Back in the Dark Ages
A colleague asked me if he could have a copy of my thesis as a PDF file a couple of days ago. It’s still sitting in a long-neglected corner of my hard drive as a series of Word files (in some antique version, circa 5.1), but as I’d been thinking for a while that I ought to convert them (before some future update to Word renders them unreadable), I decided to go for it.
My thesis is 10 years old this year, and I’d somehow totally forgotten that I’d actually hand-drawn a couple of the figures, literally cutting and pasting them into a space I’d left on the page, which I then photocopied. Obviously, this presented some problems for making a PDF file, but it also made me feel about 80 years old. Nevertheless, the hand-drawn figures do have a certain rustic charm. I also remembered that I had to construct the reference list by hand, painstakingly marking up each journal name in italics, and each volume number in bold. It nearly drove me crackers. In those days, I kept my references on index cards in an index box—-none of this inserting citations in the text with Endnote or BibTeX and getting them inserted and formatted automatically, oh no.
I can see that I’ve reached the stage when I’m going to start boring students with these kinds of recollections when they complain about how hard it is writing their theses, and from there ‘tis but a step to, “I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.”. It’s a slippery slope.
