Thesis Panic

Over coffee yesterday morning, I had a panic attack over the possibility of a hard disk crash taking out all my thesis research: the text itself, the figures, the datafiles, the code that generated them. Hyperventilate, hyperventilate, deep breath, deep breath, that's highly unlikely to happen, they have automated backups, don't worry about it. But, better safe than sorry, I backed up everything to another server.

Now I'm back to working in some final revisions and conforming to the university's ridiculous formatting requirements. All the requirements are driven by the need for the thesis to be legible after being microfilmed and reprinted. Microfilm?! No color figures?! This is the digital age! If anyone in the universe ever looks at my thesis it will be because I post it at arxiv.org, a nice, searchable, online service where you can print out a full color version for free and download the data in digital format. I will admit it's pretty cool that a bound hardcopy of my thesis will appear in the library and have its own catalog entry. But I have to admit the odds of anyone ever checking it out and taking it home for some bedtime reading are slim to none. Still, it seems like they could at least update their requirements to allow color figures.

Anyway, five (well, really four) days to go until I turn it in.