finish my thesis.

Go travel. Read a book. Write something that will make people happy. Unless one plans to make a living from this it is a painful venture.

So, I’m making appreciable progress on this project, which has me in a good mood for the first time in a month. I’ve been reading all summer, taking notes, and feel like I’ve accomplished nothing. Yesterday, however, I got organized. I formed a Google Group, solely dedicated to being a central repository for information pertaining to my project and invited all of my committee members to join, which they did. I’ve uploaded a bunch of articles I am working from, an annotated bibliography of everything I read this summer, and source analyses for my primary documents. Further, I’m revising my research questions to include the role of the clergy in Sassanid Persia at the time of the Byzantine conflicts of 628, and think I have some new leads on the espionage stuff.

So, life is good, I think. Also, this Zotero extension for Firefox? Yeah…absolutely awesome. Captures all of the metadata from your resources, then exports them to Word in Turabian, MLA, APA…whatever you want. Nice timesaver and less cumbersome than Endnote. (Though it works seamlessly with Endnote.) Too cool!

Onward!