What's concentration anyway at 3 o' clock on a Thursday afternoon. The pages full of kets and hermitian matrices lying in front of me? Rachel Yamagata keeping me awake (I could never fall asleep listening to her, I'd be afraid she'd somehow come out of the iPod and hit me)? Personally, I think it's the mars bar shaped crucial dose of sugar that's going to keep me going.
Irene and me went to Bristol yesterday to meet up with Tim. While it only takes 2 hours to get to King's Cross from here, it takes a good 4 hours to Bristol so effectively, we spend 9 hours traveling and 5 in Bristol. Deducting lunch from that, that still makes for a nice meeting, but somehow it doesn't quite sit right anyway. Lunch by the way could have been amazing. I've now signed my soul away and aren't allowed to "disclose sensitive information" (which I find quite funny), but let it be known that the HP research labs are quite shiny. Their canteen is massive and they served pretty much everything - down to almost a full Sunday lunch... and then Irene and Tim opted for sandwiches. Sigh. Goodbye, Yorkshire puddings and gravy!
Either way, the day got more productive as it went on. I didn't have a clue what the two of them were on about in the first half of the meeting, then I had enough of it (and I might have been quite sleepy) and started proposing silly ideas to have them explain to me why exactly they didn't work. So they didn't really get anything out of it but I learned quite a lot and got as far as deluding myself into thinking that I was starting to have a vague clue of what they're really doing and what I should be doing as well. On the way back, Irene and me sat together on the train (it had been packed in the way down) and I took the opportunity of asking her about pretty much everything I understand, all the way from some comment in her code to some major principle. So now I have a lot less questions and a lot more to do, which isn't necessarily bad as Irene will be gone for the rest of the year as of Monday.
The other good thing about being stuck on a train with her was that we actually got talking about things other than physics and the university. I never found her unapproachable or anything but it never hurts to actually know someone you're going to work with for 3 years a little. So we talked about american elections, religion, gender patterns, new year's eve, fire works, major cities, why you never truly fit into a society you haven't grown up in, places we've been or want to go to... you name it.
Right. Back to work, enough with the procrastination!