Back in the Dark Ages

· technology ·

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.

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.