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.
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Yes, and it's a slippery slope uphill both ways, in the snow.
by iain @ 06/01/2006 8:01 pm • Permalink •
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What was your thesis about?----- I'm already telling people how hard it was in my day, and it was less than a month ago!
by David @ 06/01/2006 8:02 pm • Permalink •
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Actually bsag, I've been wondering how you organise your documents and thoughts using OS X these days?
I've dabbled with DevonThink in the past, but couldn't really work out how best to make it work for me. At the moment I keep my documents in a fairly well organised folder structure, and use a mixture of Quicksilver and Spotlight to trawl through looking for threads and chains of thought across documents.
I'd like to get my processes a bit slicker. I've not studied at your level of academic success, but recently I completed my Cert-Ed, and hope to take things further.
One thing I'd like to get out of OS X is the ability to spring clean a little easier. iTunes allows me to create smart playlists based on songs I've never played, or songs I haven't played in over a year. I wish OS X had the ability to do that with documents; last accessed more than 12 months ago I think you can do, but number of times accessed would be more useful data to have access to as well. Something like "not read for more than 12 months and only accessed twice anyway" might help me make my mind up about the worth of keeping hold of something.
Our hard drives are so capacious these days it's tempting to keep all the miscellaneous .pdf files, but I'm not a womble, and I'd like an easier way to clean out my house from time to time!
Thoughts? Thanks!
by Kev @ 06/01/2006 9:01 pm • Permalink •
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Well I feel about oh 75 since I went to the trouble of drawing all my diagrams in Draw (embedded in Word 2.0) for my thinner-than-it-should-have been Masters paper some 11 years ago. I too can still recall the hand-crafting of references, precisely to Sheffield University's specifications - commas between this, fullstops after that, title in bold, publisher in italics. I know I used a word processor, but looking back it would have been quicker to chisel them out of rock. Using my tongue. But most of all I remember the 3 day wait for the one page that had a colour diagram on it to come out of the printer queue. (cue violins).
Luckily I think its extremely unlikely that anyone will ever want to read the thing again. Not even me.
When I used to work down t'pit on Talis (the library computer system) there was demand for integration with EndNote. I wonder if it ever happened. A couple of catalogue searches and voila - instant bibliography all nicely formatted without even a trip to the library. Just make up a few page numbers and you're done (oh, was that just me then?).
by JonH @ 06/01/2006 9:02 pm • Permalink •
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Openoffice is very useful for opening Word files and converting them to PDF. Not sure how well it works for older formats though.
by Nicholas Lee @ 07/01/2006 4:02 pm • Permalink •
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Kev, what's a womble? ...ben
by ben @ 08/01/2006 12:02 am • Permalink •
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Okay, laughing very hard, tears coming to my eyes. How the heck did this happen, this inexorable morphing into dinosours? The younger folk giving me the same look of disbelief that I gave my grandmother when she said that the only running water they had on her childhood farm was when someone ran with the buckets. Sigh.
"Womble" is delicious. It's the perfect noun for the president of my workplace. She would be the "master womble". I don't get the Great-Uncle Bulgaria thing.
by Jeannine @ 08/01/2006 4:02 pm • Permalink •
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hyperlink didn't work. It's here: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=womble
by Jeannine @ 08/01/2006 4:02 pm • Permalink •
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Milan Ilnyckyj: Oh, you know, stuff.
It had to do with the way that pigeons find their way home.
David:
I meant to congratulate you on passing your viva by the way. So, congratulations!
iain: :-D Of course. On a related note, whenever I was on my bike doing the same route in outward and return directions, I used to get a headwind going both ways.
Kev: Hmm, interesting question. I'll try to write a post about it soon, though I don't have any really radical solutions.
JonH: Dear old Talis, how I miss him/her. I also had some colour figures in my thesis, and had to wait ages to print them on our one colour printer. And then I had to add something earlier on, the page numbers changed, and I had to do it all again.
Nicholas Lee: I just used the standard Mac OS X 'Print to PDF' button in the Print dialogue. Worked fine. Then I used a LaTeX document listing all the individual files as follows:
includepdf[pages=-]{1Title.pdf}, which joined them all together in the right order.Wombles are/were characters in a stop-motion cartoon shown in the UK during the 1970s. They look a little bit like upright dogs with pointed snouts (imagine an anteater crossed with a dog), lived on Wimbledon Common and spent their days clearing up litter left by messy humans and making it in to useful things. Jeannines's link was very interesting, because I've never heard it used as a definition of a clueless user before.
Jeannine: Great Uncle Bulgaria was more or less the head of the Wombles.
by bsag @ 08/01/2006 5:01 pm • Permalink •
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Ben, I'm sorry - I forgot that this is the world wide web!
I'd not seen Jeannine's definition in the past - the root definition for people here in the UK is actually a little easier to understand.
The Wombles was a television programme in the UK shown during the 1970s (and regularly repeated since).
The Wombles' raison dâêtre was to collect and recycle rubbish from Wimbledon Common - it was a green message in its day, but the Wombles' homes ended up incredibly cluttered from the rubbish and junk they would collect.
The Wombles theme song featured the words:
> 'Underground, Overground, Wombling Free, > The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we. > Making good use of the things that we find, > Things that the everyday folks leave behind'.
I wrote 'I'm not a womble' in my post to indicate I'm not someone who likes to acquire unused junk on my hard drive - I like a good cleanout from time to time - electronic Feng Shui I guess ;o)
Sorry for the confusion, and sorry to bsag for clogging her post with wombling tales!
by Kev @ 08/01/2006 5:02 pm • Permalink •
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Whoops, sorry bsag - must've been writing when you were too!
PS: Not to worry about my question. I've decided to give DevonThink some proper attention. When I last looked at it I was snowed under with studying and didn't have the time to invest in learning how to use it. Things are quieter now, but I'm approaching a 12 month period of intense work and study - I'm trying to improve my approach before things kick off.
One of the problems with being new to the OS (and not programming savvy) is that some technical articles leave me standing! There don't seem to be many Mac orientated sites that take things in baby steps
by Kev @ 08/01/2006 5:02 pm • Permalink •
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Your post got me thinking back to when I wrote my dissertation. It was only 13 years ago, but I didn't have a PC/Mac then (or even a Word Processor - what a shame they have dissapeared!). I typed the whole lot on my mum's typewriter over one Christmas holiday and then drew all the charts and diagrams and photocopied it all when I got back to University in January. I hear a huge chorus of, "Luddite!", coming my way!
by Pete @ 09/01/2006 9:02 am • Permalink •
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I just wanted to pop in and say hi... so... Hi!
by Mavis @ 11/01/2006 5:01 am • Permalink •
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On aging, someone sent me a list of "how you know you're getting older" signs which I imagine is circling on emails everywhere. It's in its entirety here, but in the meantime these bore a horrible resonance for me (hangs head in shame):
Ouch.
by Jolyon @ 11/01/2006 2:02 pm • Permalink •
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