Master’s dissertation submitted, just in time.

Wail

Wail

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The past few days were a real nightmare, with my laptop dying on me just days before the deadline, losing me 3 days or work (I hadn’t backed up as frequently as I should have).

Having worked without sleep over the weekend, I managed to pull it through and I submitted it right on time for the deadline :)

I nearly suffered a nervous breakdown because of this incident, and because of the pressure on me to do the Masters degree (it is primarily for my father, which I hope I make him proud).

Many here have been very helpful and supportive in various ways, so I wanted to say “thank you” to all; and to share the joy of having accomplished this.

This Forum has been more than just a get-away to enjoy the pleasure of photography.

I’ve spent the best part of yesterday afternoon, up until this morning, hibernating, making up for lost sleeping hours and trying to bring my body back to normal.

Again, thank you to each and everyone here; and a special thanks to those (you each know who you are) who have helped in one way or another.


Now, time to sort out my laptop :)
 
Well done and good luck :) Time to chill, relax and enjoy Xmas !! :)
 
good work nothing like pushing a deadline :lol:
 
:)

Thank you. There is a huge sense of euphoria now that it is all done.

Finally I can relax, yes, get all the sleep I need & want, though I am not the type that sleeps a lot, but this past year got me deprived from sleep more than I had hoped for.

Enjoy Christmas, BIG time, I will.
 
Phew... that must be a weight off your mind. I remember the feeling from when I finished my PhD thesis.

Congrats on getting it done. Time to relax now!
 
It's a huge weight, as you so well know .. though nothing like a PhD at all; that is a whole different beast.

My plans, originally, were to go on to do my PhD once I am done; but I am not sure that I will do that now. I am thinking twice about this, it's not at all easy and my age and health doesn't help.
 
Nice one - enjoy!

I remember the pressure of witting my Dissertation...I left it rather late (actually I only started it 3 days before it was due to be handed in!), 72 hours without kip with Test Match Special on the Radio to keep me awake :)
 
Well done m8 :thumbs:, why is it that computers etc always die in the middle of something really important?

It's as if they know:suspect:
 
puddleduck said:
Nice one - enjoy!

I remember the pressure of witting my Dissertation...I left it rather late (actually I only started it 3 days before it was due to be handed in!), 72 hours without kip with Test Match Special on the Radio to keep me awake :)
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:eek::eek:

Sorry, but you must have been :cuckoo: to do that; that, or very brave :shrug: .. but well done on pulling it off.

Frankly, I am a "last minute" doer too; but I would not leave such a paper to the last 72 hours .. I am just not that brave.

It was very hard to remain focused in the end, but I left the easy (no brains needed) part to the end, which was the "cosmetic" look of the paper (fonts, indentations, borders, shading, etc.) ... but it was a nightmare.
 
Flash In The Pan said:
Well done m8 :thumbs:, why is it that computers etc always die in the middle of something really important?

It's as if they know:suspect:
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They do know about how important the work is ... made me think of HAL9000 from 2001 Space Odyssey and its inventor questioning the moral values of "killing" HAL with an argument like it doesn't matter "whether we are based on carbon or silicon"!
 
I had mine all planned out to the finest detail, leaving me two days before the deadline to print it and get it bound. Then I discovered that the files I had saved my work as were too big for my printer to handle (I had used a DTP package instead of Word :bonk:) and eventually I came to the realisation I would either have to retype it all or......

So I had to spend 24 hours straight, cuttting/pasting each page of a 30,000 word document into Word and printing them :bonk:

Still could have been worse, my pal left her final draft dissertation on a disc in a public computer at a another uni nearer her home.

When she reached the printers (this was the day before the deadline) she discovered what she had done she went back, but it was gone, so she had to dig out an old back-up copy and try and update it and get it printed.
 
At least now I know I am not the only one to have gone through this nightmare.

To think, when I started to work on this I gave my supervisor a road-map hoping to have it all completed and submitted by end of November at the latest :lol: ... come Saturday 13th December I thought there would be no way that I will make the deadline.
 
For future reference, Google Aps is really good for this kind of thing. Why trust your computer when you can work and save your stuff on the internet and access it from anywhere :)
 
KayJay said:
For future reference, Google Aps is really good for this kind of thing. Why trust your computer when you can work and save your stuff on the internet and access it from anywhere :)
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Oh, I assure you I have a very tight backing-up system that is fool proof.

What I normally do, after completing a bit of work (an hour or so), I back up to an external drive and to a USB memory stick AND I email the whole lot to myself using both Yahoo! and the University's email. This way, at worst, I would suffer an hour or two of data / work loss.

Well, my last meeting with my supervisor was Wednesday afternoon; I then had to take the 4am train to London to do my last one interview (which was with a very senior official, and I knew before hand what I was going to get, so this coming so late would not affect my writing up ... it would just give me some nice and juicy quotes to use).

Anyways, worked all through the hours going to London and back (train each way is just about 3 hours) and managed to get everything done.

Come Friday, I was doing the final "cosmetics" of things like page numbering, ensure fonts are the right size, etc .. when the machine went into hibernation and wouldn't come up!

The worst part is that I use Endnote for my bibliography, and for some silly reason I never backed up my Endnote library ... which meant I had to re-enter all that too!

It was just one of those VERY silly moments in time when I got too cought up in the last stage that I forget something as silly as the backup.

Had I done it, at least to my USB stick, I would have been only lost the Endnote bibliography library, and not 2 day's work too.
 
I know how it feels, i've done something similar a while back and was really kicking myself for not being more careful.

For example, while I was in India I managed to capture a photo of a windows error message on national TV when the station crashed, somehow. Got home and realised i'd formatted the memory card at some point without looking at the contents.
 
KayJay said:
I know how it feels, i've done something similar a while back and was really kicking myself for not being more careful.

For example, while I was in India I managed to capture a photo of a windows error message on national TV when the station crashed, somehow. Got home and realised i'd formatted the memory card at some point without looking at the contents.
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You should still be able to get the image back with decent recovery software....
 
Might be worth a try. I have some software that came with my sandisc cards. Nice shout.
 
Thank you very much :)
 
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