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PhD

Summer Holiday

Summer holiday One of the benefits of spending the summer holiday in Southampton is that one gets to see how the University is outside the academic year. It also gives one an opportunity to experience the “British Summer”, with this year’s said to be the coldest in 30 years; talk about summer indeed. Obviously, the campus is less busy and it takes much less time to buy things at the union shop and susu cafe as the queues are shorter and consist of more staff than students at times. Continue reading →

What’s wrong with being a PhD Student?

Adam: Musi, we supposed to have a meeting yesterday? Musi: I think, the meeting is scheduled to be every Wednesday? Adam: It was Wednesday yesterday! Musi: No, today is Wednesday! Adam: Today is Thursday, go check your calendar! Musi: (a bit embarrassed.....), Well ... blah Adam: It’s ok, I understand you are a final year PhD.....!!! Well, this was the argument I had with my supervisor a couple of weeks back. Afterwards, I cried, Oh God, what's wrong with being a PhD ... lol. Continue reading →

Project Submitted!

Project submitted! The project report has been handed in: the piece of technical literature which will have the greatest weight on my grade for this academic year. This was, in fact, done nine days ago, but it has taken me this time to recover and find the time to express the event in words. With the stress of the individual project having been lifted, there exists a sort of limbo which feels something akin to the day after the lord mayor's show. Continue reading →

Third year of PhD

Third year of PhD “Permanent Head Damage (PHD) is shining at full boom: I have become short sighted, lost my memory, lost some hair with white blob at root (so I have to change my hair style), grown fatter: my inchoate SIX packs have been replaced by one big integrated pack, I have less time for my friends and family (I apologise, but one day you will be proud of me..;p)” Well this is the abstract of what I am doing nowadays. Continue reading →

I Met Tim Berners-Lee!

I've had an exciting day going up to London to the Royal Society to attend a Web Science panel. There I saw Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web – very exciting indeed. In fact, I even spoke to him and asked, “How do you feel about the non-conformance of W3C Standards with Internet Explorer?”, to which he replied, “Well, I will be using more and more SVGs [Scalable Vector Graphics] 
 if you're using Internet Explorer, you won't be able to see these pretty pictures”. Continue reading →

UMAP 2009 Day 1

I'm in Trento, Italy for the second conference of my academic career: UMAP (User Modelling And Personalisation) 2009. The first was back in November at DIGITEL 2008, in Banff, Canada, but someone convinced me not to take my laptop and typing a blog entry on my phone was too much hard work!! Conferences are an important part of the research world, as they are where academics present their work to their peers and receive feedback. Continue reading →

Sun Was Shining in Full Splendour

Greetings...Hello Hi....I am baaaaaack! It has been a long time since I posted my previous blog. Well I don’t want to make excuses but I was in trouble, a big trouble ......(BTW, my colleague from my previous job called me a ‘trouble’...:P) It was a pleasant day; there was fresh & sweet breeze blowing, sun was shining in full splendour, there were birds singing songs and we were walking towards a pub, located just behind the university. ....Hmm...somewhat romantic ya....:).... Continue reading →

PhD Straight After Undergraduate

Doing a PhD straight after an undergraduate degree brings both good and bad connotations about yourself. Particularly in Malaysia, jumping straight from a BSc to PhD is fairly unheard of, thus they automatically assume that you're some intelligent overachieving prodigy. On the flip side, grad school has been famously caricatured as a way to put off getting a job - or joining the real world, so to speak. When I first thought about doing a PhD, I wasn't really sure about what it involved. Continue reading →