I really haven’t been giving this blog the attention it requires for it to be something people will want to regularly read, digest and generally say “I like this; you should read it to.” My intention was to use the blog to chronicle my thesis writing as well as providing me with a place to place all my notes, in case of emergency. I’ve stopped doing the former and the latter… well, I found a more effective way of ensuring my thesis and related notes survive the required three fatal hard-drive crashes (or all of Auckland going up in an unexpected volcanic eruption).
Now, normally starting a post in this manner strongly suggests, to the reader, that the next paragraph will start something like:
“So, this is why I’ve decided to close the blog down.”
The author might then say:
“Of course, I do this with regret…”
or:
“In other news, I’m joining my brothers and sisters on their astral voyage the comet we call ‘The Fathervessel.'”
but this would be too predictable.
No. I’m in the endgame of the thesis and, really, I should be doing an awful lot of work over the coming months and it would be quite helpful for me, both during the process and after the event, to have a record of what I did when, how I did what, why I did how and… well, what parts of the process my future therapist will want to know about.
So, future updates will hopefully not be all about the snark but rather the work.
Or lack thereof. At the moment I’m in a bit of a bind; one of the courses I am teaching this semester has proven to be a lot more work than anticipated, what with the class size being incredibly small and the course being designed for a student population several magnitudes larger in number. I’m rewiring lectures and rethinking the very structure of the course, session by session, and I’m not finding all that much time to devote to my thesis writing. Things will improve in a few weeks, but for the moment, work on the ‘Inferences’ chapter goes slowly (and not entirely ‘surely’).
I’ll talk about that in the next post.