I just handed in my intent to submit form, which is the bit of paperwork the university needs in order to start going through all the red tape needed to find an external assessor (and in my case an internal assessor, as my original internal is now my supervisor).
Amongst other things, the form states that I intend to submit by the 18th November, which by my reckoning gives me 99 days to finally finish the damn thing off. In fact, I've just written the following script, which knowing me, I will be checking every ten minutes from now till then. In fact I'm tempted to set it as a prompt command....
99 days, 2 hours and 0 minutes#!/bin/sh handin=`date -d "18 November 2005 12:00" +%s` now=`date +%s` left=$(($handin - $now)) days=$(($left/(24*60*60))) hours=$(($left/(60*60)-24*$days)) minutes=$(($left/(60)-(24*$days+$hours)*60)) echo $days days, $hours hours and $minutes minutes