Caffeine powered thesis machine

I spent the day working on my thesis. Man, writing stuff up is hard work. Actually, I'm just doing literature review writing right now, and I'm not doing a very good job of it. Pre-supervisor review, it's tough to know how much detail to go into. Hopefully the writing up of my own actual work is easier. But then I would need to do some actual work.

I finally decided once and for all that I am not going to be doing a PhD after I finish my M.A.Sc. Not for a few year at the very least. I'll have to wait and see if I miss academia at all. Realistically though, I'd rather do cool stuff than try to publish papers about it, and I rather not have to teach or try to get grants etc. At first I was a little sad about it, but I think that was mostly just looking into an uncertain future. However, I have a few solid options, so it's not really very uncertain at all.

Tamara asked me about setting up my old Toshiba 220CDS for her to work on. She wants a machine with no web browsing capability, to force her to work on her thesis more and not get so distracted. So I installed Debian (Sarge is frozen!) on it, with X and Openbox3 (Fluxbox soon). Emacs, aspell, AUCTeX, and Subversion make a complete thesis editing package. I've ended up using it to write my thesis, even though I use the web to find references and stuff. I just ssh into my desktop and run Firefox from there, and it works like a charm. The only real problem is that the 800x600 screen is kind of cramped, especially for someone used to two side-by-side Emacs frames.

Great Gorilla of Manila! Tamara, that saucy minx, scored tickets to a Serenity trial screening on May 26th in Seattle. NIFTY!