Procrastination is not my friend.

[baratron]

So there is This Thing that I have alluded to several times recently. And everything is now in place to deal with it, and I have in fact started dealing with it?

Well, I really don't recommend procrastination. Trying to edit a 130-page document that you wrote FIVE FREAKING YEARS AGO and no longer understand is... difficult. Especially when you print it out again and discover that half the figures never got converted to GIF or PNG. And you can't simply photocopy your own bound copy because... there are pages missing from it. Whole chunks of them. (Why did I pay for it to get bound when it wasn't all there?). So you end up having to install Ye Olde Graphing Package that you used to make the original graphs. And then you discover that you have, for example, ten plots called "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites" with various filename extensions. Do I want "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites for plot", "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites FINAL", "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites for plot urban rural highlighted", or "Maximum Daily Mean Ozone all sites colourful"? I have no clue.

And you're now not sure whether the two bound copies that you submitted also had chunks of pages missing, because the stupid University letter never told you anything that useful. So you may need to get those rebound yet again. And you've found typoes and missing figure captions from the Word document that you now want to correct, and aren't sure whether you're supposed to or not.

So you are reminded, over again, why it was that you have been procrastinating it for four years. Because you really weren't mentally well enough to deal with it when even thinking about it made you feel panicky. But it's bloody annoying that you couldn't have looked at it earlier while you still, e.g. remembered what a Hurst exponent was and whether it had anything to do with skew and kurtosis. (Figure 5.33 is about Hurst exponents, but 5.33a and b are about skew and kurtosis. Why do I have a 5.33a instead of a 5.34, anyway?!). And you curse your previous lack of mental health and all the stupid mistakes that a younger you made all the more.

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I think you're being hard on yourself. Those things are difficult to get right at the best of times. The only possible way I could recreate my PhD thesis now would be scanning the master document (which I do still have, even if some of the pages are rather scrunched, due to a photocopier mangling them.) I think for my honours thesis, you'd just have to photocopy the copy I have.

Do the best you can right now, because I'm sure the you of five years ago did the best she was capable of right then.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

You're trying to submit for the PhD, or for an MPhil?

[baratron.livejournal.com]

See next post (http://baratron.livejournal.com/554095.html) for more details.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

Well done for getting back to a scary thing! The things that need doing look mainly like annoying details that will take time rather than lots of hard thought.
I hope you feel you are a much better H-L than you were before and you will be much more OK this time.

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

I tried to open - at work - a lecture that I wrote/last revised in 2000 in Word (Office 97) in Word (office 2003) and it either distorted or failed to open at all the diagrams I had in it - these had been pasted in as metafiles. However when I tried to do it in OpenOffice it worked perfectly.

Obviously MS Office is much less backwards compatible than they would lead you to believe.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was OpenOffice that I was trying to use. I haven't paid for a copy of Microsoft Office since version 6 (which I obtained with a student discount). Office 97 was on my old laptop but I didn't have an install disc for it, and now the only Micro$oft program I'll pay for is Windows. (Even then, not touching Vista with a bargepole!). I have ethical objections to installing software that I didn't pay for unless it's free or I'm genuinely trying it to see whether I'll buy it, so now it's OpenOffice all the way.

The way Word 97 handled formatting of documents with images always was shaky, though. And OpenOffice must define the size of A4 subtly differently, or something.