Stress!

I've not yet slept decently this week. I had opportunities to, but I always ended up staying up, and it's showing on me now - I can't keep my eyes open, and just slumbered through Roy Dyckhoff's lecture. I would have stayed in bed, but I hadn't been to any of his lectures in weeks.

Just forgetting about the Chemistry lecture seems like an option, but I wouldn't sleep in the afternoon anyway - there's another meeting about this everlasting presentation. That's what kept me up last night, I was at a flat in town until close to 1am putting it together along with the rest of the group.

We were going to use a laptop, but Lynsay demonstrated her incredible talent for breaking computers very early on - as soon as she switched it on, Windows XP crashed out with the Blue Screen of Utter Catastrophe (which Microsoft thoughtfully replaced the Blue Screen of Death with - XP may not crash often, but when it crashes, it doesn't mess about.) So we relocated to another computer in the flat - Microsoft Publisher is a surprisingly rare thing to find on someone's computer, which limits our options a bit.

It's nearly finished, at least, but I want to proofread it all, and some people are doing a sort of pull-out supplement as well... I really think that's a bit unneccessary, especially seeing the meeting is at four and reprographics is only open until five... and it has to be in tomorrow.

I have now decided that it's true what prophettenebrae says - a joint degree will kill me. (By the way, you haven't updated in ages - I miss trying to understand your cryptic LJ comments.)

The Incredible Crisis

*twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch*

The afternoon didn't quite go according to plan. I thought that we would be able to finish off the paper and get it ready for printing by the evening, but that wasn't to happen. Instead, I went in to the lab and met the member of our group that was supposed to have done something - who was playing Tetris.

It turned out that not only did we not have the last part of the paper, but also that we didn't have a computer with Microsoft Publisher on it that would be capable of viewing or editing it at all. Another slight difficulty is that the file is over 4MB, and so didn't fit on to a disk where we could rewrite it anyway. If it wasn't for my pen drive, we would all be doomed. I knew it was a good purchase.

Unfortunately, because I had that, it was then decided that the plan would change from "do it in the afternoon" to "get David to do it in the evening", with a copy of Publisher that was burned to CD from a helpful bystander's computer. Hooray for software piracy. And the last part of the paper, the insert, will be prepared tonight and given to me in the lecture at 11am.

So, this evening has so far been spent looking over people's dull articles - which is no fault of the respective authors' own, but the appalling spelling and punctuation within certainly is.

I went through correcting and finalising it, and then I printed out a copy to see how it looked. It's pretty good, I think we've done a very good job for two days. For reasons best known to itself, my printer has printed everything in purple, making the photo of Professor Irvine look even more terrifying than it was already - probably a lack of ink. That doesn't matter too much, as we're going to rely on the Purdie building reprographics to print the final version.

Now, Reprographics in the Purdie building can't guarantee that they will be able to print Publisher files, but thanks to Chris Spikyhair I am now awaiting a converted PDF from the Adobe website. And I'm unsure that they'll accept it on my pen drive (assuming they're clots) so I'll have to send it over to Anna to burn to CD first. If it ever gets here, that is.

On top of all that, in the middle of it I received an e-mail from Computer Science asking me to reupload my practical for this week as a ZIP rather than a TAR, which has been accepted every single time before. I was rather dreading a trudge to the John Honey Building, but thanks to gh, the solver of everything Internet-related that I think I'm clever enough to do myself but really can't, I was saved that and got to my files remotely instead.

Still no PDF. Have to wait up until it arrives. Oh, great, the Adobe site says that "There are no jobs in progress at this time". Fantastic. Oh, wait - yes! It's finished, but they didn't bother e-mailing me about it. Saved! Brilliant, it even looks exactly the same as the original. And the best thing - it's 439kb, so I can take it in on a disk and forget about that CD-burning difficulty that I was going to do earlier. It's finished! <¦-D

I'm so happy!