In the beginning... there was Word... but I prefer LaTex

I've officially started my writeup! Well actually I wrote the very first words a few weeks ago. My supervisor suggested I put together a Table of Contents to get my thoughts into order. I know theres a better way to do this... write up as you go! If I ever do ANOTHER degree thats definitely what I will do.

I managed to write about 2 pages tonight, and to add a few more things to my contents page. I also started adding people to my acknowledgements and adding items to my Appendices. I wrote my undergrad thesis in Word and I found it a nightmare and vowed that if I ever did it again I'd use LaTex. Ok, so I didn't but I did know before starting this degree that I would!

I really dig it, it's more of a programming language than a word processor. You need to tell it explicitly what you want it to do, which may sound rather daunting to anyone who hasn't programmed before, but it's not that difficult to learn. What do you get for the extra bit of effort? EFFORTLESS compiling of your document, no worrying about getting things to look right, or fonts changing mysteriously. If you need to insert a figure, everything below your figure doesn't change it's formatting. Whats better, if at the last minute you were to decide that you really DO need that introduction, theres no going through your document checking that all the numbering changed correctly or that the figure references are correct. LaTex does that all for you.

Anyway, thats my 2 cents worth about LaTex, perhaps I won't be as happy with it after 100 pages! Nevertheless it feels good to have made a start... anyone think I'm wasting time blogging about this? Should I rather be writing up?

The new Mission

It's not what you think. I'm not going to stop running, but for now I'm not going to have a running mission. I'm busy completing my Master of Science Degree in Mechatronics Engineering through the University of KwaZulu-Natal. My thesis has always been something over the horizon, but I would have liked to have it complete by June/July, but if I'm honest, the passed month has done me no good! Most of my efforts were concentrated on being certain of completing the race on 11 April. Then I got home and got sick, what it adds up to is almost an entire month of very little work.

I did a little mental arithmetic earlier and if I write a modest length thesis of say 150 pages and say that I have 94 days till the end of July, that means, modestly, that I need to write 1.6 pages a day if I work every day and there are no interruptions. But you can probably count on not being able to write for at least a quarter of those days, so I can comfortably say I need to be writing 2 pages a day and probably more like 3 or 4 a day.

Thats quite a Mission!! As you'll have noticed I've changed the blog a bit to recognise this change in direction. I won't be blogging content as that presents serious intellectual property issues, but I will try to describe my progress without going into detail. I guess this may change some of the readership, but I promise I'll get back to my exercise goals as soon as I've done this.