So apparently I am more dead than I thought...

Or so it seems from this site.

Most of the things in my life have changed since my last post in April. I have finished my thesis, found a job, graduated, moved to Florida, started my job, and have begun building a new social network...in that order. Of course, this is way more activity than can be covered in one, or even two, posts, so I will be working on this continuing story whenever I get a chance. So, onwards.

For anyone who has never completed a thesis, it's really an amazing process. After working on a project for the better part of two years (or 2.5 in my case), and imagining that you will never actually finish, you get the whole thing wrapped up in four week mad scramble. The reason for this is because you eventually realize that you could, literally, spend the next 30 years working on the same project, and that if you're going to finish it might as well be soon. So you throw together whatever changes to your project that you need to make it fairly presentable, and then you spend the next three weeks hammering out what is essentially a 60-page lab report full of poor grammar and syntax that no one, in all likelihood, will read. Your adviser may read the whole thing through, if he's really bored, and you will never want to read the whole thing through because, for the love of god, you just want it to be over. Maybe some day you'll show it to your kids so they can be proud to have a father who could write something that was worth binding.

Along with the written thesis there is a presentation. As with all presentations in the civilized world, it is a Power Point presentation. Your task is to distill your 60 pages of excruciating detail to 20 slides that you hope will either keep your audience awake or put them to sleep, depending on how worthwhile you think your "research" was.

Once the presentation is over and your audience has been roused from their naps, everyone is asked to leave the room and you must face your committee alone. As I neglected to mention earlier, your committee is made up of your adviser, who you desperately hope is on your side, and two committee members, who are supposed to be in related fields and who, you hope, know almost nothing about what you just presented. You hope this because then the questions they are about to ask you will be very simple and low-level, such as "what does this variable mean?", and not questions like "why did you use the Lucas-Kanade method and not the Valenzetti-Linstrom method?", at which point you will fight the urge to run and/or pass out because you have no idea what the fuck the Valenzetti-Linstrom method is or why your adviser didn't mention this earlier.

However, no matter what you seem to answer, your committee eventually decides that you did well enough for them, congradulate you, and present you with at least 50,000 new corrections to your thesis. Once these are done, however, and everyone's signature has dried on the appropriate forms, you can officially be done!

So that is what I did.

Next time, whenever that may be, I'll relate the joys of drug testing in the middle of a job interview.

I am not dead...

In spite of what my lack of activity on this site may have let you to believe, I am not, in fact, dead. I am, however, the next-best thing: trying to graduate. I think part of the process of graduate school is realizing that it is not at all what you thought it would be like when you decided to postpone outside life for another few years. I know that I had imagined it similar to undergrad, except that you get to pick a neat topic and do a really big project on it.

For those of you who are like me and occasionally need a kick in the butt - otherwise known as a "deadline" - you will understand how annoying it is to realize that you've wasted the better part of a year doing work that, under different circumstances, should have taken you a month. The key here is money. If you have an adviser that pays you, then he / she has a vested interest in getting you to do your work on time. This is usually because there is someone above him / her who is ultimately paying the bills.

If you are like me, and get no money from your adviser, then you tend to be left free to float, for as long as you like, in self-imposed research limbo. This, combined with work that pays the bills, and consequently has a more valid claim on my time, means that I'll be graduating just a little later than I had hoped. The good news is that I now have my motivation in the form of a job! I have accepted an offer to work in sunny Melbourne, Florida, starting at the end of June, so if I don't get everything done and in by then I'm screwed.

Alright, that's the update for now. It's 3:47am, and time for the sleeping.

G'night.