I think different people have different methods of retaining what they learn. I asked Paul how he keeps notes on the code he writes and he told me he memorizes it and writes notes INTO the pieces of code, probably as comments.

That's good coding practice. But it doesn't help me when I have forgotten where I have used a particular structure or syntax. Since I am not building websites, but rather analyzing data, there is no predictable flow to the code.

Data processing tricks in my repertory need to change with every new data manipulation I want to do and I can't remember what tools I used for each single variable very well. I have found that I learn the most when I take the time to consciously analyse if my mind has absorbed the concepts by writing it down.

I considered using (e:strip) as my code notebook because I wanted to keep everything together. But it does not handle code well. Back and forward slashes produce wonky results. Characters don't escape well even with the code box. The code box itself is a fixed size. I always work in big wide screens and don't see it changing so I also wanted my notebook to have a very generous text area and very little of anything else.

All of these criteria are met by:


I still wish I could do that on (e:strip) though. As my life gets to be more about how to successfully survive in academia, I can distinctly see how that blog will get more entries per week than this one in the near and distant future if I stay on course. But of course, I don't see how I can I wax eloquent over trivia, veggies, food and the side effects of medication in between R, LaTeX and Perl, so maybe that blog does need to be separate.

I woke up today with the most excruciatingly severe throat pain. I had a couple bowls of that squash soup and 400 mg of ibuprofen.

Now the ground is spinning as I type this and my peripheral vision has an extraordinary sense of movement.

I hope to goodness this won't be a repeat of the benedryl drama. I know I am not the biggest of people but common doses of medicine have the weirdest effect on me. The kid dose of 9-10mg/kg comes to around 42 X 10 = 420 mg. I am 20 mg under the kid dose.

And I have dizziness. It is so ludicrous that on the very rare occasions I HAVE to take medicines, ALL the frustrating side effects come on to haunt me in full force. I mean who gets dizzy with ibuprofen, one of the most common NSAIDs?? ME. Arrrgh.

The Acorn Squash is hands-down my most favourite squash among all the other squashes.


I just made a roasted acorn squash soup with shredded coconut, tomatoes, red onions, moong dal, ginger, dried red chilles, cumin, asafoetida powder and dried curry leaves in 17 minutes.

A new record. Take that, rice cooker!

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I always have a timed (and rather unhealthy) competition with my rice cooker. While it steams the beans or lentils or some other staple, I chop and hustle to finish before it can. 80% of the time, its a tie between us, it wins 15% of the time. Today was my croaky and gloaty 5% win!

And victory was tasty! :-)

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Acorn Squash shot from Mango&Tomato: I don't own that kind of photo equipment!

I worked almost 24/7 and yet I don't feel like I am getting even close to where I wanted to be by this time.

And I didn't get to make that bread from cookbooks 101 because there was no time after endless iterations of analyses and endless bug fixing of my 60+ variables. I thought maybe I was just obsessing, but you have to be obsessive when it comes to data. One small mistake in coding and the data is telling you something else.


This is exactly how it feels like. I am not even sure where I am on that pile of unfinished work.

I want some magic to happen this week. I want to suddenly get very efficient at coding R or fluid in LaTeX or extremely good at coming up with insights on my dataset or just maybe finish everything I need to finish very soon. I am going to try and help myself very intensively this week.

When a good dose of panic wakes you up at 4:30 every morning.



Paul: When are you done
Me: I am never done.

NB: Click on the alien for the perfect simulation of how I wake up everyday.

A very well written comprehensive progress report on where we stand in cancer research and what we know currently in the war against cancer was released by the American Association of Cancer Research a couple days ago.

I think this report is well worth reading, if only to know a little more about this terrible disease. The plainly laid out facts in the report challenge the ill-founded conspiracy theories about how the medical, research and pharmaceutical establishments are out to get the cancer patient and are suppressing the cure to cancer (See for example: (e:vincent,55175))

If you had any questions about cancer or simply wished you had a better understanding of the disease, I highly recommend this read:
::READ PDF::

Humpty Dumpty was making a longtable
Yes! It was part of a thesis, and not a fable
Something about "Save" was taking far too long
Humpty didn't want to become egg foo yong
Stopping and listening to (e:strip) voices
Lead to Humpty having a million+ choices

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Nice longtable reference:

I have eaten like crap this entire past week. I think the only highlight of the week that went by was a cup of chocolate ice cream topped with mascarpone that I ate with Paul and Casey. I am determined to make bread this weekend. Specifically, I want to make the easy little bread from 101 cookbooks dot com:

I love that website. It's easily my most favourite recipe website ever. I like the pictures and the commentary on Pioneer Woman Cooks better, but more often than not, her recipes are too soaked in butter, too full of animal products and a trifle too rich for me to handle. I often wonder how many arteries she is clogging with her gorgeous looking blog. I am constantly tempted to go the whole nine atherosclerotic yards but I never make it through even two before I change course and convert her recipes to their ghastly poor versions. Unfortunately, they seldom take kindly to changes.

101 cookbooks, on the other hand, is all about light, airy dishes that don't take too long to cook and are infinitely "tweak-able" with equally good results down each tweaked path.

I read this article at 4:00 AM today:

I like its main points of summary. I reordered them to help myself out.

• Be realistic
• Face your fears
• Focus on your options
• Rise up to the challenge
• Find peace
• Don't stress over things you cannot control

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• Engage in acts of gratitude
• Be cautious when thinking about confrontation
• Don’t suppress or deny your feelings
• Be around people

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• Spend some time alone
• Feel good about yourself
• Relax
• Live your life
• Seek professional help

And these are my goals for September and October.

Pedestrian observation but hitting Ctrl+S or the save button in linux (on gedit and gnumeric)"^ is always followed by a longer delay in saving the state of whatever program I am in (specifically programs that I use for writing and composing longer documents)"^ compared with windows. I have no idea why. My linux machine is substantially faster than my windows machine so this delay can't be because of disparity in drive-accessing speeds.

It could be that windows is just telling me it has saved the state of the program sooner than it really has and that Linux doesn't report the state being saved until it really has finished saving. But this is just speculation.

I know it isn't a big deal. A few extra seconds isn't much but it does adds up when you are writing a really long document and have fallen into the habit of saving multiple times as you write. Hitting Ctrl+S is almost second nature to me when I start writing. Having to wait a good chunk of time more in linux for even minor saves is somewhat annoying.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this strange lag. I have seen it in Crunchbang, Ubuntu, Fedora and numerous other distributions I have tried. Every distro has the same annoying longer delay for saving (on gedit and gnumeric)"^.

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^and some other apps that I will continue to list as I keep a closer watch on this issue: Gummi is now in the list.

"EDIT after comments: Please click that small comment bubble below and see the comments to this journal. (e:Paul) gave me some very useful suggestions about getting to the root of this problem. Thankfully, its not the operating system or even the hardware on my computer (two things that I was hoping it wouldn't be, because I can't change them without considerable effort).

The problem apps are gedit and gnumeric. I have found a substitute for latex composition with a live preview already: Gummi! And it is 100x more fabulous. Gnumeric will be hard to replace. I don't know what program comes even close to the awesomeness of Gnumeric. OpenOffice (Libreoffice) calc is a pale shadow for the particular way I use Gnumeric.

"Thanks, Paul. If every linux newcomer had a patient friend like you, I think the transition to the OS would be so much more painless. :-)