Back to school for seminar

Boy it feels good to cycle again to school. We had a talk by Prof David E Goldberg, the writer of Genetic Algorithms for Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning. His book has been widely cited by people in the area of Optimization and since my supervisor highly recommends us to go for this talk, I thought I shouldn't miss the opportunity. It was a good talk and it was soothing to listen to the american slang again as it reminds me of the old times when I was in Oregon.

I was excited to see my colleagues again; they say I'm like my regular self, no difference at all. My scarf did a good job in hiding my other side effects of the chemo - hair loss.

I was quite sad to see a handful of hair at the bath tub hole after my shower this morning. When I comb my hair, a handful more; I guess the cooling cap doesn't really work huh. My hair is everywhere, on my clothes, on the carpet, on the pillow. I hope it won't get into our food! Other people usually shave their head during this time but I don't think I can do it. Without my hair I'd look like 'toyol', a mythical spirit in the malay mythology. Luckily, I still have my eyebrow and eyelashes. But based on my father's experience (he had chemo for his non-hodgkin lymphoma disease), every hair would be affected, even the pubic hair would drop off!

I brought back some more books from the office. Two of my abstracts have been accepted for conferences; one in Dublin in August, and one more in Bonn, Germany (in July). I now have to work hard to produce the full papers for journals. I really hope that the subsequent chemo would follow the same pattern of the first one as in between the grogginess, I manage to continue with my research. I'm not calling it a quit at this point of time as I've spent almost two years on my research. As the malay proverb says, alang-alang menyeluk pekasam, biar sampai ke pangkal lengan...