At the request of Dr. Moeller, I've been in contact with the Thesis / Dissertation Consultant in Knoxville working on the formatting of my thesis. There's a 60-page PDF handbook of guidelines which all theses are supposed to meet, and the job of the Consultant is to make sure they meet these oh, so important standards. I emailed the first formatting draft of my thesis to the consultant lady last Monday, and I had not heard back as of Friday, so I emailed again. She was apologetic about taking so long when she got back to me today. I'm understanding as long as I'm not trying to meet the final deadline. Anyway, her only real problems were margins (1.5" on the left to account for binding in the future) and my placement of figures. I've written dozens of engineering papers, a senior project report that was the equivalent of a thesis (in my mind at least), and two published papers (I didn't do so much of the writing on those, but my name is on them), and I have never heard that a figure can only be at the top or bottom of the page. In fact, if the figure is over 1/2 of the page, it has to be on a separate page by itself. Huh? I've got formatting changes to make, and I know that. Changing the margins will change everything in the document, so I'm not going to worry about anything until I do that (which will be after I finish writing the current edits to the chapters), and I'll even try to put figures the way Knoxville seems to think they should be, but that's a stupid standard. You put figures as close to the reference as is feasible. That's the way it's done. It's done that way so that the reader doesn't need to flip back and forth across pages of a document to reference a figure which is explained in the text (or needs to do so less, since sometimes it isn't possible to get a figure and its accompanying text on the same page). According to Dr. Moeller, they let Sonya get by with figures in the middle of a page, so maybe she'll stay swamped, not really look at mine again and just green light the thing when I finish it. That would be useful.
The weather is amazing. It's late July, and I have my windows open. The high today was 81. That may be a touch warm, at least when it's sunny, but I'm excessively cheap and didn't want to pay for air conditioning when it really wasn't any warmer upstairs than it would have been with me paying to run the A/C. Tonight should be even cooler than I can normally get it. And I'm rackin up those pennies of savings. Won't quite add up to Lee's part of the rent, utilities, and cable, but I'm not starving. I could stand to for a few days, but that's a different issue.
At the Superfriends lunch the other day, we were talking about $25,000 being a nice down payment on a house, and I mentioned there were houses that could be bought for that price. Within a week, my dad told me about a $12,000 house he went and looked at for the bank he works for. He did say house, and not trailer, too. While I can imagine that a $12,000 house might not have gold and jewel encrusted fixtures, they do exist. Just for reference, that is less than I will have paid to live in this apartment for a little over 18 months (not counting the savings I got from Lee living here for about a year of that). That's a cheap house.
I lost about an hour somewhere tonight. Don't know where it went. If you see it, please return it to me. More tomorrow.
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