- A winning Powerball ticket.
- 10 more hours in a day.
- New finger bones and achilles tendons.
- The spontaneous combustion of anything related to grants.gov.
- An in-home masseur and shampoo boy.
- A geothermal system.
- Dark chocolate truffles and a fine Cabernet.
- The spontaneous combustion of Osama bin Laden.
- Five more minutes with my dad.
- A full-length mink coat. Yeah, go ahead and call PETA. See what I care.
- Invisible, silent students.
- Everyone to start using LaTeX and emacs right away and stop fucking around. Underlined periods? Give me a break.
- Did I mention the finger bones, and achilles tendons?
- The death penalty for spitting on sidewalks and driving while talking on a cell phone.
- Lucky Charms.
- A cable channel devoted only to Judge Judy, with no commercials.
- A bottle of Oban. In my office.
- The immediate death and/or permanent vegetative state of all alumni over the age of 70. (Don't ask.)
- New achilles tendons, please.
- World peace.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Things I want.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
22 comments:
(I actually have a bottle of Laphroaig in my filing cabinet. It's purely medicinal. Or antiseptic. I forget which.)
...and I routinely bring the best chocolate I can find/afford (sometimes sadly, it's aero) to work to make life bearable for the receptionist...
21. Pleasure from my man (angry kid and I got you #15 tonight).
Do you know how much it pains me that I've been asked to submit a manuscript in MS Word with the equations done in MathType?
I do, Rudbeckia, and I'm not even a mathematician.
Though, I would happily settle for people just not sending me things as word documents.
Real men and woman use troff, eqn and ed :)
Prof Hirta,
Re: word and math equations, if you're feeling masochistic you can learn "wordml" which is word's xml schema. Writing word docs in xml with a text editor should save you the pain of manually entering equations.
Glad to know about LaTeX which I should study. Long comment coming:
What I would love: to know whether whether these - or xml with a text editor (an idea?) would solve my problem which is incredibly basic: word processing.
The reason I do not process words under LINUX is that I have not found a word processor which works for me.
Why: I need accent marks - lots of them, lots of kinds - so that I can either write in a foreign language or in English, but then quote in other languages (note plural). That is why changing the language in Word or Open Office does not fix the problem - I need to switch between them a lot, so it is best, given that I have English keyboards, to stay in English and make the accent marks with keystrokes, which Word lets you do and Open Office does not (those drop down menus are OK for light use only).
So I get stuck with Word. Apparently Open Office in foreign languages works for this problem but you have to have a European keyboard to coordinate with it. I keep saying I will learn to write macros for Open Office and solve the problem that way but I have not done so yet.
Does anyone know where to look for a solution ... or are the Open Office macros the way to go?
Feeling you on grants.gov.
Underlined periods? Give me a break.
Having just gotten into trouble over at Echidne's place for misunderunderstanding and commenting on female things, I probably should leave this one alone.
But I just wanted to say I agree. I think periods are already emphasized enough. By women. I don't understand why kids think they need to be underlined, too.
#11 cracks me up.
Becky, I feel your pain. I have been similarly asked. I have had success with the following: feign ignorance, tell them I can't run Word on my OS, I can't afford Word, maybe they can give me some alternatives. Usually they cave in. All the production editors are going to work with pdf anyway; the only purpose for Word is so the copy editor can edit the manuscript.
Zero, LaTeX has the "babel" package for almost any language you might want to write in. Check out this link. And it is easy-peasy, really. It's just a markup language. I love not having to write and simultaneously fiddle with format. LaTeX is the solution to your problem.
LaTeX and Sweave... ah, heaven! Stats built on on-the fly, with pretty figures and tables, no less.
However, none of my coauthors have ever heard of LaTeX, and aren't interested in learning. Word and only Word. Blech. So I use a combination of OpenOffice and ODFWeave, which gets me much of the stats functionality, but is much more of a pain in the tuchus.
I'm surprised nobody has said it yet, but vim for me! I'm with you on the rest though (and how come nobody ever brings me Lucky Charms?)
I was all set to run away to Planet AP, right up until Judge Judy. Oh, well.
*Leaves to get a bowl of Lucky Charms for breakfast because that sounds oddly appealing*
Spontaneous combustion is too good for grants.gov. But I still would be quite happy with spontanous combustion.
There are such things as flamethrowers and white phosphorus, AP.
And people who know how to use them with the proper incentives. Oban's a damn good start.
I'm with you on number 5.
Never heard of Oban before so I found this link. http://www.malts.com
I haver to ask about number 18. I bet the old alumni was very rich and wanted or was doing something stupid, crass or disgusting.
Oh good, oh good, LaTeX, Babel package, oh frabjous day! :-)
I like your blog and I feel we share sufficient common ground for a link to each others blogs to be mutually beneficial.If you agree to link then please contact me at 'An Unrepentant Communist'
http://unrepentantcommunist.blogspot.com/
on the commments page of the current post,and I will immediately link your blog to mine.Looking forward to hearing from you.
Gabriel in County Kerry Ireland
hmmm...
Does Angry Baker have a brother?
And, it is so not FAIR for you to tell us not to ask about #18. There has to be a hillarious story behind that one.
#9. I'd even take two or three minutes.
Post a Comment