illuminating science

And with 1 hour 35 minutes to spare before my self imposed deadline, I’m off to the printers with my thesis! It’s 208 pages, and rather pretty I found some last minute typos (phew!) and feel much happier now!

Well, I’ve just done what I think has to be the final edition of my thesis. I’m going to hunt down some food, have a final read of the introduction and conclusion, and then…Off to the printers!

Well, on Friday afternoon I printed off what I hoped would be the final draft of my thesis to give to my supervisor. It’s now Monday morning and with some trepidation I went to his office for feedback. The feedback is good! Only relatively minor red ink (nothing like this red inking), a couple of minor additions, and…woohoo! Two other kind souls in the department are also having a read through, and I’ll hopefully get feedback from them tomorrow or Wednesday; then I’ll make some final changes, and away we go!

The aim is to send it to the printers on Thursday, get it back Monday, I hope, and submit it later that day, or Tuesday at worst! I’m a very happy man. On Thursday it will be 3.5 years to the day that I’ve been working on my thesis, so it’s a big block of work to be finally submitting. And I finally clocked 200 pages

7 days and counting until my PhD is due! And so, a brief segue: If you’re planning to buy me a present to celebrate submission, you could do far worse than a blue laser pointer. Fr far too long the green laser pointer brigade has been smirking at those of us still using the good ol’ read lasers - sooo 20th century.

The blue laser was created about 10 years ago by Shuji Nakamura, who was working mainly on developing blue LEDs. He solved single handedly a problem which several large corporations had been working on for years!

These laser pointers are really quite bright and (obviously!) very distinctive. And, they come at the low, low price - of $999. US dollars. Whoa.

I’d also settle for a cruise. Your choice.

So, I just gave my supervisor a moderately good (in the sense of nearness to completion rather than Nobel prize material) draft of my thesis. It currently sits at a happy 142 pages, which go to about 180 once I include a final chapter that is currently a paper almost ready for publication. On Wednesday, I suddenly realised that I was actually pretty darn close to being finished - I’ve still got a bit to do, but I think (I hope!) that I’m almost done with new writing. The only thing I really have to do is write my conclusion, which will draw heavily on the conclusions from my published papers I have to think a bit more, though, about future directions that we want this work to go in.

Still, it’s a beautiful, rainy Friday afternoon, and I’m a pretty happy camper! 13 days and 11 minutes to go! (Okay, that’s technically until I send it to the printers - I’ll actually submit a few days after that

But you should go and congratulate Brett who submitted his today! First day of Spring and everything!