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I just discovered that tomorrow is a holiday in Finland. Oh well, it doesn't change much for me anyway... I'll just have to buy food today and not wait till I'm starving tomorrow. I guess that shows just how one works when they're not linked to clients or other people. Actually there is nothing making me come to the office besides the fact that I have a good chair and lots of desk space. I can very well procrastinate or be inspired at work just as much as at home. | |
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| (Photos from Risoul. Left: people socialising during the traditional welcoming vin chaud. Right: heavy snowfall on the Monday we were there.) In other news, I don't even know what we're celebrating tomorrow. Old Christmas? Epiphany? Something of the sort I suppose. | |
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| (Left: we had to figure out how to put the special snow chains on the car. Right: we had clouds every day except for Sunday.) Still in other news as of today, I have posted 61 photos for the 365days challenge which matches my previous attempt. I think I'm well on my way to actually hitting the 100 days mark, at least I hope I am! | |
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| (Left: there is one ski lift that has quite a few signs about what to do and not do and it has quite a few errors in those signs. Right: The only bad thing about skiing in December is that there is less sun than in February.) | |
I still don't own any real wine glasses, for some reason I do own champagne glasses though... but wine in a champagne glass? Not quite right. So let's use some old picnic glasses.
I am in the process of editing some stuff we wrote a book chapter. It reminds me why I hate working with lots of other people, especially when everyone writes their own little part and then we put it all together. Everyone has extremely different writing styles and what's even worse is that most of the people I'm working with aren't that good with English... and that means that I don't get what they were trying to say in about a third of their sentences and it's very clear when they just copy/pasted something someone else wrote.
Oh well, I've given up just on the tea and coffee and I've opened a wine bottle. At 3pm. I guess it could be worse.
Well, the worst bit was that the cork on that bottle wasn't actually made out of cork but rather plastic. I guess it's not as a bad as those wine bottles with metallic caps but a cork made out of plastic? What strange idea! It's quite weird to smell it and have it not smell like anything.
( cork made out of plastic? )
Alright, back to the editing. I'm on page 10/21.
GTD, TED and why I like my desk messy.
Dec. 10th, 2009 03:11 pm The General walking on proudly and proudly do I walk into another opinion filled post. |
I love where I work and I love research but some little things just piss me off. One of those things that irk me is cult following of certain "methods" and it's not necessarily related to research, actually it's not related to research, it's related to people. I've just sat through a four hour seminar and it was rather interesting but some of the discussions reminded me of just how much of a problem I have with those "methods". It started a long time ago but it keeps coming back. Last week I made a presentation on how our vision of time has changed over the centuries, now everyone has this notions that we're overworked but actually most of the time we work less than those from two generations ago. It's just that these days we have so many choices as to what to do that we feel that we do not have the time to do them all, hence the overworked feeling. My talk was based on a chapter from a book written in 2000, my final statement was that it was refreshing to read a book about time and our vision of time without seeing references left and right to Getting Things Done and The Four Hour Workweek. I've read through all of those books and I think some of their ideas are great, like the fact that there is no need to check your email every five minutes, but do we really need to have all those sites dedicated to how to make the best GTD binder? ( TED talks and why iPhones are so 2008 ) |
And here I babble and eat good food.
Dec. 9th, 2009 10:14 amWork is going ok in the sense that things are advancing slowly towards the holidays. I can't find motivation to do anything substantial though so I procrastinate a bit... or a lot. That is why there have been a lot of posts recently, sorry about that. In any case, we hopefully will have the book chapter on UDI finished by next week and my reference list for risk management will be done before next Wednesday. But here is a little adventure I had yesterday, for some reason I was really craving this peanut/sesame seeds cake thing which one can only find at the Thai shop here. For me that shop is considered "across town" because I actually need to take the metro to get there, or the tram. I kind of love that shop but clearly Tuesday night is not a good night to go shopping there as many things were sold out, including my peanut/sesame sweeties. Still, I bought some things for dinner. I bought some frozen buns filled with meaty things inside, on the package everything was written in some language I don't know and in German and I've kind of forgotten the different meats in German (I just remember "fleish" or something of the sort which is general meat). It was "surprise" bun party, in the end I ate both, one was beef and one was curry. The inside of the curry one was delicious, but man did it look weird (pictorial evidence of weirdness, do not click if you're eating). My dad would say it was the colour of a new born's poop. I also got some buns filled with coconut and with red bean paste (pictorial evidence under the cut), I wanted the ones filled with peaches but they were out of those.  But I also found this little gem. Actually these noodles were rather nice, must be all that Japanese technology! Telling ya! ( cooked noodles and red bean paste buns ) Other news: it's snowing! Wheee! Other other news: updated the 365days project last night, you can go see it here. |
the usual pointless Sunday gif
Nov. 29th, 2009 04:13 pm
So... this is Big Bang's TOP saying "good job and good luck bitches!"
It's rather appropriate because I've basically just procrastinated my way through all of the month of November and those deadlines sure make a hell a lot of noise when they fly by.
Actually I have one important deadline on the 1st of December but I don't think I'll get my paper done for then. It's just that I hate having to work on the same stuff for months in a row and journal papers are like that. For a conference paper, it's fine for you to only work on it for a month or so but you really need quite a lot of content for a journal article.
I've had enough of the damn case study, I've had enough of seeing solar thermal panels everywhere, I've had enough of the little yellow piece of paper with the deadline for the Special Issue to the right side of my desk.
So right now I'll just finish my part of the book chapter we're writing on user driven innovation and then take the night off. I'll start worrying about approaching deadlines again tomorrow.
Tomorrow I also have to drop by the post office to get a package my sis sent me. I can't even begin to imagine what it might be... but for that, let's have a hyper!MatsuJun gif. I mean, is there such a thing as a gif post without some Arashi love?
Sometimes I think that cycling in to work at 6:30am isn't worth it but then it takes much longer by bus and I would miss the sun rising over the bay.
( +1 )
Oh yeah, those are fun times!
May. 22nd, 2009 11:06 am
Friday. Leaving on Wednesday and still two more articles to go through. Yay! Okie, so not really yay because I'm finally starting to get some feedback on them and let me tell ya, it's all "we should change this and that and take this away". I suppose that's already better than no feedback at all.
Back to trying to make sense of what I'm supposed to do with those articles.
Blah blih bloh
Apr. 23rd, 2009 10:50 am
I lied yesterday, I'll actually be just under 26 if I defend my doctoral work in September 2011. Not that it makes me feel any better.
I could have had a "real" job for about seven months now. I doubt that it would have worked out well, it would have been way less frustrating though.
