The Man with No Time

Just a quick post today. I've finally managed to get the last science chapter from my PhD thesis published in an astronomy journal. It's a taken a while - I only worked on it on and off for several months, and it actually needed a fair amount of work done to it. Then the referee had several, really rather useful suggestions for improvements, which held it up a bit more. But as of today it's available online, either from the journal itself or as a preprint on the arXiv. If, for some reason, you're interested, here are the links: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society version arXiv preprint version Happy reading!

Shock, horror - I've actually managed to finish painting some models! I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of free time the last couple of weekends, and have used it putting paintbrush to metal. I've had a fair number of figures for my Cryx army partially complete for some time now, and with some tournaments coming up that I'm attending/planning to go to I thought I should get some of them actually finished. What a novel concept. Look ma, zombie pirates! (Credit: David Brown) First up on the block were most of my unit of Revenant Crew. I say most because there are two still to do, including a second copy of the most awesome model in the unit (the diving helmet guy), but they need stripped before I tackle them. Even so, eight models down isn't too shabby; it's been a long time since I got any kind of unit done, so I'm counting this as a victory. Sadly I don't have any plans to use them in a list at the moment, although I'm mulling over...

In this whole mess that is me moving to a new job, moving house, putting stuff into storage, and trying to finish up my PhD all at the same time, there is a ray of hope. That's right, my thesis is complete! Celebration time! It's finished! I actually finished it last Monday, but I left the complete version with my supervisor for him to take a look at before Friday. Needless to say he'd forgotten to do so, so we spent half an hour going over a couple of sections on Friday afternoon, then I printed it out. Which took 3 hours! Yes, I was printing three copies, but I'd forgotten just how badly my high-resolution png images affected the printer. Every time it got to a page with one of more of my plots the printer sat there thinking for a minute or two, and there are a lot of plots in my thesis! Sadly this meant that I couldn't get it handed in before I left, so I tasked a couple of my friends with securing my supervisor's signature, getting it bound, ...