I agree with Natassia. Go with the flow, do what your body is telling you to do, and sleep as needed. It sounds as though you have a good sleep/work balance, even though the sleeping seems a lot.

I am ridiculously unusual in my sleeping. I sleep for up to 18 hours, every single day, due to the brain damage from my progressive neurological disease. When the disease is more active I sleep more, when better controlled I sleep less, sometimes as little as 12 hours a day. But I just go with the flow. I figure my body knows what it needs, and I shouldn't fight it.

Good luck for the last push!

Ok I'm another one from the same era. I grew up loving the music of the 80s. But for something slightly early for me, but had my mouth wide open in sheer bogglement, here's Kate Bush:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1pMMIe4hb4

My husband was a physics and astronomy graduate. He did a computing MSc conversion course, and after that did a computing PhD. And he's a now a Research Fellow in a computing department working (primarily programming) on space technology research. So it worked out well for him.

I think you need to think really carefully about what you aim to get out of any conversion course before you enrol. My husband was aiming for either a job as a computer programmer or a computing PhD. Either would have worked out well for him. And he already programmed in his spare time, so knew he had plenty of aptitude for the task.

If a PhD thesis has been written by someone else that should be picked up at the viva. A big part of the viva is to establish that the student wrote the thesis, and this is done through astute questioning by the examiners.

Far more common are the sort of rip-off "universities" that will provide PhDs for a fee. These carry no weight academically, and would not be regarded as good qualifications for academic job purposes.

I wouldn't worry about this unduly. Honestly good examiners should detect this.

My thesis structure was introduction, 5 thematic chapters exploring different aspects of my question, and a final conclusions/discussion chapter. I was a humanities (history) student.

In the final chapter I reminded the reader what I'd done, and then pulled together the big questions. I always thought in terms of "so what" which my supervisors hammered into me. So I would think of the overarching questions, and see how each chapter contributed to them. So my final chapter was really about pulling together the different threads. I also addressed a bigger question which I hadn't thought of earlier, but really came naturally out of my research, and this was where I did it. And I had a brief reflection on future research that could follow on.

I read the forum on my iPod touch as well and the bar is a particularly big problem there. It appears part way down the window and will not move as the screen is scrolled. So it stays still and obliterates some lines of the forum text, which I then can't read.

I really hate this bar. You're probably getting that :)

Yes Bilbo Baggins was a male hobbit. I'm not. I like the name though. I used to have a much-loved pet cat called Bilbo.

And please don't go to pieces over this. Try to keep it in proportion. You need to be in as good a prepared state as possible for the viva. And that means staying calm. It's even possible your examiners haven't spotted it :p Trust me, they don't always read theses as closely as you might think.

I've been through a successful viva myself by the way, so I'm talking from some experience.

I know it's not a typo. You were clear about that. But it honestly isn't as bad a thing as you think. Errors spotted in theses always seem vastly worse at the stage you are at. Your examiners won't be majorly fussed. And you will not fail because of it. So take deep breaths and think calm thoughts. Be ready to acknowledge it in the discussion on the day, but don't blow it out of proportion.

And I'm a Mrs Baggins :) Well Dr Baggins. But Mrs will do.

Relax. It doesn't sound that big an error. They always seem bigger than they really are at this stage. At the worst you will have to correct it post-viva in your corrections. You should be prepared to acknowledge the error in your viva, but simply say how you will easily correct it, along with any other typos that you and your examiners have spotted.

But don't worry. You won't fail because of this one thing.

It is a grey block that stays there on my Mac, but it's taking up a lot of room. My desktop has a 800x600 screen for disability reasons, and this is using up too much of it.

It also shows up in Safari and Google Chrome on my Mac.