Between most of the department being on holiday and me having a (rather heavy…) birthday party this week I didn’t do that much productive work.
The birthday party was great though. It’s the third year I’ve organised it with a friend, Delphi, due to our birthdays being only a day apart.
So congratulations to us I guess for surviving another year on this planet!
My research group was so kind to provide me with an office computer. They suggested some Windows PC, but I kindly asked if I could get an iMac. They agreed! I have a 24″ model at home and am very happy with it, so I set out to order the 20″ model.
It arrived on Friday but I wasn’t in, so I picked it up this morning. Taking it out of the box was a pleasure as always. I have no idea what they do with it, but a fresh one out of the box smells lovely. Call me nuts, but I like these kinds of things, it’s similar to the smell of a new book.
5 minutes later I had it set up, connected to the network and configured to my liking. I quickly moved over my documents and some applications from my laptop.
On of these is an wonderful program I found a few days ago PAPERS. It’s a great application the manages your pdf files, collects metadata and basically lets you cross-reference and find similar papers at will. It can automatically link up to the arXiv to make things really easy. For you people who have gone through making a bibliography in LaTeX, here’s the best part : automatic bibtex export is quick, easy and painless.
So equipped with some nice new toys I will valiantly attack the problem at hand : making sense of the proposed M2-brane worldvolume theory by Baggart & Lambert. More on that later.
Today I stayed at my new apartment, located a mere 5 minutes walk from the VUB. This in contrast to the one hour commute I’ve been doing the last six years. Anyway, I don’t have any clocks over there yet and I didn’t have my cellphone with me, so I figured I’d just walk to the university when I woke up.
The problem is that with the long days we’ve been having it is rather hard to determine what time it is exactly. Imagine my surprise when I got there only to find out it was 7h in the morning. This goes against every natural impulse I have as PhD student, and being the one opening up the place definitely felt weird.
It does have it’s advantages. I managed to go through all my e-mails before I go to breakfast. I feel a strange urge to be productive and I’m awake enough to actually go ahead with it.
I fear my advisor may be sending me subliminal messages through my laptop…
Tomorrow I got up early only to find myself sick and the weather horrible. It’s raining, the kind of drooping rain that messes up your day but doesn’t even seem to want to make an effort. It’s dark, so I had to turn all the lights on in the house. It’s that time of the year where the weather in Belgium seems to be actively trying to make you sick, and it has succeeded.
I’ll just cuddle up inside with the review of M-theory branes I’m now devouring. I can think of worse ways to spend the day.
Right.
After losing my first blog (started in my Master’s) to some mysterious hacker and somehow having on my posts deleted on my new one, this is is try number three.
What can you expect? Life in Brussels in general and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in particular. Physics in general and String Theory in particular. Life in general and mine in particular.
Enjoy it while you can.
