Progress

I am approaching the five kilometre mark now. I am getting close to being able to run five kilometres in a row once again. It is paradoxical that I find running hard, compared to walking and cycling. I was able to run up to 13 kilometres before. Now I’m aiming for half, to a third less.

If I ran somewhere flat I would find running easier. One of the challenges of running in this landscape is that it undulates. In theory I could also run around in circles like others do. I could run laps, rather than a long circuit but I don’t want to run around in circles. I am considering running around in a circle for the 4.8km run. I want to run around in that circle to focus on achieving the distance, rather than struggling to cope with the contours.

Now that I’ve achieved my goal of getting most of my dissertation written I’m going to take a day’s break and work on another of my assignments to clear my head and also to make sure I complete all assignments by the required date. It’s been a long effort but last night I spent several hours working on my dissertation, getting it up to 8800 words. The word limit is from 10-12000 words and having almost 8.8K means I’m 1200 words away. With re-writing and clarification of certain points I should easily get up to the word limit that was set out initially. I’m happy about the state of affairs. Over two weeks for editing and cleaning up of the text. There’s another assignment that I will work on the 22nd of this month and another which I will start working on later today. With the way things are going, I should quite easily be able to meet all the deadlines and have time to be human by the same opportunity. It’s a great feeling. Finally, the glacier that was pressing down on me is starting to melt and I’ll begin to rise up as the pressure is released, much as England is doing since the last glacial age hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In three thousand words my first dissertation draft will be ready. This evening I may be able to get up to ten thousand words and from that point on it will be about the re-writing of one section after another until I am happy that I have fit in as much relevant information as possible into the dissertation. It’s been great weather in London over the past two days especially. Far fewer planes were flying yesterday, therefore, there were far fewer contrails than usual. It’s another beautiful day today and everyone’s going to take advantage of this. It’s too nice to sit indoors in front of the dissertation when the sun is out. Summer is teasing us too effectively.

Yesterday I woke up and within half an hour started working on my dissertation. For a few minutes, I added one or two more paragraphs of text before going on a search for interviews. I looked up Cousteau and arrived at the INA page. The INA is the french video archive online. It’s there that I found a quote from Jacques Yves Cousteau during the 1956 Cannes Film festival where he was talking about his documentaries. There are three elements that are perfect for the purpose of my dissertation therefore I am happy to have found that resource. It’s made me feel more relaxed. Add to this the fact that I’m up to 5800 words and you’ll understand that this current state of affairs is quite pleasant. I need to write almost four thousand more words by Sunday to be on track with my own project. We’ll see whether I achieve this goal. I have heard from a friend that some idiots are getting so stressed about the dissertation that they going to doctors to get medication to calm them down and this goes against all logic. If your dissertation is stressing you then there’s one key element that will calm you down: Do your work!! Why are the doctors giving people drugs to calm them down when it’s a psychological problem because they’re too idiotic to relax in a logical way. The doctors are stupid for giving the medication and those taking drugs are idiots for taking them. Rather than give people drugs why not give them time management lessons instead. That’s the real issue. Anyway, my dissertation is going well and if I reach my target of 10,000 words by Sunday evening then I will have three weeks of revision to go through. I will see whether I can meet my module leader for one last time as soon as the April Holidays are finished to make sure that the content is correct. I want to do well so I might as well put in as much time as I can to get it finished on time and to the highest standard possible. That’s why I’m procrastinating through the process of blogging ;)

You know you’re a final year student when the last thing you think about before going to sleep is your dissertation. It’s also the first thing you wake up thinking of and to make matters worse you notice that a friend has joined a group called “my dissertation is driving me crazy, just to make you feel that much better. It’s not that I’m doing particularly badly, after all, I’ve done all the research I wanted to do in relation to the topic I’m writing about and I am progressing. I just wish it wasn’t so important in relation to all the other work I’ve done. It’s over in a month. That’s when I can finally relax and enjoy the real world again. How many university students a year write dissertations? At least thirty to fourty thousand I’d guess. How many enjoy it, probably quite a few. I enjoy it but it would be nicer if the purpose was to create more content for a website than to be assessed by a lecturer. I’m going to work on adding at least another 2000 words today, get it to five thousand words today. That’d mean I’m halfway to completion and it will be a really nice feeling. Now it’s time to stop procrastinating and do something more productive. No holidays for anyone so close to the dissertation deadline.

richard - Apr 5, 2007

http://www.main-vision.com/richard/romans.html is what I wrote about the Romans

Romans? Anything on Gibbon? I may be the only person in the entire world who’s reading him right now – and loving him.

I have had a few big writing projects. The first of these was creating the website on the Romans. I had set myself the task of writing down everything that I knew down into a word document. That word document was transformed and cut up into a number of HTML pages and turned into a website. That project started ten years ago. After that project, I wrote an essay about information technology in a global society and that was really interesting. I finished that essay within a few months. I never stopped studying that subject and it’s coming in very handy at the moment but that’s another story. A dissertation is a lot like creating a specialised website. You gather hundreds of bits of information and amalgamate them into a collection of articles. Each article adds an aspect to the conversation that you are having with your reader. As they gather this information their knowledge can be used to explain whether what you have noticed is due to social effects, whether it’s regulatory or other. It’s not that hard but it’s scary to write dissertations because you have to be careful to stay on topic, you have to make sure that it meets with the requirements of the dissertation examiner. I love writing but I’m slowed down by having to source everything that I write. I’d prefer to write for pleasure but that will have to wait till I finish university. Just over a month to go till I regain my freedom.