Readers Indigest to Writers Consummation

Ever since i bought my car last week, things seem to have changed for the better. I am no longer bound to the shuttle timings, and I can plan to stay longer at school. However, I am just figuring out that staying longer at school isnt helping me much. Instead of watching youtube at home, I am ending up watching it at school. And the mornings are getting worse.. I am getting in school at the time most people are heading out for lunch. Anyways, this post is more to provide a current-state-update on how my life is proceeding so that aeons later the aliens would be able to have a glimpse of what it took to be a member of an extraordinary species called the GRAD STUDENT. The one word that best describes my current situation, is stagnation. I am completely out of ideas.. The more i read, the more i feel the need to read more to get a better grip of the field. There is always this constant thought at the back that i need to go back to the basics and read it up. SO most of my time these days is spent in re-reading basics, which i should have been theoretically comfortable with right now. I am not sure if this is the right way to go ahead to do something new. Going back to the basics, in addition to providing the fundamentals, i think, also indoctrinates one to some extent that the mind is now stuck to a framework to reason with in. May be this is good for the theoretical guys, or ones who look at things from the first order, but I am a bit skeptical if this is the right way to go for people in experimental systems. My guess for experimental research would be to initially get a hang of things by reading a few fundamental papers which get to the meat of the system, the pure vanilla system without bells and whistles, and then just go ahead and implement something new. If it works, great. if doesnt, still great. I think research is not about building systems that work, but understanding why some systems work great under some conditions while some dont, and trying to apply some of the working-principles to the non-working ones.
Unfortunately, there is a subtle boundary here, between hacking a system together by integrating multiple working components, and actually building a working system motivated by research. My opinion on that is one must go both ways. Build a system that works by integrating multiple components and analyse its performance, bottle neck, correctness etc under different conditions, as well as the vice versa-- analyse a system and postulate improvements to it and build it. I dont think the two approaches are competing, but rather are complimentary. I am also intrigued by the camp that says, "write code and eventually you will get going somewhere". Although i completely believe in the statement that we will get somewhere, but I am not sure if that somewhere is where we want to head towards.

And for the curious readers of this blog (if any), I am working (atleast.. thats the claim) on wireless network adaptation based on application requirements, and as I read more, I am being sucked into multimedia delivery over wireless networks, and as I read more on that, I am being pulled into MAC level QOS, which in turn is the motivation to write this post.

Moral: Stop reading.. and start writing..