22 April - Writing Paper (Day 94)

For the entire morning, in fact the whole day, I was reading papers after papers. Every paper I can find from scholar.google.com that is related to my field of work, I would read it. Be it visual feedback, haptic cues, psychophysical, etc. They were pretty interesting papers but it was very tiring for my eyes. Before lunch, Ana sent me an email asking if I would like to go to the prefecture with her to get the resident card. She said we could help each other with the French language. Haha. I wouldn’t be much help to her for my almost non-existent French. But still I would love to go with her. For lunch, I ate alone at the restaurant because I was too hungry to wait for the guys. Some were already on their way home to cook. While others who were planning to take sandwiches, normally leave after 1230pm. I didn’t want to eat sandwiches again. And also I was damn hungry.

Anatole showed me the profile of the NTU girl who was applying for her post doctorate. Her name was Yu Dan, a PRC turned SG PR. I guess only foreigners go for post doc in SG bah. Never heard of any local seniors doing that. And then Anatole asked me about the Chinese whom I spoke to yesterday. Was he nice? Can he speak English? And stuffs like that. I guess he wanted some opinions from me so as to help him a bit in making decision on the applicants. Later, the entire afternoon was reading and reading and reading. I have no more programming to do; I hope. I also started planning the structure of my paper. But most of the time I was reading. Anatole came in the evening and we discussed on experiment 5. After looking at the results I collected last week, he said we are ready to kick start the actual experiment. I thought it would be easier this time because he said I could reuse the participants from previous exp. But he changed his mind and told me to start looking for them in the cafeteria. Sian. He said he would email Franck to get those students from University of Rennes 2 to come. Although Franck had told me that I would be getting 5 or 6 of them, till to date, I had only 1 girl.

Thereafter, I wanted to discuss with Anatole my ideas of the frequency technique and about the paper. But it was already 525pm and as usual, he had to catch a train to Paris. Every Friday he would be gone for Paris and only be back on Tues. I guess it is rather hard for me to go for the Island stay on a Fri because normally I am the last on his agenda every week. Whenever he returns on Tues, he would have tons of work to do and has no time to discuss with me. And on Friday he would only come at around 5pm and have a short discussion. Actually it isn’t much of a discussion. It was just passing instructions to me on what to do for the next week. So every Friday evening, I must make sure I am around for him. I think it is pretty hard on him; given his busy schedule, he still has to set aside some time to watch over my work. Before he left, I asked him to help me print my confirmation email for the booking of the train ticket for tomorrow. I had problem printing things lately. I went on to modify the codes of Exp5 because the current version was for fine-tuning only. After it was done, I sent out emails calling for participants again. Although I wasn’t busy today, I was quite tired after so much reading. But tomorrow would be good. I am expecting beautiful scenery and butterflies in the air. Hope Vannes wouldn’t disappoint me.