Hello, Hello!!

Hello blog!

Hello you!

Hello me!

How I miss my blog! How I miss reading your blogs and receiving comments!

Right after my last entry about cutie Maple, I decided to challenge myself. My progress in my studies have been terrible because of procrastination. And excuses. So I decided to set a serious target in my thesis writing and before its done and ready for my supervisor’s review, no blogging for me!

I anticipated that it would take only 2 weeks, max. It took nearly a month! You have no idea how bad it is to want to blog and then turn away from it (withdrawal symptoms haha!). My fingers were itching for weeks! But I am very proud of myself. I kept the promise, I delivered (albeit taking way longer than 2 weeks) and now I can blog…..with a vengeance *grins*

Thank you Pervisha, Danielle and Nadia for checking on me, I am still alive and well, just playing good student for the past few weeks ;)

I have so many things to blog about that I don’t know where to start. I am very hungry (it’s lunch time now) and I am just minutes after hitting the send button, e-mailing my 105-page (ahem!) report to my supervisor. The first thing I wanted to do was blog instead of eat. So yeah

I feel sorry for my little blog, going through a dry spell for a whole month. But rest assured, I am back to nurturing it with lots of writing this week. For the time being, here’s another shot of Maple while I warm up to the blogosphere! I have lots of catching up to do

Lament

Like most days, I typed away in front of my computer today trying to progress with my work as much as possible.

With at least 5 windows open at a time, I tried to multi-task between making the numbers and equations tally on an excel worksheet, referencing at least 3 academic articles on PDFs and trying to make sense of it all in a word file which somehow has to emerge as something “brilliant”. Somehow.

So many aspects to report, so many technical complications to explain and so much to solve, I begin to wonder how I could manage to link all ideas and concepts in a systematic manner. At the moment, I have so many  different word documents written on different days on various topics related to my work and I fear at the thought of trying to compile them all nicely in one continuous document, with good structure, flow and formatting. And sound brilliant too.

Oh and not to mention, it must have a complete reference list and proper citations within the text too. This is the part I drag the most when it comes to technical writing. It is not enough to know what you write about, you must also remember where you first read about it and give due credit by citing it. Otherwise, you’ll get penalised for plagiarism, very serious offense.

This slows me down a lot, spending time trying to dig through hundreds of journal papers in my “collection” and pin point the exact piece for every few lines of text I wrote. Making sure formatting is consistent and up to standard throughout is quite a headache too. I get quite put off by the task of writing my thesis because of these.

Which then procrastination comes into the picture. And then I complain. And I whine.

Sometimes I just sit there wondering why I wanted to do this in the first place. Questioning if this will ever get done.

Then I thought, at least I have a powerful word processing software that is Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel to speed up calculations and Endnote as my efficient citation management sidekick.

Imagine having to do ALL this using only a typewriter….with no delete or backspacing function. Or formatting tools. How did people do anything without a computer? How was it done 30 years ago??

I am fortunate to be in the 21st century.

With that, I snapped out of it and got back to work.