Thesis Progress

I've been working like a mad man on my thesis for the last couple days. On friday, I handed in a first draft that was 40 pages long. Monday night I was up to 60 pages. This morning, I've hit 95. I was hoping to hit the 100-page milestone today, but I'm quickly running out of steam from my little marathon here. 100 pages is huge, and I'm dreading having to spend time proofreading and formatting it all.

100 pages seems like a huge amount, and it's certainly the longest paper I've ever written for school. However, When you consider that I've written over 230 pages in the [[Control Systems]] wikibook, and over 100 pages on several other books as well. However, those efforts were spread out over long periods of time: I've been working on [[Control Systems]] and [[Reverse Engineering]] and other books for years now. A little bit here, a few details there. Adding notes from classes as they come. To be fair, I could have been getting down to serious work on this thesis earlier then I did, and so I can't lament my current situation too much. I'm not even at the point yet where I am worried, I feel like I'm ahead of the schedule I have set for myself and, if I can keep up a brisk but comfortable pace, I will be fine.

Next week, the week before my spring break, I am planning to complete the first draft with some omitted results. During spring break, I plan to put most of the finishing touches on the software, including finishing the implementation of three processors, and writing short test programs for proof-of-concept. The project is going to be 100% finished by the end of March, and I can start worrying about all the administrative details in the beginning of April. "Administrative details", here, means: printing and binding copies of my thesis for the library and for my advisor, getting approval from my committee, scheduling my presentation, etc. It's going to be a lot of running around and paper work, but it shouldn't be overwhelming.