Stephen King does his writing while listening to AC-DC or Guns'n'Roses.

I work without music but it doesn't make any difference if someone else in the office is playing it. In the lab we always had music and loud! Until that whinging postdoc started. Anyway here's an awesome tune http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kzj6wdJuyQ (up)

Nope.. viva in 4 weeks and extremely stressed about it.

Good for you though, I dimly remember having good days -- mostly when supervisor was away at a conference. Wrong thread, I know.

Ligaments make phd students feel queasy; ligatures make them go "ooh, ahh!"

See.. http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

LaTeX gets another vote from me.

Also discovered it mid-thesis after Word caused enormous stress with figure placement, etc.

Word can really cause problems with large documents + figures, tables, bibliography, footnotes, etc. LaTeX is much better for that and produces far more professional results. My supervisor remarked that my thesis was "very high quality" and I suspect he was mostly talking about the typesetting, true 'small caps', and fancy ligatures :P

John's hands searched about the couch for the remote; finding it wedged between the cushions, he switched off the tv, stood up and started pacing about the room. "A strange thing indeed," John thought, as he walked back and fro, contemplating the peculiar passage of time. Suddenly, something in the window caught his eye.
"Jemima!" shouted John, "come quickly!"

Looking at other people's strong theses sure is misery-inducing.. but there are also weaker theses which make me feel better about mine ;)

It's crossed my mind that printing out a few of said weak theses and taking them into the viva could assist with a defense; one could complain "hold on, how can i fail while these *plonk them on desk* passed!"

Hi Sneaks, the usual approach with wordpress is to install it to a webserver (they have a 5-minute guide for this) then do all the editing through the web-browser. Using templates may seem constrictive but it's how all modern websites work -- i.e. content and appearance are separate, which is a v. good thing!

Also, nobody is going to find your site unless you give them its URL as google won't usually index a page until it's submitted here http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/ .

Dreamweaver is a serious piece of advanced software and really not worth buying if you "can't do HTML"!

You could try downloading a ready-made website from http://www.oswd.org and changing it to suit your needs using a free HTML editor like coffeecup (or maybe Nvu? i haven't tried that one).

I'd recommend you go the Wordpress route and find a nice wordpress theme - there are so many I'm sure you'll find one to your tastes. It won't necessarily look like a blog and will allow your dad to edit the page later on without knowing any code. Also has built-in SEO meaning people will be more likely to find the website when searching google, etc.

Just don't spend money as there's too much awesome free/open-source stuff out there (i use Drupal btw - but that takes time to learn)

walminski sure is perceptive! I was about to say the same thing (but with less wit). I suspect ajyoakum is not interested in opinions but rather reassuring him/herself that an "on-line PhD" is worth the paper it's written on, which it isn't. Of course in a corporate environment nobody will know better, but a PhD is an academic degree, so we'll gauge it by our academic standards and not by your corporate ones.

Ajyoakum, I suspect if you dropped your job and tried to get a real PhD degree you'd quickly drop your bigshot breadwinner attitude. Look around this forum and you'll find 90% of posts are from people verging on mental collapse from the challenges of their PhD -- that is called personal development, not sitting on your arse clicking around in a web browser getting a phony degree.

The internet is relatively new so there's scope for on-line education to gain more respect in the future. Right now, an "on-line PhD program" is not respected at all-- in fact it's just going to invite ridicule for the "degree holder". If someone put down on their CV that they have a PhD from a virtual university then the most likely response will be "how much did you pay for it?!"

Hi algaequeen, I'm currently going through this myself (my gf is a grad student in the US, and I've been offered a postdoc in a lab across the road). If you find a postdoc they normally issue a J-1 or a H1B. I'm not sure about the fiancee/spouse route but there is a helpful forum here which has some pretty informed users http://britishexpats.com/ . (up)

Strunk & White 'Elements of Style' is easy going but very good. It has tips like 'Rule #17 - Omit needless words'; once submitted to memory these really help improve writing.

Most authors advise aspiring writers to read a lot and write a lot if they want to get good. Imitating authors like Edward Gibbon, Thomas Carlyle, and Ralph Emerson is a good starting point -- these guys really knew how to use the English language!

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My one tip would be to stay on your supervisor's good side. When I received criticism I had a tendency to defend myself instead of just graciously accepting it; it wasn't very good for our relationship.

Also don't wait for your fortnightly/monthly meeting to update your supervisor on what you've been up to. The time I got on best with my supervisor was when I would just knock on his door with a new graph in hand. I guess every supervisor is different but sharing your excitement over the little results, and showing that you value your supervisors ideas without him/her arranging formal meetings really worked for me.

Just be like a dog and wag your tail when you see your supervisor. Seriously. :p

This forum is the property of the company (Science Registry Ltd). Writing on this forum is like writing on the walls of someone's house; if the owner wants to wipe something off the wall they can!

With your 2 months left it will be helpful to plan your remaining time with the aim of generating the minimum results for the thesis. In my field (bio) that's usually 3 results chapters, so if there are 3 sub-stories within your research then aim to round them off.