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.