Productive af-Day 109-April 29th, 2018

I didn’t bother setting an alarm this morning. Despite all the work I needed to get done, I figured it would be alright if I started it a bit later. I did have all day after all.

I got up around 10:30 and hopped in the shower. I always shower after the gym, but my lack of working out this week has thrown my showering schedule off. I will have to return to Moana tomorrow after class.

While eating breakfast I noticed how beautiful of a day it was. The weather in Grenoble has truly been wonderful lately. Good thing I don’t plan on leaving the house today. Sometimes you need to buckle down and grind out some work. This was not a bad price to pay today considering how little work I get assigned while abroad.

After I finished eating, I immediately started on finishing my paper. When I woke up this morning, I saw that Anne-Marie had sent me her responses to my questions. Talk about perfect timing. Well not really the best timing actually, the paper was due tomorrow.

I also made a discovery, she wrote her name as Anne Marie without a hyphen. I guess from now on I will write it that way too. In a similar method as yesterday, I set a two hour timer and placed my phone far away to maximize productivity.

I grinded out the rest of my paper and had a pretty good first draft. This took about two and a half hours. I took a nice long break for lunch once I finished. Since I ran out of peanut butter yesterday, I just made myself ramen for lunch and had an apple with it.

Me eating my apple

 

I wasn’t ready to work on my two lab reports yet, so I decided to watch a movie. I had downloaded Office Space a while ago and had been meaning to watch it.

I enjoyed it a lot and it made me happy to not be working in a cubicle again this summer. After the movie, I spent some time working on my physics lab report. Greg keeps forgetting to send me the data and I have reminded him multiple times. I figured I would do as much of the lab report as I could without the data anyway. This took a while because I had use the equation editor on the computer to show my math steps and additionally add a bunch of labelled diagrams to explain the different gamma ray interactions.

Once I finished all I could do for the lab report, I started working on my other circuits lab report. Most of it was done, but I had to do some graphing and analysis. To make my life easier, I was using Matlab to do a lot of this. Matlab is a software and coding language that is basically the best friend of most engineering students. I find it helpful when doing calculations for a lot of data. My code from the other day still worked, so I finished all the computations. It is much easier to put all the data into a matrices and let the code do the work. I was able to plot a nice graph, but I ended up plotting it by hand on paper since I don’t have a printer. Graphing wasn’t as bad as usual because I had the computer for reference.

After I was done with circuits, I went back to my culture paper. I had to do some edits and revisions, then organize my bibliography and appendix. This a lot longer than expected, but I did also get distracted by watching the end of the Cavs-Pacers game. A while later, I was finally content with my paper. My last step for any paper is to put it in Google Translate from English to English, then have my computer read the entire paper out in its robot voice. This is a great way to find last minute typos or mistake that you may have missed. After a few quick fixes, I submitted my paper.

Just like that, my day was over. I really am not used to this amount of work, even though days like this were very common last semester. I am glad to know I can still sit down and get some work done if needed. I’m sure my summer job will whip me back into shape for the Fall semester.

I got ready for bed, then sat down to write this blog post. I went to bed afterwards.