There was trouble, because we didn’t make it double

If you want horrible and possibly dated Pokémon puns, I don’t have any. What I do have is a set of skills, skills that make me a nightmare for … well myself frankly and even more horrible possibly dated other puns that have been… taken? The time to graduation is coming, three weeks left, less than three weeks frankly, three weeks last Friday, so like 2.5 weeks-ish. Well have I got a story to tell! I wish it were good news, and in some ways it is, but in other ways, not so much. Don’t worry I’ll break it down a bit so we can get the weekly window view of what’s been happening behind the scenes during my (mostly) radio silent era.

I do wish I had more time to write. But on that note let’s start with the dissertation update! Assuming 100 pages, we’re 90% finished. I don’t know that I’ll get to 100 pages, but even if I don’t well that just means I’m even closer to being finished than I think I am. Also, I have had two format checks. Checks I needed to pass if I want to graduate and as of today I’ve completed both! WOO!! My defense date is still staring me in the face and I promise to send out the request for anyone who wants to attend (warning, early morning!) soon. I already got some requests so I promise to make sure everyone who wants to attend virtually, will be able to do so.

Now, there was still a laundry list of things to get done before my defense and unfortunately I’ve got some horrible news on that front. But first, the good news! We had a test that I still needed to do and as of last Friday we completed it. It went well… ish, but I had assumed that I was finished and that I checked the last box on the things I needed to get done. Heck I thought it was a totally optional box anyway, but apparently school-PI had other thoughts.

Let’s set the stage. Code that I had just freshly wrote was being tested and it worked, for the most part up to a certain part. That particular part, well that was the inspiration for the title. I hit an error and I couldn’t figure out why, so we had to end the experiment. But hey, checked my little experiment box and I could say we tried at least. After some thought I even figured out what the problem was. See in programming you have single precision and double precision variables (there are others, but for simplicity let’s leave it at that). I was working in single precision, not double. That caused all sorts of problems (or rather the problem that I couldn’t get past) and I didn’t work out that was the problem until after the fact.

So after an email exchange with school-PI, I got an enigmatic message saying that I should try to get our participant back in quickly. Okay…

The short version is, I asked for clarification if this needs to work before I can defend and school-PI gave the affirmative. So the two weeks I was hoping to use to focus on putting the nice touches on the dissertation and work on my presentation slides (I would like to make a whole new slide deck for the defense instead of leaning on the previous set of slides), I now am rushing to fix the situation.

The catch… I need a very specific type of participant for this. I can’t just use any ol’ person I need a person with an SCI that meets our inclusion criteria and the person who performed the previous experiments has not been super responsive so I don’t know if they are going to do it (or if they even want to come back). How soon does this need to happen, oh you know sometime this week. MAYBE, maybe early next week at the ABSOLUTE latest, or my defense is going to have to be rescheduled. Or as school-PI put it, it’s not a big deal to put it off for another month, I’ll still have my doctorate after I defend and what’s another month after five years?

Turns out another month is a lot.

For me anyway. I have plans and things that rely on graduation, so now I’m stuck struggling to get all the boxes checked, find someone to do the experiment, and finish everything up. No big deal, or anything, but I really need to finish this so my stress level has been ratcheted up to a whole new level I didn’t even know existed. With any luck I’ll make it, but right now I can’t even think that far ahead because I have a few short days to figure it out before my fate is sealed. Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but if I miss this, then my defense is postponed until who even knows when and I need to make different plans.

In short, I’m alive… just barely. Still working through everything, and while not totally hopeless a little worried that my finish line is slowly being nudged a little further back. Forgive me if you’ve reached out and I haven’t responded, I will as soon as I can. I figured this would be an easier way to update you all though and honestly, I hope you’re all doing well (or maybe just better than me, haha). Keep your fingers crossed for me though, the next update will be the one that decides everything. No pressure or anything.

I’m so tired, well three more weeks… maybe.