time on the wing

Its hard, and not a little alarming, to believe that almost a week has gone by since my hope-filled account of mounting progress last Thursday. Since then I've sat down to implement my plans, with mixed success. The original plan was to finish off the little task last week, but it ended up dragging out until yesterday, a regrettable but not shocking slippage in the context of software development tasks.

In the interim, and on the advice of Mark, I sat down on Saturday morning and put in a determined 2-3 hours on my thesis document. I had previously downloaded and fiddled a little with the provided template, to the tune of 26 largely empty pages, but this marked, in my mind at least, the first time spent on the thesis. Significant things happened. I checked it into CVS, ensured that I have working writing/editing environments both at home and at work, and cut-and-pasted my SoSyM paper in as a chapter. That this ramped me up to 42 pages is nice, but what's nicer is the feeling of having dipped my toes into the stream and, for now at least, not found the current to be insurmountable. In addition, having it at hand and in some psychological sense begun, I can now record those high-level decisions I make in my implementation endeavours as jottings in the relevant chapter in my thesis, rather than on some random scrap paper floating on my desk.