The dissertation is now completed and submitted after some painful deadline stress. I’ll write later about the overall lessons learnt, right now it just feels good to get it completed and out the way.

I’m not sure what happened over the winter and the start of this year (2011). It felt like I was getting further and further behind on the project plan. So after Christmas had a good sit and think, changed my working practices and picked up the pace. While always making progress it just seemed to be a document that wouldn’t just finish - always ‘nearly done’. Although I’ve got there in the end, and hopefully enough to pass, it’s certainly not as polished as I’d like. The formal submission is a PDF but as a courtesy sent my supervisor a printed and bound copy. And very nice it looks too, I’ll do a copy for myself so it can gather dust in the attic along with my undergraduate projects. Right now I’m clearing up the study of the strewn papers, books and draft printouts, archiving the work to CD, just making it all tidy and done. The results are due the end of June and with nothing more I can do I should be switched off…. But the odd effect of the research is opening more intriguing questions. Perhaps I’ll become an amateur researcher…