Remember that thesis thing?
I announced way back in May that I passed my master’s thesis defense, and I promised to write more about it, but you’ve seen very little about it here. Why? Let me explain.
First, once the thesis was over, all I wanted to do was breathe a sigh of relief and forget about the thesis for a while. I was in no big rush to blog about the content of my thesis.
After my thesis was behind me, I became much more caught up in work. I found it hard to find good blocks of time to devote to putting my thesis findings on my website. The procrastination that served me so well in the early days of my thesis work had returned to help me out with the thesis website aftermath.
I had long planned to do it all over the October holiday, but laziness and a few days of flu destroyed that plan. It’s much easier to do quick one-off blog posts than to dig back into my research, so it has remained untouched.
Realizing that it will never happen if I don’t put forth a more determined effort, I have decided to put time aside to work on it instead of blogging. So I won’t be blogging at all until I finally get my thesis experiment results up on my website. I expect to finish it this coming weekend (November 9ish).
What you can expect:
– A new item in my Language section devoted to my thesis
– An overview of the experimental procedure
– An overview of the results
– A blog post or two discussing various aspects of the process
I’m not sure whether I’ll put the actual full thesis up for download. I’m definitely not translating the whole thing, but I might put it up in its original Chinese. The only problem is that a data error was identified after I completed my thesis, so if I do put it up, I’ll want to put up a corrected version. That will take more time. We’ll see.
Nov. 10 Update: Taking longer than I expected. (Forgot I don’t have MS Office 2007 on my computer right now, which I need…)
Nov. 16 Update: I’m running into some MS Office-related problems, but more importantly, I have to prepare for a business trip, so this project is going to have to be put on hold again.
I am curious: if you are that fluent in Chinese why do you primaryly blog in English? If you blogged in Chinese maybe you would have even bigger readership.
維特利, have you ever seen the grief that non-Chinese bloggers get from the Chinese online community for expressing anything that even resembles an opinion (i.e., Brendan)? No fun at all.
yay – please keep blogging in english . after your thesis
hope you have a junk food review 3 .. hehehe
維特利, you’re not a VIP. Only VIPs get access to the all-exclusive Chinese Sinosplice blog 😉
維特利,
Ha ha, you sound like you doubt I ever earned my master’s degree in Chinese. I sure hope that wasn’t all in my head…
Anyway, as John B hints at, one has to enjoy blogging. I tried blogging in Chinese for a while, and even when I kept it super simple (less pressure on me), I still didn’t find it very rewarding. I’m still thinking, but I have yet to come up with a good reason to continue blogging in Chinese (and at a higher level).
John,
I guess you have to smuggle a lesson on some fundamental linguistic concepts and terms into the CPod schedule so we are all equipped to read it…Don’t worry about the error in the data. A footnote will do.
Congratulations on finishing your thesis. Well done! I really hope you do manage to put it up for download, as I am sure a lot of us out here would love the chance to read it.
ha, i happened to find your blog by baiduing “John”. it’s either your blog or mine that always stays top 2. what’s the odds! lol
@JohnB — The Tianya flaming thing was a pain in the ass, but it’s not why I’ve stopped blogging; mostly I’ve just been lazy and/or busy with paying work, and have just generally not got any kind of drive to bother even writing stuff down anymore, much less bother typing it up.
@John — Still looking forward to reading the thesis.