Bright End of Nowhere

Looks like this is Yet Another Tooling Weekend. Got my thesis draft back with a ton of corrections to make. Bought thesis paper, and I know where a color printer is, so I'll be set for Monday or die trying.

Also need to write the paper for 21F.039 (Japanese Popular Culture) that I got an extension on by Monday. Oh, and 6.152/3.155 (Micro-Nano Processing Tech) has a design project take-home test due Monday that I...have not even looked at yet. Whoo, go me.

Good thing I've just about nailed my recipe for "Coffee of the Damned" (kona coffee + chili pepper + cinnamon); I'm gonna need it.

I just nearly gave myself a heart attack by deleting a folder on a USB stick full of out-of-date thesis files so I could transfer the current copy of all thesis files over. I had momentarily forgotten if I'd transferred unique video files off the stick and onto the main folder on Bahamut prior to deleting the folder.

Good news is that I did. Hence why I'm still breathing. I love it when my past self is so much cleverer than my current self.

In other, related news, I've come up with an awesome, terrible plan for Mother's Day. See, for the past few years, whenever I ask my mother what she wants for Christmas/birthdays, her answer is always along the lines of "for you to pass [midterm/class]" or "to graduate". My thesis is due at 5PM on May 10th. Which means it has to be done a few days beforehand so my advisor can actually read it.

I am totally giving my mother a PDF copy of my final draft of my undergraduate thesis. With the attached note of "I can finally give you what you've been asking me for years."

I think I'm a dork.

So, one of my goals was to get some major chunk of my thesis in rough draft form by the end of the weekend.

*eyes 68-page monstrosity*

Yeeaah, 'bout that.

Five chapters in the outline. Not a single one fully written, but Chapter 1 is roughly half-done, 2 is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3. 3 is about 1/3 done. 4 and 5 have yet to be touched. Well, actually, that's a lie, because I've got the majority of all the figures, graphs, photos, and key frames from the video data done, placed in the document, and labeled with the appropriate cross-referencing information. And my bibliography is being generated automatically as I go, which is great, because I have read far too many technical papers this weekend. Thank you, BibTeX.

How do I love thee, LaTeX, let me count the ways.

The appendices are almost done and scare the crap out of me for sheer length. At least now the majority of the page count doesn't come from them.

Chapter 4 is the evaluation and results section, in which I have to make sense of what the hell all this pretty data means. *facepalm* Oh, and I also have to spend this week calibrating a sensor, NOW WITH NEW CIRCUIT BOARD. The new one came in on, uh, Friday. So I have less than a week to calibrate, let run, observe behavior, and write about it. FUN TIMES.

What's even more fun is that I finally sorta, kinda figured out exactly what my thesis was about on Friday at a lab group meeting. I also found out that I'll be having to give presentations and demo this damn project during Sponsor Week, roughly the week prior to graduation. FUN TIMES. "Look, my Matlab script makes BLINKY LIGHTS. DAS BLINKENLIGHTS!" (Actually, "das_blinkenlights" is totally the name of one of my MATLAB functions in the appendix. I don't even care anymore.)

When the hell did I write 30+ pages of MATLAB code!?

Not lines, pages.

(No, I still haven't written any actual words.)

I have less than 30 days to write my thesis! AAAAH!

*runs in circles*

And my code isn't done and SolidWorks is being a bastard and I have no idea what I'm doing! (This is actually a lie.)

*runs in more circles*

Well, this is lovely: the MechE undergraduate office can't find my thesis proposal. You know, the one I turned in back in mid-February.

*headdesk*

Dammit, I just want to graduate! Why is this So. Hard?