My guitar has been back into service for 2 weeks now. I'm glad my neighbor is deaf. I'm "playing" every night when I come back from work and enjoy it a lot. It kind of kills the loneliness a bit.
So I went through my old tablatures and (very) old CDs and eventually came across my 10 and 15 years old J.J. Goldman CDs. Stuff I was listening to when I was still in high school. It's amazing how old sounds and music bring back visual memories. Summers in Brittany, on Belle-Ile, sailing camps, first boyfriends... my teen years... Makes me realize that cognitive science would be very interesting to study, ... if I had 10 lives after that one... Tonite I found the live version of "Confidentiel". The guitar solo at the end of it is really good and the ending lyrics sound so right. Too right. It's just amazing how only the good memories stick. I often go to bed thinking about where I was a year, 5 years, 10 years ago. Who could have imagined... It's like climbing a mountain on a tortuous trail with tons of side roads and from time to time looking down at the miles covered and the path chosen. Some people have been hiking part of this trail with me, some for longer times than others. I don't know what tomorrow will be like but there is one thing I know, I wouldn't be where I am today without all these people. Anyway, tonite I'm back 8 years ago, day to day. It was the beginning of a wonderful adventure... and even after all this time, as the song says, il y a toujours ce "petit feu de toi qui s'éteint pas". Bon courage pour mercredi.

Je voulais simplement te dire
Que ton visage et ton sourire
Resteront près de moi, sur mon chemin

Te dire que c'était pour de vrai
Tout c'qu'on s'est dit, tout c'qu'on a fait
Qu'c'était pas pour de faux, que c'était bien

Faut surtout jamais regretter
Même si ça fait mal, c'est gagné
Tous ces moments, tous ces mêmes matins

J'vais pas te dire qu'faut pas pleurer
Y'a vraiment pas d'quoi s'en priver
Et tout c'qu'on n'a pas loupé, le valait bien

Peut-être on se retrouvera
Peut-être que peut-être pas
Mais sache qu'ici bas, je suis là

ça restera comme une lumière
Qui m'tiendra chaud dans mes hivers
Un petit feu de toi qui s'éteint pas

-Confidentiel. J.J. Goldman

The place to be...

The place to be last Saturday night was Piedmont Park for the Allman Brothers/Dave Matthews Band concert. The concert was gigantic, more than 50,000 people attending, 2 great bands and a perfect weather. It started at 5:30 with the Allman Brothers till 7:30 and then Dave Matthews Band from 8pm to 11pm. And yes we had a wonderful time :) Here are a few pics:


The crowd leaving the Park:

So there were only 2 places in the whole town to watch the game yesterday. In short, trying to watch rugby in the US is like trying to watch cricket in France... Good luck! The picture was before the Pumas kicked our butt. We were just really bad, surprisingly bad... I hope they're going to wake up. It's not everyday you have the chance to play a World Cup at home!


So today, it's gonna be aspirin (due to the too many beers but really good time I had last night) and Dave Matthews Band concert in Piedmont Park tonite (and probably some work in between).

Got feedback?

I rarely post about my research. Not that I intend to keep what I'm currently working on secret but maybe more because it seems to me that PhD work is something you kinda do on your own, something you don't talk much about, and for which the only feedback you receive is the one your advisor or RE is giving you. And this is true that very few people actually talk about what they're doing and ideas they may have. Today, however, I got to present my work-in-progress (mainly some background research, a tentative modeling approach and some identified challenges) to a group of Masters and PhD students from my lab. We were a small group, about 8 people, no RE or advisors, just students. It was very interesting to see how things were coming across when introduced to persons who are not familiar with my work or research topic. But more importantly, I realized that the feedback I received from my peers this afternoon is as valuable, though sometimes different yet complementary, as the one I can get from my RE or advisor. So since the whole thing was totally informal I got some really immediate and frank comments about what I'm currently doing. My colleagues this afternoon got some really good points. And tonite I have a better feeling for the extent of the work down the road and where improvements or more thorough developments/explanations are needed. The main pieces of advice I received were to narrow down the scope of the problem I'm studying and to emphasize more on the methodology I'm coming with rather than the tool I'm trying to develop. I guess I tend to fall into the same pitfalls as everybody else, namely trying to boil the ocean water and develop a tool for the sake of having fun developing a tool. It's pretty frustrating when somebody tells you "well, this sounds very interesting but this is a different field of study by itself and there is just so much you can do within the PhD timeframe". And I know this is true, I can simply not address every single aspect of the problem (even in a lifetime) and there is just so much problem complexity I can deal with within 3 or 4 years. So it was good that somebody reminded me about this because I tend to get too enthusiastic sometimes and end up overwhelmed by all the things I want to study. And there is also the fact that I'm still having a hard-time being satisfied with the quality of the work I'm producing... But this is another story...
Anywaaaaayyyy, this is it for tonite. Need to sleep a bit. Tomorrow is going to be a long long day, starting with a neurologist appointment (you enjoyed the brain MRI, let send you to the spine MRI this time...) and followed by a bunch of meetings. But I wouldn't change it for anything else (except for the back pain/neuro thing obviously). Nite :)