Ok. Fair enough. I have been working on a simulation based on a Model Predictive Controller and it took way more than I was expecting (-yes! I am still struggling-). Apparently reading a very well written text book on MPC and doing fair amount of feedback control systems class assignments are not enough to tackle a simulation… Why is that? I will discuss my mental health and my intellectual capabilities in an other post, preferably sometime I can zoom out from my current tasks… (Yes, I had nightmares involving Model Predictive Control)

I am so involved in this piece of code that I always think the only way to implement it is exactly how I did it. Many times I find myself focusing on a little tiny detail too much and think on it exhaustively to a point I feel completely lost. A very useful and more elegant way to tackle this problem is writing about what you are doing and why you are doing that. As most of my friends and professors here say: “as if you are trying to explain it to your grandmother”. At this very moment, you might think that we as CMU’ers are crazy people. Describing the code you have written in C/Matlab to validate it as a solution to a research problem is a hard task by itself and discussing it with your grandmother?… Imagine the scene… That is hilarious indeed…

I have been a very disorganized person. I was one of those people that said:  ”I live in my own jungle, it might look disastrous and scatty but I know where any item is”. I still can agree with such an approach so to say. Believe me I used to know the location of what I am using already or what I might need in near future. The problem with it is: I cannot track it down to a year even. And trust me by observing other PhD students, reading/listening past stories about challenging research tasks one can realize that at some point “you will need to go back”.

So this is the main reason that this time I am sure I will try to keep this blog updated. Whenever I get lost or I need to develop a general picture of what I am doing and why I am doing it, I hope this blog will motivate me to do so…