Caleb told me to post moar...
... so I am!
jaralith told me about an awesome streaming music service called Pandora, which turns out to be the evolution of something I read about on Slashdot some years ago but never tried called the Music Genome Project. To start the thing off you can put in composers/artists/songs you like and it'll play similar stuff, and you can thumbs-up/thumbs-down stuff and it'll gradually figure out what you like (or so the theory goes) based on your preferences.
In practice, it winds up giving me Nirvana in amongst Sister Hazel (lolwut?), and occasionally gets confused about classical music (it played one song because "a major tonality" is on the list of Stuff I Like, and then another song because it had "a minor tonality"). But I've certainly heard some neat stuff -- bits from The Faerie Queene, which is an opera by Purcell I know nothing about, and Shostakovich's 2nd Symphony are probably the new things I've heard that I like the most.
I'm also teaching myself -- out of a book, rather than just haphazardly like I have been -- the typesetting language LaTeX. It's designed for typesetting mathematics in particular, and is used by pretty much anybody that needs either mathematical typesetting or precision. That fantasy book sitting by your computer? Quite possibly typeset in LaTeX by the publisher. It's very powerful and modular, and some of the modules actually require *less* work than doing stuff in a standard WYSIWYG word processor. In Word or OpenOffice, you have to fiddle around with how stuff on the page, but in LaTeX chances are someone has already decided how a physics paper ought to be formatted, so you just tell it what your chapters, sections, figures, etc. are, and it'll handle layout for you. The wikipedia article linked above puts it best: "In preparing a LaTeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using familiar concepts such as chapter, section, table, figure, etc., and lets the LaTeX system worry about the presentation of these structures."
So I can say "include the file blahblah.ps as a figure, titled 'Performance of Zerglings vs. Hydralisks', with the caption 'blahblahblah'", and it'll just stick it someplace in the text where it makes sense. I don't have to number the figure, since LaTeX will do that for me; I can even give it a name and refer to it later in the text, and it'll refer to "Figure 6" as appropriate without me having to worry about that. Of course, in grand UNIX fashion, you can override all this if you want to.
I've been sort of unmotivated photographically lately, but I should get around to posting more pictures soon.
jaralith told me about an awesome streaming music service called Pandora, which turns out to be the evolution of something I read about on Slashdot some years ago but never tried called the Music Genome Project. To start the thing off you can put in composers/artists/songs you like and it'll play similar stuff, and you can thumbs-up/thumbs-down stuff and it'll gradually figure out what you like (or so the theory goes) based on your preferences.
In practice, it winds up giving me Nirvana in amongst Sister Hazel (lolwut?), and occasionally gets confused about classical music (it played one song because "a major tonality" is on the list of Stuff I Like, and then another song because it had "a minor tonality"). But I've certainly heard some neat stuff -- bits from The Faerie Queene, which is an opera by Purcell I know nothing about, and Shostakovich's 2nd Symphony are probably the new things I've heard that I like the most.
I'm also teaching myself -- out of a book, rather than just haphazardly like I have been -- the typesetting language LaTeX. It's designed for typesetting mathematics in particular, and is used by pretty much anybody that needs either mathematical typesetting or precision. That fantasy book sitting by your computer? Quite possibly typeset in LaTeX by the publisher. It's very powerful and modular, and some of the modules actually require *less* work than doing stuff in a standard WYSIWYG word processor. In Word or OpenOffice, you have to fiddle around with how stuff on the page, but in LaTeX chances are someone has already decided how a physics paper ought to be formatted, so you just tell it what your chapters, sections, figures, etc. are, and it'll handle layout for you. The wikipedia article linked above puts it best: "In preparing a LaTeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using familiar concepts such as chapter, section, table, figure, etc., and lets the LaTeX system worry about the presentation of these structures."
So I can say "include the file blahblah.ps as a figure, titled 'Performance of Zerglings vs. Hydralisks', with the caption 'blahblahblah'", and it'll just stick it someplace in the text where it makes sense. I don't have to number the figure, since LaTeX will do that for me; I can even give it a name and refer to it later in the text, and it'll refer to "Figure 6" as appropriate without me having to worry about that. Of course, in grand UNIX fashion, you can override all this if you want to.
I've been sort of unmotivated photographically lately, but I should get around to posting more pictures soon.