Update Alert: my new mathematical webpage!

With any luck, the Fox Trot people won't sue me for copyright infringement .. but I just couldn't resist using that particular comic strip for an opening .. q:

Main changes: I've tweaked around the page layout a bit and altered the color scheme. Also, I designed a new "logo" which you can find on the upper-right corner here: it's meant as the infinitesmal picture of quasiconformality, treated as colored spheres and ellipsoids under the light of a distant light source.

Other changes: The list of UM Mathematics Seminars is still there, but since I predict that I won't be doing much traveling in the next few years (I do have a problem to solve and a thesis to write, after all), I've removed the Events / Conferences page from the list of Links.

Anyways, back to work. Enjoy the site!

Putting my money where my mouth is.

No work done today, but looking at my precedent of work hours and hours in the office, one could make the argument that "the night's still young" and "the day ain't over yet."

I continued with playing host to two friends of mine from high school, and then I played soccer with friends from the Department. Now it feels like time to work, but I can't identify whether that is my conscience urging me to work my status quo routine of hours, or whether it is something larger in scope ..

.. such as accepting and meeting my current fate head-on: having been handed a research problem by my advisor, to review the context and what is known, then to plan a strategy and execute it, baby step by baby step. I'm sorry to say that I'm still somewhat overwhelmed, and it's unclear where to start first:

• Do I read the background material more in depth? That way I can be aware of the trouble spots early on, and when they occur then I am prepared to combat them.
  
  
• Do I close the gap, and get some preliminary results done? It's not like I don't understand the problem nor misunderstand the broad strokes of its shape. Doing something might suggest to me where I should start my study of the background material ..

It's probably a convex combination of the two, or likely a feedback loop of repeating one and then the other .. and I should get to it! Now if I can only get myself to accomplish that something ..

I should keep my damned mouth shut ..

.. and stop this proclivity of wasting time on the Internet, particularly blogging and commenting on blog posts of others. In my hierarchy of must-do's, I should be:

1. Start work on my advisor-given thesis problem. Oh yes: I have a problem now, and I'm in the state of affairs where I actually understand the problem at hand, but apart from making parallels from previous results in the field, I'm at a loss for how even to approach it.
   
   Then again, if I knew how to solve it, then it would no longer be a problem, would it? q: Still, the inherent and newfound uncertainty of the matter is still unnerving to me.
   
   
2. Continue reading my advisor's book; I still feel like I don't know enough to start work in the Analysis on Metric Spaces. [1] Then again, half the days of the week I wake up and wonder if I'll ever feel ready to work in this field.
   
   
3. LaTeX my results on previous research. There are still details to check, but if I don't do them now then I'll be swamped by more immediate work: for example, the earlier items on this list!

Instead, over the last few days I've been posting on my blog, doing work for the last item on the Must-Do List, and consistently replying to a blog post about matters of Linear Algebra.

Below is the link, if you're really that keen on reading what I have to say. My comments are under the username "grey_ghost."

[from a LiveJournal mathematics community]

[1] Lately I've prefered to refer to the subject as "metric analysis" rather than "analysis on metric spaces." Less words make a single, comprehensible mouthful.