It is finally over, I put the finishing touches on my PhD thesis yesterday and I'm leaving the country on Monday. I have a postdoc job in Taiwan at the Bioinformatics Institute. I will be keeping the site going, never fear nodalpoint will live on!
Updates from me will be sporadic over the next few weeks as I deal with moving and culture shock. I'm sure everyone will keep the site in good order while I'm away. And thank you all for contributing to nodalpoint and making the site worth all the effort.
Comments
Congrats!
Congrats and remember to drop by Singapore to view our new Biopolis!
Shopping
I am very curious about the Biopolis given its wide publicity in the media. But unfortunately I won't be stoping by this time. I decided that I would take a four day holiday in Bangkok on my way to Taiwan, so I flew Thai airways. Bangkok is even crayzier than last time I was there eight years ago (I didn't think that would be possible). I don't think it is actually possible to relax in Bangkok, but it certainly is a fun city. I think I'll try for Singapore on my way back from Australia to Taiwan, we'll see.
Congrats!
Aren't you going to post your thesis online? ;)
It is my intention
I will post my thesis online. I'm just not sure whether I will do it before or after I receive comments from my markers. I wrote the thesis in Docbook, which was a challenge in itself. However the end result is that converting the Docbook source to HTML should be trivial.
One disappointing aspect of completing a thesis is the knowledge that very few people other than your markers will probablly ever read it. Getting people to post their theses online will help solve this problem. However this creates a further problem of conversion to HTML. In my case this is realtively easy, however to my knowledge most bio related PhDs are constructed using MS Word. I know Word can export to HTML, but in my experience this function is very limited. Anyone else have experience doing this ?
limited doesn't come close
Long ago (well, 1997, but it seems long ago), I wrote my Ph.D. thesis. In Word 6 no less, on a 486 33MHz PC with 8 MB RAM and a 640 MB HDD - it was so weak that I left spaces in my figures for the scanned images and pasted them in indivdually just prior to printing...
...anyway I digress. Having run a website of some description since about 1995, I was keen to put my thesis online. HTML export from Word was pretty poor, as you might imagine. PDF from Word is possible without spending $$$ on Adobe products - you just "print to file", which is really Postscript (except Microsoft don't like you to know that, so they suffix it ".prn"), then you can use something like ps2pdfwr.
I'm sure having DocBook as a starting point is the way to go for the full HTML experience. The upshot to my story is that I never did get around to putting the thesis online and it's hardly a priority 8 years later. Maybe one day.
Well then ...
congratulations are in order :)
Have fun !