Second week of the new semester. I never expected this semester’s schedule to be so packed. Every single day I feel so busy — or rather, every day I feel like there’s never enough time.
Every day has its good things and bad things — it just depends on which one takes the lead. So I guess the same goes for every week.
Let me start with this blog. It really took a lot of effort to get it up and running. Since I have zero coding background, the whole process was genuinely painful. The biggest problem was that some blog posts I’d written before couldn’t be recovered. I’d only backed up the database without using WordPress’s built-in export tool, so even with the database in hand, I had no idea how to restore them. That was my biggest issue. Actually, following my old problem-solving approach — identify the problem → analyze the cause → solve the problem — I realized it just didn’t work this time. The problem I was facing required very specific experience that I simply didn’t have. Do I want to learn? I think I do.
Speaking of wanting to learn, this week the professor gave me admin access to the lab website. He said I’d be the only admin and told me to keep the password safe. Pretty interesting — I’d visited this website a long time ago and thought a lab with its own website must be pretty legit, even though the template is really, really old. Compared to those overseas lab websites, the gap is about the same as using CNKI versus Google Scholar. At least the image upload features were simple enough to figure out with a bit of poking around. My biggest fear right now is accidentally deleting the website data — I’d probably get kicked out of the lab for that. Haha… so yeah, better not mess around.
As for work progress this week… there doesn’t seem to be any progress??? I didn’t read much literature, only four papers:
10.1016/j.nanoen.2013.10.007
10.1016/j.electacta.2014.08.023
10.1002/adfm.201804630
10.1016/j.nanoen.2013.03.012
The scariest part is that the gap between where I am and where I want to be feels much, much bigger than I thought. “Big dreams, harsh reality” — that’s pretty much how it feels.