Thesis submission

Just a week ago I finally submitted my thesis "Study of the mutual interactions of basic amyloidogenic peptides with polyanions". A last near-all-nighter (well, I got 3 hours shut-eye), and it was done. All I had to do was to convert a massive (35 MB) word document into a bound paper copy.
I spend a horrible Monday just printing that thing on our slow lab HP Laserjet 2605dn. Once more that thing was seriously struggling with printing any embedded image files because of its limited memory. If a image resolution of 300 ppi is seen as "high quality for printing" standard, why does it take more time to print the 15 full-page figures than the rest of the thesis? That should be easily done ... well, it is another Apple Mac OS X printer driver problem. Their printer drivers are quite bad in general.

My thesis before binding: 2 copies in the paper box, 1 on top, and two copies of thesis summary and thesis submission form.

The binding could not be done on the same day anymore, but stroke 9:00 on Tuesday morning (20/03/2012) I submitted two bound copies of my thesis and two copies each of the thesis submission form and the thesis summary form. The most anticlimactic ending for a thesis imaginable.
Relief and relaxation came only on the following weekend.

Endnote trouble

While writing my thesis I cam across quite a few problems with Endnote. As you might know, this software allows you to maintain a reference library for writing scientific articles or something like a PhD thesis. It can insert references and format them according to different journal styles (e.g. Science random number or human readable PLoS ONE etc.) and create a reference list in a Word document.

But there are many problems

• It makes working with Word a pain. Each time a reference is inserted it's having a big think and then reformats the whole reference list. During which time both Word and Endnote are unusable. Also, if this coincides with with a Word autosave all your work progress since last save will be lost because Word will crash.
• It is slow. As soon as you hit about 10 references in a document updates take forever. 
• Occasionally it gets the styles wrong up to a point that you would be better off writing the reference list yourself. Science journal is not a book, so the city it is published in is unimportant!
• It is expensive. £200 for a single license, and there is a new version out every year. Also, older versions do not support newer versions of Word and don't receive updates.

All in all I will try to never use it again. It is just too clunky and buggy. I only have to find some alternative that works well on Windows, MacOS and Linux (just to be prepared for all eventualities).