One of the scenes I liked of the House show, was when they were discussing how Dr. House needed to have his subordinates around him, not because he really needed their knowledge (although it helped), but because he needed someone to bounce ideas off with.

I think I like these scenes because might be just the same. For example, today I produced quite a bit more of my article than I did in the previous two days. I believe the reason may be that I had the company of one of the correspondent researchers which is developing this work together with me. Even though we didn’t collaborate directly on what we should be writing about – he was writing one section of the paper and I was writing another, unrelated section – it helped keep my morale up, and made me write more. This is not the first time it happens – my Master Thesis that I wrote while at UNICAMP was largely written while I talked to a friend on ICQ who kept pushing me on and asking how I was doing.

This is one thing that I don’t really find in the laboratories here in Japan. While there are other researchers doing work at the same time as me, for some reason I just don’t know how I can get to bounce work off on them to keep myself concentrated on my tasks. So it doesn’t make that much of a difference if I’m in a lab full of people or alone. On the other hand, lectures are a place which is very conductive for me to perform work, for some reason. Of course, I don’t pay any attention to the lecture, but my programming and writing. (I’m now seriously considering expending this day and the next one sitting at random lectures to see if my writing improves…)

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On a side note, I found out how to make Audacious play Shoutcast radios. I like to hear “The Eagle”, “Classic Rock Hits” and “Sky FM, Mostly Classical”. Do you guys have any recommendations?