Cool and uncool
Normally, my brand of geekiness does not extend to computers, but can I just mention that at the moment I have several cool new goodies for mine? I had a bad cold last week (or was it the week before? yes, it was the week before. how time flies when...um, well, how time flies), so I spent part of one of my days off sick loading Panther onto my computer. I'd been resisting this because a) I don't like doing things with computers, life is too short for it and b) I really didn't feel like I needed anything new. Now, however, I have gone ahead and fully updated to 10.3.9 and lo and behold, I can use...wait for it...
LaTeX for the Mac! And LaTeX equation editor! Now I can just type an equation into the editor, click a button, and nicely-typeset math appears in the window ready to be dragged to my desktop, and from thence to a presentation! Do you know what this means? It means I can -
Oh. It means I can do work at home, as well as in the lab. Greaaat.
However, it's still cool.
What is not cool is that Durham have still not got around to telling Matt anything definitive about the MSc thesis he handed in last March. They're supposed to let him know within three months, and even granted that his supervisor sat on it for five weeks without even passing it on to the Graduate School, that's still pretty poor on the part of the university, the internal examiner, and the external examiner...I mean really, was toenail lint removal so fascinating that it had to take priority over, say, letting him know if he's got a viva or not? For all of them? There does finally seem to be some movement now, but even so, it's pretty poor.
I would like to take this moment to note that Matt's internal examiner is a man called Mike Hunt. Yes, that is really his name, which means he's zoomed to the top of my all-time list of hilarious nomenclature, beating out such luminaries as:
1. Haime Fatas (a friend had him as a lecturer for something)
2. Yu Ming (whom malc_uk told me about)
3. Hugh Janus (whom my old friend Donacle told me about, albeit thirdhandedly)
Anybody else know of some "what were their parents thinking?" names?
LaTeX for the Mac! And LaTeX equation editor! Now I can just type an equation into the editor, click a button, and nicely-typeset math appears in the window ready to be dragged to my desktop, and from thence to a presentation! Do you know what this means? It means I can -
Oh. It means I can do work at home, as well as in the lab. Greaaat.
However, it's still cool.
What is not cool is that Durham have still not got around to telling Matt anything definitive about the MSc thesis he handed in last March. They're supposed to let him know within three months, and even granted that his supervisor sat on it for five weeks without even passing it on to the Graduate School, that's still pretty poor on the part of the university, the internal examiner, and the external examiner...I mean really, was toenail lint removal so fascinating that it had to take priority over, say, letting him know if he's got a viva or not? For all of them? There does finally seem to be some movement now, but even so, it's pretty poor.
I would like to take this moment to note that Matt's internal examiner is a man called Mike Hunt. Yes, that is really his name, which means he's zoomed to the top of my all-time list of hilarious nomenclature, beating out such luminaries as:
1. Haime Fatas (a friend had him as a lecturer for something)
2. Yu Ming (whom malc_uk told me about)
3. Hugh Janus (whom my old friend Donacle told me about, albeit thirdhandedly)
Anybody else know of some "what were their parents thinking?" names?