Well Lucent lab went badly yesterday. We could not get the cell to work. Then for the brief moment we did have RF I botched the PPP password for the handset. After that we could not get service. It was a complete waisted day. I did not get a chance to call the PLuS program. I will have to call from Seattle next week. The BS about negotiating with the administration for special accommodations for the test is always painful. I guess if you want to succeed you have to do it. I think that I could succeed without such accommodations if the tests were better written. None of the information on the test is difficult to learn. There are no complex algorithms. There is a great deal of notation. I always hear in my head how if Archimedes had Gausses notation he would have been able to solve more problems. Archimedes was a greater mathematician than Gauss. Gauss just had better tools...notation to solve problems. I guess it is good that I learn this notation. I continue to work on the CAD system in UML and architecture question. I have got the notation down. Next week I am planning to work on this question more. I don`t know if I will have Internet access from my hotel. Most probably I will. The lab hours are from 9-5 which will force me to not work 15 hour days like I do when I go to Kyocera. I am taking my shoes so that I can run on a treadmill in the hotel. It is an uneasy uncertainty that I can squelch out if I just plan to run on a treadmill. A pool is almost always not an option. Hotel pools are not meant for swimming they are meant for wading. I will take 2 laptops next week so that I can study.

I got the splash page of my web space up and the way I want it today. This is a terrible time sink. I think that I won`t be going very much farther with it. This may let the administration know about what I am doing but it has too big an impact on my study time. Once they know me they will see why a web page is a worthless piece of communication that I am only doing for them. I hope that they see that it does not aid in any academic sense. I don`t do publications. A simple list on a website would do anyway. I have turned it in to a way for people to have visibility into the program and not visibility into any research. My work research is not something that can be shared. They need to realize that. This web page will fulfill a requirement and give them a sense of how hard this thing is and not for the reasons they think. They want this thing to be hard but the hardness comes from stuff that has nothing to do with academics. I am not talking about my learning problems. I am talking about other factors. Factors that should have nothing to do with a PhD but that impact this degree and the way people execute it. Things that all players have to deal with when doing a "DePaul" PhD and not necessarily a PhD itself. Now granted I have never done a PhD somewhere else. But, If these problems exist in other programs then the programs are wrong and should be fixed. Politics and hardness by obscurity are two such factors I can think of. These should never be part of a PhD. They are not part of research. I know, I do research. They are part of business but not part of research. I do deal with them but just not as part of the technology.