The Lent Term Experiment: Week 8!

Week 8 finally ended on Wednesday.

So, that's it.

I'm officially done Learning Stuff. No more lectures as an undergraduate left. It's now just my project and exams to go (five of them to be precise).

The first of my exams will be startng on the 2nd May, around 6 weeks from now. It's an odd feeling, knowing that it will all be coming to an end in a few months. Right now though, it's a sort of distant thought on the horizon, not something to be considered too deeply in light of all the Tripos goodness that awaits me first.

The fact that Week 8 comes to an end also brings to an end my time keeping experiment.

Personally, it has been quite interesting for me. I have discovered that I sleep a lot more than I thought I do - however it could just be an artifact of that fact that I am a 4th year, and thus old by Uni standards. Old people need their sleep, okay?

I have also discovered that I spend a lot of time procrastinating - not that I didn't know that already, but to quantify it is a little eye opening. However, it has also been revealed that I do put in a reasonable amount of consistent work throughout - which is good, although it was by far not enough given that I am yet to do any examples questions from the latter half of the four courses I am taking this term.

I've been told that this is not uncommon for 4th Years, but whether it is or not, I am not going to worry about it too much, and instead I'm taking solace in the fact that my project is going well and that in the last meeting, my supervisor got so excited by the latest batch of results that he idly suggested that I should write a paper on it and get it published.

Cue incredulous "Are you joking?" look.

Apparently he wasn't: cue one boggled undergraduate mind (as if the degree wasn't enough).

It doesn't seem right to even suggest something like that to me. I mean, writing papers and stuff are for those academics who live on a different plane of existence and have IQ's far higher than mine. For me, it's crazy talk! Although, I have to admit that the idea of having a published paper under my name does tickle my intellectual ego somewhat.

Anyway, self aggrandising diversion aside (I'm allowed to talk myself up okay? It's MY blog!), I decided for the final week to have a look at some total stats which were interesting to me.

Total Productive Work Time: 259 hours (average of ~30 hours per week)
Total Sleep: 480 hours (average of ~8 hours per day)
Total Procrastination: 82 hours (average of 9.5 hours per week, or ~1.4 hours a day)

Procrastination took up 24% of my work time, this figure is probably a little higher in reality, but it's still quite a lot!

It also appears I spend on average 3.8 hours per day not really doing much of anything. This is probably not true - some of this time is probably more accurately labelled as procrastination, although I know do tend to spend ~2 hours eating dinner and ~1 hour on lunch most days, along with showering and cycling to places etc, so maybe that figure is quite representative.

Pie Chart showing time breakdown.

The complete 8 week timeline.

If you are wondering what that massive spike of Free Time in the final week was all about, it was because I went to the Yonex All England Badminton Championships - a whole weekend of nothing but (mostly) guilt free watching of international Badminton, and cheering myself hoarse for China. Fun times.

In the first post of this series, I said I hoped it would enlighten people as to how much time the degree takes out of your life, and well, given that I have worked (or attempted to work) ~40 hours per week on average, and am still far far behind on things, the conclusion can only be "a lot".

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this series of posts, or at least found them mildly entertaining, or maybe just found them as something to read to procrastinate with, it's why I write this blog after all!

Peace out for now!

The Lent Term Experiment: Week 7

Apologies, this is a day late again.

Firstly, my thoughts and prayers go to those who have been affected by the earthquake off the coast of Japan, and I wish them the very best in dealing with this huge disaster that has befallen them.

This week, I have been busy getting frustrated by Computational Fluid Dynamics, or rather, the excessive amount of time it takes to do it.

Expectations for computers have changed a lot over the last decade or so - in the early 2000's, it was pretty much expected that if you wanted to view a picture, you'd need to wait for a few minutes. Streaming movies? Don't even think about it.

Nowadays though, our expectation for computer response is that it should be instantaneous. If a website takes over a few seconds to load, people complain at it being slow. Think about that for a (slow) second.

How does this relate to CFD and frustration? Well, as it so happens, CFD is very slow. This is because simulating air, believe it or not, is actually pretty difficult and as such hogs an inordinate amount of computer time. We use local workstations with 24 Gb of RAM and the Intel High Performance Cluster in Swindon which has 384 Gb of RAM on tap, as well as the latest Xeon 64-bit processors, and yet our mesh generation still takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, and a complete set of iterations to reach a solution anywhere from 3 to 5 hours.

This is mildly frustrating, because the meshing program we use is powerful, and thus by the inverse relationship governing how Powerful a program is versus how User Friendly it is, it is not particularly user friendly. For example, there is no undo button; if you mess something up, be prepared to either reload a previous save, or to travel in a roundabout way to fix your mistake.

Also, if you make a mistake in say, Excel, it will usually take a few seconds to fix (even without the use of an undo button). If you make a mistake here, it could be one which sends the computer into it's own little happy world of number crunching for a LONG TIME, and you as the user will be left stranded, staring at a non-responsive screen, for however long it takes. Clicking the wrong button can feel like writing a deliciously dirty text to your significant other, and then realising it's been sent to your mum.

Anyway...here is the week 7 graph.

The Lent Term Experiment: Week 6

Well, a month and a half has passed now since I started this little graphing experiment.

To be honest, I'm quite surprised that I've managed to keep it up, given so many of my personal projects in the past have been abandoned halfway through due to laziness and general slacking.

I wish I applied myself to my degree work this consistently, although, to be fair, the cumulative hour or so it takes every week to update the excel spreadsheet, do a little write up and upload a picture isn't that big of a commitment.

There are several things that have been annoying me this week though (apart from my own inability to work), and I'm going to take this as an opportunity to rant about them.

1. It's cold. Given that we have just left February behind and are now a few days into March, shouldn't the weather be getting warmer? I feel the inclement weather directly affects my ability to do my 4th Year Project, as I am far less eager to stay late in the Engineering Department if I know I face a bitingly cold cycle ride home.

2. Why does Cambridge not have a sports centre? As captain of the Badminton team this year, I have seen the vast majority of our finances go on providing a paltry amount of hours of on-court training for the squad. It's frankly farcical that University of Cambridge's stature is not able (or not willing) to provide even a basic level of indoor sports facilities for their students. It's beyond farcical when you think that the college rowing clubs are able to provide more hours of training than the University Badminton team is physically / financially able to.

3. CUED. Not for any particular reason, just CUED.

Valentine Soapbox

It's Valentine's weekend. Guaranteed, I assure you, to put a large percentage of the world's single people in a less than enthused state. Unless they live in Egypt, where they were and probably are busy dodging government cars:

Note: This video is a little horrific, so you've been warned.


Now, I have a pretty limited knowledge of world politics, which probably makes me one of the most ill-equipped to comment on the current Egypt situation, but since this is my blog, and it's my soapbox time, I'm going to throw in my uninformed 2 cents anyway.

So, I'm sure I'm not alone in this world when I ask whether it was really a good idea to now put the hands of the civilian government into military control. Mubarak no doubt still has plenty of links with the military - he wasn't going to be suppressing protestors and political rivals with his bare hands now was he?

I recall with great clarity a line spoken on the show Battlestar Galactica (of all places) which goes as follows:

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."

It seems relevant. Maybe...

Anyway, as I was saying; Valentine's Day. Single people. Sad.

Unless, of course, they are in one of the many poor deprived countries around the world, which probably don't celebrate Valentine's day. Perhaps just having food for the night would be enough.

Puts things in perspective doesn't it...

Despite this, a quick search on google will reveal a wealth of Anti-Valentine's Day sites, most performing (or attempting to perform) crude Freudian based analysis, which is essentially babble, about the nature of love and how really, it's shit. Others try to argue from the point of commercialism and whatnot, and whilst Valentine's Day is rather over-commercialised, just like any other major holiday nowadays, I'm sure you won't find these people so vociferously opposing Christmas.

There's probably nothing worse than this sort of self-led deception, a pathetic attempt to rationalise and intellectualise away a fundamental tenet of human existence. All stemming from the fact that they couldn't hit someone up and got bitter about it. It's like the kid who didn't get picked for the football team subsequently going to deflate all the balls.

Here's a picture of some kittens to break up the rant:

Ready to carry on? Ok. Good.

At this point, I will hold my hands up and say I've been through the whole bitter lonely thing, more than once, and it's not a particularly pleasant experience. But you know, hope springs eternal, and so it must be because as a rather good quote on www.thinkexist.com says:

“Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope.”

The only thing worse than the deceptionists are those who are so desperate to be included in this celebration of intimacy and love that they'll go and whore themselves out to anyone with a heartbeat and two legs. Some people are surprisingly self aware about this too, and it makes me a bit angry to be honest.

It's a perversion of the whole ethos of what the day is supposed to be about; I'm pretty sure that using a stranger (or even a "friend") for a quick pull or fuck, just so one can get a little boost to the self-esteem, is about as far removed from real love as you can get. But people are that selfish, aren't they?

Here are some different sorts of kittens:

Anyhow, to bring this rant to a close; I believe that even if a person doesn't have anything else, they should always have self respect, and if they put themselves on some desperate pull-streak just to get the ego-boost, well then they've taken that self respect and thrown it down the drain, along with my respect for them.

So, to all the happy Valentine's Day celebrating couples out there: have a good one.
To all the singletons: next year, next year!
To the Vortex Dynamics examples paper: You're getting drilled tonight.

The Lent Term Experiment: Week 3

And so, Week 3 ends, and well, surprisingly (or not), Week 4 begins.

During this week, I've managed to come up with a three phase plan for not doing work. It goes as follows:

Step 1: Get work out.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Don't get any work done.

For you see, even though the red line denoting Total Time spent on work seems to indicate I've spent quite a few hours doing that stuff, I have cheekily included procrastination time within that measure, seeing as it's time spent "trying" to do work.

How much time do I spend procrastinating? Well, that will be a mystery to be revealed at the end of week 8.

Anyhow, here is the Week 3 chart.



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