Oct. 30th, 2004

morsla: (Default)
I finally compiled the half-dozen loose parts of thesis today. It's impressively long, page-wise, but well and truly anorexic word-count-wise. The extra trouble of carefully setting up styles (even though the templates aren't updating) has paid off, as I can now generate a few pages of contents, figures, and tables. Unfortunately, work uses Word for all their documents, so this certainly isn't the last time I'll be doing that sort of thing.

This weekend, I'll try to finally nail the opening sections. Complete writers block has left me unable to introduce the thing I've spent nine months working on, so the opening chapter is still in point form - but I'll get there eventually. If it takes a whole bottle of vodka to get the words flowing, I'll get there...

That leaves early next week for normalising, plotting, and interpreting all the rare earth element data - something I've never done before, and I'm not looking forward to at all. It's really not related to the main part of my project, but has to be included for completeness. Draft of the first two chapters to Dave by Monday afternoon; draft of REE chapter by Wednesday lunchtime (leaving it awfully late). Thursday and Friday to follow up on feedback. Many thanks to [livejournal.com profile] miss_rynn for taking a couple of chapters to look throughthis weekend - I hope they make some sort of sense.

As I keep discovering, I'm working on a raw and bleeding edge - on one hand, that's great. I'm looking around me to find that I'm in unchartered territory, and that's fantastic. On the other hand, Lithos has just published articles from the most recent International Kimberlite Conference (the biggest source of published work in my field), while I'm desperately trying to tie down the "existing" state of affairs in easy-to-digest terms. And so they print another 90 papers, some of which contradict fundamental assumptions I'm making - with one week to my final hand in.

I can see a fairly frantic final few (oooh, alliteration) days coming up. Which is a pity, as the person who wrote or co-authored 75% of my references (remember the 2000 word bibliography) is in Melbourne on Friday, to discuss future areas for research. Indirectly, he set up the project I've been working on all year, and I'd like to meet him. And maybe pick his brain for ideas...

September 2014

S M T W T F S
 123456
7891011 1213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 17th, 2025 01:20 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios