I wonder how much time my thesis will take?

[please note all names are people I know from PythonLand, so if you don't recognize them, that's why]

Jeremy shared on Google Reader, which I picked up on FriendFeed, a post by Ping on how much time his thesis took. The graph he generated was rather interesting. It made me start to think about whether I would have any interest in such a thing.

I figure I could use my Jaiku feed to keep track of the timestamps. Since I already micro-blog about what I am up to anyway, it wouldn't be too hard to just add a little marker to my posts to denote that I am doing work on my thesis and then a second message saying I have stopped. It could be as simple as "thesis paper ... editing latest draft" or "thesis research ... reading about Java's memory usage" and signaling I have stopped thesis work with "thesis stopped ... doing a blog post on something". I could then just pull down my Jaiku feed and write out the timestamps to a text file. I could even write a Dashboard widget for OS X that fetched the information and then aggregated the data for me so that I could see how things were going. That way I wouldn't have to even remember to pull down the data. Otherwise I would have something launch in my terminal.

Yes, this is extremely nerdy. But knowing the amount of time it took to go from ABD (All But Dissertation) to someone with a Ph.D. would be kind of interesting. I would start once I defended my thesis topic instead of right away as it gives a very specific start point as well as giving me time to get everything in place to actually do this.

Anyway, this is just an idea I currently have. With the amount of other projects I have going I have no clue if I will have the determination to keep it up for as long as I would need to for complete data.