feeling my way through

i am still riding my high of excitement about actually starting some work on my phd topic, today, i was able to layout a "roadmap" of where to begin my data collection. between my ideas and the ideas and help of a couple of colleagues, i was able to come up with some good tests to run to begin analyzing power consumption and determining possible areas of optimization. i feel confident that the work will be meaningful. the good thing about it is that it has some short and long-range goals that will prevent me from any "idle cycles." i am excited and ready to jump in the deep end. let the research begin.................