JeffJournal

Stumbled across this on a random web page today:

As for thesis writing advice, the main item is: do not ask around for thesis writing advice. Just write the fucker.
—JEL, 2003

I don’t know who JEL is, but that is certainly sage advice.

This is from a theme of several years ago, but it’s such a great picture that it’s worth showing…

Engineering: Lust for Glory

In other news, Kevin B. is engaged! Welcome to the club, Kevin. Time to give up the velvet poster of dogs playing poker…

It is done. I submitted it. 4:40pm. I can sleep again!

Ok, well, it’s not done done. I still have a little more work on it to go. A few more results to put in, a little more polish on one part of the conclusion, and a million little details that no one will notice except me. Hopefully we’ll be good to go. Yummy!

It’s all tagged in subversion (hah!).

Oh yeah, I’m talking about my dissertation. ☺

Kevin’s pretty close on his dissertation, too. Props to us both!

This afternoon, I invoked the “make” command 75 times consecutively while working on my dissertation.

A few more dissertation-related quickies:

• Don P. is the greatest ever for having invented the ndthesis Latex class file. I would have been doomed — DOOMED — without it.

• Latex’s \includeonly{} is your friend. Your really, really good friend.

• This is the longest friggen’ document that I have ever written by myself. It’s a logistical nightmare! Try writing a highly technical, highly complex 350+ page document and see how hard it is to keep everything consistent. Woof! I can’t even imagine writing this without decent editing tools. Using Word, for example, would have totally — TOTALLY — sucked.

• Subversion has been an enormous help — I converted my dissertation repository from CVS to SVN a few months ago. With all the results that I had to run, and with the number of files that I had to move/rename/delete, and with all the binary files that I am keeping in the repository, CVS would have sucked. Big time. Subversion rocks.

Well, it finally happened, and I have a [pixelated] video clip, some pictures, and [another] diploma to prove it.

I’ve graduated from Notre Dame for the 4th time and have become Notre Dame’s 15th quadruple Domer. Tracy and I went up to ND for the graduation weekend and met my parents there. I ended up having lunch with Maddog and Brandon M. right before the ceremony (Tracy and the AP’s went to the President’s Luncheon, which I couldn’t attend because I had to line up before that lunch was over). The movie clip is a bit rough, but you can see me going across the stage (and Ed right behind me!). There’s also a bunch of pictures from campus in my doctoral garb.

So it’s finally official — I’m now Dr. Squyres.

I think my friends are allowed to call me that once, and that’ll be enough. ;-)

(the title of this entry is something that a Domer friend of mine told me, long long ago)

In talking to one of my friends the other day about the current coaching “situation” (ahem) at Notre Dame, she asked me the following question:

Do you have the “out” clause for Notre Dame in your contract?  It’s in mine and I’m padding the resume with lies while I’m waiting for them to call me…

An excellent point! While my friend is currently researching medical solutions for AIDS and other nasty diseases, I think she’d make an excellent first female coach of the ND men’s football team.

Notre Dame men’s football is undefeated on Halloween.