Yesterday our order for new computers for the BCRC went in. Yes! Woohoo! We'll be replacing all of the old beige G3s with new G4s. At the same time, we'll be switching from MacOS 9 to MacOS X. I've spent the past several days mastering radmind. In many ways, it is more powerful than revrdist, which I've been using for years to maintain our lab machines. There are a suite of things it doesn't do, however, which need to be accomodated some other way.

We seriously considered switching from Apple hardware to something x86 based running linux. It would have been a lot cheaper, in the long run, but it would have limited our capabilities significantly. As I try to get a loadset for the MacOS tweaked, however, I daily curse Apple's closed architecture, though. My perception is that Apple is intentionally closemouthed about how stuff works in order to get people to buy admininstration software, training, and support. Linux is build by people who use emacs (or vi) for people use vi (or emacs). That makes it a lot easier to make it roll over and bark when you need to. By the same token, you really can't beat the MacOS for fit and polish.

I noticed Joseph Duemer thinking about academia in response to reading Caveat Lector's experiences in graduate school. I've been reflective about graduate school as I've mentored my colleague Tom who has been applying to schools this winter. I've found several metaphors useful for trying to explain graduate school. The first is that school generally prepares you to accept increasing levels of control over your own destiny but that a dissertation is like going back to kindergarten -- you place your future entirely within the hands of a single person. Establishing and maintaining a good relationship with that person is critical, but finding the right person in the first place is everything. Don't apply to schools: find the right person and convince them that they must have you in their lab. The second metaphor I found useful was describing the dissertation experience as being like crossing a mountain range. You spend a year going back and forth along the mountain range looking for a pass through the mountains. Eventually, realizing that there is no pass, you begin climbing the first mountain (writing a proposal). Quickly you are surrounded by mountains and you can see no end in sight in any direction. You go up and down and up and down mountains until suddenly, you realize you're going up the last one, you defend, and it's over so fast it's bewildering.

The scariest thing that happened to me in graduate school was discovering that my imagination had been extinguished. I used to have a rich imaginative fantasy life: I could daydream for hours about being fabulously rich or being a heroic warrior or something. I found that in the midst of my studies I couldn't do it anymore: imagining something implied I had either finished my degree (I couldn't see how that would ever happen while I was in the middle of mountains) or I had given up (and I was not going to give up). I was trapped on the horns of that dilemma, unable to fantasize without terrible anguish about my dissertation. I've often wondered if this effect really was related to my studies, or could have simply been an inevitable consequence of aging. Or whether it's experienced other people and under what conditions.

The relationship with my advisor was rocky at times. It probably reached its bottom when I made the mistake of telling my advisor about some Esperanto thing I was doing. He was furious that I was wasting my time with something other than my research project. After that, I became very taciturn about my private life with my advisor. Eventually, however, I found had to give up almost all of my private life in order to finish the dissertation. Not because I really lacked for time but because I found that if I gave myself permission to work on anything else, I would do that instead of working on the dissertation because it was so hard and so unpleasant.