Crunchtime

The irony of the last post is that taking my work and everyday life seriously and not partying hard is precisely what got me to this point in my life. And in order to sustain my pattern of upward mobility, and by upward mobility I don't necessarily mean monetary status, I'm going to have to keep it up.

So here's the background - I've got to finish work and writing on a thesis if I want to complete my Master's degree. The thesis is the only requirement I have left. My original goal for completion was May of '07, which obviously didn't happen. Now, this Summer hasn't been the most productive season for performing research work and I've spun wheels the entire time. Basically, I keep tweaking and adding to my little API to work with the Netflix Prize dataset, which one day I'll release to the public as an OSS library once the degree is finished. The work I've been doing to my API/code should, in theory, make experimenting with the dataset easier. The problem is that I've been doing all sorts of tweaking and no sort of experimenting.

Now it doesn't help that I've been working full-time jobs for nearly the entire time I've been working on the thesis (the lone exception was about 2 weeks I spent at my parents' new house helping my Pops with odds and ends). Chances are strong I will probably continue to work full-time too. But, I don't want to be in the business of making excuses. So now it's mid/late August and I've got roughly 2-3 months to wrap this thing up and get something near final written up.

So with that said, I probably won't be very accessible for a while, at least until I get near a finishing point. Instead, I'll be throwing down the coffee and getting my butt in gear to finish this thing and make a contribution to research... and obtain a Master's degree :)