It’s the simple things in life..

I don’t know, maybe I’m a person who’s easily pleased but I find that a lot of simple gestures/events/gifts/purchases …


Like finding a bonus curly fry among your normal, boring fries.

Like buying a really good music album.

Like receiving a call from an old friend.

Like replacing a burned light bulb or refilling the windscreen cleaning fluid on my own.

Like refusing a plastic bag at the sales counter.

Or maybe purchasing something that may seem ordinary, like an external hard disk.

… are enough to lift my spirits. Kinda like this guy..

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Things I’ve learned after completing the review paper..

1) The only way you can beat procrastination is to fight fire with fire. Procrastinate hard enough until you’re so sick of wasting time that you’ll eventually get to work.


2) Following up on procrastination, I find that I feel a general sense of accomplishment after finishing minor tasks which really hinders my work progress. For example, I always feel like I deserve a rest despite only finishing 2 paragraphs of text/reading 1 article.

If only there’s a progress bar that updates itself as I go along to indicate how much of work that has actually been completed.


3) It’s amazing what you can accomplish once a rigid deadline has been set. I have never finished more than 5 articles a day prior to the Dec 15 deadline. In the 5 days leading up to Dec 15, I completed about 50-55, averaging approx. 10 a day.


4) Friends in need are friends indeed.


5) Working on the bed never works.


6) Synctoy is an awesome program for backing up/syncing files between different computers


7) Chemistry is actually a pretty fun subject to learn. If only I’d known this during my SPM years.


8) Contrary to what I thought before, it *is* necessary to print out all those articles despite being able to read them from a screen. The ability to highlight/scribble notes next to the blocks of text is very, very useful.


9) I hated it (still do, actually) when I came across articles filled with pointlessly long and over-conjoined sentences using words that were picked from a thesaurus and yet, when I started writing my review paper, I found myself doing the same because doing otherwise somehow made my paper look elementary.


10) Wikipedia is a life-saver. Donated $10. Only $10? Well yeah, that’s $10 more than most of the Malaysian students would have contributed, I’m sure!


11) I love stocking up on books borrowed from the library and not reading them.


12) I’m so sick of Mcdonald’s. Because I tend to work till late or go to work after everyone had had lunch, eating in the car after passing the Mcdonald’s Drive-Thru was the easiest and most efficient way to fill up. (45 mins drive after all)

Hence, Mcdonald’s almost every other day. Ugh, absolutely sick of it.


13) The working habit that took almost 1.5 months to put into routine took only 1.5 days to get rid of. Back to bumming for me.


14) When in the world have sticky notes urging you to “concentrate!” and “work hard, don’t procrastinate!” ever work? They’re like a nagging mother, I tune them out after 5 seconds.


15) Authors who don’t put the title of the articles cited in the references section can fuck right off.


16) There is no 16, actually. That is all.

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Review Paper >>>>> Me

The good news is the set in stone deadline is December 15, which means, complete or not, my work will end then. The bad news is, I’m getting absolutely bum-raped by this review work.

It was something I expected to have finished by early November. I really upped the effort during mid-October and it’s now December but I’m still no closer to finishing it!

I’m just being asked to learn too many things too soon. There are loads of biological terminology and concepts in there that I’ve no complete grasp of; understandable given my last encounter with it was during SPM. I had to wiki biological terms every odd sentence!

Add Chemistry into the mix as well, and I’m really struggling. I bought an A-Levels Chemistry book a couple of weeks ago and that really helped me understand the concepts but still, most of the chemistry involved in the papers I’m reading are really high level stuff.

It would be alright if I was just absorbing stuff off it but no, I was asked to review it, meaning providing critical commentary on something I didn’t really have a clue about! All these contributed to my slow progress as I had to do a lot of side reading on top of going through all the articles AND summarizing them into a cohesive paper, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

Strange to say, though, I’m kind of enjoying being thrown into the deep end and being forced to sink or swim. At least once I survive this (if, actually), I’ll have a fairly high understanding on my field. Doing a doctorate was never supposed to be easy anyway.

Oh, and Windows Live Writer rocks! This rant was a bit of an excuse to test out this Microsoft offering actually and I have to say, it’s made me want to blog a bit more. It' just makes things so easy.

Not kidding about the work stress, though. I can’t wait for December 15 to come!

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