Not doing NaNoWriMo

[nwhiker]

I'm sad not to be doing NaNoWriMo this year. I love it, though I don't have an idea for a novel. I toyed with the idea of banging out my thesis outline... and then came up with a better, more productive idea.

See, I have data to work on. Namely about 500 microscope photos of 180 bits of leaf that need to be transformed, via counts of the various cell types, into quantifiable data. It's boring as fuck, and what's worse, at the awful point of too demanding to listen to an audiobook/not demanding enough to occupy my brain. So ugh. In addition before I can start the counts, I have to choose among 4-8 photos which is the best (not always obvious), do some copying and saving, and load the whole thing into GIMP and... it's annoying work. Plus, it's pretty clear, just on the few that I've done and the data from another paper that... this is going to be a negative result. Double and triple ugh.

But.

30 days. 180 bits of leaf. That's... ummmm... counting on my fingers... I can do this.... Really, I can do this..... 6! SIX measly leaf counts per day and I'll be done by the end of November! Which would be awesome.

It would be great to be done before then, of course, and done by Thanksgiving would be a major yay, worth baking brownies for.

So my goal is to use NaNoWriMo and the idea of daily achievement to get through these in November. Only adapted to me me me:







So there. Look for my updates (all two people still reading this...) each day. I might even share brownies when I'm done....

ETA. Apparently only have 168 data sets, and I've already done 14. Doing a lot of data corralling, and I forgot my scratch notebook in the lab, and I am missing a few photos of my lab notebook (the official one that cannot leave the lab). Anyhow, initial number has changed.