Completing a Thesis

Wow, it has been almost a year since I last posted here. So much for commitments to writing more. I think though I can attribute this to one big thing. My thesis.

Urgh, it feels painful to even write about it. I’m sick of thinking of it, but a thesis I did complete. I don’t feel particularly happy about it, but I think that kind of neurosis is probably why it took so long to complete. Is it good enough? Have I done all I could? Do I need to explain this better? These questions haunted me, and probably will continue to haunt me up to the moment of my oral defence, which is A MILLION YEARS AWAY in January next year.

My wife finds this quite humorous, the length of my dissertation is slightly smaller than a chapter of her work. Oh? Yes, I got married.

Back to important things, now that I am free of this albatross, what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to become a freelance farm photographer who follows the scent of dry rocks do a PhD because why not go through that whole painful process again for limited financial gain.

In the interim I want to see if I can publish my research code to github, as long as it doesn’t break any obscure university regulations. I probably also have to clean it up so as not embarrass myself (SPOILERS: It’s going to be super embarrassing regardless).

I should also document some other things I have done on here:

  • How to encrypt all the sites with Let’s Encrypt
  • How to setup an nginx SSL reverse proxy and explain what all the damn options are
  • Figure out how to setup Google Drive File Stream with unionfs on Linux to abuse Google’s generosity on storage space for enterprise accounts for totally cool and legit reasons
  • Try and figure out if libvirt-kvm is really that unfriendly or am I just stupid misinformed
  • Docker???!?

That’s about it. I can feel the insomnia ebbing, but that is probably just wishful thinking.