Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

My thesis student didn’t show up today, even though he said he’d give me his thesis paper draft this morning. Even if he shows up on Monday to submit his paper for proofreading, he cannot expect to be able to defend during the week. So that means the earliest he can defend is first week of June. It will actually be all for the better because he’ll have a lot of time to polish everything.

We also prepared the slide presentation for the High Performance Computing Lab today. Luckily, we already had content, so it was just about converting them to slides. The proposal was actually written by another of my peers who is now on leave to finish his doctorate degree. It was also written as a proposal to be submitted to the Molecular Biology group, which includes professionals not only from our department but also the other disciplines: Chemistry, Mathematics and, of course, Biology.

I told my co-teacher, who was given the task by the proposed Lab head, that I could just translate all the content into the slides, and he be the one to handle the appearance, the pictures and the slide transitions. He agreed. He also said that another co-teacher of ours, the most junior in our group, actually, who couldn’t make it at the time, would be the one to present it at the faculty assembly.

I had to skip a lot of the overview and the history when I started putting all of the information on the slides. I took the longest time copying and centering the parallel computers’ schematic from the document file into a picture file, from portrait to landscape. The legend for the different components of the diagram had to be reformatted from being below the picture and horizontal, to being on the right of the picture and vertical.

We were working on different computers, but he had uploaded the original document and his master slide from his computer to mine, and when I saved every once in a while, he just copied from my file to a new file he saved on his hard disk, with all the slide transitions put in.

When I was only a little more than halfway through when we took a break at 5pm, he said that if we couldn’t finish it today, we could continue on Monday, even to the (usual) overnight on Tuesday. After all, the presentation isn’t until Wednesday.

I was able to breeze through the second figure after our snack though, and was told the tables for the cost of materials (which was incomplete anyway) and the conclusion (which pertained to information for the Molecular Biology group and not the faculty of the entire college), need not be included.

I'm done, and leaving, as soon as I send this.