January 6, 2004

I've spent the last couple of hours cleaning up this website. I've been maintaining this site for almost eight years now (to be totally dorky, I just looked in my FTP directory, and the oldest files in there were transferred on January 27, 1996) and there are things on this site that I haven't looked at in years. In a way, I kind of like the fact that large parts of this site are mired in the past. It's a sprawling chronicle of the last eight years, spanning over three different webhosts.

But today I went through and did a little pruning. I updated some things, like my bio page, fixed some broken links in my journal archives, and deleted some things, like many of my old pictures.

Of these tasks, the one I was most dreading was going through my archives to fix links--I really hate reading my own writing, but it didn't end up being as mortifying as I thought it would be. My writing style has changed, my life has changed, my eyebrows have changed (and god, I look so young in those pictures. It was only 5 years ago! This is what graduate school does to you, I guess. That is also my natural haircolor in those photos). But even so, the old stuff isn't so bad. A lot of the really embarrassing stuff has already been uncovered. Over the years, I learned the hard way that if you write anything remotely unkind about anybody in your internet journal, they will somehow find out about it and read it. These days, I'm very mindful of that, but in 1996, I didn't exercise such discretion. Not that many people had internet access then, and search engines weren't nearly as powerful.

Anyway, dredging through my past was not totally horrible, and actually kind of interesting sometimes. It's scary how much stuff I had completely forgotten, though.

So, the revamp was in honor of the New Year. Every year, I make a new index page and do a more or less thorough update of the site in general. It's coming a little late this year, because I stupidly agreed to schedule a thesis committee meeting for January 6th. This is a meeting where I meet with the people who are in charge of monitoring my progress towards my Ph.D. and who also make the determination of when I get to graduate. I also had to write up a report about what I've been doing and where I want to go from here.

Preparing for that was a huge amount of work and it was really stupid of me to agree to do it right after the holidays. Granted, I was only away for a few days when I went home for Christmas, but with all the other stuff going on the whole process kind of snuck up on me, and then I had to spend the last couple of weeks in cramming mode: studying at all hours, sleeping erratically, not exercising, not seeing my friends, not cleaning my apartment, eating lots of ice cream, and eschewing pants with buttons and zippers in favor of those with drawstrings and elastic waistbands.

I did celebrate New Year's, but New Year's day, I was back in the lab. So, I kind of had to put a hold on the whole "new year, fresh start" thing, and that starts today, I guess. Well, I did revamp the website and wash the stray hairs out of my bathroom sink, anyway.

So, the committee meeting was yesterday, and it was fine. I had gotten myself all worked up about it, as I am wont to do. In my mind, my research plan wasn't clear, I hadn't achieved anything significant in my 3.5 years in the lab, and I was just an all-around failure, who was going to be in grad school for 10 years if they didn't kick me out before that. But my committee didn't seem to think so, which was a tremendous relief. I actually think I'm going to start that whole "new year" thing tomorrow, since I've really spent the last 24 hours or so just decompressing. And now all this reading and redesigning has tired me out.