In the wake of what may have been the closest thing I’ve ever taken to an all-nighter (I had told my advisor that I would have the Wavelet paper by tonight and I would have it by tonight if I had to stay awake all night to complete it… I really try hard to keep my word), I took a look at the “last” logs on the server after finishing, curious about how everyone else’s conference projects are coming along:

(Names changed and IPs removed to protect the innocent… and the server)

[michael@aristotle Motor Code]$ last
michael pts/1 Tue Jan 8 21:49 still logged in
michael pts/1 Tue Jan 8 14:47 – 21:35 (06:47)
michael pts/1 Mon Jan 7 16:05 – 19:47 (03:41)
tom pts/4 Fri Jan 4 13:08 – 13:09 (00:00)
tom pts/4 Fri Jan 4 13:00 – 13:08 (00:07)
michael pts/1 Fri Jan 4 11:31 – 16:40 (05:08)
wang pts/1 Fri Jan 4 09:14 – 09:17 (00:03)
michael pts/1 Thu Jan 3 14:54 – 15:28 (00:33)
michael pts/4 Wed Jan 2 14:02 – 14:11 (00:09)
michael pts/1 Wed Jan 2 14:02 – 14:12 (00:10)

“Tom” helps maintain the server and “wang” is an alumnus who graduated last year (but still logs on very frequently). Rather than assume I’m the only one using the server regularly (because I’m not most of the year), I’m assuming that everyone else just has later conference deadlines.

I’ve been logged on around 18 hours this week, which doesn’t sound like a lot but means I’ve probably been doing research for closer to 36. By most standards, that’s an hour more than a typical workweek (remember, these are actual working hours… I don’t get lunch breaks), but this is very difficult and draining work – not the sort of thing you can do for that long a period of time with no rest in between and emerge without exhausting yourself in some way.

It’s still not as bad as October 2006 – the week of my birthday was when I learned Matlab… forcefully, since I had to write code for six of our research projects in one week, and that was just for a workshop presentation. Some birthday that was 🙂