wnd's weblog

When I woke up last morning, I had already decided that I won’t sleep until I’m done with my master’s thesis. I didn’t have very much to do, but I knew it would take some effort nonetheless. I fed the cat and headed to University, my room, D226.

I started going through list of about ten items I would have to fix. Some would be trivial, some would actually require brain activity. At seven o’clock in the evening I printed the first draft, which I would use to check and recheck references, and to make sure all pictures were readable in black and white. In the process I would read the whole thing through looking for inconsistencies and things that weren’t all that clear.

At three o’clock in the morning I was done with the first run. Now the text would be mostly finished, but I would still have to force \LaTeX to place figures and tables where my professor wanted them. This would take another two hours. I also fixed fonts used in the gnuplot-generated pictures, adjusted position of legend in the graphs, and changed some linetypes gnuplot used. At half past five I was mostly happy. I would still have to run a spell checker one more time. Then I would be done.

As always, running a spell checker revealed a few things that would have to be dealt with before it was too late. At this point doing changes was not exactly a good idea, since I had already spent quite a bit of time adjusting the figures. I have to admit, though, that simply placing the figures and tables in a logical place within the source code did most of the work. The rest was just to do things the way my professor preferred.

Fifteen past seven I was done. I had printed the thing, plus another copy, plus some miscellaneous documents. Half past seven I was all done. I had left my thesis for the professor for final judgement. This would be it. This is it. I just finished what I started nearly nine years ago! What would I do next? What on earth would I do next? In fact, I was so out of my head that I didn’t even realise I was still at University, it was seven o’clock in the morning, and that I really should have been in bed a long time ago.

Right now I’m trying to clear my head. I’m writing this entry – just for the record. I know I should go home and get some sleep. And maybe eat a little. Actually, now that I finally have the time, I can do pretty much anything I can think of. Last two months have been frantic. I have spend nearly all my waking hours doing research and writing my thesis. I have had nearly no time for my wife, my cat, my projects, or computer games. All that should finally change. And all the better that way! Over and out.