Winter break is winding down

Winter break is nearly over, and yet I'm a bit behind in the work I wanted to accomplish, at home and for school. But the kids had their week off along with me, which means little time to work. But we had a trip to the Schenectady Planetarium, the State Museum (for at least the third time this month), day trip to New Jersey, visited my sister (she hasn't spoiled my kids enough yet), play date for kids, and another day I don't remember at the moment.

I have 4 6-8 page papers due. I've got about two pages out of 24-32 pages written so far. Good think I'm working on my blog instead... But at least I bought a really cool laptop for $450, though it meant lining up at Best Buy at 10:30 on a Sunday morning with a crowd of others. Is it making me more productive? I'll decide next week. At least there are no games on this machine. Yet.

Back to work and try to fit in another page before crashing for the night.

But it's all good...

Now that the Comprehensive exam is nearly a week behind me (the in-class part was one week ago, the rest turned in 4 days ago), I can't say enough how much a relief it was to turn it in. Sometime between March and June I get the results.

Now it's Friday with no classes, no lab hours, no projects due for a few days. I'm taking time before getting down to business, grabbing a bunch of online readings to download to my PDA. I'm heading to Jersey this weekend, and probably won't have my books or with me. Maybe it's old school (I'm between the Baby Boom and GenX, but still a targeted demographic) to still use PDA's, or just too Dot Com era.. but I can load my readings (even if a bit clumsily) if I can get an electronic version of it. The tools aren't good, and not for the faint-of-heart. I'd like to see a WordDoc converter, but I'm about to try OpenOffice and see if that can somehow churn out a workable source file for my PDA. Major nonproductive geek hacking all in the guise of doing real work. Maybe I'll just stamp it all under the heading of research and move on...

Comprehensive Exam fun

I'm taking one of my Comprehensive Exams right now. It's for my primary specialization. If you're another poor sucker trying for a PhD, you'll understand.

It came in two parts, for double the fun. There was an open-book 3-hour part in class last Friday , where you frantically flipped through notes and documents to scribble out as much as you could possibly manage before the noon deadline. Let's just say the exam took everyone by surprise and leave it at that.

Then came the take-home part. Why? Regardless, it's due by noon on Monday. 15 pages written, and about 14 hours to go. With one question done, and the other two about 2/3 finished, I'm suddenly stuck. Between the Beatles, Coldplay, and Led Zeppelin, I've somehow gotten through the past 48 hours. I think I need to find another Brit Pop CD and settle back in... But it's the home stretch. Somewhere I heard some ballpark figure of 30 pages, but it looks like I may be only a little over 20. Does it matter if you've answered the question? I guess I'll find out in a couple of months when these things get graded.