So, uh... hello again.
Hey, everyone. I suppose it’s really been way, way too long, hasn’t it? Yeah... I'm sorry about that.
I know some people have been asking questions, and I expect I’ll be doing a lot of answering in the next few days, whether in this thread, elsewhere on the boards, or by PM/IM. Maybe, though, it would help if I briefly summarized a few things about my time away, just as a first step. If it seems a little scattered (and if I’m forgetting some details, as I’m apt to do), that’s probably because I’m writing this all at once, and I’ve slept for two of the last 36 hours. Yes, that’s still happening. Some things never change.
The last year has been, bar none, the most hectic, frantic year of my life. There have been moments of fantastic joy and long stretches of anguish, encapsulated in a giant bubble of all-nighters and exhaustion. Most disappointing to me, though, is the fact that I wasn’t able to be here when all of this was happening, not only because I wanted (and still want) to share these things with my fellow TPMers, but also just because any length of time when you can’t be active here is distressing.
Anyway. As a number of you’ve have likely heard from a few earlier posts, I’ve been dating a beautiful girl named Becky since February 2009. She and I met at an event held a few years ago by our graduate department in our university, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. (Well, technically we saw each other before then, but since I’d rather save the happier reminiscing for another post, that’s a story for another day. Let’s just call it “love at first conversation,” if not “love at first sight.”)
Permit me just a moment to say that Becky is one of the kindest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever met; she’s incredibly smart and ambitious with all her work; and she knows how to have a good time when she steps away from it all. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but as a few of my friends put it, somehow I ended up with “the smart, hot gamer girl.” (I’m living the dream!) I think several of those guys started considering graduate school as a direct result of Becky’s emergence. It’s just too bad for them that this girl is one-of-a-kind, and that she’s already taken: on May 20, 2010, Becky and I got engaged to be married. (Another story for another time.)
Normally I’d give you some further exposition about how fantastic my bride-to-be is, but I suppose that’s probably unnecessary since you’re already getting to know her yourselves. In any case, you can probably tell just from talking with Becky that I am a very, very lucky guy.
Don’t blame her for my absence, though. I’m not sure how much she told you – it’s going to take me some time for me to read through everything that everyone has posted – but my last year of graduate work has been nothing short of catastrophic. Had I known what was going to happen, I would have given better warning to all of you and explained it sooner, but by the time I realized just how crazy things would become, I was already so deep into it that I barely had time for sleep.
---Be forewarned: A long explanation of academia, my university, and my specific research follows, solely because it’s difficult to understand exactly how everything snowballed out of control without a bit of background information. (It’s heavily abridged, but it’s still long.) If you don’t care to know why I’ve been so busy, just skip to the bottom.---
Basically, I started working toward my Master’s degree in 2008, and was supposed to finish in 2010. This is oversimplifying, but that essentially meant I had to take a bunch of classes and subsequently write a thesis – a long, comprehensive research paper – within two years. The plan was to finish by the end of April 2010, by which point I hoped to be accepted into the Ph.D. program and continue my studies for four more years before receiving the doctorate. Keep in mind, too, that while some people take a little longer than that benchmark to finish their thesis, our department typically has a standard that if you take more than one extra year to complete your degree (so, three total years for the Master’s), you’re out of the program. As such, the absolute deadline for completing my thesis was April 2011.
My thesis, speaking of which, was specifically designed to be an absolute beast. When I proposed it, several members of my committee (i.e., thesis judges) said it was more like a much-more-intensive doctoral dissertation than a mere Master’s thesis, but I told them I really wanted to do something meaningful, and that this was the best way to do it. They told me I was taking on a lot, but they applauded the ambition, reckless though it may have been.
I’ll spare you the technical explanations for now, but my thesis was basically a statistical analysis of online user behavior based on a massive block of data that I and a few colleagues received from an outside source. By mid-2009, when I first proposed and started working on the thesis, my colleagues had already transformed that text file into a database that could be analyzed for their own, related research projects. I just had to learn the system and craft my own analyses based on what I wanted to uncover. It’s a good thing I’d done some programming in the past (thank you, Pokemon Hangman Randomizer!), or I wouldn’t have had a prayer.
After several months of rigorous training and writing those custom analysis programs, my colleagues permitted me full, unrestricted access to the master files and the supercomputer on which we were analyzing them. At that point, they also made me the main go-between for the programmers and the social scientists working on related projects, since I was the only person among them who understood both fields.
That’s how 2010 began. Unfortunately, that was also when all hell broke loose, so to speak. As I started looking over the data to make sure that my programs would work beyond the sample data snippets on which I tested them, I started noticing some abnormalities in the structure. To make a long story very short, around 30-40% of the data was randomly missing from the file we received, which made the particular analyses we were doing impossible. Goodbye thesis. (Worse yet, I became suspicious of this problem around March, and it took about two additional months for me to successfully demonstrate that there was, indeed, substantial missing data.)
This was a major problem. Remember, based on the above timeline I should have been done with my Master’s program in April 2010. Instead, as I stood at the finish line, I found out that I had spent a year working with completely broken data. It’s like trying to compete in a marathon but finding out afterward that you accidentally ran the 26 miles on the wrong day.
Last summer, the source who gave us our original, somewhat buggy data set provided a new version for us to use instead. Unfortunately, all of the formatting was completely different than it was in the original text file, and we were unable to find any documentation. My colleagues were all consumed by other projects, so although they created the first database based on the original file, this time I had to singlehandedly deduce the structure of a new text file that was almost 70 GB in size (yes, gigabytes in a single .txt file). In other words, I spent several months 1) poring over several pages of text at a time (that’s how long each data line was) to try to learn the data structure without the benefit of a key, 2) teaching myself a series of programming techniques to cope with the unfamiliar task, 3) writing a brand-new, made-from-scratch program to churn through the data and automatically make it into a new database, and 4) running that program over and over again, with slight alterations each time to try to fix unpredictable problems each time some quirk in the data caused a crash and broke all of my progress. (Over the course of the ordeal I learned to hate commas and their error-inducing ways.)
Those four tasks occupied all my free time from June 2010 through February 2011. Finally, once the new database was done, I got my first organized glimpse at the data as I prepared to run the analysis programs I wrote in spring 2010. Lo and behold, exactly 50% of the data set – one of the two giant behavior categories we were hoping to analyze for similarities, differences, and most importantly interactions – was absent. I learned this wo months before my absolute, no-going-back, final deadline of April 2011.
After a bit of panicking, I rewrote the programs and a large portion of my thesis (which was about 40 pages of background, rationale, analyses, and results) to redefine the entire scope of what I was analyzing. My final thesis was drastically curtailed from the monumental work I had originally set out to create. After two years of working on this project, I finished with just one day to spare, and beating the deadline only happened by the graces of administrators who bent the rules and expedited the bureaucratic process on my behalf. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five separate ways in which, in the last two weeks alone, I could have failed to complete my thesis in time and, thus, failed to earn my Master’s degree.
Why, oh why didn’t I propose something easy for my thesis project?
I’m still dealing with some of the aftermath of taking that extra year. For instance, until a couple of days ago, I wasn’t permitted to register for classes because some university branches hadn’t yet confirmed that my thesis was, in fact, completed. I also still have to justify to friends and colleagues, on a fairly regular basis, why this somewhat shortened thesis took an extra year to finish. Still, those little issues are trifles by comparison.
---End overly-long academia explanation.---
If you want a better understanding of my daily schedule during all this, here’s a quick stat. From August 2010 through April 2011 – and I started keeping track of my own sleep habits to be sure – I averaged a measly 3-4 hours of sleep a night. I know that for many years I’ve said sleep is for the weak, but I have to tell you, those months were really devastating. I got sick with something in August or September and never went to the doctor because I couldn’t make the time for an appointment and couldn’t risk being drugged on medication while desperately working to complete this project. Consequently, I’m still recovering from that illness now. (It was just some random virus, but it’s been plaguing me for close to a year because of the lack of treatment.) I didn’t even get a haircut for months on end because I couldn’t justify getting a 20-minute trim when those 20 minutes could be used for shut-eye. I spent literally all my time teaching classes, taking classes, doing homework assignments, programming and testing those programs (this, in particular, went for hours on end), completing other research obligations to which I was already committed, eating, and sleeping. All of those items usually overlapped with one another (yes, I’m fairly certain I solved a few programming problems in my sleep)… multitasking to the extreme.
Life has done considerably less to destroy my health and overall wellbeing since April, thankfully. Becky and I spent most of May travelling about and looking at potential wedding venues, and toward the end of the month we selected our venue, the ceremony date, and the reception caterer. (We meant to take care of those details in December, but as you probably guessed from the above text, that didn’t happen.)
Since then, we’ve driven back and forth across the country to see our respective families – the last time I had been to my parents’ home was in 2009, so this was long overdue – and we’ll be wrapping up those visits in the beginning of July. Then there will be about six weeks during which I hope to recover from the brutality of the past year while getting a bit of research done. We still have to publish research papers and the like throughout our time as graduate students if we hope to get jobs as professors, you see, but I also need a long sequence of consecutive 12-hour snoozes in the near future. Completing these cross-country trips at the beginning of the summer so that we could relax at the end of the time off classes was part of our strategy.
So, that’s the story. With all that said, please allow me to apologize for my unannounced, extended absence. I consider a number of you to be close friends of mine, and I’m sorry to have made you worried for so long.
Despite my lack of appearances, TPM has been in my thoughts every day. The importance I place on this community and the people here has made the absence all the more difficult for me. I know that being busy is no excuse, and I should have taken an earlier opportunity to let people know what was happening. I suppose that it was difficult to say, after a month of being gone, “Hey, sorry for being AWOL. I may or may not be inactive for a bit longer, depending on how things go.” It’s easy to convince oneself that it would look better to say “Sorry for being gone, but I’m back now!” when you actually make a decisive return rather than provide a sheepish half-return. That problem only grows worse when one month becomes two and then three… and after that point, I really didn’t have a spare moment as it was. Again, though, it’s no excuse. I know this is insufficient, but for now all I can offer in that regard is an apology for being gone. I’m sorry.
The biggest frustration for me, aside from being away from TPM (and sleep) itself, is how the process snowballed multiple times. For a moment, it would seem as though I was finally making headway, and then some other crisis would arise that would pile on more work than before, further delaying any hopes of returning or even making real contact with anyone. Personally, I suspect that may be a small part of the reason why Becky joined at the particular time she did: to help reunite me with my online home, if only by letting people know that, hey, guess what, Brian’s still alive. (Don’t get me wrong, she’s been talking about joining the forum since we met, and I know for a fact that she’s thoroughly enjoyed some of the fanfics that she’s been reading as of late. Becky’s not merely “Pika’s plus one” on TPM, and I doubt she’d want to be treated that way, either. I just have a feeling there may have been some ulterior motives for her exact timing in registering and making her presence known. Or maybe it was just happenstance. It’s hard to say. She’s crafty that way.)
Relatedly, I have appreciated everyone’s well wishes and requests to return (which Becky graciously forwarded). I hope you know that I care about those of you on the forum every bit as much as you cared about me when you were sending those notes. (Gabi, sly as she is, even found a way to get an e-card to me; I meant to thank you earlier, Gabi, but let me do it now. Thanks! I was really touched by your kind words and actions.) You all mean a lot to me. I suppose it goes without saying after spending the better part of a decade on TPM, but in many ways, you guys are my family too. So thank you.
I’m still juggling some things at the moment – like I said, Becky and I are still visiting family at the moment, and there are quite a few other miscellaneous tasks on which I’m catching up right now – so it will probably be at least a few more weeks before I can return to anything resembling normal activity for me. There’s more to be said, I’m sure, and I’m way behind on… well, everything, especially those things that are TPM-related. Nonetheless, though, I’m glad to finally have an opportunity to let you know that Pika’s on his way home.
-Brian
P.S. Before I forget, Louis, if you haven’t already heard from Gabi, the new Pokemon Hangman Randomizer is done. Sorry for the delay on that, as well. At least finishing that is a start.
Originally Posted by Gavin Luper
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I know it isn't your b-day but it just seems appropriate. hehe I'll write something better/longer when I have a little more time!! I'm so glad to see you back though!! ^_^
