Printer Failure

Today has been a mad rush to get the rest of my dissertation done. I've had the final draft of it done for a while now and had sent it off to my parents and tutor for some feedback. My tutor said she couldn't comment on the detail as she might be the one marking it however, she did give me some very useful feedback on the general layout and some key extra information to include which couldn't really have come from anyone else. I only got the feedback from my step dad yesterday and with his help, I managed to decipher his writing and make the corrections. Unbelievably, the most difficult part of the whole thing was getting it to print!

I had it all ready, and went to print one copy to make sure it was all okay. One problem though, as soon as I pressed print, Word decided to rearrange my document. I had a graph surrounded by some text and every time I pressed print or print preview, it added an extra page break to this page. No matter what I did, I couldn't work out why this was happening. Eventually I tracked it down to being a problem with my figure caption reference which contained a field that seemed to be causing the problem. If I tried to move it, it simply duplicated itself and the graph so I ended up deleting and replacing it - which seemed to finally solve the problem.

The next problem to cross was the double sided printing problem. I always have trouble with this, either the paper gets jammed or I end up putting the paper in the wrong way. Normally something goes wrong and so I thought I'd be extra careful this time. I printed all the odd pages, checked they were okay and then printed the even ones on the other side. Except I had to cancel it half way through when I realised I had numbered the pages wrong. The auto bibliography at the end contained a particularly stubborn section break which refused to allow deletion and as such, the appendix pages were labelled 1 of 24 instead of 19 of 24. I then went to print the final two pages and Word decided to ignore me and print the whole thing... twice.

I finally got round that and now had a full copy. Problem was I needed two. At this point I was seriously considering popping into the library and just photocopying the whole thing, that way I could guarantee an exact copy and save the hassle of having to try and use my printer again. Then I realised if I wanted colour prints, I would have to pay about 50p a page and quickly went back to using my own printer. Some of my illustrations wouldn't have shown up very well in black and white and I wasn't faffing around with trying to just print those off in colour and work out how to print the rest - double sided - and slot them in. The second copy actually proved to be a lot less stressful than the first and whilst they aren't identical - the first copy has one side blank page before appendix two - but I'm sure no one is going to compare the two copies so fingers crossed it's all okay. I think something must have been on my side though because the ink was all fine. Usually as soon as I go to print something important, one of the colours runs out or plays up and leaves streaks all over the paper. You'd have thought by now they would have made a reliable inkjet printer but they are almost as unreliable as networks.

A gripping episode of spooks this week, really bring home the reality of how quickly a powerful country such as the UK can go bankrupt overnight and become a third world country in a matter of weeks. Whether this can happen in reality or not is beyond me, I don't pretend to understand the finer details of our economy but I would certainly hope that the government isn't stupid enough to let the situation get so desperate as to rely upon siphoning money from high earning tax dodgers. The thing that makes all of the Spooks story line so great is that they relate very closely to what is happening in the real world, the story lines focus on terrorism and the recent one on the energy crisis when everyone is becoming more and more conscious about running out of fossil fuels. Mixing large amounts of fact with a twist of fiction also make the stories even more compelling because it blurs the line between reality and imaginary and you don't quite know where one stops and the other starts. With national debt building up at an alarming rate and the government only now issuing statements promising to start making a conceited effort to pay this off over the forthcoming years then this episode couldn't be closer to what is happening right now. How the writers managed to time the release of this episode is probably quite coincidental but boy did it pay off for them, they must be over the moon with the incredible timing of it all.