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.

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines – Command: Strip all blank lines.