Tuesday, April 24

Arcada, 20:00

This has been (and still is) a day of total busyness. I have spent large parts of the day dealing with business arising from the two theses that will be presented tomorrow. I spoke at length with Johnny about one of them, and we agreed that it was excellent. I went away and wrote the report for him to sign tomorrow. Then I talked at length with Jutta about the other one and we agreed that it was very good but had problems in the way that it was constructed. We formulated a plan, and I went away and wrote that up and wrote to the student.

Then I went and led the XML Foundations course where most people had successfully completed the assignment and some people appeared to have made no effort at all. We went through the use of downloaded fonts and struck some interesting if slightly hair-raising issues, when several students failed to get an exercise to work while seemingly doing everything correctly.

Afterwards, Jutta and I had lengthy Skype meetings about the plans for next year, and I had an even lengthier chat with Tommy about the context within which these plans will be drawn up.

Now it is the middle of the evening and I am on my way to the gym to exercise. I have done nothing for my thesis – or have I? While writing up the “maturity examination” questions I started tidying up my old folders, and suddenly realised that there is much, much more old information and images from the Marinetta project than I had realised. I started to sort it into order and had a profound insight into why my thesis is proving so damned difficult to get going.

I need to write more about less, and I may just have found the material that I need to do this.