This was one of those days that feel so useless, but when you are looking at them from a distance (like home in my case) it looks quite different. Today we had the final session of our EU sponsored course about scientific writing in English and one of the infamous cluster meetings. This are not really productive but necessary tasks. Maybe I felt so useless because I lacked coffee and sleep after a sleepless night.

The scientific writing session was today about text organisation and abstracts. During the course Yong Wu Miao tried to explain me, that I always put too many topics into a single paper and that this makes my work invaluable. Luckily, I have the paper already accepted, so I don't have to worry about these comments. However, the course helped to get an idea how to rephrase some passages for the final version of the paper. For the other task of the course, the group I worked with choose me as a presenter. We had to analyse a text passage of which the purpose regarding the research was ambiguous. During the presentation it turned out that my interpretation was the intended one, so Marco commented "OK, Christian, you were right". This led Adriana to respond with a "like always". It's these tiny comments here and there, and the ignorance the rest of a time that make me worry - at least a tiny bit.

At least, the follow-up meeting of my cluster group was funnier. Probably, that is because we are all quite relaxed guys. I love the chaotic style that Marcus uses to moderate the meetings. Somehow these meetings feel much more refreshing than our informal lunch meetings. In the end, we are simply reporting on the progress of all the projects we are involved in. Today, it was quite interesting for me to realise that the last two weeks were actually quite productive and had satisfying results (for me).

Apart from that, I learned that Ruud finally released a first preview of Anti-loop, the prototype of the TenCompetence PCM. Don't ask me what it does, but at least I set-up a test-server where Tallies can then install the rest later this week - when ICTS put the missing 2GB back in to our server.