FOB

Well, I am back in beautiful Portland. My wife, step-daughter, son, and I are living in Forest Heights near my wife's sister. Forest Heights has a shuttle bus that runs out to the transit center,so it's easy for me to get downtown.

My advisor told me to write the first draft of my proposal --- he said to me that I had made a lot more progress than he realized. He commented my presentation was "non-standard, but we can fix that." I am hoping to be done soon.

Portland is great. My only complaint is that my apartment is at the bottom of a big hill (small mountain?). This really makes amateur radio difficult. I brought a qrp rig (ft817) from Israel along with a portable vertical antenna (ventenna hfp). Those and my automatic antenna tuner (ldg z-11 pro) should get me on the air from just about any park in the area.

I'll report on my success.

I moved to Israel late February -- I live in central Jerusalem about a 5 minute walk from the Supreme Court building. I can't say enough good things about living here --- imagine a place that has the imprint of humanity since, literally, the beginning of time.

Perhaps in a future blog I'll comment about living here.

About the PhD: I've made PROGRESS. I have a thesis topic and have answered the big three questions: what
will be the outcome of the research; what problem is being solved; and how solving this problem relates to the larger context of computer science.

I am now working on a paper that should get me to the thesis proposal and then eventually the PhD.

So, it's late January, 2007. I've made some progress -- a couple of papers, none are Journal quality. I have a good work plan with my advisor for the next 4 months.

What have I learned? I can't work on the PhD part-time! I guess for most people that is a given -- it is too obvious. I thought I could eek out a PhD a little at a time. Bart gave me good advice a year ago: Sell your house, move to an apartment close to campus, focus on finishing the PhD.

Now, I put my house up for sale and am planning to live in Israel for a few months while I work on something hard and interesting. Maybe even the thesis topic will come out of it.

I am guessing that this how I start a personal blog. The purpose is advertise my progress (and often my lack of progress) towards a PhD in Computer Science. This might help some one in the future or dissuade some one from pursuing a PhD (which might actually be helpful!).