when you could type faster than the modem could send. I have to remember not to do my one-gazillion-tabs style of web browsing, as it's really inconvenient when the browser times out.

Life.

Do you know where I can find carrier pigeons? ;)

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