The Evil March

Well, here I am updating my blog just because March is an evil month for me. It has been several weeks since I updated my blog back in France. Now it's time to moan about my life being a PhD student again. I have been moaning about traveling on my own, not sure if doing a doctorate is something that I should be doing or not, and many other stuffs. Oh Shit! That's life!. Anyway, the thing is I have been working so hard recently writing papers got accepted. But recently, my paper got rejected which made me feel like I want to scream on top of my lung. The moment I received the email, my hurt beats like I just finish a 100m sprint. I was excited but at the same time I feel very nervous. Line by line I read the email till the moment I saw the word 'regret' then I realised my attempt this time is unsuccessful. Oh holly shit and crap! I always have faith with my paper especially if the paper is based on my own work. I believe that the method which I proposed in the paper has better potential in doing its job in comparison to some of the methods in the literature. But this is life, people don't think like the way you think.

But hey you..I never expect people to think like the I think, far from wanting them to think like the way i think. But I would expect people to think twice before they even say something about my work. This sounds like I can't accept the fact that my paper has been rejected. No! that's untrue! Because I can accept any criticisms but they have to be constructive. The first reviewer commented a few things about my paper which I think make sense. The second reviewer accept my paper with a few minor corrections. But the third reviewer sounds a little idiot. After discussion with my supervisor this afternoon, he also think the same. The third reviewer might be one in the 20%. For me 80% of the reviewers I would categorised qualified and the other 20% I would say, they might be qualified but they don't really understand with your work, or probably they are just too lazy to read the whole paper and just give some stupid feedback of your paper based on their assumptions. Or it could be, they are so arrogant and just simply didn't like your paper because they thought it should be done like this rather than like that. Phewwww!!!!!

I still feel the pain, sadness and disappointment. Not sure how to mend it for the next few days. In fact, I would probably be miserable for the next a few weeks. Recently, I have written another paper and submitted it to a conference in London. Maybe I will be okay after getting a good news from the conference. Otherwise, if the decision result for my latest paper get rejected again then I will be super duper miserable. Even my recent paper I already feel like a shit and demotivated to do the rest of my other work. Let alone if my latest paper got rejected. I don't know where to put my face and brain. This is even worst after my meeting with my supervisor, because he disagreed with some of the comments from the reviewers. This makes me think that I deserve better comments and should be at least invited for a poster presentation. I don't like to say it let's put it like this. The first reviewer rejected my paper but the second reviewer accepted it. The third reviewer which basically will determine whether my paper will be accepted for my paper gave last resort to my paper. Which basically mean it's up to the committees chair to decide whether to accept it or not. As it happened, the chair rejected it. Not sure why because the comments from the third reviewer were pretty rubbish and didn't make sense at all. Arghhhhh...why?.....why?why?

Changing the topic, I also lost my badminton tournament last week. Close yet too far to reach the semi final. But I didn't mind much about it because I thought there will be good news coming soon. Then it comes to my paper decision result. The whole situation made everything even worst. Till now I am writing this post it is actually very annoying. I didn't feel very sad when my second paper got rejected because I knew there wasn't much work I've done in it. It was just a review paper which doesn't have the originality in it. But my ICPR paper which i submitted to Sweden, I do think is a novelty or some sort of contribution in it and knowing this paper is rejected is so heartbreaking. This result is really demotivated me especially my eagerness to write more conference papers. I used to enjoy writing a conference paper but now the feeling and excitement is a little but low than before. Haisshhhh.....that's life! Whatever the reason is I still don't like the fact that my paper which I thought (that time) was my best one. Arghhhhhhh.........

Anyway, I am going to revise my paper based on the reviewer's comments and going to submit it to a conference in Portugal. But before that I want to fully concentrate on my journal paper first.

A glimpse of Nantes, the conference and some thoughts

Here I go again folks, updating my blog. It has been a very busy day in the conference. By the time the conference finished I felt very tired mentally. I attended most of the sessions I wanted today except the sessions after 4PM. For most of the sessions I did ask several questions which basically means I did pay attention for most of the sessions. There were many sessions which I think very technical and only one was very easy to follow but lack of technical report in a presentation make you wonder how did the authors do it. Anyway...the thing is the audience know in general how the methodology works. But I think the presentation of the day is the keynote  from University Collage London. It was about a 3D cave reconstruction. It works by flying a device to go through along the cave and as the device flies it takes lots of information about the cave such as surface, angle, interesting points,  edges and many more. By taking all those information the algorithm will manipulate it for the reconstruction purpose. The most interesting part is, one of the caves they tested is the Mulu cave in Sarawak, Malaysia. In fact they are collaborating with some scientists in Malaysia.

Let's talk about the conference. First of all the conference venue facilitates are first class. Secondly, the services provided by the conference committees was superb! Thirdly, the food was really is amazing. The first day of the conference I gave a 7 out of 10 but today it was 8. I must say, although the french don't use much spicy in their cooking they still manage to make their food so tasty. Don't talk about the desserts. It was 8 and 8.5 for yesterday and today, respectively. There were so many biscuits on tables but I didn't really treat myself with those because I knew they are fattening. So far, everything went so well especially the conference but there is one thing I notice which is so different then the rest of the conference I've attended. For all the conference I've been, for lunch the conference committees always invite us to finish the food. But here in France, it's so different because we were only allowed to have once for every course. Today I wondered if the food were actually all finished. So I stayed in the lunch hall till everybody finished. Guess what I found out? There were so much food left and I don't understand what they were going to do with all those food. Such a waste! I mean why can't they just ask us to just finish it (sounds greedy)? Or perhaps they save it for the staffs (this sounds a bit cheeky). So yeah I am a bit disappointed with lunch because the food were really good but we were not allowed to have as much as we can (greedy again).

Okay, now let's talk about Nantes, where the conference is. I am staying in a studio apartment hotel which is very nice because it's clean, free wifi, and  quite spacious. I always make sure my room has unlimited wifi access. There are some expensive hotel rooms don't provide free wifi or internet connection to their guests. Nantes is definitely not a small city. It is actually quite a big one. Before i cam here I thought Nantes is a small city and I could walk around it within a day. I was completely wrong. But this city is not really a place that I would like to visit regularly because there's not much attraction or interesting places here. I think it has a couple of museums here but I am not really into that. I like a place which has something very rare and difficult to find at other places. It has several ancient buildings but many of them are already replaced by new modern buildings. In fact there are quite numbers of modern buildings built  among the old ones.

Food in France is generally very good but I haven't done the whole experiment yet so I can't say much but so far all the food I had in and off conference were really good. Much better than the ones I had in germany and hong kong (but the food on streets in hong kong were really good).

So tomorrow will be the last day of the conference. But I will only attend half day. I hope some of the people in the conference will be free so I can see the other side of the river in Nantes.


I was searching a conference about medical image analysis yesterday and I found two or three of them which will be held in September and November. So, most probably I will be submitting/writting a couple of papers by because June or May (I have very high expectation here!). For my PhD before i'm planning to write up my thesis (in 3 years), I would love to have 7 conference papers and 2 journals. But that is my highest expectation. My lowest expectation would be 5 conference papers and 1 journal. My other top expectation is to submit a journal into number 1 journal in medical image analysis. But this is very difficult indeed. I'm not sure if I can achieve this but I will definitely do my very best because having a journal published in a number 1 journal in the world in medical image analysis would give a huge boost to my CV in my academic career. Anyway...stop about blogging..I think it's time to go to bed. I am tired and just finished watching the all england badminton 2014. Interesting matches and would love to see some good results tomorrow. Okay folks..night night....p/s: unedited xx

Exploring Each of My Thoughts

It has been almost two months since I last updated my blog. If you look back to my posts, the last one was in January 2014 and this is the second post of 2014! Yippieeee! I am happy because I know, I don't usually have time to update my blog. Updating my blog is something so precious for me. I used to update my blog several times a day. In fact, when I just started my blog I was so obsessed and updated my blog almost every hour. It was insane of course I don't know where the hell my ideas came from. Some of them just a copy and paste post of course. Anything I found interesting from others' blogs I put them on mine as well. Correct! That's not clever at all. But I was a newbie that time and all I wanted to do is to update my blog and hoped the contents are interesting.

Well, I have so much I wanted to say but I have so little time as I need to go to bed very soon. I am currently in France, more specifically in Nantes. I never heard this place before but it quite a nice town actually. When I first arrived here I thought it's a small town but then after wondering around, this is a well sized place. Not too huge neither too small.. but just nice! Okay I am in France and will be attending a conference tomorrow. My aim is to attend all as many presentations (medical imaging) as possible. I only interested in medical imaging because that's why research area at the moment. Okay now let's go through each of my thoughts (LOL!)

1. Attending a conference on your own is always odd! I have attended three international conferences so far and all by myself traveling from the UK. It was in Germany, Hong Kong and now in France. All the national conferences I've attended so far were accompanied by some other PhD students/Post Doc. Therefore, for every conference I always hope I can make new friends/contacts (which is always the case). It is always nice to be able to keep in touch with people (doesn't matter whether they are from the same research area or not) via email or facebook. The most common way to keep n touch with the people I have known or met in the conference is via facebook. It seems to be very effective way (not sure why). So let's hope I can make some friends tomorrow.

2. I feel happy when people follow my blog and get back to me how inspiring my blog is especially achieving my ambitions. Yeah if you guys want to know who I was then you can go to the very first post of my blog. You can see how terrible my writing (English). It just recently I have improved a lot. My IELTS results weren't that amazing. I just managed to get band 6.5 in overall and only band 6 for my writing. I think this is a minimum requirement for most UK universities. But I remember it was very hard that time because I was working as a software engineer with Motorola that time and I had to take a night class from 8 till 10PM every night. It was very tiring actually but my determination pushed me to the edge of my limit. I hope this blog does not just inspires people who want to succeeded in life but also to those who have been trying hard...my advise is don't give up ..keep doing it...keep tying it. God knows when is the right time for you and you never know..because at the moment you surrendered success might be just around the corner of your life.

3. I've read several articles about PhD students committed suicides, mental problems, sick, etc. Wow! I think I am quite far away from these. It is quite worrying! That is why I always have physical exercise at least 3 times a week, 2 hours per session. I usually managed to make it five times a week but sometimes i was just too tired. It's weird how much the effect of mental energy to our physical energy. I spent most of my time in the office thinking different solutions of my PhD problems without any physical efforts but by the time I finished in the office I was so tired. Most of the time I just pushed myself to go to the gym and have a 5 or sometimes 8KM run. After my run my head did feel relax and showers make it even better. But hey folks, in many cases doing  a PhD is a choice. People took effort to make applications as well as the scholarships. For me, if you have made the effort to apply for a PhD plus the scholarship, then you should have known and ready the challenges are. Doing a PhD is not easy. I must say it is very very difficult. It's not just how brilliant you are but it is a combination of so many aspects of yours. You need to be tough mentally, emotionally, good management skills, etc. Trust me, if you want to do a PhD think about it again.

4. Up to now since i started my PhD (1 year 9 months), i already have 4 conference papers accepted, 1 conference paper under review, 1 rejected conference paper and 1 journal paper under review. At least I know I have done 7 attempts so far. I'm not sure if this is good or not. It seems like I am very much obsessed with the number of papers. Recently, my paper i submitted to London has been accepted. But I do really hope the paper I submitted to Sweden will be accepted as well. I am so damn crazy and desperate want to see this conference and the country of course. I am a bit worry because when I checked the paper i submitted there were a few minor errors. But I do really hope that the reviewers don't really get too fussy about it because they can be amended within half an hour. So I am planning to write a paper for MIUA conference, I have two in mind so far but I don't really know which one I should go. The main problem is I have no idea how the results look like because I haven't run the experiments yet. I hope to get some good results so I have something to write. Anyway, back to the under review. This is probably the toughest and waiting for the result is really daunting. In many cases in exams you know how well you did in the exam but writing a conference paper or a journal paper is really scary because writing a paper usually will take about 2 weeks for a decent one. Some people may take less or more. When you finished writing your paper, it seems to be okay and sometimes you have very good feeling that the paper will get accepted. But then in the reviewers' views your paper might be just another piece of shit which doesn't worth a penny. Hence rejected! So till now waiting for the results for my other two papers are so uncomfortable.

5. Okay this is the last in my mind. I have some other but I need to go to bed. I've been up since 3AM to catch my flight from Manchester airport to Paris and then to nantes, France. I am now so tired, but the last thing I want to say is that sometimes I have a feeling that I should not be doing a PhD now. I should be doing something else. I don't know why I'm doing this PhD. I should be working now and making money, saving and holiday. At the back of my head I always have this very very bad feeling that doing a PhD is not the correct path for me. But then when I look back again what I have prayed to God and how I'm doing my PhD now I think I have done the best decision of my life. Yet this is very uncertain because I don't know what happen to me when I finished my PhD. I might become one of those people who has a doctorate qualification but never used it. That would be really sad otherwise. But again some people say everything happens for a reason.Well, time will tell. So much plans but so little time left. Money is very important to start up something. In this world if you don't have the money there is no other way you can start something. So I hope after my PhD it's gonna be another chapter of my life. New start with new challenges.

Mmmm..okay I think I have written enough for this post. Not really I have more to write but my eyes can't stand anymore. I am so sleepy and really tired. I've been up since 3AM. I have a conference tmrw and I need to be fresh and sharp in the conference especially during my session. Okay folks..bye for now and I'll see you again in my next post. I will try my best to write a post this week but no promises! :-) xx