Back of the net!

Have it!

The thesis is in. What a day. First of all, the printer I was going to use this morning was linked to computers that couldn't read my files, and it couldn't do double-sided anyway. Then I have to beg TCM upstairs to print it off for me, which they did (very nice of them). That goes fine and I think to myself 'it's going alright, after all'. Then I go to get it bound at reception, and they manage to bind half of one copy upside down! Unbelievable. Anyway, I have to wait until 3pm until TCM chap returns and prints another copy off. The Board of Grad studies closes at 4, so I hurried the receptionist to bind it in front of me. In the end, I made it to BoGS by 3.30, although I missed my deadline by a month. Nice.

On a more relaxing note, here is a picture of Marlow:


Marlow was mentioned in Three Men in a Boat as one of the most picturesque spots on the river. It is, although the village of Hurley just upstream is nicer still. Both have lovely churchyards. Marlow has the Two Brewers pub, in which JK Jerome is meant to have stayed. That may or may not be the case but what is certain is that it serves an excellent steak sandwich!

I also paid a visit to Cookham, whence Stanley Spencer hails. I think that the entrance fee of 50p to the Spencer museum there is one of the best value entrance fees that I have ever come across. Cookham is another ludicrously pretty village, with another relaxing chrchyard to stroll around.

The only down side to this stretch of country is that the drivers seems to be obsessed with getting from A to B in minimum t, which means that the poor tourists on bend C has little hope of making it across the road without being partly carried off to point B.

Woe is me...

After a relaxing three days in Marlow, I have returned to find that the colour laser printer is offline and unavailable for use for the next few days. Am I destined never to hand this thing in? Of all the weeks in all the year, it had to be this one that it goes on the blink.

Now it is the end of the week, and it looks ominously like I'll have another weekend with it still unsubmitted, and having to answer the questions with 'not yet, not yet...but soon', again and again. Tiresome in the extreme.

So near, but so far...

After my enthusiasm of the last post, I have been cooling off today. My supervisor has advised me to finish off the thesis tomorrow and then put it to one side, go off for a week and return with fresh eyes to go over it one last time. I was reluctant to do this - I just want to finish! However, I have decided that it makes sense, and I am off to Marlow for a few days next week anyway. What's another week at this point? So, as from tomorrow, I am on holiday for a few days. I shall submit next week!

Golf on Saturday, then away to London and Marlow, where I shall sit by the river, reading and drinking a fine ale without any physics to be seen. Looking forward to it.

Nearly there...

So, the whole thesis has been read, annotated in red and returned to me. I really think submission is imminent now - a very exciting prospect! I have implemented nearly all the changes now. Before I leave tonight, I shall print off a copy so I can have one last read over and make sure that nothing horrendously bad has sneaked in. Luckily, Arsenal vs Villareal is not on terrestrial TV today, otherwise I may have chucked in the towel earlier on tonight.

I did get side-tracked into watching the tense climax to the Hendry/Bond first round match, however. It went down to a respotted black in the last frame. I wonder how often that happens; perhaps the tension and pressure on players means that a disproportionately high number of respotted blacks occur in the final frame or two of competitative matches. Someone must have looked at that. Maybe I could study snooker next...

Happy Easter

It is Easter Sunday, and I am yet again in the office. This time, my main challenge is the 15 mandarins sitting on my desk. Sainsbury's were having one of their two for one offers, and it seemed churlish to refuse them. Unfortunately, my mandarin capacity is, I fear, somewhat limited. I suspect I shall be becoming Mandarin Man at tea time tomorrow. If anyone comes in, that is. I just find it very difficult to get into the mandarins; it takes about 5 minutes to peel and 5 seconds to eat. That simply isn't right. I want a mandarin peeler. Perhaps monkeys could be trained to do that. You could have a monkey in each office and whenever you had a tricky mandarin/banana/parcel the monkey could open it.

My cheescake capacity is something to behold, however. I ate 80% of one yesterday...I could have eaten the whole thing, but I thought that discretion was the better part of valour. Actually, I was concerned about not having anything to eat today. Shouldn't have worried: I have plenty of mandarins.

Good Friday

It is Good Friday today, and there are very few people in the lab today. I am still waiting for my chapters to be returned, so I am pottering about (in a virtual way), correcting little typos that I see in my writing and adding little bits here and there. That I cannot think of sweeping changes or additions to make must be a sign that I have reached the natural end of the thesis. Undoubtedly, it could be made better, but the time has come to call it a day once I have implemented any necessary changes. I am looking forward to my freedom. It will be good to be able to do research for its own sake and not for a degree, although there will always be the pressure to publish.

I recently bought a secondhand first edition of Graham Greene's 'Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party'. It is one of my all time favourite novels, a near perfect story told with ideal brevity and balance. I recommend it to everyone. I used to have a paperback copy, but I felt that I needed to have a good quality copy. The little bookshop across from my college had the first edition for £5, which I think is a reasonable price judging by what I see on Abebooks.co.uk, but I think the lady in the shop was a little surprised and disappointed to see it at that price. Personally, I think the shop owners tend to overprice their stock, although I am not convinced that they always know what they are doing. Still, I am happy to benefit.

Arbitrary Law

I heard about a rather worrying development over the tea table this moming. Apparently, our enlightened and progressive government are trying to introduce a bill so that Ministers can change the law at will, without having to pass the changes through parliament. Six law professors from this very institution, Cambridge Uni, have written to the Times highlighting the dangers of this. Although arguing by authority is the least reliable form of argument, I have no choice (unless I go and do a law degree) but to refer to this letter and trust these learned fellows' opinions. See also this. This country is grave danger of becoming a very unpleasant place to live. We already have people being held for 90 days without charge or trial, we have ID cards on the way and now the prospect of law changes without check and balance. We need to be a bit more like the French, we need to actually stand up for our rights: civil protest works. Strikes are necessary and in fact a very useful function of society.

Hopefully Scotland's separate legal system can buffer my home country from this disturbing trend of authoritarianism.

I have done my best with those fits I mentioned below and committed them to paper and the colour printer. My supervisor should now have the last two chapters to read over and ridicule at will. Actually, so far he has been quite gentle with my work so it can't be totally awful.

I'm taking a little breather while he corrects the drafts, taking a little time to consider the holiday that I have just booked with N to South Africa. It should be great, although the SA students here have persuaded me that the country's cities are swarming pits of crime and violence! The film Tsotsi helped also! It will be fun, anyway, because I shall have a local guide. I am especially looking forward to seeing some animals in the raw in the Kruger or similar park. Hopefully they will be in the mood to show themselves.

I have also just finished reading the adventures of Prince Florizel in RL Stevenson's new Arabian nights. Prince Florizel is an unlikely character who solves crimes and brings the perpetrators to justice through his desire to satisfy noblesse oblige. What an impossibly noble, honourable, pompous and disturbingly elitist man he was (Florizel, that is)! I thought RLS was letting himself down severely with that character: a Prince totally impervious to temptation, above earthly delights, possessed of ultimate authority and the ability to make all swoon before his untouchable self, until I read the last paragraph and found that RLS was taking the p**s after all! Was RLS a fan of the aristocracy and divine right? I don't know, but after writing several chapters in which a Prince could do no wrong and was stultifyingly dull in his propriety, RLS takes him down a peg or two by invoking a revolution in his home country of Bohemia because of his constant absence overseas on matters of honour! Florizel then has to work in a cigar shop. Nice touch, RLS.

This posting is quite simply a procrastination measure, one that I can scarcely afford. I want to submit my thesis by the end of next week, in time for Easter. I've been writing since October, and I never thought it would take this long or become this frustrating.

It would have been relatively straightforward, if it was not for one particular section in which I have been trying desperately to fit a certain model to the data. It's like a rug which is slightly too big for the room it's in: you get it to lie flat in one place and it pops up in another. What makes it worse is that I cannot get the computer to do it for me. Maybe some computer whizz could do it, but the model has about 12 adjustable parameters and is very non linear. It would take me longer to write a program to do the fit than to do it by hand. So I've been doing this fitting for weeks now. Still, I think that I am just about seeing the light or dim gleam at the end of the tunnel.