Kumkwat's Journal: Doing thesis corrections

This has got to be the worst day of my short life in Hamilton. Working on thesis corrections! sigh. I think I pretty much ran out every excuse I could think of not to go back to this bound slice of hell, but today I bit the bullet, got my thesis out and started working through the corrections. Most of em are stupid little errors, I'll be expanding a bit on some stuff that came clear to me after I had submitted the thing, when I was cleaning up the implentation. I gota say this is about the worst possible way to conduct research, submit the thesis before finishing the implementation. If I get round to doing a PhD, a lot of things need to get better. Sloppy thought processes have no place for one! And grammar needs to be corrected throughout the process of compiling a large document.

I did myself a diservice, cause it's actually a rather large body of work that really didn't get the treatment it diserved, mostly from my super, who shall remain nameless. Needless to say I think I would have got a much better product out the door if we had organized things. I'm also to blame in this, I prooved stubborn about researching and learning about seemingly *everything* before sitting down and writing anything, which proved ultimately to be the wrong way to approach things. I became bogged down in things that had no direct bearing on my work and included snips and bits and pieces of information that had no real relation to what I was working on, purely because after spending so much time on it I wanted to include it, no matter what!

Anywayz, I think I'll do a much better job cleaning this up and including some information which didn't make the first cut.

Hopefully when ~L arrives she can keep me motivated somewhat, though I don't want to keep her first weeks in NZ, in the office with me!

Had a nice lunch with my french flatmate and some her french/chinese/american friends from the lab she works at. We went to a Chinese restuarant for yum cha! which worked out rather well, cost me about $12 bucks for a really filling lunch. Tip for potential yum cha'ers, go with as many people as you can, cause costs usually just go down. Especially if you take a couple of petite french girls with you who can only eat 1 steamed pork bun for every 6!. Met an american professor who is working up at Waikato, doing microbial research of some sort on Mt. Erebus. He's of to Antarctica next year in Janurary, lucky bastard. I kept pitching the idea of taking a programmer with him, I'm sure there's a sonar bouy or weather baloon that needs some last minute modifications.

Well I better get back to it.

laterz, J~