The Best Sentence of the Day

This blog is a cut-up of a dissertation in progress. Each day, I will post my favorite sentence that I have newly scribed. Everything out of context, but suggestive. I hope.

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I'm a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. Learn more here in my bio or get my contact information on my contact page.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

a pitiable circumstance

My Sony Vaio laptop died overnight. I am now working from my desktop-replacement laptop, the Dell.

The last time I backed up my dissertation work was 5 PM yesterday. I lost 7 hours of work, which I am now reconstructing. It is painful.

Sadly, I never backed up my works cited for this particular chapter, which means recompiling about 100 formal references from scratch.

I was supposed to submit this chapter this morning. I hope I can repair the damage, redo the work, and get it in.

Never mind that I need a new freaking laptop and haven't backed up anything from that damn machine except the disseration work.

5 Comments:

Blogger Ballard said...

I realize that you're far to late in the process to switch, but you really should begin using bibliographic management software as soon as you finish the diss.

I can't imagine how I would have finished without Endnote. Truly an amazing application.

Perhaps you could talk Kiyash into entering all of your references into Endnote?

2:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ugh - aweful. The dying laptop is the nightmare of everyone pulling together a phd.

I have begun to use endnote but its an uphill struggle to store all the references I need.

Good luck with the continued work...

10:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's too awful to be true - but here's something that might cheer you up for a second, have you seen this? http://www.theonion.com/content/node/48461

1:13 AM  
Blogger Ballard said...

Mathias (etal) - the shortcut is to use a "connect" file to allow Endnote to download all the bibliographic data directly from a library. There are hundreds (maybe more) of these, many of which will download from e-journal services, like Ebsco.

Jane - depending on how you've formatted your bibliographies for the chapters you've already submitted, it might be feasible to convert those directly to Endnote records. If there's much overlap in the literature across your chapters, it could be an efficient solution.

My schedule should lighten up a bit next week; if you're interested in trying Endnote, send me the sources from one of your completed chapters, and I'll try to convert it.

10:01 AM  
Blogger Jane said...

omg, thank you for the moral support all, and ken you are too nice, you are supposed to be celebrating your own graduation and not worrying about my endnotes-phobic self :)

9:33 PM  

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