Sorry for the delay...

For those very few of you who actually read this little blog, I would like to apologize for my tardiness in getting another post out. I've been "working" on my proposal for the various postdoctoral funding agencies. And I'm not enjoying it. I guess I feel a bit of pressure when around $90,000 is riding on a 2 page single-spaced proposal on work that I haven't even started. Anyway, I have a couple of pages now and I'm just going to put in a paragraph regarding the university I'm wanting to attend for this, and then I'll send it off to my current supervisor to check over before I send it off to the professors in Ottawa to have a quick look-over.

Then I have to take a look at the applications again and start putting those together in earnest. And get in touch with the professors that might give me recommendations.

My sister and her husband are getting a mac mini (computer), much like my own, except a newer model. I'm actually jealous.

I've been listening to a lot of Mortal and Adam Again recently. A friend suggested that the music that we think is the best as we get older is the music we were listening to when we were 17. So, I was 17 in 1990-91. Well, his theory sort of holds up, but not quite. I like the music I was listening to just after this time. Although I was a huge Daniel Amos and Randy Stonehill fan in high school and that has stuck with me. There's nothing like Adam Again's Dig and Perfecta though.

the morning after

So now that things have settled down, I'm still a bit uneasy. Not because I lost anything in that .rar overwriting episode - I didn't lose anything - but just because it's over now. I'm not done though. I still have my post-doc stuff to do, and I'm quite worried about that.

I am proud of my work, though. I think that my dissertation is an important foray into the nature of celebrity and a certain kind of star image, able to elicit desire by using certain strategies. And it leads nicely to future work on the voice and how one might approach its study theoretically (rather than simply using adjectives to describe a voice).

I've backed up my work on CD now (and putting it in a fire safe), and I've put it onto my USB key. So does anyone have any suggestions for FREE online storage which accepts more that a 10mb upload at a time? My dissertation weighs in at ~20mbs in total.

I'm thinking of buying an external HD as well - we'll see if this is worth it.

post-submission thoughts

Now that the paper has been handed in, I feel a bit better. It seems the strange things that happened to some of the files (corrections that didn't stick) had to do with some "rar" files that I had lying around, as backups for the dissertation. When these files were expanded by accident, they overwrote the existing files. Luckily this happened very late in the process of printing, but unfortunately I only realized what happened now.

So a few spelling mistakes in my appendices got through to the committee. And hopefully, post-defense, I can take a look at one of the printed copies to make sure that my "masters" here are correct before submitting a final copy to the school.

No big deal, really. But I guess I shouldn't have had those rar files hanging around, and for sure, the program shouldn't have overwritten the old files. That's just stupid.

So, really, it's the program's fault.

Anyway, everything's fine now.

Did I mention I'm done?

Done

I'm submitting today. Everything is ready to go and I just have to sign some forms with my advisor, and hand in my 7 copies this afternoon.

Then I have to go to the dentist.

As for the printing process, it was smoother than I expected. Unfortunately, we had some page numbering problems (changes we made that didn't seem to stick - weird), and other corrections that didn't register. This morning, when I printed out a copy for myself, one of the photos didn't show up, so I had to fix that. When the final document is cleared post-defense, I'll have to go through it pretty completely to make sure that everything is right.

Anyway, now I wait for the defense, which should happen some time before Christmas.

Would anyone like to write a couple of post-doctoral fellowship applications for me?