Semi-Hiatus

I won't be posting as much over the next few weeks, as I prepare to submit my thesis and work for the Graduate School as well.

I'm on my final chapter now, and just have to iron out the kinks that I have in my notation. Am hoping to get that drafted by Thursday, as from this Friday through to the following Friday I'm working for the Grad School on another Careers Skills Workshop. This course is non-residential, unlike last summer's which was based off campus, but because the days have such early starts and late finishes they're putting us all up in a pretty nice hotel for the duration of the actual course. If I get this chapter finished and incorporated into the main body of the thesis then I can take a draft of it with me and spend my odd moments circling things to change.

Submission deadline: April 15th. (this is self-imposed, I'll just be annoyed with myself if it isn't in by then)

I hope to keep up with Wordless Wednesdays, and will post as and when I can. Maybe something now and then about my lead up to the start of 101 Things in 1001 Days...

All the best, more soon-ish.

Monday the 3rd of March

Five chapters done on my thesis now, two to go. One of the final two is based on a paper that I did with my supervisor last year, and he seems to think that it will be OK if I just go through it and remove anything that I've already brought up in definitions and leave the rest in. Hopefully that means that my first draft of chapter six will be done by the middle/end of next week...

The final chapter (which will actually be the final chapter in my thesis) is just a short account of some work that I never really got a handle on, but which I got some results for. Not sure if my supervisor will agree on title I have in mind, but the author's prefered version would be "Speculation and Portents in the Annulus"...

Long weekend, and yet over so quickly. My nan is still in hospital, but seems to have recovered from the operation to remove the drainage tube that was accidentally left inside her weeks ago. Yesterday was Mother's Day in the UK, and so I took my mum to see an orchestral concert at the Philharmonic.

Over the weekend I read "Half the Blood in Brooklyn," the latest Joe Pitt novel by Charlie Huston; vampire noir at its best (not that I know of any other vampire noir), it takes two really interesting genres in extremely interesting directions. His descriptions and background for a clan of Jewish vampires (who only drink kosher blood from orthodox girls) make for intriguing reading, and add a bizarre religious angle to the vampire mythology that he's so far grounded as a purely physical (viral) phenomenon.

I also read "Odd and the Frost Giants," Neil Gaiman's World Book Day short story. It may be aimed at children, but it's a cracking little read for adults too. Alas, if memory serves it isn't being released in the US!

And the next book on my list is Rewired, described as a "post-cyberpunk anthology". I'll probably crack on with that tonight: I've got more done today than I had planned, and my cinema plans that I had with a friend this evening have fell through. I think a nice tuna salad when I get home would be good, and then curl up with a good book...

Yeah... More actual blogging soon.

Pages

I've been measuring progress on my thesis this week (and quite a few times in the past) based on the number of pages I do in a day. This may or may not be a good thing, as often as it comes to tidying things up and making small corrections the increase is quite small. Still, I've added about two pages to the thesis today, and made some alterations to some tables of results which needed doing, and while I feel pretty tired now I also feel pretty happy with what I've done today.

I lost six squash games in a row yesterday (the first three were enough to lose the match and keep me on sixteenth place in the ladder; the second three were just for practice), and then played football. Five-a-side felt great, just awesome to be playing again. I was really, really stiff by the end of yesterday evening, but felt quite good this morning. It's 4:30 in the afternoon now, and I'm starting to flag a bit...

I've just seen this news story and I'm amazed: the sheer pedantry, box-ticking, political-correctness-gone-mad-ness of it just blows me away.

So this evening I'm going to relax, kick back and play some Darwinia, which my officemates got me for my birthday. I'm hoping to read a couple of chapters of "Tales of the Dying Earth" (which I postponed reading before Christmas) too, and then tomorrow I have to finish this chapter I'm working on (was hoping to do it today but my mental energy is just gone) and then start another one. Woohoo!

Oh, and on my way home I am booking tickets to go and see this!

And in closing, because I was going to just do a Wordless Wednesday but didn't see this picture of Iron Man until I went and looked back on Empire; Iron Man is in the running for this year's second best superhero film.

Teasers

I am sick to death of teaser trailers. I remember when trailers actually showed you something of the film, gave you some hint of plot or visuals to make you go "Ooooooh!" Sure, there are still trailers out there (and some of them are very good), but just lately I have come to hate teaser trailers, because at most they have one little thing which makes you go "Ooooooh!" and the rest of it is just a waste of time.

The teaser trailer for the new Star Trek film is my argument exactly (spoilers for the trailer, but not the film, ahead).

It's just... Well... Boring. Some shots of some guys working on the hull of the Enterprise. Well. Whoop-de-do. Nearly a minute of guys welding. Bear in mind, this is supposed to raise excitement levels in anticipation of the film.

The two good things about the teaser trailer are in the audio as well: Leonard Nimoy's incomparable voice giving those timeless words, "Space... The final frontier..." (which sends shivers down my spine just typing it; Nimoy's voiceover at the end of Wrath Of Khan is ten times better than either of William Shatner or Patrick Stewart's efforts); the sound of the original series transporters as the old Starfleet logo appears.

Empire's blog recently had a post about how there was no opening voiceover or narration to beat the one which accompanied Star Trek, and I'd pretty much have to go along with that (although the various different opening monologues which have accompanied the first season of Heroes have been pretty good on the whole).

Work has been going well over the last two days; finished the first draft of my chapter of background material yesterday, and did a solid three pages for another chapter today (which I'm hoping I will finish tomorrow) as well as tidy up the formatting on some tables of results for one of my appendices. Through it all today I have been listening to Daft Punk and The Benjamin Gate (as well as the soundtrack to the musical episode of Buffy). I find that listening to music which is generally faster in beat has an effect on how fast I type and keep concentration.

Got to go now; playing squash in fifteen minutes, immediately followed by five-a-side. More soon.

End of the Week

It looks like it will be a fairly busy weekend, which probably won't feel that weird since it has been a fairly week. Hit a bit of a low patch yesterday; I think that I've been kidding myself in the past by how hard I had been working on my thesis when it's come to writing it up. This week has been something of a baptism of fire when it comes to meeting the targets that I have set myself in order to submit by the end of March.

(it should be noted that there is nothing inherently wrong with me submitting after the 31st of March, this is just the date that I have picked and am aiming for)

So I have an A4 sheet with my targets and so on in front of me, next to a Tim Sale postcard from Heroes (Tim Sale was the comics artist who did the artworks for the character Isaac), of Peter Petrelli jumping off the top of a building and flying. Both motivate me, though, it has to be said, from the opposite ends of the motivational spectrum.

Tomorrow I'm getting a haircut, and while my hair isn't usually especially long I think I am going to get it cut pretty short. Does the phrase "a four down to a two" mean anything to you? It has something to do with lengths, and I've had it before. It's short, but you can't see my skull.

After that have to visit my nan at the residential home, then on to shopping for birthday presents (three in the next week, including my sister's on Sunday) and in the evening I am going to see Verdi's Macbeth. It's the latest opera in the Met in High Definition series, where the Metropolitan Opera in New York broadcasts a performance to theatres and cinemas all around the world. I saw Romeo et Juliette before Christmas, which was really good - but the Scottish Play is just amazing (my favourite work of Shakespeare's is The Tempest, more on that another time I hope) and I'm really excited to be going to see it as an opera.

But right now I have to sign off as I am going to meet some friends for dinner, and then possibly go on to see the opening celebrations to Liverpool's European Capital of Culture Year. I'm already knackered though, so I'll just have to see how I feel after going for some Indian food.

Be good!

Break In Service

First some apologies. I have to apologise to some people who have commented and who I haven't replied to; thank you for taking your time to comment on whatever nonsense I was writing about. I will work harder in future to return the compliment. I also need to apologise to noisms, who has been carrying this blog for the best part of the last two weeks by himself. We set out to have something where we both regularly wrote about whatever was occuring to us, and I've left it to him pretty much over the last few weeks. I've been crazy busy with work, but that's not a great excuse, and I will be working harder in future to write.

I think I might change my "writing model," and rather than worry about finding a subject that I can say a lot about, I'll write shorter, tighter posts about things I'm thinking or have come across (kind of like Warren Ellis' blog, but with a bit more commentary, not just links to cool and interesting stuff).

So what has been going on while I've been silent? Well, I've been forgetting to bring my kit in to play five-a-side football, but that all changes today. Despite my stupid phone waking me up at 5am ("BEEP! BEEP! BEEP BEEP BEEP! My battery is low, plug me in!") I'm going to play in a couple of hours. The last time was quite good fun, even if I don't particularly enjoy team sports (apart from rounders, as previously discussed).

The chapter of my thesis that I'm working on is going quite well, but just when I think I have something stated as cleanly as possible my supervisor will come up with some other idea. It's a little wearying, as the maths is pretty much all there now, it all comes down to re-writing and re-writing. I'm quite pleased though as I came up with a corollary to the main theorem of the chapter the other day, and while the notation I've written it in might be slightly off at the moment I think that what I'm trying to say is true. Presented it at a meeting this morning, where I was given a ton of corrections for the chapter.

All for the good though, and I think that I am still pretty much on track for submitting as planned.

National Novel Writing Month is fast approaching, and I'm starting to get ideas. I had one thing that I was planning out in my head, but I think that I have abandoned that now in favour of something else which is, I will be the first to admit, utterly ridiculous. It's an idea that is, broadly speaking, science fiction, but leaning towards mainstream fiction as well I guess. I'm not going to go into the idea just yet (in case I decide on something else) but some of the influences and inspirations are Mike Hammer stories, JPod by Douglas Coupland and a variety of songs I've been listening to recently (too numerous to mention).

And that's it. I should do some maths (well, typesetting).