1. Answer emails from Reviewer#2 (still )
2. Do a presentation rehearsal for pre-defense. Drew lots of critics and comments, and the professor said that my slides is not scientific and philosophical enough They look like kindergart en’s lab manual, he said, hahahhahaha. So I have to upgrade ALL slides. OK
3. Take the greycells to do a 4km jog *proud of self * Hopefully they would get enough oxygen intake to regenerate and make me smarter to bring the slides to a higher and sophisticated level, hihih

*Notes: the reviewers only have 2 more days

He expects me to be in a solid stance, to answer any challenges, to convince everyone about my conclusions, to explain my work with strong proofs and theories, to deal with all queries with hundreds way of explanation.

At this stage, my professor said, I should only listen to the reviewer. Any inputs from promotor and co promotors will only give unnecessary interference to my jedi-knight state. I will be allowed to discuss about the dissertation revision again with promotors and co promotors, after the pre-defense.

My favorite advice from the professor is: as an academic researcher, one should be able to defend his/her work at any point of the research (assuming that he/she has conduct enough experiments). Of course there will be mistakes/miscalculation here in there,or incompleteness everywere, but any researcher should be able to capture the general behaviour of the system being observed. He/she should be able to identify the error might be occure in the system as well as projecting the theories applied to get an overall/rough conclusion about the outer border of the system limit.

Ok. This is officially a jedi-knight time. Until I become jedi-master. (and later become jedi-grand-master, hopefully )

1. The draft has already reached reviewers’ desks! Now waiting for their response.
2. Very happy to get some strong words and advice from the professor. Apparently his critics and pressures that keep me going on, from the beginning, until reaching this point. They also keep my braincells alive and regenerates!
3. Read a very good paper about how to select cryptographic key size and add it as reference of the dissertation.
4. Found a brief and clear article about Finite State Machine which is very useful for helping me generating ones for my multiplier design.
5. Start writing a(nother) paper for the next journal publication.
6. Have finished a task given by the department.
7. Have some ideas in head to keep me away from boredom, and surely will keep the braincells productive during the incoming super long weekend

*infinite revision process with such limited time is so stresful

1. Submit the latest version of revised draft to co-promotor #2
2. Add some improvements to the paper submitted to the journal. The reviewer said it will be published after some minor revisions.
3. Keep the light saber handy to get rid of those who are trying to stand on my way.

Have given the draft to promotor and co-promotors and will gather the more advices/corrections on Friday.

Meanwhile will check on calculations, make more graphs and analysis. And revise the paper to be appear on a journal.

Phew, the back-breaking journey looks like have no ending

1. Draft has been approved and signed by co-promotors
2. Seminar schedule is now fixed
3. Proposal for next year’s research is ready (will get some signatures and then upload it to research.itb.ac.id tomorrow)
4. Missed Prof. Bando’s Studium Generale on Bamboo Shelter Project (

1. Promotor wants simpler title with certain keywords
2. Co-promotor #2 agrees with the keywords, but won’t give approval and put signature before all complexity calculation completed
3. Complexity calculation should be done down to gate level NOT the transistor level
4. Example of multiplication calculation (with real “numbers”) have to be finished too before seminar
5. All has to be finished before Thursday.

OMG.

1. Attended phd students regular discussion. Picked up some ideas from fellow students (want to make a casual blog post about this if I have time)
2. Had a quick discussion with promotor. I gave him the answers of yesterday’s questions and he gave me more questions to be confirmed by co-promotor #2.
3. Had almost-an-hour discussion with co-promotor #2. All promotor’s questions are answered. Gained more details understanding about the design. Gather a lot of inputs on how to calculate the complexity of the architecture more precisely.

Other (unimportant things):

1. High heart-rate and tension due to the anxiety that the design might have flaws.
2. Need anti-depressant instead of aspirin. (I thought at this stage someone might be optimistic and stress-free while what I experience is high tension that I might fail to defense the thesis, OMG).

1. Met the professor and had a debate about clock and clockless, synchronous and asynchronous, combinational and sequential circuits
2. Been asked to read and refer to “Engineering Digital Design” – Richard F. Tinder
3. Added more calculation complexity to the dissertation draft
4. Thinking about how to explain ideas in the dissertation briefly but understandable (especially to those people that will complain if you explain it verbosely (“to the point, please!”) and be displeased if you over simplify the concept (“hey you should explain more!”)

1. Make the schedule for each step need to be fulfilled before the defense
2. Prepare a to give more explanation about the details of the architecture proposed to the professor

*Notes: Met Co-Promotor #3 and gathered a lot of questions and inputs.

1. Define the characteristic of the architecture proposed.
2. Measure the complexity, down to the gate level.
3. Find formal equation that define the complexity of the architecture.

Promotor:

1. (Still) define the optimality. Draw the curve.
2. Update and re-submit paper for journal (approved).
3. Follow Co-Promotor #2