I was surfing the web, looking up information on TeX (actually, LaTeX) when I stumbled across the LyX website again. I had been there before, but that was before I got Linux installed on it’s own dedicated machine… So now that I’m learning LaTeX, I’m seriously considering installing LyX. It has great sounding features (like WYSIWYM), but I wonder if it wouldn’t just be more convenient for me to use ‘raw’ LaTeX instead of trying to learn how to interact with LyX. Anyway, its a cool link to have.
While I was browsing their site, I saw mention of a ‘trend in word processors moving towards the XML standard’; that sounds very interesting- can’t MSWord 2000 & XP do that already. Imagine if you could actually import files from Word into say, WP, without losing formatting. That sounds impossible: I don’t see MS giving up their competitive advantages like that.
Well, I’ve exceeded my quota of boring, geeky blog for the night, so I think I’ll go back surfing… maybe see if my email is back up yet (I still can’t believe its been down for nearly 24 hrs straight!)
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Since I’m still waiting for my email to load, I figured I might as well just add another blog since I’m in the blogging mood.
I noticed that my grammar leaves a lot to be desired; I can’t figure out if that is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, it seems more fluid and natural than stopping to organize sentences that would parse right in an English DTD (I wonder if it is possible to construct a DTD for English— something to look up… ). Then on the other hand it seems so unpolished. Oh well, I don’t feel like becoming an English Professor anytime soon so I don’t have anything invested in being 100% syntatically correct, or even fifty percent (see, it should have been 50%).
I just started learning TeX two days ago; I printed out the TeXBook (that’s a large heifer) which I dlled from freenet. I plead ignorance: I have not idea whether the book is actually ripped or was released free; not that it matters, I can always destroy the evidence (all approx. 500 pages). It’s actually good reading: the author actually realizes that most of the people who read the book don’t do the exercises. Plus he’s got a nice sense of humor: “When you’ve finished reading this book, will you be a TeXnician or a TeXpert?” BTW, I learned TeX is actually pronounced Tech where the ch is like the ch in a German ach. I better wrap this up, lightning is flashing outside about 5 miles away and knowing the way the electrical circuits in my neighborhood are sensitive, the computer’s probably going to crash within the next minute and I’ll lose all my hard work. That is of course assuming that the operating system (Win98) doesn’t do the job first, as it usually does.
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It’s been a long time since I last blogged—seeing as how this is only my third attempt, I take that as a bad sign of things to come. Today I finally started driving @ my driver’s ed class. It—rather I—was pathetic, I can’t turn at all. My instructor was getting really frustrated for a while, then he relaxed after I think he realized how seriously I meant it when I said I’d never driven before. I felt a little weird too, cause my driving partner was on his sixth drive and he went on the freeway. About the only thing that I committed to memory from that whole experience is that commentary driving sucks! Imagine commentary sex: its about the same, while it probably gets you doing what you should be doing, it seriously interrupts the flow (not that I have any experience with either commentary or non-commentary sex).
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I love this! I just looked at my first ever blog– it looked dang fine. Ah, the pleasures of being me; so easily amused. I promise to try to avoid making posting annoyingly small blogs a habit ( that was a mouthfull, read it again, make sure you got it). So anyway’s welcome to my blog. This will be my chronicle, my autobiography of sorts forever more; or until I find something more interesting to do with my time.
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I’m going to make my first blog really small, because I just tried blogging a monster of a message, but that got lost! So I’m taking it easy until I figure out this thing. But I must say I’m really enthused with this blog stuff: it’s the first web application I actually want to use: it’s not like trying to set up perl scripts for guestbooks (yeck!). Now if I knew PHP, I could really make this baby shine! That’s all, signing off for now…
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