The paper is reaching its final stage

Dear Diary,

today, I spent another day working on the paper that has been invited to a special issue. The deadline is on the 1st of July and today I finished up the last edits and small things. I sent the final draft to my supervisor this evening. He’s in Singapore right now and will look at it and send me the final comments so I have them tomorrow. Then I’ll implement them and will be ready to submit it.

The only thing that I still need to do tomorrow is figure out how to best publish the data and all the code for the analyses. Usually, that is not done: you just publish the paper and the paper has some figures and the results of some analyses in there. In the paper, you describe how you did the analyses. But the best description, of course, is the actual code. So we want to make the data as well as all the code that gets us from the data to the results (and the figures) publicly (and freely) available.

I’ve started putting together a file with all the code and descriptions. I’ll need another half hour or hour to finish that tomorrow and then I’ll have to figure out how/where to publish it. Github seems like an obvious idea. I haven’t worked with it before but I think that’s what I’ll try to do. I wanted to start using it anyways and this might just be the perfect opportunity.

Temporary roommate

Dear Diary,

last night, my friend NB came back from the States. He spent the last 5 months at MIT, working on his MSc thesis project. Now he’ll be in Groningen for about a month to finish up some things he still needs to do to get his degree and he’ll stay with us during that time.

He’s a super nice guy and I am happy to have him around. It’s going to be a good month! And he’ll pay a third of the rent so I’m going to have a bit more money to spend on other things. It’s a win-win situation!

He’s still pretty jet-lagged and we’re both super busy right now so we didn’t have too much time to catch up. Looking forward to hanging out with him once we both have a bit more time.

Not as much climbing this week

Dear Diary,

due to all the squash, I didn’t climb much this week. I went with EJ once and just made it a day of hard climbing. I warmed up and then only climbed routes I couldn’t actually climb. The easiest I did was a 6a+. I tried two more 6b’s and a 6b+. They are starting to feel easier but are still pretty hard. :D

There was one 6b that I did that I could do quite well up until a point where I just couldn’t figure out how to go on. I think I have to jump to the next hold. From a really shitty position, though. I can’t think of another way to do it, though. I’ll have to ask around to see whether there’s a more elegant solution…

I briefly talked to BB last night. He got back from a climbing weekend in Belgium and wants to go somewhere again next weekend. I might join him. However, it’s going to be super hot next weekend (it’s going to be 37C in the Ith on Saturday :o ) so that’s not ideal for climbing. We’ll have to talk about it a bit more during the week and see. It’d definitely like to go again…

Lots of squash this week

Dear Diary,

I played quite some squash in the last couple of days. Last Thursday, I played in my club’s masters tournament. I was the number 8 seed and finished 5th. I was really happy with that and played well that night. I even won a game against TW because I was playing well and he made quite some mistakes. I also beat SB and MM. MM played amazing that night. I’ve never seen him play that well. Usually, I can beat him without much trouble but he actually forced me to play five sets against him and the last one was 12:10. Very, very close!

On Saturday, I was at the other squash club in Groningen to play at a tournament that was organized in honor of the lady that organized all the tournaments there – she’s retiring. I signed up for the D category and won quite easily. Starting now, I’ll sign up for C in up-coming tournaments. I need to get my ass kicked more.

Today was the last training of the season. There’s one more event Thursday but this was the last training. I trained for an hour and it was pretty hot on the courts. We were all sweating like crazy. Then I played another hour with HB. We played 12 or 13 games, I think. We were both super exhausted but it was awesome. I never play as well as against him and it’s a lot of fun because it’s so close that you have to fight for every single point.

There’s one more thing on Thursday and then the season is officially over. I’ll try to keep playing about once a week during the summer to maintain my level but mainly focus on climbing during the next 2-3 months.

Still no phone

Dear Diary,

I am still phone-less. I gave my phone to my friend SH and he took it to Hamburg to have it checked at the Apple Store. However, he didn’t make it to the Store all week and was in Paris over the weekend. He has another appointment there tomorrow so I hope that he’ll be able to make it this time.

He’s a bit unreliable and I probably shouldn’t have expected him to do it straight away. I could have known better. Anyways – not having a phone is not as terrible as I thought it’d be. I miss being able to listen to music or podcasts while walking/cycling and staying in the loop regarding the planning of social events is tricky.

In the meanwhile, i have decided what to do. If it’s the battery, it can be replaced for 75€. Then I’ll just have that done. If the repairs are less than 100€, I’ll have it fixed. Otherwise, I’ll buy a new phone, and switch to new, cheap Android phone. The iPhone 5 that I could have bought will go to my brother. But I don’t believe that until it’s actually arranged – as I said, not the most reliable friend I have. ;)

Slow climbing progress

Dear Diary,

after an hour of squash, I met with two friends at the climbing gym last night. Since we were rotating with the three of us and the other guys decided to climb easy stuff but climb multiple routes back-to-back, I didn’t actually spent too much time climbing.

I worked on a very balance-y 6a+ again and was able to send it at the end of the evening. Really cool route. This week, I’ve focused on squash a bit more but I hope that starting next week, I can climb at least twice or even three times a week to get stronger. My main problem at the moment is endurance and the only way to increase that is to just climb a lot.

New phone or replacing the old one?

Dear Diary,

I am not sure whether I should get a new phone. My friend SH will take my broken iPhone 5 to the Apple Store in Hamburg on Friday. There are basically three options for me at this point, ranked from cheapest to most expensive:

1. The phone’s battery is broken and they can replace it and I get my phone back.
2. The phone’s broken and replacing it will be expensive. In that case, my friend’s buddy would sell me his old iPhone 5 for 120€
3. I buy a new phone.

I still have hope that it’s the first option. Then I am set and don’t need to worry. If it’s the second or third, I’ll have to think about which I want. I could get the used iPhone 5 for relatively little money. But then I have a device that’s 3 years old. And the more recent updates that Apple puts out use more and more hardware-driven features that are not really necessary but slow down your phone so you upgrade.

If I buy a new device, I’ll have to spend more money. But I’d have a new device. I’ve been looking at the OnePlus One. The 64GB version only costs 300€ and it’s a top of the line device that has gotten good reviews. I like the idea of having a slightly bigger screen but am not sure how I feel about switching to Android. It might be an interesting experience but would also require some time and energy to get used to. On the other hand, I don’t plan to do anything fancy with it.

Hmm. Decisions. I’ll have to wait until Friday and see what my friend says regarding my phone. I am tempted to get the OnePlus One, though.

Final squash events of the academic year

Dear Diary,

this week is the last week of squash events. Tomorrow night, I’ll play in my club’s “master tournament”. Throughout the year, there was an internal competition in which everyone was ranked (it started alphabetically) and then you could challenge people above you and take their place if you won. At the end of the year (that is: now), the top 16 players are invited to battle out the final ranking in the “master tournament”. This year, two sub-divisions will be formed: the first 8 players will battle it out and the players ranked 9-16.

I finished the season being ranked 8th so I’ll be able to compete on the highest level tomorrow night. My goal is to not finish 8th. I should be able to finish 6th if I have an okay day. If I have a very good day, I might even finish 5th. But that’s not likely.

Since I want to play decently, I trained for about two hours on Monday and played for another hour yesterday. I was able to play against (and beat) two of the guys that I’ll play tomorrow as well. But both of them didn’t have very good days so I try to disregard that.

I managed to break two of my rackets on Monday. I didn’t even hit the wall very hard. I just had to dig very tight balls out of the corner. On one of the rackets, the frame just kind of split (this is what usually happens, I guess) but the other one looks like I purposefully destroyed it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a phone to take and post a picture right now. I’ll do that as soon as I have a phone again.

Anyways, looking forward to squash tomorrow night. I’ll get my ass kicked because the top players are way out of my league but there are three players that I should be able to play good games against.

Weekend hiking trip to the Harz

Dear Diary,

last weekend, I went to Bremen to meet with some friends. I drove over on Friday night and on Saturday morning we left early in the morning (around 8 am) to drive down to Hahnenklee for some hiking. The route we looked up turned out to be kind of lame (it was a gravel road and the view was not that great) and it started to rain quite hard towards the end.

The original plan was to camp there for a night, do another hike the next day and then come back. We decided to stop in Goslar for a coffee and then just do the other hike straight away and ended up driving back to Bremen at around 9:30 that night. The second hike was pretty awesome and took us up some cliffs with a great view of the Oker valley. I really enjoyed that.

One of the guys was a little bit scared of heights so this was a lot more terrifying to him than it was to me:

It was a long day of not-so-strenuous hiking and I stayed with my friends in Bremen for another night. On Sunday, I went to have breakfast with my parents and it was good to catch up with them since I haven’t seen them in a while. I drove back to Groningen in the early afternoon and had the rest of the evening to pick out some pictures, answer some e-mails and then do a little home workout with BB. My arms are still sore.

Overall, another great weekend!

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth

Dear Diary,

last night, I finished reading An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield [Amazon]. Hadfield was the first Canadian to be the commander of the International Space Station (ISS) and during his service there, his son helped him to generate a lot of social media attention. He made dozens of videos explaining how certain things work in space but probably the most famous video is his interpretation of Space Oddity:

The book itself is great. Hadfield tells his life story: how he dreamt about being an astronaut ever since he was a small kid and how he knew that it’s most certainly not going to happen. But that it’s still worth trying. That’s really the main point that I am taking away from this book: how to motivate yourself to dedicate your time and energy to something that you know is probably not going to work. The tricky part with this, of course, is failing. We all fall short of the goals we set for ourselves all the time but how do we deal with it? And maybe even more important: what can we do to do better the next time around?

So the whole book is great from a life-advice perspective. But it’s also filled with very interesting facts and information about the day to day life of an astronaut, the training and the selection, etc. What kind of blew my mind is the sheer insanity of it all. We have people living in space. Doing science in space. It’s crazy! I mean, I kind of knew this before but never really thought about it. Along with CERN, the ISS is one of the best examples of how humanity can work together to achieve something great.