I'm aiming to submit a paper about Theseus in the next few weeks. The deadline is about 3 weeks away. My sister wants me to join her for spring break the week leading up to that deadline, so I'm going to see what I can do in 2 weeks, despite how insane that sounds right now.
I read recently about the Poisson distribution, specifically about how seemingly large numbers of concurrent events are expected to occur even for events of low probability. Blaming the piling-up periods and the periods of rest on pure chance helps me deal with stress when everything seems to happen all at once, even when I know it's probably not a valid characterization.
Anyway, I have a lot coming up in the next week:
This Monday I hope to announce a Node.js class to the students of my advisor's course, 6.813/831. I'm designing the class to be taught with- and without Theseus in order to gather lots of data about how real people come to use it over an "extended" period (longer than a lab study). I'm planning the curriculum around three scenarios: understanding code, writing code, and debugging code.
I'm also meeting with Daniel Jackson on Monday about an opportunity to introduce Theseus to students in 6.170, in the context of Rails programming.
6.345, a speech recognition course I'm taking, has a homework assignment due on Monday as well. I've been working on it for the last two weeks and I'm only about half-way done, so I'm planning a big push tomorrow morning. There's also a midterm on Wednesday.
As a grad student, one of my biggest struggles is determining when to do classwork, when to do research, and when to take a break. When I was an intern at Adobe last summer, there were only two choices, and "the work week" made most of the decisions for me.
At MIT, even with a deadline looming, my schedule is chunky with constant context switches. During the summer at Adobe, research was literally my job and I worked at it consistently. The difference is illustrated by my GitHub activity log:
I think that's part of the reason I want to go back this summer.