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Tuesday, Mar 10, 2009 - 04:14 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Clearing Obstacles One By One

"One of my professors liked to recount how she'd rather clean the bathroom than work on her dissertation."

- Comment 64 (by a professor), from The Online Citizen



Well, it is kind of discouraging to discover that Mr. Fake Bert has managed to garner more comments in only his third blog post, than I have ever managed in over 300. The customer is king, though, and it seems that said customers are demanding more straight talk, if on the crude side. A certain amount of rough-hewn vitality is always charming.


The Other Stuff

Hammered out another three thousand words for my second and last Development Economics essay some weeks in advance, and indeed it was somehow more attractive than working on my dissertation, if perhaps slightly less than cleaning my bathroom.

Now, coming up with 3000 words is, by itself, not a terribly difficult (if time-consuming) task. There are quite a few approaches that may be taken, not the least of which is paraphrasing the relevant chapter of the textbook, and chopping unneeded stuff away.

In fact, this probably will be done to some extent, as a completely original essay would either mean that the textbook is out-of-point, or that the economists before oneself were all dumb enough to miss something glaringly obvious, or that one is using a bunch of unsubstantiated points. In any of these cases, it has been my experience that the grader is unlikely to be too impressed, and therefore taking the text as a framework is usually a good idea. Save one's creativity for publications.

Of course, keeping the entire structure isn't optimal either, and thus some reorganization, and a few out-of-the-text tidbits is ideal. My FYP advisor recently reminded me of a writing technique which I have not used for a long time - plan out a key point for each paragraph and stick that sentence at the head, leaving the rest of the paragraph for elaboration of that point only.

This gives rise to a rather stiff and regular academic style, which however is efficient in that it allows the reader to speed-read through a paper by glancing at the first sentence of each paragraph. It applies better to more technical subjects in my opinion, and for my economics essay I stuck to more free-form writing.

The natural follow-up question is, if the majority of the meaning can be conveyed thus, why bother with the rest of the words? I have encountered this issue with my UROP project, and really in many cases I feel a few sentences can adequately convey the essentials.

For example, the first part of my essay was supposed to answer "why has there been such dramatic rural-urban migration in LDCs?" One probably doesn't need a module to arrive at most of the answers - lack of rural jobs due to an increasing population from high births, societal expectations for reasons of status, recommendations by acquaintances, seeking jobs not available in rural areas, the desire for a new start or different life, and of course most importantly, the fact that people generally earn more in urban areas (which quite surprisingly was supposedly ignored by most migration theories half a century ago).

So I am supposed to expand these few dozen words into a thousand. Well, a student's gotta do what a student's gotta do...


This Irritating Computer

And how often have you tried to save a Notepad file for Windows to tell you that there is not enough space on the disk? Well, it just happened for me when saving the draft of this post to the Desktop - my C drive has literally zero bytes free, or so Windows Explorer tells me. I thought that ten gigabytes was reasonable for a system-only partition, but all that space has slowly, inexorably vanished, and to top it off I'm pretty sure my computer isn't infected. Can't wait for the holidays to arrive, so that I can reformat everything and chuck in a new 500GB drive with a 100GB system partition. To think that I once thought a few gigabytes was plenty on my first system.

Had my surfing of overseas sites, and especially images, slow to a crawl some of these nights, no thanks to the fat green pipe of Starhub. Slightly disappointing. Also discovered that Chrome isn't all it's cracked up to be when it doesn't have enough space for cacheing, and indeed I'm unsure if it knows when to stop doing so - the first time my C drive filled, I discovered that Chrome was responsible for over a gigabyte of data.

I suppose I could try surfing using emacs, as one particularly masochistic guy does:


Classy white

Think I should buy a netbook to get the desktop to wake up its idea. I was never really sold on laptops, since to me they offered too little for too high a price. Netbooks, on the other hand - they don't pretend to have the solidity and power of a desktop, and keep to the essentials, i.e. Internet access.

Seriously, to me there is little point in paying through the nose for a wow-it-can-do-everything-a-desktop-can laptop, when I would prefer the desktop whenever I'm home. Most of that processing power would be simply wasted, as many consumers are doubtless beginning to realize. If you're mostly using a laptop to check your email, do word processing and watch YouTube, why the heck do you need a freaking 2 GHz processor and a 15-inch screen?

Well, to be fair, there isn't a sudden price dropoff between netbooks and budget laptops, since most decent netbooks start from around S$600 to S$900, while entry-level laptops can be had for S$1000-odd. Still, I'm not inclined to go halfway on this matter. It's get a cute little extra-portable 10-inch netbook, or stuff my desktop, monitor and miscellaneous paraphernalia in a backpack to go!


On Temperatures And Moods

I seriously think I am less irritable, more optimistic and more productive at lower temperatures, kind of like Pratchett's trolls. I have felt rather tired and down many a time in recent days, only to discover that the fan (not csq's) was switched off. Wonder if the temperate latitudes are for me.

Entered my name in the ballot for a couple of Champions League final tickets, as the spectacle very coincidentally takes place the very next day after we touch down in Rome. Not too optimistic given the sheer number of applicants, but we'll see what comes up. Interestingly the official UEFA site uses the same reCAPTCHA authentication as this blog.

Feel like ending with a quote I thought rather meaningful, so here goes:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us."

- Marianne Williamson




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3 comments

csq's bird said...
wtf, u surfed porn until ur hard disk is full
(csq)(csq)


March 11, 2009 - 11:30 SGT     
gilbert said...
where got pple save pr0n on system drive one.

then again, s3af00d on sea-drive, hmm...


March 11, 2009 - 18:42 SGT     
fan of psw said...
(csq)(csq)


March 12, 2009 - 01:26 SGT     

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