The nocturnal workers' thread

W

Right, enough for tonight - 3 hours of lectures to do tomorrow.

W

Must finish my lecture for the MSc students tonight, so another late one. I think it's difficult for MSc students, knowing what level to pitch it at. I don't want to overwhelm them, but at the same time I don't want to cover stuff that they would be expected to already know about. Today for instance, I talked at length about the respiratory system to a group of BSc students and they just glazed over. Crumbs.

B

Good luck Wally and anyone else on the late night train tonight. I'm rather missing it myself! Perversely I admit, but I got much of my most productive PhD work done in the middle of the night.

K

Hope you're getting there Wally?

I'm on board. Choo chooo (For those who watch Peep Show I always imagine saying this in the way Mark does the fog horn noise when talking about the El Dude brothers.)

Teaching Northern Lights tomorrow and haven't finished reading it yet. I hate it. Talking bloody polar bears and the lot. Yes I know, children's literature, v.important, pedagogy, zzz.... I think I'm just going to tell them I hate it. Might rouse somebody to reply.

W

Well, I've got about 3/4 of it done, and that'll have to do as I'm knackered. I've worked non-stop all weekend and I'm tired. I've got one more day to redraft my questionnaire for my PhD and half a day to finish my lecture, so I should be okay. The El Dude brothers brings back some happy Peep Show memories: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5xl-Ur-kPk I hope there's a new series in the pipe line.

K

Sleep well Wal.

That clip sums up the spirit of the Nocturnal Worker's thread for me. I'm sure there'll be another series, Mark as a new dad is too much of a good opportunity to miss.

C


Up trying to finish corrections to an essay due with the editor tmrw morning. eeeek. The publisher is demanding "plain English", which is obviously a problem when it is supposed to be an academic text in the first place! sigh!

W

At it again tonight. This stupid, stupid research questionnaire of mine.

N

So am I but hopefully not for much longer. Finishing a presentation on the ethical future of anthropology, interesting as before last weekend I had never studied anthropology properly...thankfully this isn't assessed. I've had a tough week so am trying to take the pressure off myself a bit. Good luck tonight Wally (up)

K

On board tonight...Need to finish marking mock exam scripts (painful) and polish up my upgrade documents (including changing the formatting of every reference in my bibliography- approx 350 books- because Endnote won't do it) by the morning. My own fault as I've put off working all weekend.

T

Anyone about this fine nocturnal morning?

After a day of procrastinating I've finally tackled the revisions made by my supervisor. In fairness to him (and despite all my whinging upon receiving them) most of his comments were genuine improvements. Now I just have to write the rest of the thesis and get it all reviewed by all supervisors - urgh.

B

Hi Teek, I'm about, though I really should be sleeping after yesterday, but am having a bit of trouble unwinding and relaxing! Just been reading various bits of advice about corrections. I can imagine that when I get the report from my examiners I'll be up burning the night oil a little bit!

Good luck with your revisions. It's good that you're happy that the suggested changes will be an improvement, even if it will be a bind to go through. It's much worse if you vehemently disagree with the changes that a supervisor suggests!

B

Anyone else working tonight? I've made a start on my corrections. Have already done the few typos. Now going through the captions, making sure they are all the right type, full enough, and preparing to add source references below tables etc. And then much repaginating. And renumbering tables of contents and stuff.

But it's a start :) Because I use an antiquated version of Word I'm not going to send in the corrections using track changes, but will prepare a separate PDF of just the changed pages, and highlighting the changes probably in red or something. Somehow I think that might be a lot of work in itself!

Ah well. Cracking on.

C

Hi Bilbo,
I'm working tonight - chipping away at the last jobs before I submint, in hopefully the very near future.

Huge congratulations at passing your viva - great news to hear it went well and all your hard work and determination paid off. It sounds like you haven't got too much to do. For your not-tracked changes can you just do a list with the page number and maybe paragraph or line number and state what you did - perhaps in a table? Keeping it as simple as possible so you can send it back with the least amount of extra work!

Well done! (tree)

CG x

B

Good luck with the last-push Cakegirl! And thanks for the kind congrats.

Good idea re a list of changes. I'm thinking of doing that, but also want to include a separate file of just the changed pages, so my convenor can quickly scan through that and see the changes. I don't think it's going to be that much work.

I've just about gone through all the captions, checking all are the correct type and full enough.

So I think that will just about do for me for tonight. Can only work for an hour or so at a time, and this has been a productive last hour.

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