Date: Monday October 10 2025
       
       Writing a gopher blog in the middle of the final stages of a PhD
       program is a perfect way of procrastination, or stated more gentle,
       a perfect way to flex the writing muscles before starting a new
       day.
       
       I always thought that writing a PhD book would be a difficult job.
       However, in reality it is just boring. You search for new words
       about things you have already have written about before. But, you
       are allowed to spend more pages on expressing your ideas.
       
       Publishing papers, certainly for conferences, feels always like
       trying out new shoes that are two sizes too small. What can you
       express in 8 to 15 pages what you have been working on for about a
       year. Add in a graph or an architectural image, and there goes your
       page limit. Add the introduction, repeat what you already have said
       in the previous papers, add a state of the art, all that is left is
       maybe the half of the page limit.
       
       No, the PhD book can be as big as you want. In my case I am
       bundling papers that I already have published together with some
       introductionary chapters and a conclusion. This introduction is
       just stating what is wrong (in the world of scholarly publication
       in my case) and then again adding a state of the art chapter.
       Writing is nothing more than reading a lot of papers and trying to
       synthesize them in a paragraph of two.
       
       "Does that mean Patrick, that this is a mechanical process and 
       could be automated?". No, no..I would not suggest that a machine, 
       an LLM, could generate such chapters. Well, it could generate 
       something but if it is relevant or not, I don't give it high 
       chances. The process is not boring because it is mechanical. It is
       boring because in my mind I have already done the work. It is 
       boring because the process is slow and I do not learn anything 
       new. 
       
       This PhD I am writing at a stage of life where I already have spent
       30 years in the field of academic libraries and scholarly
       publishing. No big surprises can be found while digging out old
       skeletons from the field.
       
       Back when I was a student we laughed about our future life as
       scientists (my subject was theoretical physics at that time). We
       would wake up at noon, walk to the laboratory, read the newspaper,
       write a brilliant article and return home.
       
       In reality I wake up at 5:00 am, read the newspaper, work in on my
       book from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, get exhausted, spend my time on
       email, cook, eat, fall asleep at 9:00 pm and wake up again at 5:00
       am.
       
       "But you love it, Patrick". Yes, I do. But still it is exhausting.
       ___________________________________________________________________
                     Gophered by Gophernicus/3.1.1 on Ubuntu/24.04 x86_64