Ich habe fertig.

At least partially. Today I finished the first draft of my thesis. I think I still have to include some corrections, but that should be a matter of days. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter, right now I should hear the sounds if it were a train...

PhD

An amazing amount of people doing a PhD comes out of it with stress related problems, either psychological or physical. Some develop stomach ulcers, some turn into near-alcoholics, some are depressed. If you are lucky, you just survive your PhD with a major frustration. Not sure if this is supposed to be like that or if it is worth it...

Strange

It's friday evening and I am programming like mad... It seems that finally motivation has caught in to get my thesis off the desk as fast as possible.

The End is nigh!

I am running out of "Blabla"-Parts to write for my thesis. I already wrote "The Experiment", "The Theory" and "A general Description of Stuff". Now just two chapters are left: "Stuff I actually did" and "Conclusions and Outlook". Those will be the hard part...

Writing...

Writing theses sucks. You stop having social contacts because you are always busy with writing. In the short times where you wait for your software to run you mailbomb friends and the time you are neither working or writing you annoy your surroundings by being generally weird. Not a good time to meet people...

Thesis

It seems that everything I was directly involved failed. While writing up it seems that all data that I took was useless, all tests I conducted showed that the detector is not understood and that the tests were useless. At least it will improve my english when I try to make it sound that everthing was great.

Else: this weekend my car wouldn't start (empty battery), my mobile broke (wrong pin entered three times while it was supposed to sit in my pocket being switched off), I met a lot of advanced-level-geeks and had a lot of good wheat beer. The beer was definitely the high point the last couple of days...

The sky is still above

For those who were wondering why my page counter seems to be stuck: I fought a battle with two year old data during the last three weeks. First getting it converted, then getting it combusted by our tracking software and now the last few days getting the output analysed. Thanks to a lot of my colleagues who I bothered with stupid questions I today produced my first own physics plot containing actual particles (after nearly five years of my PhD):



It shows that cosmic rays are coming mostly from above (Phi being the angle to the horizontal plane). That's great neaws, as it means current theories about the universe are still correct. (OK, there is some ambiguity, they can also come from the bottom. We can't distinguish with that detector. But there is a 50 % chance that they mostly come from above.)

Trend

Thanks to XL, who graphed my progress in writing :-)

[EDIT]: Just to clarify: the graph was kindly produced by Axel (or short XL) who has a job in industry and is therefore excused for the use of Excel (or short that-crappy-program-which-cant-calculate-stuff-decently). I of course would have done that in root and have used the very convenient drag and drop feature to get the points closer to the fit. Or maybe in PAW because it's FORTRAN and I like self-flagellation.

Script Foo

In case you want to convert a bunch of eps-files to pdf-files (e.g. root generated plots, as the pdf output of root sucks and the eps sometimes produce strange encoding-effects when converted directly...):


#!/bin/bash
for epsfile in $*;
do
echo "Converting $epsfile ...";
eps2eps $epsfile ${epsfile%.eps}_temp.eps;
epstopdf ${epsfile%.eps}_temp.eps -o=${epsfile%.eps}.pdf;
rm ${epsfile%.eps}_temp.eps;
done


Pagecount

As I am getting more and more frustrated and might answer questions on how my thesis is going on in a style which might annoy people you can now find a page counter in the sidebar. It is updated daily, everything more I would tell you would be on the lines "don't ask..."

In case you want to know how I did the counter:
convert -background white -fill black -font Helvetica -pointsize 24 -size 50x label:`pdfinfo $THESIS | grep Pages | awk '{print $2}'` $PNGFILE


State of mind

It seems that I am entering the writing up phase of my thesis. My flat gets cleaner everyday, without me remembering of cleaning it up on purpose. The same already happened during my diploma thesis. You just start cleaning, to not need to write...

Engine Block

Engine Block
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Successful week: I managed to seperate the engine head off the motor block of my DKW, cleaned out all the rust and dirt. It looks like it needs a bit of honing and some cleaning, but else it looks usable again.

I also managed to make two plots for my thesis and to copy a couple of pages into my thesis taken from an old report.