Week in review: 24-30 May

This week has not gone as expected.  This week I exposed a mountain of work that I, previously, had greatly underestimated.  Last Sunday I stated my goal was to move on from my current programming tasks by today, but even with an extra afternoon today, I am still far from completing this task.  It's my own fault to find myself in my current situation and main for one reason, poor planning.  Making things up as you go along is bad news, especially when you're months from submitting you PhD thesis.  The problem came when I desired to update my documentation for the communication protocol I use for controlling my custom built hardware.  This isn't a bad idea as I frequently refer to my previous notes and I had recently made some significant changes.  Also, next month I'll be headed overseas to a lab where I plan to hand off copies of my instruments to other researchers.  For their benefit, decent documentation is welcome.  After cleaning up this portion of my user manual, I got a wild idea to update all my documentation.  This is a good idea, because it's been nearly a year since I wrote the original documents and much has changed, however, this is a bad idea, because it's been nearly a year since I wrote the original documents and much has changed.  At this point, I have the option to continue with my task, which will make it easier for other to reproduce my work and take advantage of the hardware I've developed.  Or I can fall back to preparing/writing my thesis.