Passing Time

[UPDATE] One of my friends just messaged me because this post sounds sound. On rereading I have to agree it does make me sound a bit depressed, which wasn’t exactly what I was going for. I was more just reflecting on how changeable emotions are. Also, Pete requested a post about how much I love him because he’s been giving the blog address to some friends and family. Life in general is good. I have up days and blah days. I wrote this on a blah day but it wasn’t a bad day. So thank you dear friend for taking time to check!

Have you ever looked forward to something so much that ever day just seems like you are passing time until it happens? I returned from Australia middle of July and since then every day has just seemed like a trail to get through until Peter arrives here for his next visit. Some may think that we are talking about waiting month but sadly it’s only about 3.5 weeks. 3.5 of the slowest weeks I’ve ever lived through….since the last time I was waiting for him to get here. We are lucky that he is in a position to be able to visit me so regularly. Most couples when faced with the mass of the earth being between would either resign themselves to yearly visits or sadly resign themselves to the inevitable conclusion of breaking off their relationship. Some days and some weeks are harder than others, video chatting over skype helps immensely, except when it makes it worse. Being able to see and hear someone, they feel so close but they aren’t. I worry that something will happen to one or the other of us and how would the other find out?

In order to pass the time I work on my PhD (which feels like an infinite loop of non-progress and lack of drive at times). As many of you know I am in machine learning (related to artificial intelligence) and specifically its applications to ecological problems. Currently I am trying to make the software I’ve written for my experiments scale up from working on a few thousand problems (standard dataset size) to a few billion in order to be able to make predictions across an entire satellite map of a region (specifically Victoria, Australia).

I also spend a lot of time at home with my pets, or out with friends. Occasionally I get to hang out with my brother, sister-in-law and niece. Today, my brother being entangled in an act of good Samaritan for a kids broken down car, I took my niece and Quinn to play in the small river near my house. I had forgotten how endlessly I could play in water when I was young. I loved nothing more than exploring streams, splashing diving and generally doing a pretty good otter impression, Rhiannon is similar.  I got some lovely shots of her playing and posted them to my flikr page. If you haven’t already been there you should take a look: Arwen’s Flikr Page

On other days I find myself sinking into a strange malaise from which I seem unable to rise. I get tired, sad and unable to focus. I’m cnovinced that something will go wrong with Peter and I, I have somehow offended my friends or that my dog is looking even more reproachful for her lack of walk than normal. Most of the time I pull myself out of these funks quite well but some days I revel in feeling sorry for myself. It must be a personality flaw, I think I’ll go back to playing with my niece

Back to School

So today I talked to the species distribution group about some of the work that I did while I was in Australia. The group today was composed of Tom (my adviser), Weng-Keen (another professor), Rebecca (name may be wrong, but new post-doc) and Phoebe (another IGERT student). While I felt that I could have gotten more done during my time in Australia I really felt pretty good about the progress. I was proud to show the maps I had created and was pleased with my grasp of the data, the data collection process and the policy impacts my work could have. Tom however seemed less than impressed. I am not, nor have I ever been, a student that was interested in the nitty gritty details of machine learning algorithms. I am however, endlessly intrigued by the possible applicaitons of them outside of the field of CS. Perhaps this means that I dont pay enough attention to the details of such algorithms and I am sure that this frustrates Tom but I told him I wasn’t interested in theory. It was just a real downer to come from ARI where the ecologists really like my work back to my university where it apparently isn’t meeting standards.

I take my quals this month. I am wondering if Tom is going to pass me or just suggest that I get my masters and go.  That would crush me but I would try to get into University of Melbourne and do my PhD there I guess.

Le sigh.