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Sunday, November 19, 2006

mac me TeX!

i have had my mac - a 15'' PB, soon a museum piece - for over two years and only now am i getting to really making use of it somewhat more seriously: i am getting back to using TeX for my academic papers. yes, back. i did my MS thesis using TeX by having the raw text input by somebody's girlfriend as i had written the whole text long hand. then after she had done the typing, i did the typesetting with TeX, and then had the whole printed on another relic, a daisy wheel printer. needless to say that i used mag tapes.... then at the university of bern when i was a graduate student - there, here - i had a computational setback, the department had PC's and a colleague and i were the only two who used apples for interfacing to our experiments. mainframes somehow although in the same building were objects that our thesis advisor was highly suspicious of, or so it seemed. all the papers that i wrote for my doctoral thesis were done using microsoft word. it was not funny, but it kept the papers short and succinct. so, while doing my doctoral degree i took a break from things UNIX. i got back to it and TeX while at Cornell University, but I have not used it ever since. is it the pull of legacy that had me back to a mac, and now back to TeX, or is it the fact that for writing real papers there is nothing better? Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Thursday, November 16, 2006

i do not get it

beta.blogger has some nice features, however... 1. it needs to be hacked in order to work with the performancin FF plug-in 2. it does not work with ecto 3. it does not work with google's documents and spreadsheets... so, why do i expect a rolls-royce when i can not even afford a bike?