It seems hard to believe that it has been a year since my last Doctoral Residency, but here I am in Phoenix, AZ! This residency is only three days long, but I am developing the first chapter of my dissertation this weekend! (GULP!)
I haven’t been posting much lately because work has just been insane. We are doing a software upgrade that got moved to this weekend. My supervisor was very understanding about my taking the weekend off to attend residency, but I still feel bad leaving her to deal with the upgrade on her own. There are only two of us on the team. She does have a team from Information Services backing her up, but still…
More on residency later…
As always, your comments, questions, and suggestions are always welcome.
Here is another gem of the Internet. Whether you are working on a scientific or industry discovery, a short story, the great American novel, writing code for the next essential program, drafting plans for a super new invention, or writing a love letter to your mate creativity is at the heart of our ability to alter the world around us. In the video below, John Cleese talks about what creativity is and how to coax it out of you. The clip is about 11 minutes long. Enjoy!
As always, your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome! Do you have something like this to share? Please share any links in the comment section below.
The Internet is full of fascinating and wonderful information and creative endeavours. It’s also full of a lot of junk! Sifting through it all can be a long and tedious process. When one finds a real gem amongst the junk, it’s time to share. The video below is called “Validation” and I believe is one such gem. It’s about 17 minutes long, but well worth the time. Enjoy!
As always, your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome! Do you have something like this to share? Please share any links in the comment section below.
Being a grad student is serious, tiring, exhausting, tedious, hard, wearing, frustrating, and occasionally rewarding business. Grad students are dedicated to the idea of completing their educations and jumping through the hoops that their respective Universities require. Jorge Cham has captured all of this perfectly in his PhD Comic Strip. Here is the strip from February 25, 2009.
"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham - www.phdcomics.com
All grad students and aspiring grad students should check out this strip!
Your comments, questions, and suggestions are always welcome!
It’s been awhile since I last made an entry here…and I have missed it greatly! My last post preceded an especially busy time in my life that has not yet abated. I was in the midst of finishing a particularly ornerous class which commanded a lot of my time and energies. Just as I finished that up and was looking forward to a week off between classes, work kicked into overdrive.
I am a full-time employee (in addition to being a full time graduate student) and we are getting ready to implement an upgrade from Microsoft SharePoint 2003® to Microsoft SharePoint 2007® and I have 365 site administrators to instruct in the changes between the two versions. Work has been a flurry of activity that has included several 18- to 20-hour days. Needless to say, I’m more than a bit exhausted.
With all of the extra work, the time, energy, and the muse (or creativity) have just not intersected…until tonight. Tonight I had the time but no energy. However, my muse has a hammer and insisted on exerting its influence. As I laid down to take a nap for a bit my muse began releasing words to run around in my head and keep me from my desired (and needed) nap. The only way to get the words out of my head are to sit here and type them out. Hopefully this entry will satisfy my muse and it will allow me to get some rest.
I had to travel to San Francisco from Sacramento (approximately two hours by car) today to teach a couple of classes today. On my way there and back I listened to some back podcasts that are on my iPhone. In particular I was trying to catch up on my Net@Night with Leo LaPorte and Amber MacArthur. On this particular podcast the hosts talk about Web 2.0 technologies. It is both entertaining and informative. The episodes that I listened to today were particularly helpful in waking my muse and getting me thinking about my dissertation topic again and how I can narrow it down. I will flush these ideas out a bit more in later blog entries. Right now I’m going to try to get some rest…
It seems hard to believe that it has been a year since my last Doctoral Residency, but here I am in Phoenix, AZ! This residency is only three days long, but I am developing the first chapter of my dissertation this weekend! (GULP!)
It’s been awhile since I last made an entry here…and I have missed it greatly! My last post preceded an especially busy time in my life that has not yet abated. I was in the midst of finishing a particularly ornerous class which commanded a lot of my time and energies. Just as I finished that up and was looking forward to a week off between classes, work kicked into overdrive.