Current Affairs ....

Looking back this week regarding the PhD ... not much done actually. It was not a good idea somehow to cancel the lab meeting on Thursday morning. I was not "forced" to present some results. It was a great opportunity again to procrastinate on this project. Yes, I did the protein networks for the mouse, but as I had created quite a system for this it was easily done. By the way, my supervisor hasn't said anything to the results yet *sniff*. So, what are the next steps then?

The gene expression data from Kate focusing on Macrophages looks quite interesting. I am concerned about the value of this approach as mouse PPI data, especially for the endocytosis process, are not enough of quantity so far. But I would like to give it a try, to get some analysis data for my thesis. That means I have to do some mapping again. So, let's find a way to find the connection between the GEO project GSE10246 (I like this number) and Entrez GeneIDs.

Also it would be good to get the third chapter of my thesis going. Not much context so far. Ok, to be honest nothing so far ... still just the mindmap. If there wouldn't be all these other much more interesting projects in my ToDo list. The possible outcome of all the other projects excites me more than this PhD. What is the goal again? Hello ... where are you? Is it just because of the title? Who cares about this network thingy I am doing? ... Ok, I assume that's always like this with research. Just keep going now.

Photo Courtesy by Markus Brosch

As I have told a couple of blogs ago, I am back with ThinkingRock. There are some pro and conts, like for any tool and toy. The Pros are that I have things every time with me on my USB stick. So far, wherever I am, there is a computer ... so all good. Of course, I am still carrying my notebook with me. First of all to make notes and second to track my expenses. I might need another strategy for this one. Another thing I like with TR is, it creates all recurrent tasks by itself. That's THE advantage to offline tools – automatisation.

What I am struggling with is the Context feature. I am still not sure for what it is useful. Ok, I actually haven't read David Allen's book “Get things Done”, but Stephane tried to explain it already several times. But no nice way came to my mind. It is a bit annoying as it splits the sorting function. I definitely will have to rethink this feature and make it useful for me.

Before TR I had the strategy to work on a specific project on a specific day. As I couldn't already manage this before jumping onto TR, now it might be even more trickier. As soon as I get an email regarding one specific topic, I can't wait until the day for this project arrives and process it then. What do you think? And also how much details would you put into TR regarding actions and projects. As I want to empty my mind immediately, I would put things down as detailed as possible. Otherwise I keep thinking about it or even forget it and I would lose information.

Yes, in summary I am still in the testing phase, but looking forward to get the projects moving.