finally finished?

After submitting last Thursday the revised thesis of inevitable minor modifications, this weekend was the first in the last three years where I had nothing specific to do! A most bizarre feeling. No complaints though.

A journal article of some of my thesis work has now been published, so the next milestone will be the thesis submitted to the university and British Library repositories; consider this post the penultimate, possibly!

congratulations

Eight days of happiness; last Friday I was pleased to hear those immortal words: "congratulations, we are pleased to award you a PhD"; whilst at work, yesterday secured a first contract.

Now to begin with the minor modifications to the thesis...

Ten days!

Not quite never, I had further tests to do but eventually finished in March or so. Managed to attend a grand total of ...one conferences. No research article is likely to be published before I finish, but at least I tried. I also tried to make an application to continue my research by noone is interested to support me. In retrospect, perhaps my research is too multi-disciplinary; biomass people are not interested in the waste aspect of my work whilst the waste people are not particularly interested in the chemistry of emissions control nor the more fundamental science. As for employment, who knows? Perhaps good news at the end of this week.

One of the earlier posts was about the frustration of being unable to use the university e-mail system from my e-mail client (claws-mail). Recently (!) was told that to use this system, the mail transmission setting needs to be configured to that of the internet service provider!!! I was astounded.

Anyway, the last 10 days are all about thinking of the practicalities of the thesis: revision of content, edit, revise, etc. Today I really think could be the final edit made earlier this morning! So much advice has been distributed about the difficulty to write, but for me I found this aspect the most enjoyable part. Maybe latex was the reason?

never again?

As I saw the last particle of fuel pass through the Archimedes' Screw and drop into the combustion chamber, I couldn't help but smile as I thought about the possibility that this could be my final use of this equipment. Looking back I considered the experience to be frustrating (at the delays for one reason or another) and tedious (not very stimulating having to maintain operation for 2-4 hours for each test).

My next hope is that my chemical analysis for organic and metal traces proves to be a success. On to the next phase...By the way I am not responsible for the reference to Bob Marley, although I have to say the song selection was appropriate. ;)

an imminent convincing argument

For the last 10 weeks, work towards the annual review has been in progress. The task has been to create a 5000 word report for submission to supervisors and other review meeting attendees. For this project I made the early decision to use latex to produce documentation. Most of the time, the results have been satisfactory, but occasionally there have been frustrating moments, the latest of which was with bibtex. Can't get the apacite style to work so having to revert to apalike instead. It will have to do for now as the review is due to occur my the end of the month at the latest.

This is a list of the tools I use and how I use them:
Jedit: text-editor
Gimp: image editor
Imagemagick: image viewer, used to view output from gnuplot
Gnuplot: data visualisation (i.e. creating graphs from data sets)
R: data visualisation, specifically of linear regression analysis but capable of a WHOLE lot more

Perhaps in my next post I'll show some example latex files. For now, the draft document has been sent to those supervisors for review, in the meantime I'm going to start work on creating the presentation which is also required as part of the review. Unlike last year, this time I am going to change from openoffice to latex beamer class to produce the presentation in a presentation mode pdf document.

Following the herd, I've also decided to open my profile to the public...

Steady progress

A mini milestone reached this week; successfully completed all fuel mixture tests for one biomass fuel. Today's test was the last for bioethanol, mixed with rdf (70 % by weight of the latter). Did not manage to achieve the ideal correlation between combustion temperature variation (dependent variable) and waste content in the fuel mixture. However, happy to have got a data set. With luck five more tests to go!

the joy of latex

There is a common saying that a good scientific paper/presentation/poster, no matter how well produced, cannot hide poor data. For the last few weeks I had decided that I needed to get some conferences and publications submitted; every PhD thesis features 5-10 at a minimum and I am nearing the end of the second year with a grand total of ... nil. Whilst I had frustrating fun writing a poster abstract, executive summary and a0 poster, the un-deniable fact was that I had not generated sufficient data to produce something of any value.

Looking back, I had been to far too relaxed about the failure to get the combustion apparatus in operation during the first year. There were problems with replacement parts, delays with delivery of new equipment, lack of knowledge of existing equipment (!) etc. But, to quote a politician: "we are where we are"!

Recently I was informed that the papers and presentations I had submitted to review were poor; simply put not enough data. The moral of the story, start work as soon as possible.

August has now arrived. Whilst technical staff are away on holiday (therefore preventing any analytical tests being completed) there is a chance for me to complete all combustor tests. My dream is to complete all by September, so I will never have to see the combustor room again!