Christmas bounty

Summer with Kira and Rory's christmas present. It did not last long.

I just saw a lot of people online bitching that they didn't get iPads and cars for Christmas. And I felt bad that mum got me a Kindle and Jamie's 30-minute meals. I have already made a chicken pie and it is awesome (though it took me longer than 30 minutes because I hate cleaning the food processor and so chose not to use it). I do not eat salad but I actually want to try some of the salad recipes. Crazy.
Kindle is awesome too, though I have only purchased one book - Bad Science. I am trying to be good and save money, given that I'm only working casual and have this stupid thesis to edit. I did download some free books but kept finding ones that aren't available in Australia.

Boo!

My sister got me the best beanie in the world. Although it is summer, the weather right now is cool enough to justify wearing my boo beanie constantly. She also got me the graphic novel Will Supervillians be on the Final? by Naomi Novik. I love her Temeraire series and it's so bizarre reading something so different. I don't think it is the best graphic novel out there but I still liked it. And now I have to wait for both the next Temeraire and the next graphic novel.

Now I am house-sitting for the rest of the week. I did plan to work on thesis but I just want to read, sketch, and pat the dogs. And write materialistic blog posts. I should at least look at my thesis today...

Grumpy Helyn is grumpy

My life currently consists of thesis writing and feeling shitty during the day, followed by playing Wii and getting sore thumbs in the evenings. Urg.

I have had to pretty much reanalyse everything in my thesis. All so I can put add an extra decimal point to my P values. This requires increasing my permutations from 999 to 9999. I didn't hink this would be an issue but some of my runs are taking over three hours on my lappy. My poor old desktop has a heartattack. I have tried to do writing and updating tables on the desktop but I get so hot and cranky upstairs that I end up downstairs playing Zelda while waiting for my lappy to finish a run.
And I have to do new analyses too because one of my examiners hates my method. And rightly so - there are many criticisms to my statistical method and it is rather outdated. The problem is that the examiner hasn't specified what he wants. He just mentions "Bayesian approaches", which is no help because a lot of statistical methods use Bayesian analyses. I think he means using Bayesian coalescent-based statistics but I can't be too sure. The problem is the computational power required for such analyses. I did try a coalescent approach before but the power was cut two months into the run (I have no idea how many more months it would take - it probably wouldn't have been done in time). I am currently trying again on a cluster but will it be finished in a month? I can only hope...

I honestly feel more productive playing Zelda while running analyses than speding a morning reading papers only to write a single sentence. Really not looking forward to rewriting an entire chapter.
While I was somewhat lukewarm to Skyward Sword initially, the game has started to grow on me. I still don't like the sword and I still hate flying (I can't figure out why my stupid bird likes to do 180 turns while I try to fly up). I'm only past the third dungeon but so far I really like the items. Unlike the sword, I love how the items utilise the Wiimote. Bomb flowers were initially annoying - I had trouble rolling and kept blowing myself up. But that's not an issue once you get the bomb bag so it's all good. This is what I have been waiting for with the Wii. It's just a pity about the sword...
I love the design of Impa. She's so cool.

Results in

Two Thursdays ago I received my PhD examination results. There are a range of levels from you are perfect, graduate now down to you are terrible beyond redemption. Do not pass Go, do not collect PhD.
I got the best level that a non-superhuman can get - pass subject to edits. This should be a happy thing. But after reading the feedback of my two examiners I ended up a teary mess, feeling like a total failure and seriously questioning my desire to become a scientist. Things like "I found the end result rather disapppointing" does do that to a person.
It seems like everytime I build up my self-confidence, someone comes along and rips it to shreds. I know that I'm not meant to take it personally but it's so damn hard not to. I spent months putting all I had on my thesis and it turns out that wasn't good enough. Why would anyone willingly put themselves through this? My respect for novelists has deepened considerably.

Some of the comments are so mean while others are too vague for me to understand. Not helpful at all.
One of the examiner's general comments gives me the impression that my writing skills suck (which is true, I'll admit that) but then only provided specific feedback on my writing for the first chapter and ignores the other chapters. That is so damn frustrating. Even if I had the ability to see where I needed to put in topic sentences or do whatever, I still wouldn't be able to because I'm only permitted to make changes based directly on the examiner feedback, not just guess what the examiner wanted.

Despite my ranting to anyone who'll listen to me, I'm doing ok. I've managed to make all the changes for one chapter in a week. There are two more chapters that I think will only take about a week each. But then there are two chapters that apparantly need to be completely rewritten (one of which I'm meant to be turning into a paper to publish. Bye bye confidence). And I have to do more analyses (although the guy doesn't like my analytical method, he doesn't quite tell what he wants me to do) which might take a few months to run.

Take a wild guess what I'll be doing over Christmas?