I have returned.

Saying goodbye to Plurk

These past few weeks, I've been mostly over at Plurk, and any urge to blog was quickly worn down by a barrage of tiny little micro-entries (i.e., plurks). While satisfying enough, it was beginning to feel a bit too stifling.

Plurk works well as a sort of cross between a chatroom, a forum, and a blog. The interface is very user-friendly and quirky enough to be interesting, with the karma point system and the ubiquitous dancing bananas. The interface makes it easy (and quite addicting!) to keep up with new plurks and responses to plurks.

I would say it works best when you have a bunch of good friends along with you - Plurk makes for a good way to keep in touch with and amuse one another. So while I did have fun watching friends interact with their friends, but I don't think it really worked all that well for me, personally.

With just barely over a semester left in college, I probably would find it more useful than ever to get my thoughts in order by writing them out. So I'm quitting Plurk and trying to get back to regular blogging.



Saying hello to "old friends"

These past few days have been almost totally unproductive. I spent my time on Plurk, reading Blade of the Immortal, and playing Monsters' Den (and Monsters' Den 2). I could come up with excuses, but I'll leave them out for now, for brevity.

I've been in a research-work rut for this entire semester. Although I do attend the weekly seminar, I've also been utterly dry, production-wise. Sure, I've been reading up on my own, but I can't seem to get started on an actual project by myself. Perhaps it's time to admit this and ask for a little help from my adviser. I've only been putting it off because I wanted to be able to talk with him only when I had something to offer myself, but as it happened I still have nothing, even after a couple of months on my own.

As to my classes, they're manageable enough, but I haven't been getting the most out of them. I will be getting good grades, perhaps even 1.0's, but only because the professors are letting us off easy. Even with high grades in Physics 152 and 170, I still know next to nothing about statistical mechanics or solid state physics. Again, this is due to a lack of motivation and effort on my part: had I studied harder and solved more problems on my own, I could've gained a better understanding of what the heck we were supposed to be learning.

So, like I said, nothing much is new. Hello, old friends. I am afraid to say, I do not seem to be better-equipped than before to meet you; we shall have to make do with the usual routine of frustration and regret.



The future?

I have taken the liberty of preparing this idealized schematic for how I'd like to proceed:

BLOGGING -> SELF-UNDERSTANDING -> MOTIVATION -> EFFECTIVENESS -> SUCCESS

(Realistically, the first link is the most suspect. I've been blogging for years, and look where it got me. Nowhere.)