Take a look at this seemingly mundane screenshot. Look at the modification time of the highlighted file, thesis.pdf.
This is the hard drive from my old, dead iBook, dewi, which I finally (tonight!) found time to tear apart so I could extract the HDD to see if I could find some old files (which aren’t on here after all, it seems). This iBook was my main computer throughout my PhD; those files there are the LaTeX source code to my thesis. This iBook was also the model that had the famous logic board fault. In the three years I owned it, it went back to Apple four times for replacements.
On October 25th 2005, I was struggling to finish my thesis. I was very, very close to submitting, slouched on a sofa at home, making the last few amendments. I adjusted my position slightly… and watched my laptop screen die. With sinking heart, I realised the logic board had failed for the fifth and final time. Panicking about my submission, I managed to coax it into life (with no graphics output) one final time and extract some key files over the firewire interface so I could finish and submit my thesis.
My PhD was a marathon that took over four years to complete and will be the single biggest, most difficult thing I ever achieve in my life. The fourth year, I was working full time for forty hours a week and putting in a further 20-30 hours on the PhD. Dewi was with me every inch of that slog, right up until the end; it died with mere minutes to go until I finished. I essentially worked it to death.
I think that’s kinda awesome and seeing these files here, untouched since that night, has brought back a whole rush of the nervous exhaustion I felt then.
I’ve kept some parts, like the logic board itself and the keyboard. I’m going to frame them.
Notes