Week 13

Submitted the literature review for my dissertation earlier today. The past 3 days have been very productive: I wrote the literature review, technology survey, and rewrote my proposal for a third time. Very happy with how the literature review turned out, it’s structured well in paragraphs and has a nice narrative.

There was some confusion a few days ago with referencing. For some reason, I assumed Zotero will magically capture every metadata about a resource. I didn’t edit the imported bibtex entry and it led to weird looking citations. I realized this after meeting with Marylou and switched to manually copy pasting bibtex entries to track my references.

The logo and stylization of tex and related programs is awful. I refuse to use the “right” casing for them, at least in personal writing. Just looking at it makes me want to look away.

The compilation time was annoying for Overleaf. I like to preview my changes often and waiting 3 seconds for a preview didn’t feel nice.

TIL that Firefox now has support for vertical tabs. I have switched over to them from Sideberry. It looks very nice. I assume it’s going to be faster since it’s built in, but I had no performance issues with Sideberry to do a comparison. The collapsed sidebar with favicons looks great!

Lectures were great this past week. I got a lot out of the FP tutorial as I went in with some questions.

The meeting with Julian went very well. He gave me many helpful tips and ideas for the report.

Microsoft is the biggest piece of garbage to ever exist. It keeps signing me out of Outlook - that’s not new. But now it signs me out immediately after I sign in. So I have to sign in twice every time I’m signed out automatically, which is quite often.

Printed 6/12 of the HCI research papers. Sophie from the Copy and Print Service showed me how to use the built-in stapler. A narrow slot on the printer detects the presence of a paper and staples it automatically. Wonderful - I didn’t think something like this could exist.

Running without my phone and it feels liberating.