the ONLY reason i did *some* work tonight, was so that i could write something in my entry for today. lol
so this diary thing does work!

usually i would have been ah heck, it's too late, will just do it tommorow. but i didn't want to leave a blank update. so did about 2 hours of reading and making notes whilst having bad boys II in the background keeping me awake (love Will Smith! he's so hot). movie is so funny and action packed :)

update:
approx 2 hours of productive work.

read through 9 papers (some briefly read, some quickly scanned through, some turned out not to be relevant, some only read the abstract, some will come back to later on for when i work on my introduction in detail)

3 and half pages of handwritten notes on the papers.

Hey Lara,
How's it going? I saw your owl post...I'm an owl too, although yesterday I just wanted to sleep the whole day regardless of the time! Hopefully I will be more awake and productive today...hopefully!
Hope things are going ok with your work...I like your Will Smith work technique...he's so nice to look at!

lol cakegirl you are so cute haha thanks for the message

well yesterday was not very "productive" half the day i spent backing up my thesis onto a dvd. and for some reason my computer burns the stuff on the dvd, but then cant "read" the dvd. but i used my laptop to check the files were there.

then i just happened to come across an old file in one of my cds when i was checking out my dvd reader. and found a thesis from an old collegue of mine, in word document. and i have been looking for it for years!! and realised i could use his format and layout and use it as a template to do my own table of contents, figures, and tables, and use his header fancy dancy stuff.

it wasn't as easy as i thought though! so took me hours and hours to figure it out, and make my own template based on his.

hours of screaming and frustrations, finally got it to work. i have no idea how! lots of reading of the microsoft help. but i feel better now, that i have a skeleton of how to do table of contents. i don't know why. but i kept having this nightmare flashes, that it will be 1 week before i have to submit, and i wouldnt know how to do table of contents. and all those tiddy bits. and my whole thesis would be a disorganised mess. and i read how sometimes having a table of contents as you write, can help you to see what you have done and what is missing, so its advised to do it as you go along, and not leave it till the end.

so i thought if im stressing about it now, i might as well just do it now. i know it's "procrastination" but there will come a point where i will "have" to do it.

and i have also decided to have ONE reference end note library, i think it was S that said you should have one reference endnote library, otherwise things go pear shaped!

although. near the end of the nite, i did feel guilty i had not done anything. so i set my timer to "10 mins" to do anything related to my results. which i have been avoiding, and just been reading papers up until now. then i thought i will just do anything, and then 10 mins turned into 20mins, and i got an idea on how to present my data and summarise it.

how was your day Cakegirl? (and glad you agree about the Will smith thing ) during the time I was writing my mphil, i had the Matrix on loop throughout the night to keep me awake. and just for "company" lol sad i know haha

and nice to meet a fellow owl! hehe

and BB how about you? how was your day? glad you fixed those figures, sounds like it was a productive day. well done :)

my grammer has gone to pot! lol just re-read my posts. sorry!!

Evening,
Ug, all that formatting stuff is so time consuming...it is sort of procrastinating, but it is also necessary! Are you using master document in word to process your contents table etc? I haven't started using it but will do when I am at the writing up stage. I also have to start using endnote...there's a long to do list.

My day has been ok. I am trying to get a big document of scrappy notes and thoughts into a decent draft. Very slow to start with but improved and now have 1800 (hopefully) ok words.
Off to have food and get my BGT fix. Hopefully recharge my brain for a few more words before sleep. Note to self...don't open the red wine.
How was/is your friday?

I wouldn't use Master documents in Word, and there are ways of setting up your chapters so you don't have to. According to my word manual it is very difficult to use, often cocks up, and should only be attempted my IT types. Certainly not something to attempt for the first time when trying to compile a thesis! I would recommend setting up one word document, with all your formatting set up (e.g. styles), and then saving it as a template. Then use the template to write all the chapters. Also write as much as poss in "outline view", so you can actually see the formatting.

When bringing the chapters together, and if you want one endnote bibliography at the end, unformat at citations, copy and paste, and the re-format the citations and a bibliography will be created. This only works if all the citations have the same identifier, so itd best to have one endnote library, in the same folder as all your chpaters.

Sorry, shocking spelling! I'm typing on the train and I can't see my screen very clearly.!

Hey Cakegirl! nice to hear from you! :) sounds like you accomplished alot! well done you:)

well naughty me, kinda took the day off on friday, unintentionally! ooops. but i did get an email back from a collegue on a paper draft he wrote, that will help me with my chapter. and my supervisor sent me the word documents of the paper i wrote and sent me the figures, color and black and white, that i need for my chapter.

but didn't really do anything, as i went to a philosophy lecture in the evening. i cancelled my social plans and didn't watch much tv during the week, so i could have the evening off. :)

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then yesterday, didn't do much either. but did 1 hour of productive work on a results chapter, where i did the calculations and finished the table. so that's good. now i just need to spend today pulling all the results together and writing a rough draft what it all means to email my supervisor tommorow.
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no i dont do master document thingy, i dont even know what that means!

That's very good advice BB!!

I am going to have one end note library. but at the moment i am working on different word documents of my chapters and then will bring them together into one word document near the end.

How was your day yesterday BB?