The good news: The excellent-looking (and I mean in terms of “It looks good but I haven’t tried it”) iPhone was announced to day.
The bad news: GSM + EDGE and only on Cingular. Blargh. What about WiMax? Such a groundbreaking bit of technology except for the outdated WAN connectivity. Grr.
My vacation and my trips to New Orleans and Seattle are are over. I arrived back in Baltimore yesterday, and made my way through the cold, wind, and rain to the lab today.
Hopkins has an “intersession” period at the beginning of January, affording me a brief break from classes. Assuming I passed Models of the Neuron (I still don’t have my grade), and that I pass the two classes I’m going to take this semester, this should be my last semester of classes. Finally. Anyway, for the moment I am free, and I have two more weeks free of immediate and pressing deadlines (i.e. homework).
I plan to take full advantage of this time to knock down Next Actions and finish some projects.
The flip side of this plan is that I am going to try to avoid burnout. In the effort to (a) settle in, (b) keep up, and (c) make a good first impression at JHU, I went full-throttle into the fall semester, working many days 08:00 – 22:00. In short order I found myself burned out but without enough free time to properly recover. I had a very good meeting with my advisor toward the end of the year, in which she suggested that I make time for exercise, meditation, etc.
I know those things are important, but it’s interesting how easily I push them aside when things seem “urgent”.
Thanks to my vacation, I am now well-rested and not a bit burnt out. In fact, I am eager to dig in to my work. However, I’m going to set a few priorities. Call them new years’ resolutions if you like:
Also, several people in my life are climbing on to the GTD bandwagon, and this is giving me renewed interest in streamlining and making more effective my own system. On the flight to Baltimore I spent some time with my treo, whacking the stupid out of my system and re-evaluating some of my stubborn Next Actions. I’ve already seen an increase in my ability to knock down the NAs.
Inotropic: having the property of reducing changing the force of muscular contraction.
Thanks to Amanda for the correction.
When I read academic papers, I underline information I deem relevant, and later add that information to a mind map associated with the corresponding project. I’ve discussed this previously:
This worked fairly well once for my qualifying exam research at Tulane. However, that was a relatively small set of papers in a short period of time. For a project that’s been going on longer than I’m going to explicitly admit here, it’s not possible to keep as much organizational information in one’s head. I’ve been collecting and mapping reference papers for some time on this project, and I hoped that all that effort would pay off when it came time to write the introduction and discussion.
It’s paying off in spades!
Today I spent a few hours going down the list of important notes from papers I’ve mapped, and translating that into important points with reference markers (I.e. which paper to reference). It worked like a dream. I’m quite confident now that once I finish mapping the rest of the relevant papers, things will keep dropping into place.
There’s one important bit of feedback about mapping papers that I discovered in this process — don’t even bother mapping secondary information. That is, don’t bother mapping information that your paper cites from elsewhere. Just read and map the referenced paper. I pretty much quit underlining that stuff recently anyway.
Since I’ve done some more traveling this year, these needed updating:
create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands
In 2005 and 2006 I passed the 50% mark on visited states:
create your own visited states map