overstated

I’m at the point where I’m beginning to think about actually writing my Ph.D. thesis, and that means deciding what to write it in. My last experience in this realm was a disaster: with three hours to finish and print my Masters thesis, my sections automagically renumbered themselves, something that took me an hour to reverse. If possible I want to avoid a situation where my word processor “fixes” things for me.

My needs are simple: I want a pretty document, with a nice layout, and good bibliographic support. Here’s a quick rundown of my options:

Microsoft Word

World standard, good bibliographic support through Endnote, pretty good global style control, sucks for editing large documents

Adobe InDesign

No bibliographic support, handles large documents, but most features (such as endnotes/footnotes) must be done by hand

LaTeX

No interface, good bibliographic support through Bibtex, handles large documents, good global style control

Like many a Ph.D. student before me, it appears that if I can do without the interface, LaTeX is the obvious solution. No weird side effects, total style control and great support for all kinds of sundries like equations, bibliographic data, and so on. The only thing I worried about were the fonts.

Contrary to previous accounts, installing LaTeX on OS X was a cinch: using the ii installer, packages for teTex were installed on my machine in seconds. And something I was not aware of is the fact that OS X provides a system called XeTeX that has full support for OS X and TrueType fonts. Seriously brother, can a man ask for more?

I took the MIT Thesis LaTeX files, added some Mac fonts like Hoefler Text and Optima (using the fontspec package, which is a breeze), and blamo! I’ve got a great looking thesis. After struggling with my last thesis, this is a weight off my chest.

An organization has arisen in NYC to help support those individuals arrested during Critical Mass events under the name Freewheels Bicycle Defense Fund. This past weekend they hosted an inaugural fund driving event in Brooklyn that apparently made upwards of $4k for the legal battling bikers.

According to my friend Jamie, most, if not all of the arrested cyclists have refused offers of Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal (ACD) and decided to take their cases to court. Given the number of cases already pending, along with the expected number to arise from the first big ride of the year in April, the Critical Mass defendants will be needing quite a bit of support for what could be a very defining court battle for bikers rights in the city.

The symptoms started about two weeks ago when I first noticed that my 12″ Powerbook’s hard drive was on the fritz. My applications slowed down, movies stopped playing halfway through, and I was finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Then today when I went into my local Apple store for a diagnosis, things really started to set in. I’m grumpy, irritable, and constantly frustrated. I’m afraid I have classic symptoms of Laptop Withdrawal Affective Disorder (LWAD).

In all honesty, I’m telling the truth. Well, maybe the part about not getting up in the morning is more about me being lazy, but I am generally off since I realized I’d be without my laptop for a week. It’s not the service it provides, per se, it’s how it’s integrated itself into my life. I’ve had relationships with a few PC laptops in the past, but my Powerbook seems to be the first laptop I’ve ever truly loved. Without it I feel lost, aimless, and like I spend most of my time thinking about how much easier everything would be if I didn’t have to use this damn PC desktop.

It’s definitely a testament to the quality and usability of Apple’s laptops. Sure they’re not the fastest, lightest, or most eye-catching machines around, but they generally work better than anything else. Maybe Apple would settle out of court if I sued them over my current condition. I think my expensive AppleCare support should include some sort of counseling for my condition. Something—anything—to make this pain go away.

I’ve been dealing with this problem with my Powerbook 12″ lately which has been the source of neverending frustration: while using my laptop occassionally the keyboard will stop working. For a while I thought that the only way to cure my ill computer was to reboot it, and with Google providing no help, I was just about to stick my silver friend in the microwave to teach it a lesson.

Over the past month or so, I’ve discovered quite a few features of this peculiar bug. The first thing I recognized was that not all of the keys were frozen: most of the option and F-keys still provided their full functionality, such as App switching (Commant-Tab), brightness control (F1-F2), etc. Still nothing would repair this ailment, and I’d eventually end up rebooting.

But last night I made a major breakthrough: while locked, I tried to Force-quit (Command-Option-ESC), and suddenly my keyboard was returned to normal. I quickly tried seeing if it was related to any of my running applications: not iTerm, not BBEdit, none of them seemed to affect it. But, while switching applications once I tried to not use Command-Tab, and low and behold, the problem went away entirely.

Whenever I use Command-tab to switch applications now, there’s a good chance that my keyboard will lock. Has anyone ever encountered this problem before? Either I’m a really peculiar user or it’s something specific about the applications I use (I just reinstalled last week).

Very strange.

Update: I realized that when the machine gets into this state, any Cmd-Tab operation will render the keyboard unusable (until you run force-quit), but a reboot returns things to the normal operation. Relaunching the Finder has no effect, so it’s as if the kernel gets into a state where application switching causes the keyboard to hang.

I’m supposed to be eating Tex-mex in Austin right now, reliving old SXSW’s with that group of people I only see this time of year. Instead I’m in a Courtyard Mariott somewhere in Northern Kentucky. Apparently not the part where the bourbon flows freely from spigots one every street corner.

But I’m not mad, I’m glad. The room is comped, my flight isn’t too early in the morning, and they have free high speed internet access. I guess they do this sort of thing often in Cincinnati because after landing they asked people to raise their hands if they had a connection to make. Even the staff raised their hands. It was a straight up connection party on that plane.

The hour and a half spent on the tarmac in Boston cost Deltinental severely, because I’d say a good third of the plane missed the last flight of the night. When we all staggered to the ticket counter, there was a giant sign that said “hotel accomodations,” and they had already prepared vouchers for room, board, and pre-printed our tickes for the morning. Now that’s what I call service.

So if you’re going to fly through a hub during the snowy season, make sure to fly through Cinci, because they won’t give you this “we’re not liable for flights delayed due to weather” bullshit. They give you the red carpet. Or something. In fact, in 2004 it was rated Best Gateway Airport in the US of A.

Over the past few days I’ve received emails from a few friends asking me to sign up for a service called “Fill My Closet,” which appears to be yet another viral marketing campaign.

Their proposition is simple: sign up for a free trial from a host of companies, get 5 of your friends to do the same, and get a free $250 gift certificate to Nordstroms. Paypal was the first company to utilize this sort of strategy when they paid cold cash for every new signup a user could generate. I fell pray to this offer (who could resist free money?), as did millions of other people. Paypal subsequently turned out to be a great service, and I would have signed up anyway.

FillMyCloset on the other hand is essentially a viral marketing frontend for all of the old school junk snail mail—magazine subscriptions, free product trials, cd clubs—seemingly great offers with huge drawbacks. These junk services are brokered by a company called MetaReward.com which allows people to easily sign up for services (one-click shopping for thigns you don’t want) Unlike the postal service, which is a random attempt to find gullible people, FillMyCloset uses social networks to find cliques of gullible people.

If each person that completes the required networking service, and gets 5 people to sign up for a service, the cost to the service provider would be $50. I’m sure that none of the participating companies would pay that much money per new customer, so the service must depend on people not being able to quite achieve their goal. If they set the number of friends too low, everyone will succeed, and if they set the number too high, no one will think it’s possible. Five seems to be the magic number, although I’m not sure why it’s so hard.

The site is a service of Free Super, an incentives-based viral marketing company. Their website provides very little information about the company, except that they can “generate thousands of new customers every month, at a fraction of the legacy cost of acquisition.” At least they’re upfront about their sliminess.