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Jul. 10th, 2009 11:35 amGosh, nearly a month already? Time has been passing quickly. So, where was I..?
Lance has moved out of our flat, and in with Nick and Fi. Here's hoping that works out well for him. If all works out well we may be getting a Sam, who's looking like pretty good flatmate material despite being a first-timer, and will certainly help us in covering those winter expense bills. Scott's managed to get a bit of work to tide him over until he gets the kind of job he wants, too, so as a flat that'll have us in a somewhat less stressed place I hope.
I've made some useful progress on the technical side of my thesis, implementing a learning activity in Second Life (and portable to OpenSim with the right art assets). Getting used to LSL (the scripting used in Second Life) has been a bit tricky, as the API is a less than consistent thing and sometimes the things I'm trying to do with it fall (I suspect) a little outside the standard use case. Still, now that I have a bit of a better idea of how to do event modelling, storing object properties and handling inter-object message passing, future work will be a lot easier. I've got a couple of other designs in the pipeline to do, so there should hopefully be some interesting things to conduct activities around. For OpenSim I can also do some things in C#, so that's a good excuse to learn the language, finally.
On the more academic side of things, I've formed a general structure for my PhD proposal. I also just had a department interview with the HoD and a postgrad research committee member. Happily, they try to make the process supportive rather than adversarial. I got some good advice on things I'll need to concentrate on going into the proposal period. One piece of advice I particularly agreed with was the idea of writing it with a cynical audience in mind. While I'm working in a field that has a "cool" factor, that's not something I should - or want to - rely on. A chief concern will be showing people where the science is. Having a proposal that reads like I'm going to have fun for three years and then try to claw some observations and justifications together to make a thesis out of is not the thing to do.
Game work is proceeding, though I don't have too much time to devote right now with other priorities. I'm still doing enough that I feel like I'm contributing, even if much of that is helping colleagues refine their ideas rather than creating my own materials right now.
Really looking forward to travelling. I had it suggested to me that I might want to look at suspending or going part-time with the thesis while I'm away, just to make sure I don't get caught out at the tail end of the PhD in terms of time to submit it. I'll need to investigate what implications that has in terms of my scholarship funds, though. That said, I can work from a laptop in the U.S. as easily as I can here, for the most part; if I can have a productive Skype meeting with colleagues in Seattle and Toronto, I can certainly meet with my PhD supervisor from Versailles or Pasadena. And nothing will stop me from going anyway.
Lance has moved out of our flat, and in with Nick and Fi. Here's hoping that works out well for him. If all works out well we may be getting a Sam, who's looking like pretty good flatmate material despite being a first-timer, and will certainly help us in covering those winter expense bills. Scott's managed to get a bit of work to tide him over until he gets the kind of job he wants, too, so as a flat that'll have us in a somewhat less stressed place I hope.
I've made some useful progress on the technical side of my thesis, implementing a learning activity in Second Life (and portable to OpenSim with the right art assets). Getting used to LSL (the scripting used in Second Life) has been a bit tricky, as the API is a less than consistent thing and sometimes the things I'm trying to do with it fall (I suspect) a little outside the standard use case. Still, now that I have a bit of a better idea of how to do event modelling, storing object properties and handling inter-object message passing, future work will be a lot easier. I've got a couple of other designs in the pipeline to do, so there should hopefully be some interesting things to conduct activities around. For OpenSim I can also do some things in C#, so that's a good excuse to learn the language, finally.
On the more academic side of things, I've formed a general structure for my PhD proposal. I also just had a department interview with the HoD and a postgrad research committee member. Happily, they try to make the process supportive rather than adversarial. I got some good advice on things I'll need to concentrate on going into the proposal period. One piece of advice I particularly agreed with was the idea of writing it with a cynical audience in mind. While I'm working in a field that has a "cool" factor, that's not something I should - or want to - rely on. A chief concern will be showing people where the science is. Having a proposal that reads like I'm going to have fun for three years and then try to claw some observations and justifications together to make a thesis out of is not the thing to do.
Game work is proceeding, though I don't have too much time to devote right now with other priorities. I'm still doing enough that I feel like I'm contributing, even if much of that is helping colleagues refine their ideas rather than creating my own materials right now.
Really looking forward to travelling. I had it suggested to me that I might want to look at suspending or going part-time with the thesis while I'm away, just to make sure I don't get caught out at the tail end of the PhD in terms of time to submit it. I'll need to investigate what implications that has in terms of my scholarship funds, though. That said, I can work from a laptop in the U.S. as easily as I can here, for the most part; if I can have a productive Skype meeting with colleagues in Seattle and Toronto, I can certainly meet with my PhD supervisor from Versailles or Pasadena. And nothing will stop me from going anyway.
