This past weekend was such a treat to a few weeks of hard work preparing for my dissertation proposal. After completing my proposal presentation, Gloria came into Austin for the first time since being back in the States this summer. The next day, our good friends G and Angela came to visit us from Houston (or from NYC, depending on how you want to look at it). The last time we were all together was about a year ago. So we spent a weekend mostly eating and hanging out. Roamed around Austin a little bit, but mainly just spent time catching up on lost time.

On Sunday night, we watched the Austin fireworks from the top of the Synopsys parking garage. Chloe came along for the fun but fell asleep before the action started. Maybe next year she'll be able to stay awake.

On Friday, I made yet another step towards finally getting that elusive doctoral degree. After weeks of stressing out, I presented my dissertation proposal in front of my lab members and my dissertation committee. In the end, my committee decided that I should be allowed to advance into candidacy.

What does it mean to be a PhD candidate? Well, on paper it means that I'm no longer "just a grad student". A PhD candidate is someone who has satisfied the doctoral requirements except for the final dissertation. What does it really mean? Not much other than the fact that UT now officially recognizes that I'm on track to receive a diploma sometime in the near future. It also means that perhaps I'm not a slacker? Hard to say.

It was really challenging in the last couple of weeks having to prepare for this proposal defense while also taking care of a newborn. But Carolyn was too kind on more than one occasion to let me sleep through the night so that I could be well rested the next day to continue work on my proposal document and presentation. Either way, it is a relief to be finally done with this step in my doctorate.

So I found a website that let's you see how secure your password is. It estimates how long a computer would take to brute force guess your password by using combinations of letters, numbers and punctuations.

Even though the site says they don't save your password, I'd recommend against testing out your actual password(s) on the site. A fake password with the same number of letters/numbers will pretty much give you the same answer.

Hilarious. Too bad they'll only fit her for a few weeks.