My Day Home, a Timeline

circa 8:30: I slowly climb out of bed. I've been laying, awake but with my eyes closed, for at least an hour. Haven't gotten enough sleep, but can't make myself get any more. Throw on my pajama pants, yesterday's T-shirt, and walk out to the living room.

circa 8:34: Plop down in front of the computer, where I plan to spend most of my day. I need to set a timeline or I wont get any work done. I decide that I will start to work on my thesis at 10AM sharp, so I have an hour and a half to goof off.

9:00: I've finished reading my emails and all the blog posts that have piled up in my aggregator since I went to bed at 1AM. I have received an email from my advisor, it's a happy email. He's waiting for the next draft of my thesis. I send back a thoughtful reply.

9:10: Another email pops into my inbox, it's another email from my advisor. This email, about a class that I am teaching, is significantly less happy. I write most of an angry reply but thankfully, I do not send it.

9:15: I erase my first email, and draft a second one, much more calm this time. My students think they are all getting A's in my lab, and my professor is upset about this. All my students are not getting A's, and some of them are actually doing very poorly.

9:20. I want to do some work on my Octave implementation. Looking for answers to some questions I have, I start browsing the source for the NQP compiler.

9:40: This stuff is amazing! I'm still reading through all this source code, learning things that I would have never gotten from the documentation. "Oh crap! It's 9:40! I'm supposed to start working on my thesis in 20 minutes!". I close the NQP files and open up the Octave ones. There are a few things I want to try to do now, while it's still fresh in my head.

10:04: Done coding, but no time to do any quick tests. This annoys me, but a timeline is a timeline, and I'm already 4 minutes late. I open my thesis on one computer, and open up the Temple University "Dissertation and Thesis Handbook". The handbook is lousy. I look for the [edit] button so I can fix something. This isn't a wiki and I cannot find the button. I consider, briefly, sending an email to the webmaster to complain about the poor quality of this document. I decide not to waste the time.

10:10: I start my first pass of the document. At 100 pages and counting, this is no easy feat. My first task is to remove some sections which have been deprecated and information which is no-longer being included.

11:00:Finish my first pass, check Gmail and Google reader. Nothing good.

11:05:Time to start the second pass. This time, I'm focusing on formatting issues: properly indenting paragraphs, properly labeling figures. Updating text styles for my section headers, combining small paragraphs and separating up large paragraphs. This is going to take a while.

1:15: Finished the second pass. I'm hungry and my fingers hurt. I haven't eaten anything since I woke up today, although I did drink half a glass of water. I get up to go make food. We have left-over meatballs, and I consider making a meatball sandwich. I also consider making myself a fried egg sandwich, which is something of a specialty of mine. I look around for some chips, and some other stuff to eat too. I decide that I'm going to eat some yogurt and fruit, have a sandwich, a glass of orange juice, some chips, and maybe a bowl of cereal. I'm very hungry.

1:20: My appetite was much bigger then my motivation to prepare food. I eat two slices of toast with butter.

1:25: I decide to take a break from work and write a quick blog post. I'm too frazzled for complete sentences so I opt to write a timeline instead. I say things which are very funny to me, but in retrospect are not funny to anybody else. I publish the blog post anyway.

1:35: Time to get back to work. Third pass. I need to fix section numbering, figure numbering, and table numbering. I need to manually create a table of contents because the one in Microsoft Word doesnt do what I want it to do. I need to fix tables which spread onto multiple pages.

circa 4:00: Go crazy. Take off all my clothes, dance outside, and shout swear words at the sun. Try to climb a tree and hurt myself. Cry, laugh, and then cry again. Tell my thesis that I hate it and that I won't work on it anymore. The thesis talks back. We reach an understanding.

circa 4:15: Fourth pass. This time I need to try to fix my references and bibliography.