Day 15: Last Push Panic

Current Paper - 23,700 words/67 references

This is the last week!

My friend Mike Oltmans told me on Saturday that I didn't appear depressed and stressed enough to be working on a PhD.  So I just want to assure everyone that right now I'm feeling that trapped, panicky feeling in my mind and the pit of my stomach.  I only have a week left to pull together a lot of the parts of the thesis that are still in fragments or grossly underdeveloped.  Then there is this little voice in the back of my mind that says "Wait, this isn't at all what I was going to do, this is completely not going to work".

Right now the core chapter that I've been working on is starting to look like a pretty good and comprehensive survey of the field with regards to Web page models and features, better than any I've read (in scope at least).  It still is lacking my own contributions in those sections though besides some side comments about first-hand usefulness, which is not good.

Additionally, my papers on genre classification need to be rewritten to make more sense in the context of the rest of the paper.  Right now they are sort of jammed in there without too much linear flow.

To get more data I need to program, which as I've said before is a dangerous path.  I already spent this morning coding when I should have been writing.  It happened to be a pretty fruitful session, but I still can't afford it.  I need to get this thing into readable state and chances are I won't have data by the end of this week anyway so I need to continue to enforce the lower priority of that.  I plan on abandoning some of my pace and luxuries I use to keep myself going and just sprinting for the end.  I should be able to handle that for a week.  Wish me luck!