Keep on chugging

[jethrien]

Up to the 60 page mark.

My advisor is apparently swamped in drafts. I get the impression he has no intention of reading mine. Fantastic. So I have no idea whether I have included enough calculations, or whether I'm going to get slammed for not having enough technical content for a design project. (Why is it design? Because my advisor told me to make it design.) Sigh. Very sigh. Feeling rather insecure, and suspecting that lovely paper I have slaved over will get trashed. I also haven't the foggiest notion what I should be doing for the presentation, either. They're going to eat me alive. Like a roomful of pirhanas. Only with engineering degress. And glasses. Most of them have glasses. Glasses, and ties, and nasty little sharp fishy teeth.

Very tired of this all. Very much looking forward to being done.

Comments

[shnayder.livejournal.com]

That's a great mental image.

If you email me a draft I can send comments, though probably not ones representative of what a mechE prof would say. And don't worry overmuch about the presentation-just put in pretty pictures and some animations of your pro-e (or whatever else) models and they'll be happy. Maybe a picture of a little castle in a fishbowl too.

You can do it!

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not emailing this to anyone. The report is 10 MB - the appendix is almost 30. Half this thing is photographs and diagrams.

[chantal1382.livejournal.com]

111 MB, at last count. No idea where it's all coming from, but word essentially freaks out and stops working whenever I try to save it. We started saving in sections and it *still* freaks out. 2 days!

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Hah! Open Office wins! It takes about three full minutes to save the appendix, and nothing else can be running at the same time, but it saves without choking and dying.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

That's why I wrote mine in LaTex. Sooo much nicer than Word for science-y stuff.

Besides it's fun to write for a while, then compile it and see how many pages it added.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Yay LaTex! Except that it sucks for pictures, which is why I didn't like it all that much and Jethrien couldn't use it.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I only had a few pictures (and lots of graphs) and I definitely remember having to learn bits of a graphic programming languages to create them in the right format to insert. That was not so much fun.

And then there was the one graph that took over 10 hours to make because I had to enter all of the several thousand data points by hand. After I did all that I learned how to import into Excel and use tab delimiters to seperate columns and then convert back into dat files, which required zipping back and forth between two computers (Windows and Linux) and learning how to use my Pine account - oh god. The aggravation. That and some of the files created by my program had upwards of 100,000 data points which is too big for Excel to open so I had to open them in Notepad and break them into smaller files by hand and then reintegrate them ---

AAAAAAH!!!! Thesis flashback! Make it go away!